Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  I never figured out where Steinbeck might have turned off U.S. 20 and camped overnight along the Ohio-Michigan border. The book is a geographic garble about where he was and when. It could have been anywhere there was a lake, and there were plenty of them. As he said he did, I abandoned the rural desolation of U.S. 20 for the fast and busy Indiana Toll Road. In his day it cost 2 cents a mile in tolls and was not a private investment owned and operated by a Spanish-Australian consortium.

  Well after dark I ended a long day of driving at a unchained motel in South Bend, Indiana, narrowly missing the exorbitant $300 room rates charged for the Pitt-Notre Dame game over the coming weekend. The next morning, Friday, Oct. 8, I traveled 90 miles on private toll roads past Gary and into downtown Chicago – a rare thrill for a libertarian. Steinbeck says he drove the same route late at night. If that were true, he would have seen Gary at the peak of its fiery glory. The Gary I saw was, shall we say, looking kind of deceased. The elevated highway presented an amazing view of the shore of Lake Michigan, a vast petrified forest of cranes, smokestacks, monstrous electricity towers, furnaces, mills, oil tanks and esoteric industrial hardware that once produced steel in pittsburghian proportions.

  A wisp of white smoke rose from somewhere in the gigantic corpse. Somewhere out there was the Gary Works, which no longer employed 30,000 but was still USX’s largest operating U.S. manufacturing plant. It was an awesome industrial landscape, especially for someone who’d spent the previous 20 years watching thousands of acres of Pittsburgh’s riverbank steel mills being scrapped and redeveloped into offices and shopping malls. Yet Gary was nothing like the hell-with-the-lid-off scene Steinbeck must have witnessed in 1960, when the city had 100,000 more highly paid citizens to tax and was world famous for turning out steel not Jacksons.

  The Chicago Way

  I cruised into the Ambassador East Hotel’s dense neighborhood of brownstones and apartments with little trouble or traffic. I came via I-90 and the privatized Chicago Skyway, plus whatever other expressway the GPS Person said I needed. My E-ZPass handled the tolls. I felt no shame in using GPS. I wasn’t on a serendipitous road trip, ready to wander off on a 100-mile tangent because I liked the looks of a river valley or saw a billboard for the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center.

  I had a route to follow – Steinbeck’s. Most of the time that meant just following U.S. Highway signs from town to town, from Main Street to Main Street. For that I didn’t even need a map. My Tom-Tom GPS Person and the GPS Robot on my smart-phone were invaluable guides through the tangled freeways of mega-cities like Chicago. I didn’t have time to get lost, literally or figuratively, like poor Steinbeck so often did with only his state maps.

  My parking problem at the Ambassador East was solved the Chicago way – with a bribe. Actually, it was a perfectly legitimate market transaction of the type that has made America the richest country in the history of Earth. When I asked the Ambassador's doorman where I could park for an hour without going broke or to jail, he looked across the street at my RAV4 and said, "Park where you are, I will take care of you."

  I can't spell out the sounds of his accent, the way Steinbeck and other great writers can, but it wasn't from Pittsburgh. Since I was parked in a spot at the curb under a sign that said it was reserved for taxis, I quickly figured out the unspoken business deal I had just made with the street-smart doorman. Handing him my car keys without fear, I went inside the hotel while he continued doing his doorman's job – which meant loading and unloading luggage for guests, helping people open doors, helping scofflaws park illegally and pretty much doing the work of five men who were born in the USA. No specifics were discussed, no handshake or nod-nod, wink-wink was traded. But we both knew what would ultimately go down.

  The Ambassador East was John Steinbeck's kind of place. Like the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco, where he would stay a few weeks later, in 1960 it was already the kind of full-service hotel they were never going to make anymore.

  Glass, mirrors, chrome, heavy dark wood, marble floors, marble walls, marble steps, marble elevators, a lobby with expensive furniture too heavy to be moved – it had character carved, soaked and burnt into its old soul. It was where the biggest celebrities, movie stars and cool guys of the era like Sinatra stayed when they came to Chi-town to party or pay respect to their mob patrons.

