Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley': Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'

by Bill Steigerwald

  In answer to the ribbing he got from friends and family who thought his ambitious quest to find America was not only dangerous but also quixotic, Steinbeck changed the name of his project from "Operation America" to “Operation Windmills” and christened his truck "Rocinante" after Don Quixote's heroic horse.

  The inside of the $750 camper shell on Rocinante’s back was as efficient – and Spartan – as the cabin of a boat. It contained a propane stove, a refrigerator, a toilet and a table that could be turned into a platform bed. Overloading his truck with books, booze, spare parts and tools for every contingency he could imagine, Steinbeck also packed two rifles, a shotgun and plenty of ammo along with his fishing gear.

  He wanted folks to think he was merely a vacationing subscriber to Outdoor Life from the state of New York, not John Steinbeck, world-famous novelist. Yet he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. He wore a hunting coat with corduroy cuffs and a big pocket for game, khaki pants, half-Wellington rubber boots and a blue serge British naval hat. Plus he had a beard, shaved cheeks, a moustache – and a standard French poodle born in France.

  Dodging big cities and avoiding major highways, sleeping in his camper shell and in motels, Steinbeck’s counterclockwise route around the USA is famously drawn on the inside covers of “Travels With Charley.” He drove east to Bangor, touched the top of Maine, then dipped south and raced west through New Hampshire and Vermont. He hugged the southern shores of the Great Lakes, crossing northern New York and the tops of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to Illinois.

  As he noted in “Travels With Charley,” he paused for about five days for a rendezvous with his wife Elaine in downtown Chicago. Then, alone again, he slanted across Wisconsin and Minnesota farm country and zoomed through the voids of North Dakota and Montana on old U.S. Highway 10 to the Pacific. Seven days and 2,100 miles after leaving Chicago, Steinbeck and Charley made Seattle, where his wife jetted out to rejoin them.

  Elaine and John cruised like honeymooners for almost a week down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco, stopping at nearly empty resorts in the redwoods. In downtown San Francisco they stayed four or five days at the St. Francis Hotel, eating and drinking in the best North Beach cafes and bars with John’s old friends.

  The Steinbecks then motored south about 120 miles to his native Monterey Peninsula for a two-week stint at his family’s small seaside cottage in Pacific Grove. There Steinbeck argued politics with his Republican sisters, viewed the changes of 20 years in his hometown with sadness and cast an absentee vote for John Kennedy on Nov. 8, 1960.

  Steinbeck’s month of leisure on the West Coast ended in mid-November. Without Elaine, he and Charley crossed the Mojave Desert to Route 66 at Barstow and raced to the Texas Panhandle. As he describes at length in the book, his wife met him again in Amarillo to attend a Thanksgiving “orgy” at a nearby millionaire’s cattle ranch. They visited her relatives in Austin and after about 10 days in Texas, Elaine flew on to New York and Steinbeck and Charley headed for home in the truck.

  He made a point to stop in New Orleans for a few hours to witness the ugly racial demonstrations at a recently integrated public school that had become a daily national news story. Then, road weary and sickened by bigotry and hate, he sprinted almost nonstop across the Jim Crow South to New York City. Arriving home in early December, he and Charley had seen more than 30 states, many only briefly through their windows at 50 mph. They had been gone for roughly 75 days and logged about 10,000 miles in Rocinante.

  Knowing he had discovered no great insights or truths about America or its people, Steinbeck worked off and on, taking about 10 months to write "Travels With Charley in Search of America." Marketed as a work of nonfiction, it quickly sold 250,000 hardback copies at $4.95 (about $35 in today’s inflated money).

  The book was generally lauded by book reviewers for its humor, its evocative nature writing and its insights into Steinbeck’s little known personality. It reached No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list on Oct. 21, 1962. It was replaced the next week by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” but stayed on the Times Top 10 nonfiction list for 57 weeks. It has since sold nearly 1.5 million copies around the world, earning its publisher Viking Press (now part of Penguin Group) tens of millions of dollars and never going out of print.

