Algren (27 page)

Art and Nelson also came up with an idea of a book of photos, with text. Ken McCormick liked the idea, and was counting on the
Life
story to help market it. Art thought they should call it “Nelson Algren's Chicago.”

“How about ‘Chicago: Its Deeps, Creeps and Steeps?'” Nelson wondered.

“It stinks,” Art told him.

Unlike Nelson, Art knew just how to market an image—Nelson as the tough guy, the neon poet of the streets—just the sort of thing to appeal to a popular, general interest magazine with Ivy League editors who were looking for something edgy. But after taking all these pictures, and then chasing around the West Side for a week finding the bums to get them to sign one-dollar releases, the
Life
project fell through. Art said Nelson was partly to blame—Art had built his new friend up as a hard character, but when Nelson met the editors for lunch to go over the photos, he came off like a tweedy University of Chicago sociologist.

“Is this really a whore in this picture?” an editor asked, hopefully.

“Not necessarily,” Nelson responded. “She's having a party in the afternoon.”

“He goofed it up in his shambling way,” Shay said.
Life
instead decided to run a story about a Mexican jail—that would be their
“down” story for the year. Shay said that
Life
kept the pictures for six months before sending them back, with a note that drug addiction was a tough subject to tackle. The picture book idea fell through, too, but Nelson and Art remained friends, with Art next recommending him to editors at
Holiday
magazine for an essay about Chicago that became the book
Chicago: City on the Make
.

The year 1950 was full of little projects. McCormick urged Algren to dig up
Somebody in Boots
for a reissue, to make some money off the success of
The Man with the Golden Arm
. Nelson joked that the Depression-era novel must be somewhere amid the wreckage of the
Eastland
, but he'd make a dive for it. Algren was a tricky writer to handle—McCormick also had to send him a warning about a negative review Algren had written about Paul Bowles's
The Sheltering Sky
—other editors were talking about it, and McCormick advised him to stay away from reviewing for a while. Nelson ignored this advice—he did about one review a month in 1950, including one of a work by his old nemesis James Farrell. “The only emotion of his own he can spare to his material is a thinning sort of sentimentality touched by a vague nostalgia,” Nelson wrote about Farrell's
An American Dream Girl
. Nelson could not have forgotten Farrell's kind words for
Never Come Morning
—he just did not care about anything but the truth of his impressions.

In the spring of 1950, Nelson found his house—a little white-sided ranch with an alcove at the front with a big picture window, a few rooms, and a basement at 6228 Forrest, a short walk to the beach and a liquor-grocery store and an easy bike ride to the South Shore railroad station. Nelson called it “the house that Doubleday built,” while Jack Conroy called it “Algren's folly.” It was nothing fancy—narrow as a house trailer—but nicely isolated among the trees, with a backyard that connected to a lagoon with muskrats. Algren told McCormick that he had just wanted the rowboat he'd seen in the lagoon, and found that the house came with it. Nelson
enjoyed having a place of his own, and spent part of that year making inexpert improvements—on one occasion he added water to a can of thick, yellowish glop he found in the basement and painted over the kitchen wallpaper, splashing the stuff all over the stove, the cutlery, and the pots and pans for good measure. He also planted a lilac bush and daffodil bulbs, and put in a few pieces of used furniture. He swam often in the water, and took walks up and down the acres of grass-covered dunes. Sometimes, he drank vodka with a Russian neighbor who carved faces into logs. On clear days Nelson could see blue-and-gray Chicago in the west, across the narrow southern end of Lake Michigan. It seemed like a great place for writing—William Saroyan told Algren in a letter that he thought the arrangement made sense—he needed the dunes and the city, too. Miller felt like a boxer's corner, a place to sit and clear his senses, before returning to the ring. The dunes promised a place to have an interior life—separate from the exterior life of book signings and socializing of Chicago, said Denise DeClue, a screenplay writer and friend in Nelson's later years. “There's a difference between your inner voice as a writer and your exterior persona,” said DeClue, who also moved from Chicago to the Indiana lakeshore. “People try to protect their interior life.” The risk was that he was separating himself from daily contact with the sources of his material—there would be no more random visits from neighborhood addicts, or weekday evenings at his desk looking out the window at tavern life.

