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

  The edits didn’t surprise Gentry. He was very involved in politics in 1960. Like Steinbeck, he was a devout Adlai Stevenson Democrat. During the 1956 presidential year, when he was active in the Young Californians for Stevenson, Gentry was called upon to drive Stevenson around town a couple times. He also was a driver for JFK, who apparently was on his best behavior because Gentry had no sexy story to share.

  Gentry and Steinbeck kept in touch, exchanging several letters over the next few years. After Steinbeck’s death Gentry wanted to write a book about him and his relationship with his close friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist and real-life model for Doc in “Cannery Row.” Steinbeck’s agent, Elizabeth Otis, liked the idea, Gentry said. But widow Elaine – who controlled Steinbeck’s estate with a firm hand – nixed it. Elaine was, to put it kindly, not Gentry’s favorite Steinbeck. One thing that bothered him, he said, was the closeness of Elaine to Steinbeck’s biographers, Jackson Benson and Jay Parini.

  “They automatically accepted anything she said about his first two wives, Carol or Gwen,” he said. “Everything I’ve read and heard is that Elaine was a real ball-buster and a terrible person, with her ex-husband, Zachary Scott (the movie actor), manipulating her in the background.” That was a new bit of inside-Steinbeck World gossip/dirt for me. I had no idea if it was true and didn’t care one way or the other, but it sounded like something a guy who wrote an expose of J.E. Hoover might know.

  Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints. That was pretty much all the “entertainment” there was in 2010. But in 1960, the clubs and bars spinning around the intersection of Columbus and Broadway were booking stars of the present and incubating stars of the future. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Tatum played in clubs. Johnny Mathis got his start in North Beach in the mid ‘50s right after high school.

  The famous North Beach nightclub the Hungry i, by itself, is said to have launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters and Barbra Streisand. The Hungry i was owned by mad impresario Enrico Banducci, who also opened up Enrico’s Coffee House on Broadway. Upstairs was Finochio’s, the famous nightclub featuring a vaudevillian floorshow of female impersonators. Gentry knew and liked Banducci. As soon as he made enough money, Gentry said, he basically lived in Enrico’s sidewalk cafe, which by day was a Herb Caen watering hole and by night a jazzy de facto after-hours club for cops, prostitutes and scuffling writers like him.

  Enrico’s Café, now closed, still existed in 2010. But its glory days, like North Beach’s, were ancient history. The afternoon I went to check it out it was closed for lunch. Basically unchanged since 1960, its outside tables were jammed inside behind big glass doors. The sidewalk patio was showing its age, its concrete cracked and its booths worn at the corners. The three-story building needed a paint job. The top floor where Finochio’s raunchy floorshow once shocked or entertained the straight world looked vacant.

  Enrico’s Café’s near neighbors in 2010 were strip clubs like the Hungry I Club (“The Best Girls in Town”) and Big Al’s adult bookstore. But still on the corner of Columbus and Broadway was City Lights Books, which became world famous in 1956 after its owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” The precedent-setting First Amendment test-case that followed ultimately overturned the country’s obscenity laws and allowed banned books like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to be published in the Land of the Free.

  For several days in the fall of 1960 Steinbeck loafed only a few hundred feet from City Lights, yet he had nothing to do with the Beats and their revolutionary scene, and vice versa. Ferlinghetti’s assistant told me Ferlinghetti and Steinbeck – the new literary generation and the old – never met then or any other time. By 2010 City Lights and the Beat Museum – a well-done retail shrine to the lives and works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and other dead Beats – were the only two reasons left for going to what was once one of the coolest, most cutting edge, most culturally important intersections in America.

  Portrait of an Immortal

  The great columnist Herb Caen, who in 1958 coined the word “beatnik” to describe the Beat Generation, also captured a sharp, mid-trip portrait of John Steinbeck. Caen’s breezy, literate daily column of insider gossip and smart-alecky opinion about the city he called “Baghdad by the Bay” was a must-read for decades until his death in 1997. In his Oct. 30 column he detailed the recent afternoon encounter he had with Steinbeck at Enrico’s sidewalk cafe, where Caen ate lunch nearly every day.

