by Studs Terkel
“The reason I called, I found a piece of paper, a tissue, and written in lipstick is your name. It says ‘Studs,’ and your phone number is there. I just thought I’d tell you that.”
“I’m glad you did, thank you very much. Don’t worry about it. Thanks a lot.” I knew one of those girls had to be Rose. I hung up, told Ida about the call, and went off to work.
Then Ida picked up the story. It’s noon, I’m at WFMT, Ida’s at home. The bell rings, she goes to the door and there they stand, three disheveled girls. Ida said: “You never saw three as bedraggled as they. In the center, of course, is Rose, she’s in charge. They just look at her. I say, ‘Rose, come on in.’ ” That was Ida. So they come in and sit on the divan.
Now what’s she going to do with them? “Let me give you a nice little drink.” She’s got ginger ale in mind, or a glass of milk. Meanwhile, their breath is 100 proof. So they sit there sipping whatever it is.
Then Ida gets an idea. “I’ll play a Billie Holiday record.” She puts on a Billie Holiday slow blues. Ida used to do a wonderful takeoff on Billie Holiday. The girls had never heard of Billie Holiday. Ida tells them Billie used to wear a gardenia in her hair when she sang. They’re listening, and Ida’s doing Billie. Ida puts a rose in her hair and closes her eyes and sways. At the end she gives them a sawbuck and they leave.
That night Nelson Algren is visiting us, so we tell Nelson the story. He says: “Of course they were fascinated. Ida acted it out, she told them a story. These kids have never been told a story in their lives.”
Meantime, there’s trouble. Rose meets a woman named Shirley Garzutti, a hippie before her time, Italian, married to a Puerto Rican guy who works at the Congress Hotel. They’ve got about four kids. Garzutti writes, too—she even won a Jerzy Kosinski prize—but she’s busy with her husband and kids and has no time for Rose. But Rose wants attention, Garzutti’s attention. Rose is annoyed, and she throws a rock through the Garzuttis’ window, breaking it, and she does this several times. The husband goes over to Rose and punches her right in the mouth. So there’s a lawsuit—Rose is to stay away from Shirley Garzutti, per a restraining order.
Burton Joseph, a Playboy lawyer, nice man, had met Rose and was taken with her, and agrees to represent her, pro bono. The judge is a very nice black woman, impressed because I’m a witness for Rose. The judge says, “You’ve got to stay away from Mrs. Garzutti or else there’ll be trouble. This is Studs Terkel, very well-known in Chicago. He’s your character witness, so don’t you embarrass him. Do you promise you’ll stay away from Shirley Garzutti?”
Rose says, “I can’t promise that.” I remember the woman judge looking at me: She’s thinking, “What are we going do with her?” Finally we get Rose to agree.
Eventually Rose got married and had a kid. The wedding was at the Green Mill before it became a jazz place. Some time later a group is giving me an award, a liberal group, but they happen to be fighting a union. Who happens to be lead organizer of the union? Rose. Rose was learning about being a paralegal and working for an aid organization, helping inmates at the Cook County Jail and doing a great job. Every inmate, most of them black, knew of Rose.
Meantime, one of Rose’s brothers is killed, another dies in a motorcycle accident. Another brother and his girlfriend were drunk and they were having a fight, and so they call on Rose to settle the fight. Rose goes there and there’s a gun on the table. Something happens, no one knows what, the gun goes off and Rose gets shot and dies.
She was maybe forty, her life just starting to go well. Of the loss, the waste, Ida said: “You know it had to be.”
How do the inmates of the county jail find out? There’s no Rose showing up, and they keep asking, “Where is Rose?” Finally one of the guards says, “I gotta tell you guys that Rose is dead.”
The weeping at the county jail, it reminded me of the inmates who wept for Eugene Debs. I spoke at Rose’s service and some of the top social workers in town were there. This was Rose.
PEARL HART was someone very special to me. She was a large lesbian woman who became a lawyer and a public defender, and possibly a founder of the Daughters of Bilitis. Pearl was courageous and absolutely dauntless. During the McCarthy days she defended everybody who was called “Red.” Finally she herself was attacked.
