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

  His father, who was neither poor nor un-influential, built the red-and-white cottage early in the 20th century. Steinbeck lived there with his first wife Carol from 1930 to 1936, when he wrote books like “The Red Pony” and “Tortilla Flat” that made him nationally known. Though it was still owned and used by Steinbeck heirs, no one was there when I dropped by to snoop. It was just as well, since all I wanted to do was take photos.

  In 1960 the Traveling Steinbecks were at the cottage for only a day or two when the Monterey Peninsula Herald dispatched a writer and photographer to do a story. The resulting feature, which ran in the Nov. 4 paper, was very well written by Mike Thomas and included a photo of Steinbeck standing in the garden with a cigarette in his mouth.

  Thomas found Steinbeck fixing a wooden front gate, which the author said he had probably built himself 30 years earlier. Describing Steinbeck as a big man with broad features, piercing blue eyes, graying hair and small goatee, Thomas said he was wearing corduroy pants and a shapeless green sweater.

  His fingers were nicotine stained and he had a Zippo cigarette lighter on a string around his neck. Wife Elaine was there. So was “an aging poodle sitting in a car at the curbside.” When Thomas asked if he would ever move back to the Monterey area, Steinbeck said he felt like a stranger on the peninsula and repeated his Thomas Wolfe mantra – “You can’t go home again.”

  Prices & Politics, 1960-Style

  The pages of the Monterey Peninsula Herald that week described life on a simpler, cheaper planet – planet 1960. Display ads read like cruel jokes from a time machine. A Hoover vacuum cleaner cost $80. A wool sweater at the Casual shop in Carmel was $5.77. Three pounds of ground beef cost 99 cents.

  When you factor for inflation, which you must always do to get an accurate comparison of prices over time, the sweater and the beef were not the deals they seem today. Since the dollar’s purchasing power in 1960 was more than seven times what it was in 2010, in current dollars the sweater was almost $42, the meat $7 and the Hoover cost the equivalent of $589.

  Meanwhile, a transistorized “microcorder” from Webcor was advertized for $179.95 ($1,326 in 2010 dollars) and weighed 4½ pounds. A ticket to see Mort Sahl at the San Jose Civic Auditorium was $3.75 or $1.80 for the peanut gallery. A new 3-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot house, built to the buyer’s specs, sold for $23,395. A new house one-third that size was $8,695, with 100 percent financing. A classified ad offered a “sharp” used 1959 Ford Fairlane for $1,795. That’d be about $14,000 today, which is not too bad. But it wasn’t exactly loaded with options – just a stick shift, AM radio and heater.

  On Nov. 1, 1960, the Peninsula Herald’s editorial page, which contained the “Dennis the Menace” cartoon strip every day, ran an editorial cartoon depicting JFK and Nixon in a drag race. A letter to the editor defended Truman’s use of the atomic bomb on Japan. In sports, the big headline talked about Alvin Dark becoming the new Giants manager.

  Going into Election Day, the presidential race was close in both California and the nation, with Kennedy leading Nixon in the Time and Newsweek polls. On Nov. 2, with six days to go, JFK came through San Jose on his way to a fundraiser in San Francisco and Nixon was about to fly into Fresno. The Peninsula Herald put its endorsement of Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge at the top left of its front page. It ran the same recommendation on Page 1 every day for the next six days.

  The plug for “Tricky Dick” may have helped Nixon take Monterey County by a 56-43 majority and narrowly carry the state by 35,000 votes out of 6.5 million cast. But it couldn’t sway Steinbeck. On Nov. 8, he cast an absentee vote. Unless he wrote-in the name of his hero Adlai Stevenson, he voted for John F. Kennedy.

  Two months later he’d attend JFK’s inauguration and begin his personal relationship with Kennedy and LBJ. Steinbeck would be pleased to know the voters of Steinbeck Country have done a political 180 in the last half-century. In 2008 they voted 66-33 for President Obama, a nail-biter compared to the 80-20 Obama landslide in San Francisco.