  “John Steinbeck, well-nigh immortal writer, was there, looking distinguished, like/as a writer should. Pinstriped suit. Black hat. Silver-topped cane. And a handsome beard.” Caen quoted Steinbeck’s explanation for the beard: “‘Hemingway wears a beard because he has skin cancer. My reason is pure vanity. The cane? I broke my kneecap four times.’”

  Steinbeck, pushing away his lunch and ordering a beer, told Caen what he was up to:

  “‘I drove across the country in a campwagon. Alone. My wife met me in Seattle. I’ve been living in New York – that’s not America – and Europe. I hadn’t seen my own country in twenty years. I wanted to get to know the people again, hear how they talk and feel. You can’t live on memories.’ ”

  Steinbeck also told Caen that the American people “‘are disturbed, plenty. They feel nobody in Washington has been telling them what’s going on. I think Kennedy will win. It’s like writing a play – you can’t fool people. You can get away with a sensational play, maybe, but not a bad one. Nixon is a bad play, the kind you don’t believe.’”

  Caen said Steinbeck “lit a cigarette with a lighter strung around his neck on a black cord” and raved about the “magnificent” beauty of the country, especially Montana. Other topics included Steinbeck’s upcoming novel about America’s lack of morality and a few semi-humorous asides. Charley and Elaine were not mentioned, though they were probably there.

  Caen’s brief detailed depiction of Steinbeck, like Gentry’s longer portrait, is telling. It also almost single-handedly destroys the “Travels With Charley” Myth. The “well-nigh immortal writer” Caen met – dressed flamboyantly for lunch in one of the hottest eateries in town – was not the grizzled romantic road warrior of “Travels With Charley.” Nor was he lonely, depressed or sickly. Nor was he roughing it, trying to lay low or searching very hard for America.

  Barnaby Conrad’s Joint

  During his rest stop in San Francisco, Steinbeck hung around a great deal with his multi-talented friend Barnaby Conrad. Conrad, then 38, was an author, an artist, a musician and an ex-bullfighter, ex-diplomat and ex-secretary to Sinclair Lewis. Conrad met Steinbeck after he chose Conrad’s bestselling novel “Matador” as his favorite book of 1952.

  In 1960 Conrad owned the El Matador, a popular celebrity piano bar in North Beach. The swank hangout was decorated with bullfighting gear, bullfighting photos, bullfighting art and two stuffed bullheads. It was where Sinatra, Judy Garland and the Reagans went when they were in town, where Marilyn Monroe or Lenny Bruce or Duke Ellington or Norman Mailer might drop in. Where Kerouac was comfortable.

  El Matador is long gone, but it was just a few doors down on Broadway from Enrico's. Conrad ate lunch at Enrico’s with Steinbeck almost every day of his "Travels With Charley" layover. In the spring of 2010, when I began researching Steinbeck’s trip, Conrad was one of the first persons I contacted. He was 88 and living in Santa Barbara, California. Steinbeck was "riding high and in wonderful spirits" when they saw each other 50 years earlier, he told me. "He visited me a couple of times in my saloon and took me to see the inside of Rocinante."

  One of their adventures together took Conrad and the Steinbecks down the Pacific Coast to Monterey and Carmel. Conrad had been drawn into producing an independent movie based on a Steinbeck short-story called "Flight." According to Steinbeck biographer Jackso
n Benson, when Steinbeck heard that Conrad was in “deep financial trouble” and having trouble selling “Flight” to distributors, he offered to do a brief “stand-up” introduction for the movie. “Flight” had debuted at the San Francisco Film Festival days before Steinbeck hit town, and had been generally panned.

