Touch and Go (26 page)

“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:

MY FRIEND the British journalist James Cameron played a great role in my life. He was the nonpareil, the best of all British roving correspondents of the last half of the twentieth century. Most British journalists of any worth will cite him as an inspiration. Cameron had a certain way of capturing what's important in the news. He went all over the world, and wherever he landed, he'd capture the true quality of what was happening.

In North Africa, he saw Schweitzer and discovered that Schweitzer was not all that he was made out to be. Great at playing Bach, perhaps, but not great in helping to foster creative people where he was living. Cameron was the first to reveal Syngman Rhee—the great little hero of Korea, the guy we were fighting to protect—as a phony.

James Cameron's life as a British roving correspondent was what might be whimsically called a checkered one. He got in all sorts of trouble, but he was able to keep on working. The thing about British journalism, everybody sought him, even when he was in hot water. He often offended his publishers by exposing some of their
friends in high places as corrupt. But he was never really blacklisted because he was so good that the publishers all wanted him; he was always rehired.

For years, his
bête noire
was Lord Beaverbrook, the celebrated publisher and tycoon. Beaverbrook had two papers and in one of them, he was exposing Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy. Cameron was in Hong Kong at the time, working for the other paper, and it was a couple of days before he read the article. The headline was: KLAUS FUCHS WINS, SO DOES JOHN STRACHEY. This was shortly after the war, and Churchill had been upset by a Labor victory. Clement Atlee, the new prime minister, had chosen Strachey as undersecretary for air. Cameron considered this to be yellow journalism in the worst sense of the word, and he said so in an open letter to the
Times
of London along with the words: “I quit.”

Beaverbrook, thoroughly embarrassed by Cameron's Korea articles, threatened to kill him with a whiskey bottle. Cameron always told the story matte r-of-factly. “I received four or five calls from a voice saying, ‘I am the butler of Lord Beaverbrook and he must see you immediately.' Naturally, I thought it was a practical joke, so I hung up. One day at the door stands a man with his derby, glasses, umbrella, and the London
Telegraph
under his arm. He says, ‘I'm the butler of Lord Beaverbrook. Why did you hang up on me? Lord Beaverbrook must see you at once. There's a plane waiting for you at Heathrow airport to take you to Cannes.' ”

Cameron said, “What the hell, I'll go.” So there he is and there's Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook says, “Cameron, your last book wasn't very good. May I suggest another for you.” Meaning a book about
himself.
“There's a little gathering here, just four of us. The other two are Aristotle Onassis and Winston Churchill.” Churchill was elderly at the time and had been ill. Beaverbrook says, “Do put on a tie.”

Cameron said a phone call came from his current publisher, who was very excited and said: “We know where you are, Jimmy. You're at Beaverbrook's house and Churchill is going to be there soon. Word has been passed that Churchill is close to death. Prime Minister
McMillan is calling a special conference to work out the proper tribute. Do it. What a coup this will be.”

As Cameron told it, he puts on a tie, and he's walking down the stairs, grieving not for Churchill but for himself. The door opens, in come four footmen carrying the seemingly inert body of the former prime minister. “Oh my God,” thinks Cameron, when suddenly the body moves, and it says with Churchillian gruffness, “Let me down, let me down, let me down.”

Beaverbrook seats Churchill at one end of the table, he's at the other end, and on the other two sides sit Cameron and Onassis. Cameron is watching the old man, a totemic figure, whose Romeo and Juliet cigar is about to fall into his Courvoisier. He appears asleep. Cameron very gently removes the cigar and puts it in his own pocket, thinking it may very well be Churchill's last cigar and he wants it for his son Fergus. In the meantime, this tedious conversation is going on, about money and profits, between these two dull men, Onassis and Beaverbrook. Just then Churchill looks up as though awakened, and says: “Max!” addressing Beaverbrook, who is disturbed at being disturbed.

“What is it?”

“Did you ever go to Moscow?”

“Yes, you sent me there on a mission to Stalin. I was your minister of aviation.”

“But did you ever go?”

And Cameron says of that scene: “It occurred to me it was a comic version of
King Lear
.” Of course, Churchill lived on for years.

When we first met in 1967, Cameron was on a book tour for
Here IsYour Enemy,
his report from Hanoi. His sponsors put him on all kinds of American shows. They didn't realize he was going to be clobbered as a Communist because he'd described North Vietnam as a country inhabited by human beings. He appeared on my show because I asked for him.

There I was in the studio of WFMT, having just finished a program, waiting for this guy to appear. I was looking forward to it because
oh, I liked the way he wrote. He came in lugging a heavy bag, shoulders slumped, so tired. As soon as he appeared, I said, “James Cameron! I'm delighted to see you. That's a hell of a book you wrote.”

“You like it? You're the first one.” He'd just come from a different station and someone had given him the works.

On the show I said, “This is a great book by a marvelous newspaperman,” which was the opposite of everything he'd experienced in America. He'd suffered all sorts of attacks: Eric Sevareid and Morley Safer slashed him;
Time
magazine called him a conduit for the Communists. He felt good after my show, came over to the house, we had a drink, and that's how we became friends. He ended up staying with us that trip, during which he also happened to be covering the 1968 convention. I describe our adventures in Grant Park in
Talking to Myself.
From then on, every time he came to town he stayed with us.

Cameron had an incredible ability to improvise. That's the way he wrote when he was at the Hilton Hotel during the '68 convention, sitting in that pressroom with the typewriters and the telegraphs and everything. He'd write without revising, the words just flowed off of him. I didn't learn that from him—I wish I had—but observing his style played a role in developing my own. Mostly it was his attitude and his thoughts about the matter of objectivity that affected me.