  Purging Steinbeck’s Partisanship

  Politics is strangely absent from “Travels With Charley.” Being a political creature, I noticed that right away when I re-read the book. It made no sense. During a historic, heated election, in a nonfiction book about America written by an openly partisan author, could the names Kennedy and Nixon really each appear just once? I did a quick search on my Kindle. It was true. The names show up on page 177 of the 246-page 1962 Viking Press hardback edition, when Steinbeck arrives in Monterey a few days before Election Day and has a brief, hot, childish argument with his Republican sister.

  Part of Steinbeck’s original mission had been to take the political pulse of the country. He was quickly disappointed to find how difficult that was. As he wrote in his first draft, he was saddened to learn that the greatest number of Americans he saw “did not have political opinions, or if they did, concealed them whether out of fear or expediency I do not know.”

  Their silence didn’t stop him from lacing his original manuscript with his running commentary on the election, which he obviously followed closely. He was a stanch New Deal Democrat and didn’t pretend otherwise. In the first draft of “Charley,” he wrote, “It must not be thought that my wife and I are or were nonpartisan observers. We were and are partisan as all get out, confirmed, blown in the glass democrats and make no bones about it.”

  That confession was axed. So was nearly every overt political comment or crack he put in the first draft. For example, all four televised Nixon-Kennedy debates occurred while he was on the road. Based on his letters and the original manuscript, he saw or heard each one in full or in part.

  A Stevenson Man until the bitter end, Steinbeck didn’t swoon over the prospects of a President John Kennedy. But he loathed Nixon, as the manuscript repeatedly makes clear. At one point, after watching a Nixon-JFK debate on the big TV in his motel room, he criticized Nixon and Herbert Hoover and went on for about 150 words, making fun of their pedestrian Republican reading habits and comparing their low intelligence levels to Kennedy’s high one. “Being a democrat,” he wrote without capitalizing Democrat, “I wanted Kennedy to win….” That scene was axed.

  Also cut was his commentary following the third presidential debate, which he watched in his room at a “pretty auto court” in Livingston, Montana. He sarcastically asked himself if Montanans had any real interest in the major geopolitical issue of that debate – whether the United States should defend the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which the Red Chinese were shelling and threatening to take from Taiwan. Other political comments he made in San Francisco, Monterey and Amarillo – some of them refreshingly bipartisan in their cynicism – were chopped out completely. So were two pokes at the John Birch Society, a favorite punching bag.

  Though it took some of the edge away from an already nearly edgeless book, cutting 99 percent of the presidential politics from “Travels With Charley” was smart and logical editing. First of all, by the time the book would hit bookstores – in late July of 1962 – the 1960 election was ancient history. Who would care by then what Steinbeck thought about the third JFK-Nixon debate?

  Plus, his political sniping was petty and one-sided, though that probably bothered no one at the Viking Press. It was also boring and at odds with the rest of the book’s grouchy but generally likable tone. The trouble was, removing all of the politics left a glaring hole in what was supposed to be a nonfiction account of what was going on in the nation.

  It also resulted in some sloppy editorial work by Viking. For example, in “Travels With Charley” Steinbeck mentions that the presidential election is occurring and that he cast his absentee vote. Yet he never says anything after that about who won or whether he was pleased by the results. It was not that way in the original draft.

  When he was in Amarillo for three or four days getting his cracked camper window replaced, Steinbeck noted in the manuscript that the election was over and Kennedy had narrowly won. He also says he went out into the streets
and hotel lobbies to canvass the electorate’s views on the results and had a good laugh when a local Republican-demanded recount found more GOP voting irregularities than Democrat ones. All that information about the election was lopped by editors.

  Like his wife, who played an even more important part in his actual trip, Steinbeck’s politics were purged from his book. In the end it was no great loss, because he had pulled most of his political punches anyway. What he wrote was softball stuff compared to what he expressed in long letters to Adlai Stevenson and his operatives in the run-up to the 1960 Democratic convention in July 1960.

