Dave Peltz said he did not understand why Amanda kept hanging on—Nelson was being nasty and taunting her when she asked for money. She had a lot invested in keeping the marriage alive. “He told her to quit her job and come back. And she did. And it was devastating when it didn’t work out,” Peltz said.
By September of 1955, Amanda had quit trying, gotten her own lawyer, and filed her own complaint against Nelson while he was staying in Florida. An agreement allowed her to live in the house in Miller Beach until he had paid her $7,000, and Nelson would give up the furniture in the house—including the phonograph. She also got the car, which he did not care about. The divorce was entered on December 28, 1955, and she eventually got her own place in Miller. There would be no third try, and they ended up hating each other. Their old friendliness of the 1940s, which had been a source of support for Nelson while he was writing his great Chicago books, was gone. Speaking of Amanda years later, Nelson said that if he saw her, “I’d kick her all the day down the street, unless she did it to me first. She was always a little faster.”
Nelson wanted to make another trip to France, and tried again to have his passport renewed. On April 13, 1956, he sent a letter to the passport office saying that he wished to take an oath that he was not presently a member of the Communist Party, nor had he been one in the past. His agent Madeleine Brennan also sent a letter to the passport office, vouching for his good intentions and saying that Nelson wanted to be abroad for six months to help with a foreign film production of Never Come Morning, as well as the translation of A Walk on the Wild Side. But on June 26, 1956, the passport office told Nelson that his application was again denied, and the FBI began a painstaking, two-year investigation to see whether Nelson could be prosecuted for perjury, using Howard Rushmore’s letter and other informant testimony as evidence that Nelson had been a Communist Party member.
Imprisoned in America, Nelson’s depression deepened. “He couldn’t get a good night’s sleep,” remembered Dave Peltz, who sometimes stayed at Nelson’s house. “He would wake up. The minute he’d fall asleep he’d have such bad dreams he would [cry out] ‘Nooo, nooo, nooo.’” Dave thought Nelson’s unconscious was smarter than he was—he was in denial all the time about his own problems, but in sleep he would wake up with “these terrible, terrible moments of regret about what he must have been doing with his life.” He was so paralyzed by depression that even getting on the South Shore train to Chicago for a publisher’s meeting was an ordeal—Nelson had one foot on the train, but could not move the other one off the platform. The conductor and the other passengers started to yell, and Dave Peltz had to push him on board. Dave thought Nelson could have been helped, but Nelson did not want to submit to psychoanalysis. Dave took Nelson to a psychiatrist friend of his own, who told him, “Mr. Algren, you have a depression, under the depression, under the depression—you have a series of them. To get to them, it’ll take a long time.” But Dave said Nelson was frightened of analysis—he feared that tapping into the treasure of his creativity would cause it to leak away.
One morning, as they sat drinking coffee in Nelson’s yellow-painted kitchen, Nelson said he had dreamed that Dave was lying on the floor, dying of a gunshot wound.
“Nelson, you wrote that dream,” Dave told him. “You produced it. You were the main actor in it. It was not Dave on the floor, it was Algren.”
In the late summer of 1956, Nelson told Amanda and the Rowlands he was ready to be treated for his depression, and then kept changing his mind, saying he did not want to go through with it after all. Despite their acrimonious separation, Amanda still cared enough about him to push for treatment, so they all got into Dave’s car and drove to a private psychiatric facility in wealthy, north suburban Winnetka. The North Shore Health Resort was a stately brick mansion surrounded by mature trees that looked a little like Yaddo, the New York State writer’s colony Nelson had fled after a single night in 1935. They all waited with him in the lobby, while Nelson took an hour to sign his name. As Dave remembered it: “He writes ‘N’ then walks away. He comes back and he writes an ‘E.’” When Nelson finally finished writing his name, two big men in white coats walked out and grabbed him. “And I hear him as they’re pulling him down the hall, ‘Daaave! Daaave!’”