That spring Algren collaborated on the
Golden Arm
screenplay with Paul Trivers, an experienced screenwriter who had worked with Roberts and Dalton Trumbo, and was associate producer on the upcoming 1951 Roberts-Garfield picture
He Ran All the Way
. The resulting
Golden Arm
screenplay was terrific. Like many movie adaptations of novels, it simplifies the plot—dropping minor characters and certain complications. For example, Sophie and Frankie marry because of the car accident instead of the false pregnancy.
Also, Frankie makes his first appearance after just getting out of the army, instead of in a police lineup a year after the war is over. The character of Captain Bednar is expanded into an angelic figure, telling Frankie he wants him to give himself the same “good count” that he gives others. Sophie, whose true feelings are mostly interior in the book, is expertly externalized—she has lines that read like a combination of Syph Patrol monologues and
King Lear
. “You were really going,” she rebukes Frankie after he visits her in the mental hospital. “You were going for keeps. You weren't coming back, never, never, never.”

The story ends with Sophie falling down the stairs, and Frankie with hope for a future, so it is sappy and Hollywood. But Nelson hadn't cared for his own ending anyway—in later years he said he wouldn't have had Frankie commit suicide, but would have instead had him go into isolation, which would have been a greater tragedy. Despite the screenplay's happier ending, it is true to the spirit of the book, much more so than the melodramatic rubbish that would be concocted on the orders of Otto Preminger five years later. The Algren-Trivers screenplay showed respect for Algren's characters and a realistic view of addiction that would have been far ahead of its time. One of the most powerful parts of the screenplay is Frankie's speech to Sophie in which he summarizes why he needs a fix:

“You think I'm sick now? This is only where it begins, Zosha. Wait till an hour from now, you'll see me really dyin' then. Like nobody died before … I won't die, Zosha. But I'll come so close you'll be wishin' I was—that's when it gets really good…. I got the monkey on my back, Zosh. I got him on in the army 'n I got him off, 'n the night you got hurt he climbed back on 'n he come to stay that night for keeps, it looks like.”

It is easy to picture Algren saying these lines to himself, pacing the little Miller house, rubbing his fingers back and forth through his thinning hair, maybe hearing Garfield saying them in the movie,
perhaps to Sylvia Sidney, while horns wailed and violins keened. Despite Algren's misgivings about “Smilin' Bob Roberts,” with his toes poking out of his sandals and his cheap bourbon, Roberts was known as a producer who respected a good screenplay and made emotionally honest films. It could have been a great American movie—if everything had gone according to plan. In the spring of 1950, Nelson could still imagine that Frank and Sophie would make him rich.

His romantic life that year grew increasingly complicated. His troubled friend Margo had been staying at his Wabansia flat on and off that winter, still fighting her drug problem, vulnerable and sweet. They could read or talk or listen to music or just be quiet—she was a restful person, when she was not using, and when she was using she provided material and a chance for Nelson to feel like he was needed. Nelson wrote Simone about the situation—and she teased him that as long as he did not marry this girl and have twelve children before their next meeting, she wouldn't object to “your practicing a little your hard manly job so you have not forgotten everything when I'll kiss your dirty face again.” He had given her something else to worry about when he wrote from Hollywood, having seen Amanda looking so well and wondering if he had made a mistake in divorcing her.

But Nelson was not the only cause of tension in his relationship with Simone—despite Nelson's heavy workload, Simone wanted to come as early as June because Sartre would be away for three months and he wanted her to travel only when he was gone. Then suddenly June wouldn't work—Sartre needed her for a trip to North Africa! It was the same problem from their Mexico trip in 1948—Sartre's needs always came first. The great feminist's life was full of ironies—she was financing the Chicago trip through a
Flair
magazine article arguing for complete equality between the sexes. Her American lover called this “bullshit” and told her that while
it was OK for her to write tripe for “a bunch of silly women,” she shouldn't bring it home to Wabansia. She finally agreed she would come to Chicago in July, and stay through the summer at the little house by the lake.