  In one letter now among the Stevenson papers kept at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Steinbeck casually referred to Kennedy as “a bed-hopper.” Womanizing was a JFK character flaw the author obviously knew about in the summer of 1960, as did LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover and untold other Beltway media insiders, even if the voting masses didn’t.

  Steinbeck had no interest in throwing his JFK dirt into “Travels With Charley.” And though he wasn’t shy about making fun of his hated Richard Nixon in the first draft, he wasn’t about to share the explosive information he had on the vice-president as early as the spring of 1960. In a May 24 letter to Stevenson’s right-hand operative, Bill Blair Jr., Steinbeck wrote that he knew of a talkative, snobbish “psycho-analyst” in New York who traveled three times a week to Washington to “put Dickie on the couch.” Steinbeck said this political bombshell, which could have prevented Nixon from getting the GOP nomination, “should be leaked and if you don’t leak it, I will.” Steinbeck said it was “pleasant to know that Poor Richard is not happy. But this should be used.”

  Nixon’s secret shrink was Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. The German-born psychoanalyst had been consulting with the vice president in Washington and in his New York City office since the early 1950s. For years there had been rumors that Nixon was seeing a therapist, but apparently Stevenson’s people didn’t pass along Steinbeck’s tip because JFK’s camp didn’t find out about Dr. Hutschnecker until the first week of September. The details of Nixon’s relationship with the therapist and how the Kennedy campaign learned about it – which took more than 50 years to become public – are the latest evidence of how thoroughly sleazy and vicious the 1960 election was.

  Both sides played hard and dirty. In June Nixon’s team of tricksters sneaked around in the offices of two Kennedy doctors and found that JFK was gravely ill with Addison’s disease. In response, JFK’s father Joe asked Frank Sinatra to hire a private detective to look into the old rumors that Nixon was regularly seeing a head doctor. What the detective learned and how he learned it is detailed in David Robb’s highly praised 2012 book “The Gumshoe and the Shrink.” Though Nixon operatives publicly raised the issue of JFK’s potentially fatal illness a few days before Election Day, JFK refused to counterattack by releasing the personal dirt he knew about Nixon.

  Too bad Kennedy didn’t expose the existence of Dr. Hutschnecker. History would have been changed. It would have blown open a close election, made all that Democrat vote fraud in Chicago and Texas unnecessary and made it virtually impossible for Nixon to become president eight years later. As for poor Steinbeck, he had to endure Nixon’s political resurrection and watch him defeat Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Luckily he died that year on Dec. 20, so he never had to witness his hated Tricky Dick being sworn in as president.

  Old Monterey

  I went other places on my quickie Steinbeck tour. I didn’t need to search downtown Monterey along Alvarado Street for evidence of the bars he regularly drank in. I had already done that in March. Monterey has a fairly healthy downtown, with seven or eight blocks of old stucco buildings with the usual offices, eateries, coffee shops, a cigar store and a Walgreen’s. But Steinbeck’s favorite bars, including the Keg on Alvarado Street owned by Johnny Garcia, were destroyed with the rest of their vintage block by an urban renewal project of the late 1960s.

  Dennis Copeland of the Monterey Library told me Alvarado Street was always the heart of downtown Monterey. The downscale mom & pop grocery stores, restaurants, Army surplus stores and pawnshops that were demolished served the Sicilian fishing community and catered to visiting soldiers and sailors. I loved Copeland. He hated urban renewal and knew how it was used to destroy parts of cities across America. He said old-timers in Monterey still complained about how a lively working-class block was destroyed in the name of progress by city hall and “free” federal money.

  As happened in Pittsburgh and later in other cities before and after 1960, the poor part of downtown Monterey was declared a slum so it could be clear-cut and redeveloped by local pols and their favored developers. I don’t pretend to know whether Alvarado Street deserved the wrecking ball, but it ended up with two beastly hotels and a block of sterile storefronts where Johnny Garcia’s Keg used to be.