Ida remembered, during her time as a social worker, appearing with a client in court, with Pearl as the public defender. Ida’s client was a girl who’d been picked off the street as a hooker. The judge was one of those loud-mouthed, ignorant, brutal bastards—a vicious hack—and he let the girl have it in the worst way. I think the girl’s trick was black, which made it even worse in his eyes. The girl was shrinking and shrinking, and Ida remembers Pearl putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder, and the girl’s back straightening up, just like that. Ida never forgot that scene, that gentle support.
The man who loved Pearl most was Paul Robeson. When he sang at a concert, he’d always ask her to name the encore: “What do you want to hear, Pearl?” Ida was always very moved by that. Pearl would name, not a militant, Spanish Civil War song or “Joe Hill,” but instead, always, “Curly-Headed Baby.”
(Robeson turned fifty in 1948, when he was in hot water for being named by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had many fiftieth-birthday celebrations, and at the one in Chicago, I was the emcee. I remember wondering if his voice might have been slightly going; he’d cup his hand over his ear when he sang.
Lena Horne appeared on stage that night. She was in Chicago headlining at the Chez Paree, which was a fancy nightclub in Chicago, run by the Mob. As I recall, Horne had been a hatcheck girl at the Cotton Club in New York. She made it clear that she was a sex target, for white guys as well as black, and she had felt very insecure. One day Paul Robeson came in and said just a few words to her, but suddenly, she recalled, she felt, oh, so good and strong.)
Pearl had become known as un-American in some quarters, and a good many of the audience were members of the FBI. I made that very clear: “Maybe a third of you here are FBI. I’m glad you came here to contribute. There’ll be a collection later on, I hope you’ll put forth.”
In the middle of this very crowded tribute to Pearl Hart, people are singing, lively festivities, and in comes Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. The judge was about to be nominated by the elder Mayor Daley to the Federal Court. Naturally, the FBI was investigating him.
The judge says, “Studs, I have something I want to say.” He walks up to the microphone. “I think Pearl Hart is a great woman. I think she’s a great American. I admire her. She’s defended the defenseless, those who might otherwise not be defended. I’m delighted to be here to pay her tribute.”
Now, that’s something, especially from one who was known as Mayor Daley’s yes man and buddy.
After Pearl died in 1975, I was again the emcee, and I called on Jim Hapgood to speak. The audience was full of left-wing labor people. I said, “Jim Hapgood is the head of the Mattachine Society. In case you don’t know, it’s a homosexual gathering. I felt honored to be the first hetero speaker they ever had.”
You should have seen that crowd. These were people of the left, the labor unions, along with others who often challenged authority. Here we were with these labor union people who are for the put-upon, for black civil liberties, fighting for everybody, but this matter of homosexuality discomfits them. I’ll never forget that. Suddenly I realized that this prejudice is deeper than deep. And all these years later, we’ve still got a long way to go.
Part IV
21
Truth to Power
I first met Nelson Algren on the Illinois Writers’ Project during the late 1930s, before the war. Others on the Project were Richard Wright (though he left for France before I had a chance to meet him), Saul Bellow, the folklorist Jack Conroy, a black man named Frank Yerby who later wrote bestsellers, and Stuart Engstrand, who wrote a book on homosexuality called The Sling and the Arrow, a daring book for the time. While I was working on radio scripts, they were work
ing on the WPA guide.48
Before meeting Nelson, I’d read Somebody in Boots, his first book, about riding the freights and more. I later adapted two short stories from The Neon Wilderness for ABC Playhouse radio. One was called A Bottle of Milk for Mother, and it has that great line: “I knew I’d never live to be twenty-one, anyway.” The story that most affected me though was Stickman’s Laughter. (In my adaptation I call it Banty’s Laughter.) It’s about Banty Longobardi, an ex-fighter, who gambles and loses. It was a favorite of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s as well.
For a time, I used to go to poker games in Algren’s flat. Nelson’s building on Evergreen Avenue had a wonderful stained-glass win-dow up above the door, a religious scene, I think. You go up to the third floor, and there’s Nelson, with a visor on, as in the movies, and garters on his arms. He’s got the table with the green felt, and several fresh decks of cards laid out. Some of the regulars were my writer friend Dave Peltz; Jess Blue, a con man Nelson knew from East St. Louis; a Bohemian barber who often used to win; and a Jewish furniture dealer who always carried a little snub of a gun, because his store was in a poor black community and his son had been shot and killed. The dull guys won all the time because they were careful; they were accountants at heart. Nelson and I lost all the time.