The international situation and anti-Communist paranoia at home darkened that summer. The year before, the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb—long before the United States had expected it—and China had gone Communist under Mao Tse-tung. On June 25, 1950, the war in Korea began when North Korean soldiers crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into the southern part of the country. This was the first major test of the US domino theory of foreign policy, which held that any new Communist incursion would lead to other countries falling under Soviet and Chinese control. The United States entered the war on June 27, the first “hot” military action of the Cold War. The three-year conflict resulted in the loss of five million lives, including forty thousand Americans, and ended in a stalemate, with the Korean Peninsula still divided. This was not just a local tragedy—the whole world saw North and South Korea as surrogates for the two nuclear powers, and feared the conflict would lead to a showdown that could end life on Earth. The Federal Civil Defense Department distributed pamphlets on how to survive a nuclear attack—these were followed by an animated film starring Bert the Turtle, which told American schoolchildren how they should “duck and cover.” Communist invasion was also a major theme in popular culture. A book used in Chicago parochial schools from the era graphically showed what it would mean if the Reds took over—a little boy weeps while his stern Communist teacher points to a blackboard on which he has written, “There is no god!”

The United States was afraid, and had reason to be afraid, though not enough reason to trade its birthright for a mess of illusions. The war gave impetus to new attacks on anyone seen as
potentially disloyal—and by the middle of 1950, most of the Hollywood Ten had started serving prison time for contempt. In June Louis Budenz, the former
Midwest Daily Record
editor who had become a fervent Catholic and anti-Red activist, told the FBI that Nelson Algren was a “concealed Communist”—one who would deny membership in the party and didn't hold himself out as a Communist. There also was increasing scrutiny on political liberals in the arts. On June 22, 1950, the right-wing journal
Counterattack
issued a pamphlet called
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television
, listing 151 popular musicians, writers, and actors with alleged Communist ties. Studs Terkel and Nelson missed the cut—Studs blamed a New York bias. But the list included such major stars as Nelson's favorite radio satirist, Henry Morgan, conductor Leonard Bernstein, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, band leader Artie Shaw, folksinger Pete Seeger, and actor John Garfield.

Simone flew out of Paris on July 8, and arrived in Chicago during the hottest stretch of a hot summer. She was wearing an embroidered Indian peasant blouse, carefully chosen to please Nelson, according to her account of the trip in
The Mandarins
. But after she had panted up the wooden back stairs into the Wabansia flat, she felt a chill. Nelson “greeted her casually and then issued all sorts of pronouncements and ground rules for her stay,” according to biographer Deirdre Bair. He had decided that the relationship was going nowhere, and he did not love her anymore. “We'll have a nice summer together, all the same,” he told her. Simone was mortified—she had braved her fear of flying and imminent world war to come see him, and he did not seem to want her at all. In
The Mandarins
the Nelson character, “Lewis,” wants to listen to a baseball game, on which he has bet three bottles of scotch. After a day in which everything seems counterfeit, they get into bed together, but Lewis turns his back without an embrace, claiming he is too tired.
When Simone's character “Anne” packs for their trip to Miller, she puts the embroidered blouse at the bottom, never wanting to wear it again—“it seemed to me as if there were something malignant in its embroidery.”

Even Nelson's old Polish neighborhood, where Simone had felt so at home, had become hostile. The heat was oppressive, softening the tar on the streets. When she went to a hairdresser in the neighborhood, a girl washing her hair asked her severely, “Why are you all Communists in France?” It was also hard to stay clean during the sticky days—there was no bathtub or shower at Wabansia. Art Shay offered to drive her to a friend's house to take a bath while Nelson played poker. She left the bathroom door open, and he snapped a picture of her in the nude, from behind. “You naughty man,” she muttered, though she seemed unperturbed.