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

  Sure you do, pal.

  He asked where I was from and I told him Pittsburgh.

  "I've got an uncle in Pittsburgh and I went to a football game at Three Rivers Stadium in the '80s, when I was a teen-ager."

  Then he hit me with the closer that I should have seen coming.

  "I've got some good weed if you're interested."

  Good old California. It was bankrupt in myriad ways, but it still had some of its old ‘60s spirit. I declined the sidewalk weed vendor’s kind offer, which was 20 years too late for my lifestyle, and missed the chance to contribute to the GDP of Humboldt County.

  That night I tried to make it all the way to my daughter Michelle's house in Mill Valley, but I couldn’t stay awake. After sleeping in my car for three hours in a big open patch in the hills somewhere lonely along U.S. 101 near Willits, I polished off the remaining 100 miles. Pulling into my daughter’s driveway at 2 a.m., I slept in the back of my car until 6, no doubt breaking several dozen zoning laws in her upstanding community.

  Because I didn’t dawdle in Seattle or relax for days in the redwoods, I was a week ahead of Steinbeck’s pokey pace. Like a poor migrant journalist, I crashed on my daughter’s couch. She lived on a street lined with small, highly polished, late-1940s California ranch houses – wood, stucco, no basements, no second floors and .17-acre lots. Their average price was about $900,000. Or used to be, until the housing bubble burst and values fell 20 or 30 or 40 percent.

  I couldn’t tell which, if any, houses in her neighborhood were in foreclosure or had mortgages that were underwater, but everything seemed Marin County normal. The driveways still had their Audis, BMWs and hybrid SUVs. Handsome dogs were being walked. Handsome children were being swung in the community park-let. As long as no homeowner lost his/her six-figure job or needed to quickly move out of paradise, no one needed to panic. The Northern California real-estate roller coaster was always going up and down. You just have to be careful, and lucky, about when you decide to jump on and off the thrill ride.

  16 – Fun in San Francisco

  San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold – rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this golden white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which could never have existed.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Wednesday, Oct. 26 to Oct. 30, 1960 – San Francisco

  According to city columnist Herb Caen, the Steinbecks arrived in San Francisco on Wednesday evening, Oct. 26, 1960. They socialized with John’s friends and stayed at the posh St. Francis Hotel downtown through Sunday. He was interviewed in his suite on Oct. 28 by Curt Gentry, a freelancer for the San Francisco Chronicle’s book section.

  Steinbeck Hearts ‘The City’

  San Francisco did nothing special to seduce John Steinbeck. She has put on the same lovely show he described so well in “Travels With Charley” for millions of people who were not already in love with her, as Steinbeck was. Thousands of tourists, day-trippers, photographers, hikers and bicyclists from around the world enjoy the sight of San Francisco from the hills above the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge every day.

  While I killed a week in the Bay Area revisiting Steinbeck sites and watching the Giants play the Rangers in the World Series, I went to the top of the Marin Headlands. I had been there at least 20 times since 1974. It was always a treat and never the same. Details of light and color differ wildly from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour, depending on the whims of clouds, fog, wind and rain. Sometimes you can hear the hum of the bridge traffic far below, sometimes you can’t even see the bridge. It’s an absurd panorama, a superior example of man and nature showing off their greatest engineering works and collaborating at their best – at least until the same tectonic violence that created all that natural beauty destroys it.

  The wide-angled view of the city and the bay and the islands and the mountains and the towering bridges that tie them together has not changed since Steinbeck took his stunning verbal snapshot. From afar San Francisco still looks like the same place. It has the same tourist attractions that made it world famous as a place where it’s simply great to be – fabulous views in every direction, the Golden Gate, Alcatraz, cable cars, terrifyingly steep streets, Coit Tower, Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, fog, beaches, parks, good food and restaurants.

  But 50 years have brought dramatic changes, and they’ve not all been for the better. Republican bitching notwithstanding, it’s not because it’s become America’s most politically liberal city. Or that its percentage of gays, immigrants, Asians and Latinos is much higher than in 1960. Or even that it’s overrun with computer geeks.

  It’s that San Francisco exacts such a cripplingly high price on anyone who wants to live there. America’s most beautiful and visitable city is much more crowded with people and especially cars than in 1960. Its home prices and rents are obscene, beyond the reach of not only the working class but also the middle class. Its parking shortage is chronic, its parking enforcement sadistic.

  The city’s infamous Skid Row, where in Steinbeck’s day squalid flophouses provided cheap rooms for the city’s indigent and street drunks, is history, wiped out in the 1970s by urban renewal. But slum clearance, as usual, only moved the problem elsewhere. By 2010 almost 10,000 homeless and/or crazy people lived on downtown sidewalks and in shelters, an intractable civic embarrassment and tourist turnoff that cost city taxpayers $200 million a year.

