Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  Frankie Machine, for his part, is a man with no real idea who he is or what he wants to become—if anything. He never finished grammar school, and for years, his ambitions were limited to bedding women, drinking, and gambling. But by the time the novel begins, he has realized there isn’t much space left in the world for a man without profession, money, or class. He’s proud of his talent for dealing cards and boasts that he’s the “kid with the golden arm,” but knows that doesn’t count for much and has begun undermining himself just as often as he brags. “I never get nowhere,” he says, “but I pay my own fare all the way.”

  The list of Frankie’s wishes is long. He wants to leave Sophie so he can be with Molly Novotny. He wants to stop buying morphine from Louie Fomorowski and kick his addiction. He wants to become a drummer, join the musician’s union, and “bang the tubs” for a bandleader like Gene Krupa, but he can’t get out of his own way long enough to see any one of those goals all the way through—he begins an affair with Molly, but doesn’t leave Sophie; he stops using morphine, but gets back on; he practices drumming on a pad he keeps in his room, but never tries to get a job playing professionally.

  After Nelson introduces the novel’s most important characters, he sets the plot in motion. Frankie ends up in the alley outside Zero Schwiefka’s one night with Louie Fomorowski and Sparrow, and when they begin arguing, Louie mocks Frankie for being an addict. “You’ll look me up ten thousand times to come,” he says. “’N on yer knees to beg me to take your money too.”

  Until that moment, Sparrow has no idea Frankie is an addict, and Frankie can’t stand the thought of losing his friend’s admiration. He knows Louie is right as well, and can’t stand the thought of that either. “I want people like you knocked on the head,” he tells Louie. And when Louie laughs, Frankie snaps his neck and leaves his body in the alley.

  Louie’s death sets in motion the chain of events that determines the course of Frankie’s life. The police begin to suspect that Frankie killed Louie almost immediately. Someone took the money Louie was holding when he died, and when Frankie begins to suspect Sparrow stole it, their relationship cools. They go shoplifting together, “just to do somethin’,” and the police catch Frankie in the act and send him to jail for several months.

  Frankie is a diminished man when he’s released. Molly, whose love had been the most promising thing in his life, has left the neighborhood. Sophie has begun to lose her mind. He and Sparrow aren’t talking, he’s lost his touch with the cards, and he starts using morphine again. Once, he tells himself he’s going to get a library card “the minute” he finishes the shot of liquor in his hand—but he can’t even accomplish that much.

  The police entrap Sparrow eventually, and after threatening him for weeks, they convince him to finger Frankie for Louie’s murder. They get an arrest warrant for Frankie, and their pursuit moves the story along from that point forward, but the cat-and-mouse dynamic of their chase and his evasion never become the book’s primary focus because there’s no doubt who killed Louie—Sparrow knows, and so do Blind Piggy, Antek Witwicki, and everyone else in the neighborhood. There’s no doubt as to what will become of Frankie Machine either. He’s no survivor, but he is a dreamer, and the story remains compelling all the way through because he continues to believe he has a way out until his very last moments.

  Frankie goes on the run to avoid the police, manages to find Molly, and then moves in with her. She finds purpose and contentment in nursing him off morphine, but then Drunkie John finds them, extorts them, and then calls the police and tells them where Frankie is hiding.

  Frankie finally succumbs then. He leads the police on a chase, gets away, and hides in a cheap hotel room. He’s alone, and he’s been shot, and he’s bleeding. “What am I waitin’ for?” he asks himself. “For the ice in the blood to reach the heart? Or for the tread of heavy boots following a flashlight up the stairs?”

  He takes a double strand of twine, secures it to the ceiling, and fashions a noose. “Have a good dream you’re dancin’, [Sophie],” he tells the empty room, and then he hangs himself.

  Much ink was wasted discussing the “sordid” and “degenerate” nature of the characters in The Man with the Golden Arm when it was released. Frankie’s morphine addiction seemed scandalous, though it plays a relatively minor role in the story, and so did Blind Piggy and a host of the characters Frankie meets in jail. But today, the book doesn’t seem outré—it seems prescient.