Nelson was diagnosed at the facility with an “anxiety state and passive aggressive personality.” But he was not there long—in less than two weeks, he escaped through a window down a fire escape onto the manicured green grounds, just as he had gone through a hole in the fence at the crooked carnival in long-ago South Texas. He found his way back around the lake to Gary and his messed-up life. He owed money on taxes. He owed money to Amanda. His law firm was dropping its case against Preminger, and wanted its fees. He had made a clumsy effort to propose to Margo—who turned him down. And he could not get an advance on the unfinished Entrapment, the book he had described to Simone as the book for himself. He had spent the previous Christmas with none other than Hemingway himself, in Havana, with good scotch and conversation about hunting and boxing, Papa in a baseball cap and a long white beard like Santa Claus. Even though Hemingway’s other guests spoke in a mix of French and Spanish, everything had seemed understood. This Christmas, nothing seemed understood, and Nelson could not see a way ahead. After his long silence, Nelson sent Simone a letter for Christmas 1956 that worried her—he was exceptionally hard on himself, and felt that the light inside of him had gone out.
On New Year’s Eve of 1956, Nelson bought beer and other groceries at Pignotti’s, the little store on Lake Street in Miller, and headed back across the ice-covered Marquette Park lagoon, using a common shortcut instead of going around, which would save him about ten minutes. The day was relatively mild for December 31, above freezing for part of the day, and about twenty feet across, the thin ice began to crack. Neighbors heard Nelson screaming, and three brothers working on a nearby house saw him hanging on to the breaking ice in more than fifteen feet of frigid water. Nelson warned them that the ice was too thin for them to come out, and asked for a rope. But his hands were numb, and he lost his grip on the rope several times before the men told him to wrap it around his arm. Nelson was taken to a neighbor’s house for dry clothes, then to a local hospital to be treated briefly for exposure. He threw his bundle of wet clothes onto one of the two front stairs leading into the house. By the time Dave Peltz had heard about the accident and gotten to Nelson’s front door, the clothes had all frozen together into a heap. Dave went into the house to find Nelson in bed. “Did you try something, Nelson?” Dave asked.
Nelson grunted something inarticulate.
“Did you try, Algren?” Dave repeated. But Nelson stayed muffled under the blankets, not saying yes or no.
It would have been a strange way for an intelligent man to try to kill himself—going through ice in front of witnesses. It would have been an awful way to die, and he had screamed for help. It was likely not a suicide attempt, but an act of inattention by a clumsy man who was distracted by stress and deep blues. “It is so much like you, honey, to fall in a hole!” Simone said when she learned of the accident. A year of ice-water reviews had ended in real ice water. Wrapped up in blankets in deep midwinter, Nelson wondered whether anything he wrote was even wanted anymore.
The following February, Art Shay drove Nelson out to New York to meet a girl who had written him a sexy fan letter. He also wanted to cast about for a new agent to replace Brennan, whom Shay called a “drunken idiot.” A man named Marion “Joe” Lebworth offered Nelson $25,000 for the movie rights of A Walk on the Wild Side. The contract would guarantee the rights in perpetuity. Burned by the Preminger deal, Algren told Lebworth he was not born yesterday, but Lebworth gave him a personal check, saying Algren could cash it if he wanted.
“I just took it to get rid of the son of a bitch,” Algren told Shay, but Shay worried that Algren was not consulting an agent.
Back in Gary, the check was an object of constant temptation to Nelson, who was then making a meager living
off book reviews. “Every morning, he’s sitting at that breakfast table, having his coffee, and looking at that check,” Peltz remembered.
Finally, Nelson called Dave and said he had decided to cash the check, and he needed a ride to the bank. By that time the corners were frayed and it was so speckled with butter and coffee stains it was hard to read. Dave looked at the check dubiously, and told Nelson he would have to call the local bank in Miller and see if it would still be honored. It turned out that the East Coast bank that had issued the check had been waiting for the call. Excited, Nelson opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out an old, rumpled, brown paper bag. “That’s for the money,” Nelson explained.
“You don’t need a paper brown bag, they’ll give you a cashier’s check,” Dave scoffed.
