Algren (32 page)

In the winter of 1955, Nelson was again subjected to the Hollywood hospitality treatment, though this time it did not last ten days. He went out to California in a roomette on the Super Chief, and then was given a room at the Beverly Carlton, where he found a “pretzel-shaped swimming pool and a fountain blowing pink water, in a germ-proof room with a sterilized television set.” As in the Roberts adventure, free liquor was delivered, and then ice, and then a man to cut his hair. Otto picked Nelson up at the curb in a long red Cadillac with electric windows—with Otto inquiring courteously if passengers wanted them “opp” or “donn,” before bullying one of them for lighting a pipe. In Otto's office Nelson watched the director get his makeup applied and give orders to his minions. Nelson told Amanda at first that he felt they were getting along fine—Otto just needed to know if he was politically clear and whether he could write the screenplay. The good start deteriorated quickly, with Otto realizing that he had an eccentric on his hands. When Otto called Nelson at the Beverly Carlton to schedule another meeting, he found that Nelson had decided it was too fancy and moved himself into the cheaper and more homelike Hotel Vermillion on Skid Row, which had a red neon sign outside advertising Good Booze.

Otto wanted Nelson to write about the suffering of drug addicts, but not too much suffering, Nelson recalled. “Because how can a movie be creative if only a few people say it's any good? What we want is something creative that
everybody
wants to see.” There is some Hollywood wisdom in this, but Nelson did not go for it. Otto was used to giving orders, and Nelson was not used to taking them. Algren tried to explain to Preminger why it was important to have Polish and American music on the jukeboxes, to show the two worlds of the characters, but Preminger did not understand. “What is this?” he complained to the Jaffe Agency, which had sent Algren. “This man he talks to me about jukeboxes. He
likes
these people.”

Algren gave Preminger a twelve-page, double-spaced treatment for a screenplay in what he called an attempt to figure out what Preminger was talking about. The treatment was a joke; it had Frankie Machine saying at the climax, “White goddess say not go that part of forest.” After a few days of working with Algren, Preminger said that he found that the great Chicago writer was an “intelligent, amusing man” who “couldn't write dialogue or visualize scenes,” and sent him on his way. As Nelson remembered it, Otto did not shake hands at the end but clicked his heels in grand Viennese style and told him, “I am happy to have met such an interesting man.” Nelson felt he had met an epically arrogant one. He wrote Amanda that Otto told him he had wanted a screen technician, which Nelson was not. Otto also told him that he felt Nelson was not used to the “discipline of working against deadlines.” Nelson admitted this was true—he was late with the
Somebody in Boots
rewrite for Doubleday. But Nelson wondered if his problems with the passport may have also played a role—he was not, strictly speaking, politically clear.

Algren told about his adventures with Preminger in various versions through the years—including in “Otto Preminger's Strange Suspenjers” in
Focus/media
in 1972, later collected in
The Last Carousel
. While the “Suspenjers” story is hilarious, Nelson seems to conflate some of the events with his experiences with Bob Roberts in 1950, so it might be best to stick with what he told Amanda and Jack Conroy at the time it all happened. What he told Conroy in a letter in mid-February of 1955 is that he learned in Hollywood that Roberts had sold the rights to the novel to Preminger a year before, but kept silent about it. Preminger had paid as much as $100,000, and despite a contract promising him 50 percent of the sale proceeds if the rights were resold, Algren had been left out of the split. Nelson told Jack that he believed he had been brought to Hollywood to waive his rights to the novel—and that was the real
reason for the $1,000 screenwriting offer. “And while you're standing around they stand in line with their big greased dicks—when you bend over for the pennies is when they get you,” Nelson fumed. Nelson wrote to Amanda that he suspected that Otto might be trying to make sure he had no claim on the movie's profits by offering him the screenwriting gig as a bone, before taking it away again.