  In “Travels With Charley,” Steinbeck reveals little about his pleasant rest stop in Chicago. He spins a yarn about how he drove all night and arrived at the hotel looking like a bum before his room was ready. Rather than have him sit in the main lobby and offend their guests, management let Steinbeck wait in a room that had been occupied by a traveling salesman but had not been cleaned yet. Playing detective, looking in the wastebasket and under the bed for clues, Steinbeck does a CIS routine to recreate the salesman’s evening of drink and sex with a call girl or girlfriend. Like so many other scenes in “Charley,” it’s too good to be true. In the book, the cheating salesman’s name is “Lonesome Harry.” In the first draft Steinbeck called him “Lonesome George” and provided some more specific information about him. He also said he considered sending the salesman’s wife a note ratting him out.

  Otherwise, Steinbeck drew a blackout curtain over his stay in Chicago. “Chicago was a break in my journey, a resumption of my name, identity, and happy marital status,” he writes in “Charley.” He left out details of his time there, he explains, because it posed a literary difficulty for him: “It is off the line, out of drawing. In my travels, it was pleasant and good; in writing it would contribute only a disunity.” It was more than a “disunity,” of course. Detailing his luxurious layover in Chicago, which also included a sleepover at Adlai Stevenson’s nearby farm estate, didn’t fit with the author’s heroic quest to rediscover America, and he had to know it. In the first draft of “Charley” he also confessed that he “paused” five times on his trip – in Chicago, Seattle, California and twice in Texas. Viking’s editors quickly deleted that incriminating line.

  Steinbeck, who became lonely a few days after leaving Sag Harbor, writes in “Charley” that he was “delighted” by his four- or five-day rendezvous with his wife Elaine in Chicago. It brought him back to his “known and trusted life.” Later, hitting the highway for Seattle with just Charley, he mentions how he had to get used to being lonely again. What he doesn’t tell the reader (because it was cut from his first draft) was that in seven hard-driving days he would be ensconced in a gleaming modern motel in Seattle, waiting for Elaine to join him again and cure his loneliness for the next month.

  When Steinbeck and Elaine stayed at the hotel, it still had an annex called the Ambassador West. The two buildings were connected under the street by a "secret" tunnel, which was commonly used by celebrities to duck the public, the paparazzi and the private detectives hired by their wives. The tunnel was closed, now that the Ambassador West had been converted into a condo. But the likes of JFK, who stayed at the Ambassador East when he debated Nixon in Chicago a week before the Steinbecks arrived, and Michael Jackson used it to their advantage. The night before I showed up President Obama had shacked up at the Ambassador West with enough security to take over Chicago. I was assured by an unnamed hotel source they didn’t reopen the tunnel so the president could dodge the media and meet secretly with his old homeboys Bill Ayers or The Rev. Wright.

  While I was talking to the desk clerk in the lobby a young woman with a big smile appeared next to me. “Are you Bill Steigerwald?” she asked. I was afraid I knew her from somewhere. But she quickly explained she had been reading my blog “Travels Without Charley” online for several weeks and had spotted me getting out of my red RAV4 with my big camera and Professional Reporter’s Notebook.

  Rachel Dry was a serious Steinbeck fan. She was also retracing his highway, or a portion of it. She and her mother were in the middle of driving a 1,500-mile stretch of his route that had started in her native upstate Vermont and would end in North Dakota. She was a nice, friendly, smart, inquisiti
ve Harvard grad, but a tad evasive. When I asked her if she was staying at the Ambassador, she lied and said she was staying nearby with friends. She also waited a little too long into our conversation before revealing that she worked in the opinion section of the Washington Post. Dry asked me to keep her name and her trip off the record and off my road blog, which I did. My discreetness paid off.

  Six months later, in response to an article I wrote in Reason magazine, she wrote a defense of Steinbeck’s fabrications in “Travels With Charley” for the Post. It was a nicely styled op-ed feature story. Her Ivy League education may have made her too forgiving of Steinbeck’s factual misdeeds, but she fabricated no facts herself. She described our encounter exactly as it happened, confessing she had lied to me about where she was staying. She even called me “charming,” for which she should have won a Pulitzer for nonfiction.