  Steinbeck set a lengthy drinking scene in Garcia’s place. In the first draft of “Charley,” Elaine is sitting at the bar with Steinbeck. But in the published book he sits alone. It was in Garcia’s that Steinbeck says he realized how much he and his former pals had changed in the 20 years since they had seen each other. Half of his old pals were dead. He and everyone else had become ghosts to each other.

  A stranger in his hometown, he writes that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he wrote “You can’t go home again.” Of course Steinbeck had known for 20 years he could never live on the Monterey Peninsula again. But the theatrical bar scene, real or invented or somewhere in between, was a nice display of his writing talents.

  RIP, Mr. Steinbeck

  From Pacific Grove, I pointed my RAV4 due east for the first time since I touched the top of Maine in late September. First stop was Salinas, 15 miles inland. I didn’t need to revisit the Steinbeck House or the National Steinbeck Center. But I wanted to pay my respects to my dead road-mate before I made my assault on Fremont Peak.

  On state Route 68, as I approached Salinas, I pulled over by an immense strawberry field. For miles I had been watching Fremont Peak’s little shark tooth poking into the cloudy sky above the Gabilan Mountains. The peak was not much taller than the others on the jagged gray range, which ran across the horizon and seemed to be propped up by a row of brown and green foothills.

  Taking photos of the distant peak with the strawberry field and a dozen Latino farm workers in the foreground made a good photo but it also made the farm workers and their boss nervous. I could see them pointing at me through my zoom lens. Then their pickup truck, hitched to three port-a-potties, started moving directly toward me.

  Who knows what the poor devils thought I was doing or which government agency I was working for. Immigration? Homeland Security? Border Patrol? The Minutemen? I drove off three minutes before the pickup could reach me. The strawberry pickers had no way of knowing I meant them no harm. I didn’t care whether they were legal or illegal immigrants as long as they weren’t on welfare.

  In Salinas at Garden of Memories Memorial Park, hundreds of graves were decorated lavishly with piles of fresh flowers, balloons and flags. It was part of the celebration for Dia de los Muerto (Day of the Dead), when Mexicans honor their dead by visiting them and over-decorating their graves. The only other living soul in the cemetery, a young Latino man in a baggy light blue jersey, knelt on the grass by one headstone, staring intently into his smart phone.

  In the older, grayer part of the cemetery, where there were spiky granite monuments and few fresh flowers, Steinbeck’s simple grave was pretty much as I had left it in March. The tiny ceramic poodle guard dog was gone. But several pennies, a marble, a Jesus medal, a crystal miniature Blessed Mother and a few soggy flower parts were scattered on his weathered bronze marker.

  Set into the concrete next to “John Steinbeck, 1902-1968” was the matching plaque of “Elaine Anderson Steinbeck, 1914-2003.” Her marker still had its original copper sheen. His marker and the raised bronze letters of his name had long ago turned a faded gray-blue. With nothing new to say to him, and vice versa, I took a few ph
otos and left him in peace.

  Party on Fremont Peak

  Before leaving the Monterey Peninsula and motoring to Texas for a long Thanksgiving holiday, Steinbeck had one last important metaphorical thing to do in “Travels With Charley.” He takes Charley to Fremont Peak, the mountaintop he said overlooked “the whole of my childhood and my youth.”

  Looking back in time and space, Steinbeck bids final farewell to the place he no longer belongs to and can never go home to again. He writes it was a “formal and sentimental thing” he had to do before turning his back to his “permanent and changeless past.” His brief goodbye to what would soon become “Steinbeck Country” was some of the best writing in “Charley.”

  Fremont Peak State Park, virtually unknown and off the beaten tourist track, is an incredible place to hike, watch a sunset, camp overnight, gaze at the Milky Way or just be. Just getting there is an adventure. From Steinbeck’s grave in Salinas it was a 20-mile trip around the northern end of the Gabilan Mountains, followed by 11 harrowing miles up a twisting narrow road that hangs over steep canyons.