Algren (35 page)

“I just took it to get rid of the son of a bitch,” Algren told Shay, but Shay worried that Algren was not consulting an agent.

Back in Gary, the check was an object of constant temptation to Nelson, who was then making a meager living off book reviews. “Every morning, he's sitting at that breakfast table, having his coffee, and looking at that check,” Peltz remembered.

Finally, Nelson called Dave and said he had decided to cash the check, and he needed a ride to the bank. By that time the corners were frayed and it was so speckled with butter and coffee stains it
was hard to read. Dave looked at the check dubiously, and told Nelson he would have to call the local bank in Miller and see if it would still be honored. It turned out that the East Coast bank that had issued the check had been waiting for the call. Excited, Nelson opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out an old, rumpled, brown paper bag. “That's for the money,” Nelson explained.

“You don't need a paper brown bag, they'll give you a cashier's check,” Dave scoffed.

“Hell, no!” Nelson said. “I want fives, tens, and twenties. Dave, you gotta do it my way.” So another bank had to be called to make sure he could get the money the way he wanted it—thus the paper bag. The bank gave him stacks of twenty-dollar bills, and he got his small-time mobster friend Jess Blue to drive him downtown to put it into a safe-deposit box. Lawyer Sam Friefeld helped Nelson use about $16,000 to buy an apartment building in Lincoln Park at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Wisconsin—a property that would have been worth of lot of money in fifteen years, when the neighborhood lost its rough edges and was starting to become fashionable. It was a beautiful, four-story building, with a coach house in the back, a few blocks from one of Nelson's favorite haunts, the Old Town Ale House. If Nelson had kept it, it could have paid him a good income for years, and Nelson might have never left Chicago, Shay said.

But Nelson immediately started having trouble with the heavy responsibilities of being a landlord. The lady living in the coach house, in whom he was romantically interested, needed a better refrigerator. Insomniac Nelson called Art at three in the morning, wondering how he could find a good used one. Art offered to help, but then Nelson got to worrying about what would happen if everyone wanted a different refrigerator. The prospect was overwhelming. Besides, someone from
Time
magazine was renting an apartment, and Algren was worried about what would happen if word got out that the great proletarian writer had turned into a fat-cat landlord.
Nelson sold the building back in less than two months, losing $2,500 in the process. “He was an aggressive loser,” Shay said.

The rest of the money was spent quickly at the track and the poker table, Peltz said. By the autumn of 1957, it was all gone.

As for Lebworth, he resold the rights for $75,000 to Hollywood producer Charles Feldman, who turned the book into a 1962 film starring Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist, Laurence Harvey as Dove, Barbara Stanwyck as the brothel madam Jo, and the white model-actress, known as Capucine, as the mulatto Hallie. This tawdry, soulless film makes the Preminger version of
The Man with the Golden Arm
look sensitive and respectful. In the movie Hallie is a sculptor-turned-prostitute from New York City who had a long-ago love affair with Dove, who takes to the road to try to find her. Jo is a villainous lesbian who wants Hallie for herself, and threatens to have Dove charged with statutory rape to drive him away. In a struggle between Dove and Jo's henchman, Hallie is accidently shot and killed. Outside of the Depression-era New Orleans bordello setting and the names of the characters, the story has nothing to do with Nelson's book. He said he never bothered to see it, adding, “I also keep moving when I see a crowd gathering where somebody has been run over by a garbage truck.”

Algren was happier with a 1960 musical version of
A Walk on the Wild Side
, which Peltz directed at the Crystal Palace theater in St. Louis. It opened on February 11, 1960, and ran for only a few weeks. Peltz thought the script by Algren and Jay Landesman was a “piece of junk.” But he loved the lyrics Nelson had written for it with Fran Landesman, including songs for the legless Schmidt and for the prostitutes. The bordello song, called “This Life We've Led,” begins:

This life we've led has left us strange

And now it's late for us to change

Our luck runs out, our dreams grow old

In rooms where love is bought and sold.