  From his description, Steinbeck didn’t drive to the top of the Marin Headlands, where you can wander around the ruins of coastal defense forts, look down on container ships squeezing under the Gold Gate or risk your life peering over the grassy cliff to see the surf foaming against the shore 800 feet below your feet. Most likely, he cast his loving gaze from Vista Point, the popular scenic lookout at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Essentially level with the bridge deck’s six lanes, 200 feet above the icy bay, Vista Point was already open in 1960. Its parking lot/viewing area was like an international block party the afternoon I was there. Half my time was spent taking pictures of couples from Australia, Florida, France, Japan and Berkeley – with their own cameras – so they could prove they were together in San Francisco.

  But it didn’t really matter where Steinbeck stood. He could have described the sparkling skyline of San Francisco from memory. As he wrote in “Charley,” it’s where he spent his “attic days” struggling to become a writer. During the 1920s, while Hemingway and the other literary supernovas of his generation were losing themselves and becoming rich and famous in Paris, Steinbeck, who didn’t have the money, the desire or the Ivy League pedigree to move to France, said he “fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts.”

  Despite his fondness for San Francisco, Steinbeck had little to say about it in his book. After describing the city from the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, he wrote, “Then I crossed the great arch hung from filaments and I was in the city I knew so well. It remained the City I remembered, so confident of its greatness that it can afford to be kind. It had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency. I might have stayed indefinitely, but I had to go to Monterey to send off my absentee ballot.”

  That’s it for San Francisco. Steinbeck’s next paragraph is about the politics of Monterey County, “where everyone was a Republican” including his family. But in the nonfiction world, Steinbeck had no intention of zipping past his favorite city without partaking of its pleasures. He spent four busy days downtown, staying at the handsome St. Francis Hotel in Union Square.

&n
bsp; Apparently, booking a room in San Francisco had been difficult even for him because of conventions. If scenes cut from the book’s first draft can be believed, Elaine made several fruitless calls ahead to hotels from roadside pay phones before they landed a suite at the St. Francis, where Caruso, Fatty Arbuckle and Hemingway had once been regulars and Steinbeck was a familiar face.

  In the deleted scenes, Steinbeck described arriving with Elaine via U.S. Route 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge. After getting lost for a while, he found his way to the St. Francis downtown. Now the Westin St. Francis, it has undergone many cosmetic changes since 1960. But in 2010, when I prowled its halls and stairways, it still had dark wood, heavy rugs, mirrored ceilings, monstrous chandeliers and a two-ton shoeshine stand. Everything else – the floors, the back steps, walls – was made of marble.

  Steinbeck wrote that he parked Rocinante at the luxury hotel's entrance – and just left it there, where it was in the way and attracting the wrong class of attention. He went straight to his hotel room and jumped in the bathtub with a whisky and soda at his side. He really enjoyed sitting in bathtubs with whiskies and sodas.

  In the cut scenes Steinbeck purred that the spacious suite was "pure grandeur." He was pleased to find no Formica, no plastic, no cheap ashtrays in the St. Francis, which in 1960 was already old, prestigious and, as he admitted, “outmoded” and “trapped in an ancient and primitive way of doing things.” He wasn’t complaining about the hotel’s old ways. Eating in the living room on white linen, he was pleased in his first draft to report being attacked by an army of servants – “valet, waiters, maids, pressers, housekeeper.”

  Apparently, after her punishing ride in Rocinante and a week’s worth of rustic resorts, Elaine was back in her idea of lodging heaven. She preferred well-staffed English country inns to the "do-it-yourself" style of the modern American motel, where you had to fetch your own ice at the end of the hall and lug your own luggage. "My lady wife was very pleased,” Steinbeck wrote.

  As he sat in his bathtub “like a sunburned Buddha,” Steinbeck wrote, the phone rang. It was the doorman. Rocinante was blocking traffic and it didn’t fit in the underground parking garage across the street under Union Square. What should be done with it? The unsightly pickup truck was moved to a parking lot and the hotel scenes end with Elaine calling the hairdresser. It’s not hard to understand why this glimpse of the Steinbecks indulging themselves on the road was purged from the book. And where was faithful Charley in these dropped scenes? His presence at the St. Francis was never mentioned. Apparently he’d already been checked into a kennel.

  Steinbeck meets the press

  Headquartered at the St. Francis, Steinbeck hung out with old friends at some of the city's top bars and restaurants. The local print media instantly discovered his arrival. Herb Caen, the famed city columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle and “the uncrowned prince” of the city, reported in his daily column on Oct. 28 that his friend John Steinbeck had “chugged” into town “from New York” on the evening of Oct. 26.