  The scouting trip down the coast took Steinbeck to the city of Monterey, which he had not seen in 24 years. The city was trying to revive Ocean View Avenue and had officially renamed the blighted street of closed sardine factories "Cannery Row" in Steinbeck's honor. When Steinbeck saw what the city had done he was "terribly depressed," Conrad told me. "He hated it," said Conrad, who had told the same story to Steinbeck biographer Benson nearly 30 years earlier.

  In his bio, Benson has other details about what happened when Conrad and the Steinbecks got to John’s old stamping/writing/drinking grounds. Elaine excitedly pointed out that the movie theater on Cannery Row had been christened "The Steinbeck" and she said she wanted to go inside. But Steinbeck could barely look at it, writes Benson. It wasn't because a naughty Bridget Bardot movie titled "Come Dance With Me" was playing. It was because the theater was branded with Steinbeck's name – one of the early signs that "Steinbeck Country" was in gestation.

  Though he had given his permission, Steinbeck hated seeing his name on the marquee, Benson wrote. He knew by then that after he was safely dead his name was going to be used to boost his hometown of Salinas and the city of Monterey. Everything that Steinbeck said happened to Sinclair Lewis in his hometown after his death came true for him, too – by a factor of 1,000. After he died, Steinbeck had a whole country named after him.

  Conrad and Steinbeck found a spot to film by the ocean on 17 Mile Drive near Carmel and returned the next day to shoot there. After several takes, the camera-shy Steinbeck was able to deliver the brief introduction to “Flight.” It was attached to the movie, but reportedly didn’t help it much commercially.

  A photo of John and Elaine Steinbeck on the location set is in “Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost,” a book Jackson Benson wrote about the 13 years of torture he underwent to complete his biography "The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer." The Steinbecks are sitting at the base of a tree eating boxed lunches. Elaine is wearing a headscarf and John is wearing a corduroy sports coat but no tie. Charley and Rocinante were parked elsewhere.

  Peeing in Muir Woods

  Based on an another story told in Jackson Benson’s biography, at some point during his stay at the St. Francis Hotel Steinbeck drove back across the Golden Gate to Muir Woods, where he said Charley peed on a redwood that “was 50 feet across, 150 feet tall and 2,000 years old.” There’s a drawn-out scene in “Charley” in which Steinbeck tries to get Charley to pee on a redwood, but the tree is so huge Charley doesn’t recognize it as a target. An example of the book’s dopey pee humor, it may have been based on the Muir Woods visit.

  In any case, since Steinbeck said he went to Muir Woods, it was my job to go there and see how things had changed. Fifty years is a blink of an eye for a redwood, so it was no surprise that Muir Woods was still a cool, quiet, dark, beautiful oasis of old growth Coast Redwoods only 12 miles north of downtown. But a lot of things were different about it in 1960.

  It may or may not have been officially called Muir Woods National Monument then, no one could tell me for certain. But the same 500-year-old trees Steinbeck saw were still standing tall. In 1960 there was no visitor center to sell him nature books, organic local salads, coffee and gluten-free pastries. And instead of two miles of boardwalks and paved walkways, he and Charley had only dirt paths to walk on.

  Muir Woods was purchased by a private individual more than 100 years ago and then given to the federal government for safekeeping. That was exactly the opposite ownership arrangement my libertarian brethren and I would prefer, but I had to admit that Muir Woods appeared to be well maintained and carefully protected.

  It was no place for silently communing alone with nature, though. It was a place for weddings and herds of tourists. On a Monday morning at 10, five sightseeing buses and 30 cars had already delivered more than a 100 people through the front gate. Steinbeck wouldn’t have liked the Muir Woods I saw – too crowded, too official, too controlled. And Charley would have been displeased to learn Muir Woods, like so much of America in 2010, was no longer a dog-friendly place. Not even on a leash.

  Steinbeck’s Libertarian Streak

  While I was in San Francisco, back home in Pittsburgh a few regular Tea Party readers of my brother John’s hybrid sports & politics blog had an ideological bone to pick with me. They asked why I, a libertarian, was wasting my time writing about a lousy left-wing/commie writer like John Steinbeck.