  The Ambassador East was once culturally famous for its Pump Room, where big stars of every variety sat in booths in order to see each other and to be seen. The walls of the bar/restaurant/cathedral were still neatly plastered 20-feet high with 8x10 black-and-white glossies of hundreds of celebrities and power people dating back to 1938. The rugs were thick and the tablecloths white. The wood was heavy and dark and everywhere.

  A relic of an age long gone, the Pump Room was closed for lunch. But the hotel general manager said the magic word and the heavy gate was unlocked so I could poke around by myself in the semi-darkness of a time capsule that had only months to live. For 20 minutes I searched the walls for Steinbeck. He may or may not have had his mug posted there. But among the familiar faces beaming from the VIP booths were Reagan, Nixon, Sinatra, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bozo the Clown. One of the few stars born after the Korean War was comedian Dennis Miller.

  After I finished scouting the Ambassador East from marble lobby to marble 17th floor exercise room, I found the doorman out front at his marble post. As he handed me my car keys I slipped a tightly folded $10 bill in his palm. We both said thank you and goodbye. No harm, no foul.

  Rachel Dry and her progressive colleagues on the Washington Post editorial page would not have countenanced what we did. We probably broke 13 federal, state and city laws, but two consenting adults had engaged in a mutually pleasurable capitalist act. A voluntary free-market transaction – black-market-style, maybe – had occurred on the sidewalks of Chicago. As I drove off for my personal tour of Adlai Stevenson's former farmhouse, I felt the American economy perk up a tick.

  Not long after I visited, the Ambassador East was closed, remodeled into an “urban-contemporary” hotel and renamed the Public Chicago Hotel. When the Pump Room reopened, all that was left from its golden days was its name and some old celebrity photos, which were moved to the walls of a tiny vestibule inside its street entrance. The hotel Steinbeck knew and loved had disappeared forever.

  Steinbeck’s political superhero

  Libertyville, Illinois, sounds like it should be the national headquarters of the Libertarian Party. It's not. It’s where Steinbeck’s political hero and pen pal Adlai Stevenson had his 70-acre farm. It’s also where John, Elaine and Charley Steinbeck stopped for a sleepover in the fall of 1960. On a perfect sunny day, as the temperature neared 80, I went straight from the Ambassador East Hotel to Stevenson’s “gentleman’s” farm in the horsey part of Libertyville. I had arranged to meet Nicole Stocker of the Lake County Forest Preserve, which owns the farm's current 40 acres, for a personal tour of the modern/Art Deco house Stevenson lived in from the late 1930s until he died in 1965.

  Steinbeck and Stevenson were more than contemporaries and pen pals. They had several interests in common – liberal/New Deal politics, agriculture, dogs and the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table. Politically, Steinbeck was a Stevenson Man, 110 percent. He helped the former Illinois governor during the 1950s with some speeches and desperately wanted him to become the president in '52 and '56 and to win the Democrat nomination again in 1960. He was still pulling for Stevenson long after it was clear that his days as the Democrats' standard-bearer were over.

  Stevenson’s white, squared-off house at “The Farm” was simple, practical and smartly designed, with airy rooms, huge windows, a wild Art Deco bathroom and a long back deck looking out at the lawn and blazing oak trees that stretched to the Des Plaines River. The house had been restored for tours in 2008 and was used for meetings but still needed several rooms of furniture. Only Stevenson's study – the most important room in the house, Nicole said – was completely furnished. It had his old desk, his books and his address book – which happened to be opened to "S." Steinbeck's name and Sag Harbor phone number were there.

  In 1960 Stevenson's place was still a working farm. He grew corn and soybeans, and had horses, sheep and a pack of Dalmatians, all named after characters from King Arthur's Court. He, like Steinbeck, lived relatively frugally for a wealthy man, but Nicole said a housekeeper and a caretaker were on the premises. One of Stevenson’s near neighbors was Marshall Field, who owned a little department store in Chicago. Many historic figures of the era came to talk politics with Adlai in his ample living room – from Senator Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft of Ohio to a young, ambitious rogue with the initials JFK. Nicole said the three Steinbecks probably slept in the guest suite, where Eleanor Roosevelt would crash whenever she dropped by.