“Hell, no!” Nelson said. “I want fives, tens, and twenties. Dave, you gotta do it my way.” So another bank had to be called to make sure he could get the money the way he wanted it—thus the paper bag. The bank gave him stacks of twenty-dollar bills, and he got his small-time mobster friend Jess Blue to drive him downtown to put it into a safe-deposit box. Lawyer Sam Friefeld helped Nelson use about $16,000 to buy an apartment building in Lincoln Park at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Wisconsin—a property that would have been worth of lot of money in fifteen years, when the neighborhood lost its rough edges and was starting to become fashionable. It was a beautiful, four-story building, with a coach house in the back, a few blocks from one of Nelson’s favorite haunts, the Old Town Ale House. If Nelson had kept it, it could have paid him a good income for years, and Nelson might have never left Chicago, Shay said.
But Nelson immediately started having trouble with the heavy responsibilities of being a landlord. The lady living in the coach house, in whom he was romantically interested, needed a better refrigerator. Insomniac Nelson called Art at three in the morning, wondering how he could find a good used one. Art offered to help, but then Nelson got to worrying about what would happen if everyone wanted a different refrigerator. The prospect was overwhelming. Besides, someone from Time magazine was renting an apartment, and Algren was worried about what would happen if word got out that the great proletarian writer had turned into a fat-cat landlord. Nelson sold the building back in less than two months, losing $2,500 in the process. “He was an aggressive loser,” Shay said.
The rest of the money was spent quickly at the track and the poker table, Peltz said. By the autumn of 1957, it was all gone.
As for Lebworth, he resold the rights for $75,000 to Hollywood producer Charles Feldman, who turned the book into a 1962 film starring Jane Fonda as Kitty Twist, Laurence Harvey as Dove, Barbara Stanwyck as the brothel madam Jo, and the white model-actress, known as Capucine, as the mulatto Hallie. This tawdry, soulless film makes the Preminger version of The Man with the Golden Arm look sensitive and respectful. In the movie Hallie is a sculptor-turned-prostitute from New York City who had a long-ago love affair with Dove, who takes to the road to try to find her. Jo is a villainous lesbian who wants Hallie for herself, and threatens to have Dove charged with statutory rape to drive him away. In a struggle between Dove and Jo’s henchman, Hallie is accidently shot and killed. Outside of the Depression-era New Orleans bordello setting and the names of the characters, the story has nothing to do with Nelson’s book. He said he never bothered to see it, adding, “I also keep moving when I see a crowd gathering where somebody has been run over by a garbage truck.”
Algren was happier with a 1960 musical version of A Walk on the Wild Side, which Peltz directed at the Crystal Palace theater in St. Louis. It opened on February 11, 1960, and ran for only a few weeks. Peltz thought the script by Algren and Jay Landesman was a “piece of junk.” But he loved the lyrics Nelson had written for it with Fran Landesman, including songs for the legless Schmidt and for the prostitutes. The bordello song, called “This Life We’ve Led,” begins:
This life we’ve led has left us strange
And now it’s late for us to change
Our luck runs out, our dreams grow old
In rooms where love is bought and sold.
Dave said he kept Nelson away from the low-rent production until it was ready to go up. Then Nelson came down with Doris Peltz on the train, full of enthusiasm and playing the part of the big producer, drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Nelson claimed he had gotten $3,000 from an alcoholic lawyer for the Broadway rights to the play, which if true was a swindle, since he had already sold the rights. “The whole thing was foolish,” Dave laughed, remembering, but Nelson thought it was a masterpiece. Nelson sat in the audience watching the low-paid dancers perform his songs and nearly wept with joy. Despite the critics, he felt that he had come “damn close” to writing a great book.
