The Holiday piece that became ”Chicago: City on the Make,” came about after Holiday editors Louis F.V. Mercier and Harry Sions called me from Philadelphia to ask me to recommend ”a good Chicago writer,” since I`d be doing some of the pictures for an upcoming special issue about Chicago. I gave them Algren`s number. Jokingly, he told them to check his credentials for the job with Carl Sandburg, then strumming his guitar and raising goats on his farm in North Carolina. Sandburg gave Algren high marks, and the project was on.
The deal would give Sions many an anxious moment, after it became apparent that Algren would not permit any but minor changes–and he didn`t share Sions` concern about offending advertisers or the municipal powers who could discourage advertisers from appearing in an issue that knocked Chicago. The title for the book that came of the article was born in my 1949 Pontiac around Hammond, Ind., as I drove Algren and Doubleday`s editor in chief, Ken McCormick, to Algren`s house at Miller Beach. (Algren, pondering the title, said, ”I`ve always thought of Chicago as a hustler`s city.” McCormick said, ”Yes, it`s a tough, working-class city, a sort of city on the make, a . . . . ” I interrupted: ”That`s it,” I said. ”That`s the title.”) That was the day Algren posed a gag snapshot of himself carrying McCormick`s bags into the house, acting as his lackey.
I photographed him playing poker in a Division Street joint and met several of the people whom he had coalesced or would metamorphose into fictional characters, including a legless man rolling himself around on a little cart. One day we saw this man on West Madison Street. ”Is that the guy?” I asked, shooting him from the rear. ”They all look alike,” said Algren.
An East St. Louis drug addict agreed to demonstrate for the camera the technique of a heroin fix. ”Bad idea,” Nelson said afterward. ”He`s been off it a while. Posing got him too excited.” Fortunately our model survived and stayed clean.
I photographed a buy being made in a doorway, thanks to a dealer named Yellow Jack. I asked him what heroin felt like. He said, ”You jes` put down seven cots right here and put Lana Turner on one, Rita Hayworth on the next, then Bette Davis–and so on down the beds. Then you put this here ampule on the seventh cot–and you watch me climb over them six movie stars to get to that there ampule. . . . ”
We sneaked into the Washem School of Undertaking and into the Cook County Morgue for pictures, my camera hidden. I followed Algren to Riccardo`s Restaurant on North Rush Street, where (with Simone back in Paris) he`d dine with a gorgeous black actress named Janice Kingslow, who had once played the lead in a Chicago company`s production of ”Anna Lucasta.” Another of his girlfriends was Mari Sabosawa, a pretty Nisei who later married James Michener. (In 1937 he had married Amanda Kontowicz, then living in Los Angeles. They were divorced in 1946, remarried in 1953 and divorced again in 1955. In 1965 he married actress Betty Bendyk. They were divorced three years later. He had no children from either marriage.)
We shot on the streets, in Bughouse Square, in skid row hotels, in all-night restaurants and tough bars, in tattoo parlors–and at the ancient city office building on West Hubbard Street where he had once worked for the Department of Health in the VD Department.
Nelson`s lifelong habitats had been on Cottage Grove Avenue, Wabansia, Noble Street, Evergreen Street, Miller Beach near Gary, Ind., and he had a poor-boy`s awe of good living. I picked him up one morning as he left actress Geraldine Page`s hotel suite on North State Street and he was absolutely starry eyed. Not merely with Page, whom he regarded as one of the greatest women alive on stage and off, but with that suite: ”Everything is so clean up there. We had breakfast on this heavy linen, and even the lid on the marmalade jar was polished. (He loved orange marmalade with his tea, and after having some, he would pick the bits of rind from his poor teeth with soft Stimudent toothpicks.) And there were these red flowers. Even they were clean.” The flowers were probably roses. Algren often shook his head in awe of writers who could identify flowers, birds and trees. ”That`sa whole world I never paid any attention to,” he said.
Among Algren`s other dreams: ”owning” a boxer, ”like (writer) Budd Schulberg does,” and being at ringside for the fights. Owning a racehorse,
”to give me something to do at the track instead of losing or stooping.”
(We once did an article together for Sports Illustrated on ”Stoopers,”
horseplayers who comb the clubhouse floors for winning tickets thrown away by inexperienced bettors.) In fact, Algren bought a losing horse named Jealous Widow (a.k.a. Algren`s Folly) and kept her at Cahohen Downs in Belleville the summer of 1970.
Another of his lost dreams was to run a poker game and be the top dealer. Herman Kogan, another old friend and fan of Algren`s, and I once estimated that Algren`s poker playing–he was only a fair player but thought himself a master–had cost the world of literature perhaps four great novels.