Acting on this suspicion, Algren wrote a sarcastic letter to Preminger, saying he would give back the money he had already received and accusing Preminger of arrogance. He apparently imagined that he could avoid the fate of Persephone by refusing to take any food offered in the underworld, and thus create a better legal case when he took Preminger and Roberts to court. “He thought he was smarter than Preminger,” Peltz said, noting that Algren believed the old Marxist idea that all businessmen were fools. “He thought that Preminger would not be a match for him and of course Preminger made an absolute fool of him.” Nelson spent the rest of his time in Hollywood trying to sell a treatment about a “stooper,” a man who makes money at the racetrack by picking up winning tickets others have thrown away, accompanied by young Clancy Sigal, a representative for a writer's agency who later became a friend. Over drinks, Sigal confessed to Algren that he wanted to go to France, write novels, and have an affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Nelson did not blink. “‘That's a pretty good idea,' he drawled. ‘But you don't want to mess with her boyfriend, Sartre. If
she
doesn't talk you to death,
he
certainly will.'”

Preminger went through several writers on the project—they found it difficult to turn the impressionist novel into a script. Walter Newman was signed to a screenwriting contract for $70,000 in February 1955 after Nelson was shown the door. Preminger also rehired Lewis Meltzer, and between him and Newman, they turned out a cheap melodrama with major deviations from the novel. Ads for the movie advertised it as “A Film by Otto Preminger,” with
Algren's name missing. So Algren lost out with Preminger in every way he could—he did not get to have a say in or any money from the screen treatment of his novel. He lost the money he could have gotten from the sale of the movie rights under his contract. He also lost money with his New York Supreme Court lawsuit in the spring of 1956, which demanded $250,000 on the grounds that the rights resale to Preminger had not been bona fide and that Preminger had falsely claimed authorship. The lawsuit resulted in thousands of dollars of legal bills for the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, but no victory. As Dove Linkhorn put it in
A Walk on the Wild Side
, “Sometimes I almost think it'd be money in my pocket if I'd never been born.”

The movie version of
The Man with the Golden Arm
debuted in December of 1955, with Frank Sinatra starring as Frankie Machine, Kim Novak as Molly, and Eleanor Parker as Sophie. Preminger got what he wanted in that he was able to have a successful movie without the Production Code Administration's seal of approval, which led to changes in the code. But outside of this victory and a decent performance by Sinatra, the movie is an artistic failure; it gives a chilly, voyeuristic view of the addict's world—“a tourist's glance at the urban dispossessed,” as Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch puts it. It gives the narcotics angle more emphasis than it is given in the book, and portrays withdrawal inaccurately—with Sinatra going into an acrobatic frenzy instead of getting very sick. The movie was shot in six weeks on an empty-looking soundstage, which does not look like Chicago, with an edgy, Oscar-nominated Elmer Bernstein soundtrack, which does not sound like Polonia. Chicago-born Kim Novak is the only one who gets the accent right—Sinatra sounds like a Jersey guy, and Parker sounds like she is from nowhere in particular. In the movie Frankie is a real, aspiring drummer, instead of a card dealer with a practice board, and has an audition to be in a jazz band with some hepcats. But Sparrow gives him a stolen
audition suit, so he ends up in jail. He gets another audition but he needs his heroin, goes to Louie's house, attacks him, but can't find the heroin. Not being able to keep the beat, he messes up the audition. Louie goes to Frankie's house and discovers that Zosh has been faking her injury, so she pushes Louie over the stair railing and kills him. Later Zosh throws herself off the balcony to her own death, and Molly and Frankie are able to go off together, presumably to live happily ever after, though Novak had the wit to look concerned. The resemblance to the book seems coincidental.

The film was a financial success, earning over $4 million, and it got mostly good reviews in the mainstream press. Robert Hatch in the
Nation
offered a contrary opinion, finding that Preminger had replaced Algren's respect for his characters with contempt. Delmore Schwartz in the
New Republic
was less harsh—he thought it was “a pretty good picture show,” but it would have accomplished more “by training the camera more often upon the Chicago slum which is the real villain of Algren's novel.” He also thought an unseen narrator could have been used to convey some of Algren's “eloquent prose.” Ironically, the popularity of the film—with its influential soundtrack and instantly iconic crooked-arm marketing design—has helped contribute to the modern perception of Nelson Algren as a B-level, film noir novelist—closer to Raymond Chandler than to William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway. Algren expert Bill Savage said the shallow but popular movie is part of the reason Algren is not part of the literary canon, along with the cheap paperback versions of his novels with their lurid covers. “It transforms the novel, which is anti-plot on every level, into a popular potboiler drama,” Savage said. “It fills me with rage.”

