Just call me Sammy.

Thanks. You've had a long career first in Hollywood and now in politics. I'm interested in your views on this election and the candidates, Cruz in particular, but also Trump and the others.

I didn't have two careers, just different audiences. You feed them what they want. They changed, not me. Politicians don't change, the times change. We've seen both Trump and Cruz before. Neither Trump nor Cruz experienced poverty but they're similar to the self made men from the early 1900's.

There seem to be two kinds of self-conscious self-made men, those who like to dwell on the patriotic details of their ascent....and those who take every new level as if it were the only one they ever knew, rushing ahead so fast they are ashamed , afraid to look back and see where they've come from. One is a bore and the other is a heel.

I take it that Trump is the bore.

Yes, and it's overly generous to say Cruz is a heel. But like other politicians before him, say Bob La Follette in the early 1900's, you develop a love/hate relationship with them.

They rankle, like a splinter festering under the skin.

Somewhat like Trump.

No, not like Trump. 

Trump makes you feel that any confession of failure is on a level with admitting you had a yen for nothing but female dogs and ten-year-old corpses.

Like a friend of mine said about the secret of success and which I give you at no charge--

Work hard, and, if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud.

But Cruz seems to be stymied, he can't budge Trump out of the lead.

Well if I had managed Cruz, here's what I might have told him:

You never had the first idea of give-and-take, the social intercourse. It had to be all you, all the way. You had to make individualism be the most frightening ism of all. You act as if the world is just a blindfold free-for-all. Only the first time you get it in the belly you holler brotherhood. But you can't have your brothers and eat them too.

Sammy, what about Hillary Clinton?

Ah, she's o.k., probably be elected if she gets good script writers down the stretch. Speaking about scripts, the two interesting women are Heidi Cruz and Elizabeth Warren. Heidi Cruz because she's being dragged through the mud and doesn't deserve it and Warren because she's the one who deserves to be running on what Clinton is now saying, but isn't running. 

Warren reminds me of a woman named Kit who I knew in my early days in Hollywood. I loved her. But she was too far above me and even on the top of my game I couldn't imagine having her.

Kit had a manner of modesty that made me feel like a dope. All she had to do to make me feel that way was just to stand there and smile through me. I hadn't learned to take female superiority in stride. I resented it.

And you, Sammy, do you think they will ever make a movie of your life?

For a while Hollywood was Hollywood, I was it, I bathed in it, I conquered it. Now the corporations have ruined it, like they've ruined everything else. Corporations, Political Parties, Hollywood---they are all one in the same---except that the people haven't caught on yet, and when they do, the jig will be up. Hollywood doesn't want people to catch on. They are not about truth or morality the way my life story is. My story wouldn't fit and might give the hoax away. They'll never make a movie about me.

Getting back to Ted Cruz, what makes a guy like him run?

We will never understand a guy like Ted Cruz---the self interest, the drive and energy. All we can do is look at the people he runs over and the people he panders to and try to understand them.