  Steinbeck says nothing in “Travels With Charley” or his road letters about his visit to Stevenson’s farm, which is 35 miles north of downtown Chicago. Biographer Jackson Benson mentions Steinbeck’s visit in “John Steinbeck, Writer.” And a Steinbeck letter to Stevenson that I read at Princeton alludes to their walk together in Stevenson’s "blazing" woods in the fall of 1960. Exactly when the Steinbeck family stayed in Libertyville is not known and doesn’t matter. What is certain is that on the morning of Monday, Oct. 10, 1960, Steinbeck and Charley were back on the road together, heading north on U.S. Highway 12 into Wisconsin while Elaine was jetting back to New York.

  We know these facts because Steinbeck wrote to Elaine that night from a truck stop in Mauston, Wisconsin. It was the first of four detail-rich road letters Steinbeck wrote that week as he raced west to Seattle. It was their contents – ironically, made public in 1975 when Elaine chose them to be included in “Steinbeck: A Life in Letters” – that would betray Steinbeck’s most egregious fictions.

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Monday, Oct. 10, 1960 – Mauston, Wisconsin

  As Elaine flies back to New York, Steinbeck and Charley set out from Chicago in Rocinante for Seattle. He drives about 220 miles north and sleeps in his camper at a truck stop on busy U.S. Highway 12 in Mauston, Wisconsin.

  An MRI of America

  Driving, eating, blogging, driving, eating, I didn’t make it too far north into Wisconsin on Friday evening. After leaving Adlai’s Stevenson’s house in Libertyville in late afternoon, I cut over to the village of Volo and hooked up with U.S. Highway 12, an official leg of the Steinbeck Highway System. Rush hour traffic finally disappeared, evaporating along with the suburban developments and malls. I entered a prosperous land of farms, lakes, YMCA camps and antique malls, sullied – some would say – by the occasional mini-mall, cheesy vacation place and new housing tract with a name like Remington Pointe. Richmond, Illinois, a healthy upper-middle class town of 1,000 near the state line, was closer to Milwaukee than Chicago.

  Crossing into Wisconsin didn’t change a thing outside my windows, except that U.S. 12 became four lanes. It was still mostly single houses spaced randomly among cornfields and woods and smallvilles like Cambridge. I noticed few motels, not that I cared. I was aiming at Wal-Mart store No. 2335 in Madison, where I arrived at 10:30 Friday night. It was no Ambassador East. But my blacked-out berth was comfortable and warm and I didn’t have to bribe anyone to watch my car.

  It had been a big, long day of driving – South Bend to Chicago to Madison. Urban, suburban, exurban, rural, small town and college town – in just 250 miles I’d taken a pretty decent MRI of 2010 Middle Amer
ica. Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, like every state I had been in and every state I was headed for, were noticeably much more empty than full, much more rich and white than poor or black, much more clean and green than dirty. The Chicago I saw was bustling. Even the highways were fast and smooth. Signs of the Great Recession I was traveling through were nowhere.

  A few cars and a bus kept me company overnight in Wal-Mart’s parking lot, which was lighted more humanely than the Wal-Marts of Bangor and Potsdam. I woke at 5:15. It was 62 degrees and sunny, the start of another fine Midwestern day. My smart phone informed me coffee and Wi-Fi were .8 miles away at a McDonald’s, then told me how to get there. My destination for the day was Mauston, Wisconsin. I hoped to find the truck stop on U.S. 12 where Steinbeck made his first overnight stop on his 7-day, 2,100-mile dash from Chicago to Seattle. Mauston was only 75 miles north of Madison. But because of a charming small town in the Wisconsin Dells and scary encounters with two political extremists I wouldn’t get there until dinnertime.

  After escaping the streets of Madison and Middleton on U.S. 12, it was back to Wisconsin-as-usual – rolling farmland to the max. Nearly every inch of flat dirt was fenced for dairy farms or contoured for corn. Every perfect farm had a house, a barn, metal outbuildings and two or three tall shiny silos that could have been hiding ICBMs.