  First of all, as I explained to them in my “Travels Without Charley” road blog, if I only wrote about people whose politics I agreed with even 50 percent of the time, I would have had few people to write about during my journalism career. Second, Steinbeck was not as far left as Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern or Teddy Kennedy. In fact, in some ways – specifically his animosity/bellicosity toward the Soviet Union and communism, his hawkish position on Vietnam and his affection for guns – Steinbeck was far to the right of McGovern and most artists and celebrities of the 1960s.

  As a staunch New Dealer, Steinbeck, like most artists of his generation, believed that a bigger, stronger, more pervasive federal government could fix social problems or micromanage the economy without making things worse or diminishing the freedom of citizens. He made constant fun of the John Birch Society’s fevered anti-communism, even in the pages of “Charley,” which all good 1960 liberals were required to do at least once a year. But he was no commie and no fool.

  He knew what was wrong with the Evil Soviet Empire. And when he went behind its fences on cultural exchanges in the 1950s and 1960s, he behaved better than most American writers and celebrities. He didn’t kowtow to Soviet officials, but bucked their authority. He was an individual, a free and outspoken American – and he acted like one.

  He refused to be a pawn or a fool for Moscow’s propaganda purposes and went out of his way to meet and encourage dissident writers. He proved he was no Red in this wise and prescient message he delivered over Radio Free Europe in 1954 to the captive peoples of Eastern Europe, who looked then like they would be imprisoned forever behind the Iron Curtain:

  To my friends,

  There was a time when I could visit you and you were free to visit me. My books were in your stores and you were free to write to me on any subject. Now your borders are closed with barbed wire and guarded by armed men and fierce dogs, not to keep me out but to keep you in. And now your minds are also imprisoned. You are told that I am a bad writer but you are not permitted to judge for yourselves. You are told we are bad people but you are forbidden to see and to compare. You are treated like untrustworthy animals, subjected to conditioning as cold and ruthless as though you were rats in a laboratory. You cannot travel, you cannot read freely and you cannot work at the profession of your choice. Your writers are the conditioned servants of a regime. All of this is designed to destroy your ability to think.

  I beg you to keep alive the integrity of the individual in his ability to judge and compare and create. May your writers write secretly and hold their writing for the time when this grey anesthetic has passed as pass it must. The free world outside your prison still lives. You will join it again and it will welcome you. Everything around you is cynically designed to destroy you as individuals. You must remember and teach your children that they are precious, not as dull cogs in the wheel of party existence, but as units complete and shining in themselves.

  That fine defense of individual rights and freedom, plus his indirect appreciation in “Travels With Charley” of property rights, plus his little anti-government rant at the border crossing at Niagara Falls, prove that Steinbeck was not as left-wing as his friends wished and his enemies thought. For a devout New Dealer, he had a decent libertarian streak.

  17 – Steinbe
ck Country, USA

  My departure was flight. But I did do one formal and sentimental thing before I turned my back. I drove up to Fremont’s Peak, the highest point for many miles around. I climbed the last spiky rocks to the top. Here among these blackened granite outcrops General Fremont made his stand against a Mexican army, and defeated it. When I was a boy we occasionally found cannon balls and rusted bayonets in the area. This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth, the great Salinas Valley stretching south for nearly a hundred miles, the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Steinbeck Timeline

  Sunday, Oct. 30 to Nov. 15, 1960 – Monterey Peninsula

  The Steinbecks – John, Elaine and Charley – move 120 miles south to the Monterey Peninsula for a two-week stay with his sister Beth at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove. He is interviewed and photographed at the cottage by the Monterey Peninsula Herald. The article, “John Steinbeck Back – But Not to Stay,” runs Nov. 4, 1960, and includes a photo of Steinbeck standing in the garden of the cottage with a cigarette in his mouth.