  Though not a work of journalism or a travelogue, the book was accepted by scholars and critics as an accurate and honest account of Steinbeck’s journey and his impressions of America and its people. Its commercial and critical success is thought to have helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 25, 1962.

  Like Steinbeck’s other greatest hits, “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men,” “Travels With Charley” has had a long commercial tail and has never lost its appeal to readers around the world. A fixture of book clubs and high school summer reading lists to this day, it’s become a classic American travel book.

  Its synopsis is embedded in our culture like a TV Guide movie listing: “Travels With Charley: Novelist John Steinbeck and his poodle spend three months alone on the American Highway, roughing it and camping out under the stars as the Nobel laureate carefully documents the soul of a changing nation and its people.”

  For half a century “Travels With Charley” has been taught, reviewed and sold as a work of nonfiction. It was supposed to be the true story of Steinbeck’s trip around the USA – or at least close enough for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

  I wasn’t the most gullible kid on the media block when it came to exposing the abuse done to reality by the creative sector. In the late ‘70s I had worked briefly in L.A. for CBS’ docudrama unit, where my job was to make sure TV movies about real people and real events could be advertized as “The True Story of ….” without incurring a slap from the FCC. After that, I spent half my newspaper career writing articles and columns aimed at separating fact from fiction in Hollywood’s over-dramatized versions of history. I should have been warier about “Charley.” But when I started my project to retrace Steinbeck’s route in early 2010, I naturally assumed the “Travels With Charley” Myth was true. Why not? Two-and-a-half generations of Steinbeck scholars had never said otherwise.

  2 – Stranger in Steinbeck Country

  Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.

  – “Travels With Charley”

  Alone on Fremont Peak

  My journey with John Steinbeck officially began seven months before I had my big laugh in the cornfields of Alice. I was sitting alone and shivering on top of Fremont Peak, a spectacular little spike of marble overlooking the entire Monterey Peninsula. I couldn’t see Steinbeck’s grave or his ghost, but both of them were out there somewhere under the glare of the dying California sun as it fell toward Monterey Bay.

  Everything Steinbeck was down there somewhere – the house he grew up in, the statues, the things named after him, the museum/shrine that glorifies him and his works, the places and characters he made famous for eternity in “The Red Pony,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden.” It’s why they called it “Steinbeck Country.”

  Except for the pushy wind and the chirpings of a few invisible birds, I had Fremont Peak to myself. No tourists. No park rangers. No other ex-journalists with or without dogs doing books about “Travels With Charley.” Just lucky me, my notebook, my cameras and a head full of conflicting thoughts about my famous new sidekick.

  It was Day 4 of my extreme West Coast research tour. I had learned a ton of new stuff about the man, his last major book and his highway travels. I’d gone to Stanford’s Green Library, where 300 letters from Steinbeck to his agent Elizabeth Otis are kept. I’d been to San Jose State University’s Steinbeck Center. I’d been to San Francisco to meet a writer who interviewed Steinbeck on his “Charley” trip. I’d chec
ked out Cannery Row, downtown Monterey, Steinbeck’s family cottage in Pacific Grove, plus his gravesite and the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

  The only reason I was up on Fremont Peak was because Steinbeck said he climbed to that exact spot during his “Travels With Charley” trip. I was glad to be there. It was an awesome, rugged place, the star attraction of Fremont Peak State Park’s collection of grassy round mountains and steep wooded canyons.

  The pile of gray boulders is only 3,169 feet above Monterey Bay, but its distinctive little tooth is visible from almost anywhere in the Salinas Valley. It was lonely, peaceful, beautiful, a little dangerous and a little scary. No wonder young Johnny, who played on its slopes, hoped to be buried up there someday. It was the closest you could get to a heavenly view of Steinbeck Country without putting on wings.