This one night Peltz is there, along with a guy named Moretti, who’s with the Moretti family, but not too successful as one of the Mob boys. And Moretti’s brought his buddy, a Blackhawk Indian who called himself Chief. I’m introduced as a disc jockey, and the term “disc jockey” impressed Chief—I’m the magic voice in the box, kind of a celebrity. Chief and Moretti are sitting next to each other, and they’re winning every hand. Peltz writes out a check for $200 and gives it to Chief. Chief says, “How do I know it won’t bounce?” I say, “It’s all right, Chief, don’t worry about it.” Chief says, “If it’s OK with the disc jockey, it’s OK with me.”
Meantime, it’s the custom for winners to, on the way home, take someone who’s lost a bit of dough out for a meal. So I’m getting a ride with Chief and Moretti, and Moretti says, “Let’s stop and have breakfast at an all-night diner.” I have breakfast on them, of course. I have the works: ham and eggs and potatoes and all. Moretti says, “That guy Nelson acted funny, didn’t he? Wonder what the trouble is.” I say, “Well, that’s the way he is.”
Next day I get a call from Peltz. “Guess what? Nelson told me to cancel the check.”
“What do you mean, cancel the check?”
“The check I gave to Chief. Nelson said they were cheating.”
“But, Dave,” I said, “You can’t prove that. You got proof?”
He says, “They were sitting next to each other.”
“No, you gotta pay.”
“No,” says Peltz, “I’m going to follow Nelson’s advice.”
A couple days later Peltz gets a call. Moretti. “What happened to my check? It bounced. What are you doing to me?” Remember, this guy’s a failure in the family. He had won something, and now again, humiliation.
Finally, Peltz tells him: “Nelson said no.”
“Nelson said that, huh?”
A couple days later a big brick crashes though the glass window above the door. Peltz figured he’d better pay, so he goes over with $200 in cash. Moretti says, “From now on, you’re staying with me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re staying with me! I’m gonna show you the best time you ever had in your life.” Peltz said that night Moretti spent three times the $200. Everything! All kinds of food, girls if he’d wanted, taken to the best places, out ’til all hours of the morning. Moretti now felt a success, a good man redeemed.
A month later I say to Nelson, “What made you tell Peltz to cancel the check?”
“Because they were cheating. I could tell.”
“But you know how these guys operate, and you live upstairs. You’re pretty vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable? I got a bat.” (It was a small, cheap, Goldblatt’s-department-store kind of indoor bat.) “You see this bat? They come up those stairs I’ll go bang.”
I said, “They could shoot you from downstairs.” He really was nutty as a fruitcake.
By the time we became friends, Simone de Beauvoir had come to Chicago and was living with Nelson at Miller Beach in the Indiana dunes. She came up to ABC with him when they were doing A Bottle of Milk for Mother, with John Hodiak. I had adapted it for radio. Then she went back to France.
The first time I went to Paris, it was a free trip, a junket. Air France was having its initial flight, Chicago to Paris, stopping to refuel in Montreal. I was invited on that trip along with some crooked politicians and travel agents. We’re at the George V Hotel, where the bellhops speak twenty languages. Who’s at the door waiting for me in a World War II jacket? Nelson. He says, “Come on.”
I say, “I got luggage, let me check it.”
“Forget that. Come on. Follow me.” So I give my suitcase to the bellhop and I follow him. He goes through the lobby—I’m sure a house detective is watching him—and he strides through the dining room. People are dining, and he’s walking through, calling out, “This way!” and they’re looking up. He goes through the kitchen, and the chefs, they’re looking up. He goes out a door and takes me to Les Halles, and we have some steak and petits pois, and he’s telling me how much to tip.
Another night, we go to this four-hundred-year-old place, high elegant. de Beauvoir is known, of course. People all look: There she is with her American lover. That’s news. We walk in and sit down, haute-bourgeois people staring. Nelson has a tie, and the tie has a little flashlight under it, and there’s a little wire running into his pocket. Every time this certain couple looks over, he presses the button and the light goes on. Every time they look, the light shines right at them. I got a kick out of that. She got a kick out of that. “Oh, Nelson, he’s so funny.”