Dave said he kept Nelson away from the low-rent production until it was ready to go up. Then Nelson came down with Doris Peltz on the train, full of enthusiasm and playing the part of the big producer, drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Nelson claimed he had gotten $3,000 from an alcoholic lawyer for the Broadway rights to the play, which if true was a swindle, since he had already sold the rights. “The whole thing was foolish,” Dave laughed, remembering, but Nelson thought it was a masterpiece. Nelson sat in the audience watching the low-paid dancers perform his songs and nearly wept with joy. Despite the critics, he felt that he had come “damn close” to writing a great book.

I would prefer not to.

—H
ERMAN
M
ELVILLE
, “B
ARTLEBY THE
S
CRIVENER
”

Chicago has always been a city in transition, from the 1871 fire that allowed it to start over from scratch to the reversal of the course of the Chicago River to the lifting of buildings out of the swamp with giant screws. In the twentieth century, there were few changes more profound than the urban expressway system that carved up the city with giant, eight-lane highways, taking out huge chunks of neighborhoods to allow for easier access to the suburbs and possible escape from nuclear disaster. The Congress Expressway, later called the Eisenhower, opened between 1955 and 1960, cutting through the old Jewish neighborhoods of the West Side. The Dan Ryan Expressway rammed through the South Side, with the route reinforcing the border between Mayor Richard J. Daley's Bridgeport neighborhood and the Black Belt to the east, according to Mike Royko. The Kennedy opened for traffic in 1960 through the North Side, after taking out chunks of old Polonia, including the Wabansia flat where Nelson had spent so many lucky days, though sparing
St. Stanislaus Kostka parish through a plan by State Rep. Bernard Prusinski, a civil engineer.

The city had also changed in other ways in the late 1950s. Richard J. Daley, a powerful politician Nelson held in contempt, started his twenty-one-year reign in 1955. The Chicago Police's Red Squad was collecting information on citizens with suspected subversive tendencies, including Leon Despres, a friend of Algren's who was one of the few anti-Daley aldermen. On television the Kuklapolitans had their last show in 1957. Big modernist high-rises like the concrete-clad Prudential Building and Mies van der Rohe's steel-and-glass Lake Shore Drive apartments changed the skyline. The destruction of the streetcar lines in favor of exhaust-spewing buses was complete by the summer of 1958. The Chicago Transit Authority also took out six elevated lines, including the Humboldt Park branch going west from Nelson's neighborhood, leaving concrete-and-iron-girder ghosts. O'Hare International Airport opened in 1955 for commercial passenger traffic and the growing domination of air travel over trains meant that travelers would no longer stop downtown for a drink before heading west. Chicago still bragged that it was the “city that works,” but its neighborhoods were rapidly losing population to the suburbs. High-rise public housing, air-conditioning, and television were diminishing neighborhood life by taking people off the streets and front stoops. The changes that Nelson saw beginning in the late 1940s were now firmly in place, and Chicago had become in his eyes a colder, more fearful, lonelier, grayer city. When Nelson finally gave up his place in Miller in 1958 and moved to a crummy apartment at 920 North Noble Street south of Division, he returned to a different Chicago, one that still roused his indignation but no longer stirred his imagination in the same way. In a 1961 afterword to
Chicago: City on the Make
, Algren complained that his town had gone from being the Second City to the “Second-Hand City,” where mediocrity is
honored. “Anyone who lives inside Chicago today has to admit it is a grey subcivilization surrounded by green suburbs,” Algren wrote.

The adjustment was difficult. When he showed sociology professor Gerald D. Suttles around the neighborhood on a drunken night in the mid-1960s, Algren was so preoccupied with telling Suttles what it was
really like
that they could not see what was actually going on. As Algren stood before a vacant lot, heedless of the surrounding traffic, “it came over me that he was trying to reink a dry pen,” Suttles recalled.