Algren himself thought it was good that Preminger got the drug problem on the screen, but otherwise considered the film a travesty. He said later that it had been lost to the tradition of Chicago writers “through a presentation which confused it, in the public
mind, with a cheap biography of Frank Sinatra.” He refused to let Art Shay take a picture of him standing by a marquee advertising the movie on North Broadway, asking coldly, “What's that movie got to do with me?”

But gamblers know how a man can sit for almost twenty-four hours at cards, without looking to right, or to left.

—F
YODOR
D
OSTOYEVSKY
,
T
HE
G
AMBLER

Sometimes I live in the country

Sometimes I live in town

Sometimes I take a great notion

To jump into the river and drown

—“G
OODNIGHT,
I
RENE
” (
TRADITIONAL
)

By the fall of 1955, Nelson had finished transforming his earnest, proletarian protest novel about poor Cass McKay into an absurdist protest novel about lusty, silly Dove Linkhorn, minus several beheadings but adding a lot of sex. Now forty-six years old and growing weary of the struggle for success, Nelson said in an interview before
Wild Side
was published that he was trying to write a “reader's book, more than my own book” with a contrived rather than an organic plot, and with more of an urge to play for laughs. “I began thinking of this clown who kept working into these
situations; and so it became a kind of funny book,” he said of the rewrite. He admitted it had been easier to write than the book he wanted to write—this time he had not followed his own advice of always doing it the hard way. He submitted the manuscript to Doubleday—five years after he had first promised it.

But the sex was too much for Doubleday. Timothy Seldes, who had already gone through the tricky work of trying to edit “Nonconformity” into something manageable, had to break the news over lunch that the publisher would not go for the novel in its present form. Seldes downed a martini for courage, but Algren was so droll and full of enthusiasm for both his New Orleans farce and his planned serious novel about drug addiction that Seldes had to have another martini. It was only after the third martini, with the restaurant softening all around, that Seldes could finally break it to him—Doubleday could not take the book. Doubleday had had years of legal trouble over the sexual content of Edmund Wilson's second novel,
Memoirs of Hecate County
, in the late 1940s. The Society for the Suppression of Vice had successfully sued Doubleday, ceasing publication. The publisher felt it could not risk another expensive scandal.

For Nelson that was the end of his relationship with Doubleday. Ken McCormick kept trying to call him while he was on a road trip to Florida, but Nelson did not return the calls. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, which later put out
Hecate County
under its Boston imprint, L. C. Page, picked up the book Nelson called
A Walk on the Wild Side
, rescuing the title from the unpublished “Nonconformity” essay. Despite the book's humor and absurd situations, Algren signaled in a statement on the book jacket that it had a serious purpose—the book asks why “men who have suffered most at the hands of men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.”

For A
Walk on the Wild Side
, Nelson retains some of the characters and locations of
Somebody in Boots
. It again starts in a woebe-gone South Texas town, and then moves to New Orleans in 1931, though it stays there, without making the trip to Chicago. Besides Cass's transformation into the well-endowed Dove, Stub becomes the cesspool-cleaning, fire-and-brimstone preacher Fitz Linkhorn, a variation on Lincoln. Fitz is described as a native son, the pure American, long-necked, hillbilly, shambling type that spawned Davy Crockett and Jefferson Davis and Jesse James, pushed southwest as the hunting ran out. Bryan becomes Byron, his war injury made into consumption, and instead of rebelling against his father he is now his permanent audience. Idealized Nancy has disappeared altogether, replaced by a memory of a long-gone mother with red-gold hair, a prostitute and the only creature Dove felt ever loved him. Like Cass, he recognizes beauty in his limited world, but Algren's writing here is more certain, the “schoolboy poetry” remade by an experienced craftsman. Dove sees a “solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue, and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that he looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.” Nelson has stripped away the grotesque acts of violence from the beginning of
Somebody in Boots
, and the writing is sharper, more humorous, and more economical.