  Though it was the end of a hazy day, I could see more than 20 miles in every direction. In the shadows behind me, dry valleys and barely green mountain ranges stretched eastward to the Sierra Nevada. The San Andreas Fault was down there somewhere too, which explains why Fremont Peak – not to mention the Monterey Peninsula, Los Angeles and the rest of the northbound Pacific Plate – had inched 8.33 feet closer to San Francisco since Steinbeck visited the area in 1960.

  Twenty-five miles southwest across the valley floor, hugging chilly Monterey Bay, was the historic city of Monterey. To be honest, I couldn’t see it, even with the zoom of my video camera. I only knew it was out there somewhere in the growing darkness, hidden by a strip of low coastal mountains, because that morning I had gone to Cannery Row to watch the sun come up over Monterey Bay.

  At my feet, sprawled on the valley floor, lay Salinas, the capital of Steinbeck Country and the barely fictionalized setting for “East of Eden.” The city was an island in a shallow sea of strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach and other crops – the “green gold” that made Salinas rich 100 years ago and earned it the nickname “The Salad Bowl of the World.” The valley’s fertile black soil and sunny, ocean-cooled climate, combined with the labor of busloads of Latino farm workers, produced 80 percent of the lettuce Americans eat every year.

  Salinas’ population was 160,000. That was twice what it was in 1960 and 40 times larger than when Steinbeck was born there in 1902. The city was wracked by deadly Latino gang violence and, like most California governments in the spring of 2010, was in deep budgetary trouble.

  The Great Recession had slammed Steinbeck Country hard. The unemployment rate was 13 percent and going higher. Foreclosures were running twice as high as in 2006. Poverty rates were up, property tax revenues were down. But from high atop Fremont Peak, California was as golden as ever and everything in the Salinas Valley looked fine and healthy.

  Earlier that day in the old downtown of Salinas I had toured the main Steinbeck stops. I took a few photos of the restored Queen Anne-style Victorian house he grew up in. It was closed, so I didn’t see the gift shop or gourmet restaurant that features local produce and $13 entrees like Asparagus & Ham Timbale with choice of Tomato Leek Soup or Green Salad. The corner house is on the National Register of Historic Places and Oprah Winfrey taped one of her shows in the front yard when her book club was touting “East of Eden.”

  Two blocks away was the National Steinbeck Center, one of the few reasons for tourists to divert from the sun and surf of the Pacific Coast to the scorched flats of Salinas. The largest museum in the country devoted to a single writer, it's smartly designed and visitor friendly. Steinbeck’s life story and books co-star in a dozen well-staged exhibits that include loops of clips from movies like “East of Eden” and “Of Mice and Men.” Recordings of his deep voice are never out of earshot.

  The enduring popularity of “Travels With Charley” was evident at the center. The bookstore sold various editions of the entire Steinbeck canon – 16 novels, six non-fiction and five short-story collections. “Travels With Charley” had been the No. 1 seller since 2003 and the center’s most popular attraction and holiest relic was the 1960 GMC pickup truck/camper combo Steinbeck rode in on his search for America.

  You couldn’t get inside the cab of the truck or the camper shell, or even touch them, because “Rocinante” was corralled behind a tall fence of Plexiglas. Squared-off and primitive, the cab’s hard utilitarian interior was uncomfortable just to look at. It was proof of the punishment Steinbeck endured for 10,000 miles with only an old French dog, an AM radio and his imagination for company. Unfortunately, the $11 million Steinbeck Center was not doing well. Its annual attendance was running about 30,000, which doesn’t sound so bad but works out to about 82 people a day. Chronically short of funds, it was dependent on subsidies from a city government that itself was in serious fiscal trouble.