Another of Algren`s costly dreams was his strange desire to be a landlord. He knew and wrote about several–mostly proprietors of places in which he played poker or under whose parsimony characters of his dwelled.
I take you to Second City, where some of Algren`s friends and admirers have gathered for shared reminiscences a few weeks after his death. On stage were a literate alderman; oral historian Studs Terkel; photographer Stephen Deutch, probably Algren`s closest friend, to whom he dedicated ”The Devil`s Stocking”; reporter Jan Herman, who had been in New York when Algren died there while preparing a party celebrating his surprise induction into the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and Nelson`s old friend and neighbor, radio writer Dave Peltz.
Peltz amusingly related how Algren got a check for $25,000 from producer Charles Feldman for the movie rights to ”A Walk on the Wild Side.” Peltz told how Algren, ever suspicious of banks, cashed the check and stored the cash in brown paper bags at Peltz`s house. Each time he wanted to go to Washington Park racetrack Nelson would get cash from one of the paper bags.
”When the leaves turned brown that year,” Peltz said with radio-man dolor, ”all the money was gone.” Sighs from the audience for another great artist`s mismanagement of his money.
My own recollection: In 1956, shortly after ”Wild Side” came out, Nelson and I drove to New York in my 1954 Hudson Jet. He was casting about for a new agent, having gone through several financial disasters with his original agent, Madeleine Brennan, who had let him sign away the movie rights to ”The Man with the Golden Arm” for a mere $15,000. He was going to stay with a young lady who had written him a sexy fan letter. Nelson and I met a couple of nights later to see O`Neill`s ”A Long Day`s Journey into Night.” Near the end of the interminable first act Nelson whispered, ”I been here so long I feel like I`m a member of the O`Neill family.” After the play he looked at me strangely. ”There`s a guy been following me. Says he`s one of Charlie Feldman`s guys. Nice guy. Very persistent. He wants to give me $25,000 for
`Wild Side.` ”
”Good God!” I said. ”Hold off until you get a new agent.” I knew he had an appointment with Shirley Fisher of the classy McIntosh & Otis agency in the next day or so.
A couple of nights later Algren called. ”Oh, I sold it,” he said. ”It was the best way to get rid of the guy. He was interfering with my social life.” Bettina Drew, currently working on an Algren biography, since discovered that the man who gave Algren the $25,000 resold the property within a few weeks for $75,000 to producer Charles Feldman.
(Years later Otto Preminger blithely mentioned on Kup`s Show that he had paid $100,000 to the would-be producers who had paid Algren $15,000 for
”Arm.” Contractually, Algren should have received half of this selling price and, with a sharper agent, a 2-percent cut of the net. All he got was several futile lawsuits and a chance to work for $725 a week for Preminger on the script–and learn as much about Hollywood as Faulkner, Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald did during longer sentences. Somewhere I have a hilarious tape of a TV play Algren and I worked on together about Preminger, whom he renamed Schlepker.)
Algren hated the way Frank Sinatra played Frankie Machine, especially when he moved wildly about coming off a drug fix (Algren said he should have been ”on the nod”). He didn`t like the way Kim Novak or anyone else in the movie was dressed. One night we were driving by a North Broadway movie house where ”Golden Arm” was playing. Gingerly I asked Nelson if he`d pose in front of the marquee.
”What`s that movie got to do with me?” he asked icily.
But I digress. Nelson returned to Chicago with that $25,000 check, went to a Milwaukee Avenue real estate office and for $15,000 total bought the four-story apartment building with coach house that stands on the corner of Wisconsin Street and North Lincoln Avenue just north of the Lincoln Hotel. A landlord at last!
One dark 3 a.m. Algren, a habitual night owl, called. ”Where can I get a used refrigerator for around $80?” he asked. During a moment of passion with one of his tenants, Algren, ever the generous womanizer, had promised her a better refrigerator than her current Norge. I helped find one for him, but between purchase and delivery Algren decided he couldn`t hack the
responsibility of landlordhood or of his generosity–and sold the house back to his real estate agent for $11,000. One of his better deals. He had lost a mere $4,000 in six weeks of ownership.
Dave Peltz`s brown leaves aside and agent`s fees added, I still don`t see how Nelson could`ve had more than 8,000 or 9,000 bucks in those brown paper bags. Value of house today? Almost a half million.
Come to think of it, the first house he`d bought was from adman Ed Gourfain. It was a bargain at $8,000. He showed it to me, proudly. It was right on Miller Beach–noisy bathers abounding, and it collected sand like a sand trap. Ed and his wife, Joyce, graciously returned the money, and Nelson bought his second-choice house, on a quiet lagoon in Miller Beach for $15,000. I helped move him there with a couple of U-Haul trailer loads.