12
GOOD-BYE TO FICTION
I would prefer not to.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, “BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER”
Chicago has always been a city in transition, from the 1871 fire that allowed it to start over from scratch to the reversal of the course of the Chicago River to the lifting of buildings out of the swamp with giant screws. In the twentieth century, there were few changes more profound than the urban expressway system that carved up the city with giant, eight-lane highways, taking out huge chunks of neighborhoods to allow for easier access to the suburbs and possible escape from nuclear disaster. The Congress Expressway, later called the Eisenhower, opened between 1955 and 1960, cutting through the old Jewish neighborhoods of the West Side. The Dan Ryan Expressway rammed through the South Side, with the route reinforcing the border between Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Bridgeport neighborhood and the Black Belt to the east, according to Mike Royko. The Kennedy opened for traffic in 1960 through the North Side, after taking out chunks of old Polonia, including the Wabansia flat where Nelson had spent so many lucky days, though sparing St. Stanislaus Kostka parish through a plan by State Rep. Bernard Prusinski, a civil engineer.
The city had also changed in other ways in the late 1950s. Richard J. Daley, a powerful politician Nelson held in contempt, started his twenty-one-year reign in 1955. The Chicago Police’s Red Squad was collecting information on citizens with suspected subversive tendencies, including Leon Despres, a friend of Algren’s who was one of the few anti-Daley aldermen. On television the Kuklapolitans had their last show in 1957. Big modernist high-rises like the concrete-clad Prudential Building and Mies van der Rohe’s steel-and-glass Lake Shore Drive apartments changed the skyline. The destruction of the streetcar lines in favor of exhaust-spewing buses was complete by the summer of 1958. The Chicago Transit Authority also took out six elevated lines, including the Humboldt Park branch going west from Nelson’s neighborhood, leaving concrete-and-iron-girder ghosts. O’Hare International Airport opened in 1955 for commercial passenger traffic and the growing domination of air travel over trains meant that travelers would no longer stop downtown for a drink before heading west. Chicago still bragged that it was the “city that works,” but its neighborhoods were rapidly losing population to the suburbs. High-rise public housing, air-conditioning, and television were diminishing neighborhood life by taking people off the streets and front stoops. The changes that Nelson saw beginning in the late 1940s were now firmly in place, and Chicago had become in his eyes a colder, more fearful, lonelier, grayer city. When Nelson finally gave up his place in Miller in 1958 and moved to a crummy apartment at 920 North Noble Street south of Division, he returned to a different Chicago, one that still roused his indignation but no longer stirred his imagination in the same way. In a 1961 afterword to Chicago: City on the Make, Algren complained that his town had gone from being the Second City to the “Second-Hand City,” where mediocrity is honored. “Anyone who lives inside Chicago today has to admit it is a grey subcivilization surrounded by green suburbs,” Algren wrote.
The adjustment was difficult. When he showed sociology professor Gerald D. Suttles around the neighborhood on a drunken night in the mid-1960s, Algren was so preoccupied with telling Suttles what it was really
like that they could not see what was actually going on. As Algren stood before a vacant lot, heedless of the surrounding traffic, “it came over me that he was trying to reink a dry pen,” Suttles recalled.
Nelson did find a life in Chicago again in the 1960s—a social scene, parties, favorite bars in Riccardo’s, O’Rourke’s, the Old Town Ale House, and the Billy Goat Tavern, and friends like the Kogans and the Terkels. He got steak dinners at the Corona Café at Illinois and Rush, an old-time Italian place with white tablecloths. There were alcohol-soaked parties with the Beatles on the hi-fi, where literary young women in mod Mary Quant dresses fawned over Nelson the Famous Writer, listening to his stories. After six months he left the grim Noble Street flat, where he had been drinking coffee out of bowls for want of cups, for a sunlit third-floor apartment at 1958 West Evergreen in the Wicker Park neighborhood, a little west of where he had lived before he went into the army. It had high ceilings, a bay window in the front, and a wooden back porch on which he strung Christmas lights for parties. Friends remembered that there were so many books on the floor it was difficult to move. Even his bathtub had a bookshelf over it—while on the door hung a poster of W. C. Fields. He covered the walls with photographs from his travels or of people he admired—Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, Simone de Beauvoir and Rocky Graziano, and even his 1927 high school basketball team. His decorating got more eccentric around the holidays—after Christmas he would search the alley for the best-looking discarded tree, drag it upstairs, and keep it until it was too dry.
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