Nelson did find a life in Chicago again in the 1960s—a social scene, parties, favorite bars in Riccardo's, O'Rourke's, the Old Town Ale House, and the Billy Goat Tavern, and friends like the Kogans and the Terkels. He got steak dinners at the Corona Café at Illinois and Rush, an old-time Italian place with white tablecloths. There were alcohol-soaked parties with the Beatles on the hi-fi, where literary young women in mod Mary Quant dresses fawned over Nelson the Famous Writer, listening to his stories. After six months he left the grim Noble Street flat, where he had been drinking coffee out of bowls for want of cups, for a sunlit third-floor apartment at 1958 West Evergreen in the Wicker Park neighborhood, a little west of where he had lived before he went into the army. It had high ceilings, a bay window in the front, and a wooden back porch on which he strung Christmas lights for parties. Friends remembered that there were so many books on the floor it was difficult to move. Even his bathtub had a bookshelf over it—while on the door hung a poster of W. C. Fields. He covered the walls with photographs from his travels or of people he admired—Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, Simone de Beauvoir and Rocky Graziano, and even his 1927 high school basketball team. His decorating got more eccentric around the holidays—after Christmas he would search the alley for the best-looking discarded tree, drag it upstairs, and keep it until it was too dry.

Rather than rely on his own erratic housekeeping, he started to have a motherly African American woman named Mary Corley come in a couple of times a week to tidy up and make a meatloaf. He would have her fry chicken for parties, for which he would buy champagne and during which he would tell funny stories until the small hours. He had a stereo for listening to blues and Lenny Bruce records, and a television, where he happily killed time watching sports, attempting a nonsensical science fiction parody in a notebook. A little marijuana, which he had been smoking occasionally since the 1950s, helped him relax. He held weekly poker games, wearing a green visor and regularly losing to a group that included a Polish barber, a furniture dealer, and a disgraced former cop. He felt at home on Evergreen, and usually paid the sixty-dollar-a-month rent six months in advance, by money order, because of his history of bouncing checks. By the front window, he kept plants and his big oak desk and the typewriter, surrounded by pale drifts of letters and manuscripts. But it was so hard to sit down to it, and so very easy to get away.

He still boxed and swam at the Division Street YMCA, and often took steam baths with friends at the Luxor bathhouse on North Avenue. The schvitz was a remnant of the Old Country that was still popular in Chicago—politicians and businessmen, including Al Capone, liked to use the baths for private conversations. Mike Royko remembered that Nelson would sit in the steam for hours, “listening to the bookies, loan sharks, precinct captains, and his other favorite creatures.” Patrons would scrub each other with soap and water using a brush made of pin oak leaves. Once, Dave Peltz was giving Nelson this pin oak
platza
when he noticed a lump protruding from his friend's stomach.

“Nelson, what the hell's that?” Dave asked.

“Uh, I don't know, Dave. I just push the damn thing back in.”

Dave made an appointment for Nelson with a surgeon friend, who repaired the rupture. For Dave the incident underlined how
out of touch Nelson was with his own body. “He could have a heart attack and not know anything was wrong. He could break out in a cold sweat and not know it had something to do with his health,” Peltz said. Nelson always figured he could just have a couple of martinis, and everything would be fine.

Algren had an active romantic life during the 1950s and early 1960s—dating many beautiful and interesting women, including the journalist Carolyn Gaiser, the artist Lily Harmon, and the great actress Geraldine Page, visiting Page in New York while she was appearing with Paul Newman in Tennessee Williams's
Sweet Bird of Youth
. Nelson was not always nice to the ladies he romanced, as Amanda could testify. But Nelson was also described by friends as a man who could genuinely love and respect women, and often preferred their company to that of men. “He liked women because there was an authenticity there,” said Denise DeClue. “They weren't trying to prove anything.” His courtship techniques could be unusual—Andy Austin, a female friend and Chicago courtroom artist who used to have Nelson over for parties, said that once he unsuccessfully tried to entice a woman by presenting her with a wooden leg he had found in an alley and decorated with drawings of cats. He also behaved unpredictably—something that could be aggravating even to women who liked him. Terkel remembered that Harmon, a wealthy divorcée, once had a party on her houseboat so her friends could meet Algren, but the guest of honor failed to show up.

“I wonder why she's sore at me,” Nelson told Studs. “I come to the house with flowers and a box of chocolates and she slams the door in my face!”

Nelson gravitated toward women of creative achievement—writers and artists and actors—or to smart younger women whose accomplishments were in the future. His tastes were catholic—his crushes included Asian and African American women, and though he tended to prefer brunettes, he also went for blondes.