  The next day local writer Curt Gentry got a tip from a Chronicle staffer. Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

  Gentry, then 29, would go on to write more than a dozen books, including his biggest one with Vincent Bugliosi, "Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders." But in 1960 he was a struggling writer, ex-newspaper reporter and bookstore manager. He lived in North Beach, the super-hip Italian neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. He mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

  On my research trip in the spring of 2010 Gentry met me at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. In its heyday the dim, aging, wood-lined North Beach landmark was a hangout for writers, politicos, musicians and the city’s in-crowd. But the WashBaG, as Herb Caen had nicknamed it, was almost empty when I was there and in a few months would close forever. Gentry, as well known to the staff as the owner, was easy to spot at the bar, looking dapper in his brown cap. He was the real deal. “Helter Skelter” made him rich. His 1991 New York Times bestseller “J. Edgar Hoover” exposed Hoover’s paranoia, his serial abuses of power and how he created the myth of the FBI as invincible and incorruptible.

  At 79 Gentry was still writing tough books like the one he was working on about the Las Vegas mob. He couldn’t have been nicer, more helpful or more supportive of my “Charley”-retracing project. Not only did he buy me lunch and ignore our wide political divide. But he told me stories about the 1960 North Beach scene, repeated his favorite Steinbeck gossip and, when I expressed doubt about pulling off a book deal, kindly said, “I have faith in you.”

  On top of that moral support, Gentry gave me something else that was priceless – 10 pages of notes he had typed up after his meeting with Steinbeck. An observant record of what Steinbeck was doing and thinking in mid-“Charley” trip, Gentry’s account depicts a politically partisan 58-year-old at the top of his game, not lonely, not depressed, but full of piss and vinegar.

  When Gentry went to the St. Francis for his 11 a.m. interview, he said, Elaine was still in bed, Charley was in a kennel and John was hung over. “It looked like they both had quite a night," Gentry told me. A longtime admirer of Steinbeck, Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

  He asked Steinbeck to sign the books, which he cheerfully did. Steinbeck had just finished sending Adlai Stevenson a telegram containing some silly anti-Nixon jokes and was sewing together the clasp for his walking stick. Later, after Steinbeck finished a rant about what he called the immorality of Americans, Gentry wrote that “he tossed the stick across the room in anger.”

  In his notes, Gentry described Steinbeck as friendly, talkative and animated. They discussed, among many subjects, the presidential election, what was wrong with America, why his friend and neighbor Dag Hammarskjold would make a great president and why Hemingway should write about people not bullfighting. Steinbeck told Gentry he was driving across the country in an attempt to find out what the American people thought about politics. "Everywhere he has traveled," Gentry wrote in his notes, "there is fantastic interest. People are not indifferent, or undecided. They just won't say."

  Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had "made it fashionable to be stupid." Gentry also noted that Steinbeck "had much to say on Richard Nixon, a great part of it unprintable." According to Gentry, Steinbeck was down on Americans for becoming soft and what he called “immoral.” Previewing what he would express in his recently completed but not yet published novel “The Winter of Our Discontent,” Steinbeck defined “immorality as ‘taking out more than you are willing to put back.’”

  Steinbeck, wrote Gentry, “went on to note emphatically that ‘a nation or a group or an individual cannot survive immorality. The individual can’t survive being soft, comforted, content. He only survives well when the press is on him. In Rome when they began taking more out than they put in they began to decay.’ And then his voice grew louder, his gestures became more emphatic as he added ‘If a fuse blew out in the Empire State Building today a million people would trample themselves to death … No one can do anything anymore. Who could slaughter and cut up a cow if they had to? No it has to be carefully cut for them, cellophane wrapped. They have lost the ability to be versatile. When either people or animals lose their versatility they become extinct.’”

  When Gentry asked if he’d ever come back to live in California, Steinbeck said what he would later w
rite in “Travels With Charley” after visiting his old haunts in Monterey. Steinbeck, according to Gentry, “said, sadly, ‘The truest words ever written were Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again.” I wish it weren’t so but when I come back to California to stay it will be in a box.’ ”

  Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited. The piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, under the headline "John Steinbeck: 'America's King Arthur is Coming.'" (In an eerie presaging of Jackie Kennedy’s post-assassination comment that her husband’s presidency had been “an American Camelot,” Steinbeck had said, apparently in reference to JFK, that all countries have legendary King Arthur-types who show up during times of trouble.)

  In his article Gentry described Steinbeck as “big in body, mind, and heart” and “full of humor, vitriol, compassion and strong feeling.” What Gentry had written was printed in the paper verbatim until it came to his attempts to share some of Steinbeck’s stronger political opinions with the Chronicle’s readers. A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.