Sam Rolfe

Someday, when I'm in a rocking chair, and can't remember my own name, and people wonder what I'm giggling about, be on notice . . . I'm recalling one of the countless, sidesplitting, memory lasting, wistful, ironic, bizarre or ridiculous experiences I encountered in forty three years of knowing Sam Rolfe.

I first met Sam in 1951, when he rode into MGM from that dusty frontier town of Brooklyn, with an original script under arm entitled "Naked Spur" held co-authored with Harold J. Bloom. First-time screen writers weren't accorded much acknowledgment in those days. All Sam and Hal got for their trouble was Jimmy Stewart in the starring role, and an Academy Award nomination.

I'm not sure what the glue was that early on cemented our relation-ship. Probably it was that Sam was a terrific story teller, and I was a terrific audience. I don't just mean screen stories. I mean his stories, of his own life. Rich, the stuff of fables, I'd never met anyone like him, nor heard anything like it. His coming from Brooklyn, where Jewish gangs fought Italian gangs who fought Irish gangs who fought Jewish gangs. Of coming out of the Army following World War II to find friends in Sing Sing Prison, and others on the way. How he decided to get out, grabbed Hal Bloom and others, Joel Cohn among them, and came west to the sanctuary of Hollywood. How they struggled to survive, all of them in one apartment, with the utilities cut off for lack of payment, except the phone, following the cord in the dark, hurrying to see if it was an agent or a collection agency. How one of them was shoved out the door, pleading and screaming, to go downstairs to make love to the landlady so they wouldn't get evicted for another month. How he and Hal registered at a writing school to get G.I. benefits to live on, when they were called into the office to be told the school was letting them go. They simply had no talent. This, by the way, was the same day they sold their screen play to MGM for the then considerable price of $22,500.

They were stories that absolutely enthralled me, and anyone else who heard them. No meanness, no anger, no pettiness in any of them. Only joyous wry accounts of struggle and encounter. Adversity was romance. The telling of it pure theatre. And he told it best on himself. The wonderful, and the outrageous, and the funny and memorable. They always followed Sam. And if you followed him, you were a part of it. And to this day I've never known, did Sam write the stories he lived, or live the stories he wrote.

And write them he did. Thirteen series created and developed for television. "Have Gun Will Travel" (don't tell me there wasn't a lot of Sam in "Paladin"), "Eleventh Hour," "Man From Uncle," "Caz," "Dundee And The Culhane," "Delveccio," "The Delphi Bureau." Always that wonderful archness, and sense of hope and romance, never a whine, nor a bitch nor a moan in anything he wrote. Nor ever in the man himself.

Recently we enobeled ourselves by establishing the highly exclusive, restrictive, chauvinistic meeting of the Board of Directors, a quarterly luncheon with E. Jack Neuman and anyone else who could afford the price of food at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Walter Newman would come. And on occasion Richard Alan Simmons. Sam was the centerpiece. Sam who liked nothing better than to do it right. We worked hard for it, he'd say, and we were entitled. He'd walk in in a handsome coat and slacks, with a colorful scarf at his throat, looking elegant and dapper as hell. And we'd sit there and enjoy the devil out of each other and our histories, glad we had life and health and friendship, talking about new stories we were writing, or were going to write.

And now Sam is gone. And that, though I swore I wouldn't let it creep into this, saddens me so deeply. A memory I can't giggle at. But I'll tell you. If Sam were to walk through the door this minute, yes, I'd be surprised. Though not completely. Someday when fact and face and memory blur and fuse, I won't be surprised at all. And I'll look at him. And I know what I'll say: Tell it again, Sam.