  Across the street from the Steinbeck Center, suckered in by the permanent sidewalk sign boasting that “Steinbeck Ate Here,” I ate lunch at Sang’s Café. Under my withering questioning the owner broke down and confessed the truth. The sign should more accurately say “Steinbeck Drank Here,” because that’s what young John did too much of there in the ‘20s and ‘30s when he was a struggling writer and the place was a bar. It wasn’t the first or last time I’d bump up against a Steinbeck myth. A lot of what we know about him – good and bad – is either truer or less false than we think.

  Until I began “investigating” him for my book idea, I didn’t know much about him at all. “John Steinbeck” had been reduced to a famous literary name – a “Jeopardy!” question to the answer “This Californian was the sixth American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.” Whatever I had learned about him I’d forgotten. During high school in the 1960s I was forced to read the usual Steinbeck classics, but they had no more impact on my life than "Beowulf.”

  I liked “Of Mice and Men” then and appreciated it much more after re-reading it as an adult. But unlike Bruce Springsteen, my social conscience wasn’t aroused by “The Grapes of Wrath’s” expose of the cruelty of capitalism and the sufferings of the migrant working class. I was a Baby Boomer from another political planet, a red one. When I was 17, in 1964, I was watching William F. Buckley Jr.'s “Firing Line” and sneaking Barry Goldwater stickers on the bumper of my neighbor’s Country Squire station wagon.

  By today’s definitions, Steinbeck was a ball of political contradictions. He was a highly partisan FDR big-government Democrat who went ape for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s and became a White House-sleepover friend of LBJ and frequent weekend guest at Camp David. Like most of his New Deal generation, he had a naïve trust in the federal government to solve massive social and economic problems.

  But Steinbeck was never close to being the true-believing commie or socialist both his rightwing enemies and leftwing friends liked to claim he was. He was what we call today “a Cold War liberal.” He supported labor unions, the civil rights movement and LBJ’s war on poverty. He was also a staunch anti-communist who believed in containing the Soviet Union and what then was so impolitely called “Red China.”

  He was a sincere patriot, which, along with becoming too friendly with LBJ, may have blinded him to the folly of Vietnam and the fallacy of the Domino Theory. He was a loud public hawk on Vietnam in its early stages, but became a quiet dove when he realized the war was unwinnable. Intolerant of anti-war protestors, whom he thought were stupid and cowardly, he despised hippies and the ‘60s youth culture.

  Steinbeck the man had personal issues that didn’t appeal to me. He was a parochial New York City snob by the time he took his long road trip. He was an enthusiastic and daily boozer. And in the 1960s he forgot his earlier wise warning to artists to stay away from political power and cozied up to JFK and especially LBJ. His biographer Jackson Benson pointed out in his 1984 epic “The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer” that Steinbeck’s darker side included a quarrelsome nature and a “striking lack of charity and understanding.”

  His sons John Steinbeck IV, who died from complications during surgery in 1991, and Thom, who is a California writer, felt their father
neglected them after he divorced their mother and married Elaine, his third and final wife, in 1950. Yet whatever his faults as a father and husband, personally and politically Steinbeck was a living saint compared to many celebrities and famous writers of his era.

  Despite our differences, I had grown to like the grouchy, contradictory guy. Underneath his New Yorker magazine limousine liberalism, he hid an admirable libertarian streak. He wrote fine paeans to individualism, understood the importance of private property rights and hated bureaucrats and government bullying. Plus he didn’t moralize about things like prostitution. He treated prostitutes kindly in his books and thought they provided a service to the community, which of course they do.

  If I wasn’t captured by Steinbeck’s New Deal politics or his social conscience, I sure was impressed by his writing skills. When I re-read “Of Mice and Men” and “Cannery Row,” I was blown away by his spare style, beautiful descriptive powers, sense of place and storytelling. Just the first 500 words of “Cannery Row” should make any journalist envious or throw her laptop away and become a plumber. I didn’t have the casual attitude about facts that Steinbeck did, which was why I’d ultimately get pissed at him. But I totally agreed with what he said about the impossibility of objectivity and the inherent and unavoidable subjectivity of journalism and all writing – fiction or nonfiction.