The trouble is, later on, after she wrote The Mandarins and he split with her, he started ridiculing her in places like Playboy and Penthouse , horrible stories, making a fool of her. Except for one thing: They’re so funny you’re falling on the floor laughing. That cad.
Women liked him, despite his caddishness and boorishness. Lily Harmon was the widow of the guy who funded the Hirshhorn Museum, just loaded with money, and she loved Nelson. She’s so proud that she’s his lady friend she throws a party in honor of Nelson, the great writer. Guess what? He doesn’t show up. She, of course, is completely humiliated. Nelson says, “And you know what? I came by the next day with flowers and chocolates. She slammed the door in my face. Now why would she do a thing like that?”
As it is, she sent a wonderful letter when he died. That’s the thing. They all did. Except Amanda, his wife twice, who wanted to kill him. As his second wife, Betty, said, “It’s like living with a wheel on fire.” A wheel on fire! You gotta get burned. That was one of his perverse prides; that no one could really get at him. He was a friend of mine, we were very close, and yet nobody was really close to him. No one could get close.
Kurt Vonnegut respected Nelson and nominated him for the Academy of Arts and Letters. Vonnegut said, “The guy never showed up at the event.” He was in the building where he was being honored, but he was sitting with this girl at the bar the whole time. Never went in. He received a special medal from the Academy and I asked, “What’d you do with the medal?”
“I dunno, I threw it away or something.” He deliberately did this kind of thing, imp of the perverse. Maybe he wanted to show his independence. By that time, he’d been badly hurt by the Red scare. He was one of the signatories of clemency for the Rosenbergs, and the U.S. government denied him his passport. Those bastards did a job on him. He never forgot that.
Nelson taught at Bread Loaf, a summer writing school, a couple of times. Russell Banks was at Bread Loaf as a student and drove Nelson around the place. Later Nelson wrote a piece about Bread Loaf that was devastating. It was funny as hell, but it absolutely demolished the place where he
taught. That’s Nelson. And yet Russell Banks says were it not for Nelson, he wouldn’t have become a writer; that Nelson edited like nobody could. Ernest Hemingway said Nelson Algren was one of the two best writers in America. Hemingway said, “Watch out for this guy. He hits you with both hands.”
Nelson spent time in Cuba as a guest of Hemingway. Truman Capote could never get over the fact that Nelson was such a favorite of Hemingway’s. At a gathering, Capote said, “I like Nelson, but why does Hemingway always have to attack me to praise Nelson?”
Nelson wrote serious material, but he was a funny guy, a clown figure with his dry, crazy, goofy sense of humor. I had a wonderful old-time card from Nelson, but I lost it: a photograph from fifty years ago of a little kid and a woman holding a gold watch. Below was written, “Louie, did you find work yet?” signed “Sophie.” It’s that very goofiness that fed his work.
His essays in Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way are very humorous. In one, he’s being chased with a machete somewhere in Kulon. The Atlantic Monthly was supposed to run some of them, but it didn’t print a thing because the essays were so outrageous. In The Last Carousel you find a lot of humor, yet in the middle was very moving material.
When people compare me and Nelson as writers, I say he’s a writer; I’m not. I’m a disc jockey who happens to have written some books. I often say, I put together the book instead of I wrote the book. Without even thinking about it, I use that phrase. I’m nowhere near in his league. Nelson had that extra quality that made him an honest-to-God writer who I think is one of the best of our generation. Whatever writing facilities I might have were most strongly influenced by Nelson. James T. Farrell was among the first to have captured the argot of Chicago streets, South Side Irish. He caught the language, the idiom, that Chicagoesque quality. But Nelson went a step beyond; there was a lyricism to his writing, a poetic aspect. His description of Chicago captures that very essence:Remembering nights, when the moon was a buffalo moon, that the narrow plains between the billboards were touched by an Indian wind. Littered with tin cans and dark with smoldering rubble, an Indian wind yet finds, between the shadowed canyons of The Loop, patches of prairie to touch and pass.