  When Nelson returned from the war, he began to fear that the end of hostilities in Europe and the Pacific was also the beginning of a struggle to shape the future. Other writers shared his concerns, of course. The most notable among them was George Orwell, who looked at the expansion of the central state in the Soviet Union and envisioned the dystopian world he described in Nineteen Eighty-Four—a place where government was all, thoughts were policed, and dissent was impossible.§

  Nelson feared a different, but no less despairing future. Instead of looking to the government for guidance, he studied the class of people who had not benefited from the wartime recovery or the postwar economic boom. The thinness of the American Century’s promise was evident in the quality of their lives, he believed, and he intuited that their fates foretold everyone else’s. He looked at them and saw an atomized society where no one felt at home any longer, and masses of people cycled through prisons and jails—a place where irrelevance was both sin and punishment, and there was no need for a totalitarian government to stifle dissent because everyone was out only for themselves.

  Everyone is “the only one on his own side,” he wrote, and people are so divided by class and lacking in charity, that it’s hard for someone down on their luck to “find five dollars in a city of four million people, most of them millionaires.”

  Incarceration is no longer the burden it was intended to be, he wrote, because “time off for good conduct means little to men with no place to go and nothing in particular to do when they get there.” Prisons and jails, he reported, are not filled with dangerous people; they are packed with “men and youths who had never picked up any sort of craft—though most of them could learn anything requiring a mechanical turn with ease. It wasn’t so much a lack of aptitude as simply the feeling that no work had any point to it.”

  And as cities had become wealthier, more complex, and more regimented, people had begun to lose their identities and their sense of belonging. “You know who I am?” Frankie Machine asks. “You know who you are? You know who anybody is anymore?”

  By the time Nelson began writing Arm, he had realized that the lives lived by people surviving at the margins of society provided a glimpse of the future. That insight was the reason Nelson focused so tightly on Frankie, Sparrow, and Sophie. A traditional naturalistic novel dwells on environment and studies its effect on characters. It tells its readers to pity these poor people, help them. But The Man with the Golden Arm reverses that dynamic so that its characters have to be acknowledged as individuals—no more or less capricious, vain, weak, lustful, and deluded than anyone else. It tells its readers, “Look at what’s become of us, we need to help ourselves.” Or, as the defrocked priest says, “we are all members of one another.”

  The excitement surrounding Arm’s release lasted through the holidays and into the New Year. It remained on local best-seller lists until mid-December, and then a subscription service called the Book Find Club selected it as its monthly reading for January 1950. Pocket Books paid twenty-five thousand dollars for the paperback rights—a record price at the time—and an abridged version of the novel appeared in the first issue of Book Digest.

  Promoting the book kept Nelson busy for months. He cycled through the department stores in the Loop to sign display copies, and appeared on television and radio. He addressed a capacity crowd as the keynote speaker of the first Sun-Times book and author luncheon, accepted an award from Time magazine for writing the best novel of the year, and sat down with a writer from the New York Times for an interview. He speak
s “a run-of-the-mill Chicagoese, an unpretentious colloquial,” the reporter wrote later. “He looks like any guy—medium height, medium slim, medium sandy hair—and could be anything: a clerk, a sailor, a baker’s boy, a soda jerk, an electrician, a bus driver. But not a writer.”

  Reviews of Golden Arm continued to appear as well, but the praise Nelson valued most came from peers. Kenneth Millar, a mystery writer who published using the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, wrote to say he had been reading Arm aloud to his wife and couldn’t believe how good it was. “I think it’s the strongest and deepest work of imagination that has been done in this country since the war,” he wrote. And Robert Lowry, a novelist and reviewer from Time magazine, wrote to say, “I honest to God don’t know how you did it. I mean the sustained invention, all in a pure, fresh-minted idiom. The turn of phrase on turn of phrase on turn of phrase, no two of them alike, all of them brand new and trembling. Brother it was wonderful.”

  Nelson knew Millar and Lowry and their letters flattered him, but the message that moved him most came from Ernest Hemingway—a man he had long admired but never met. Hemingway had been on record as a fan of Nelson’s since he told a newspaper reporter that Faulkner was the best working writer in America and Nelson was the runner-up, but after reading Arm, he went even further.

  Into a world of letters where we have the fading Faulkner and where that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe casts a shorter shadow each day, Nelson Algren comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer when one of those things is what you need and need it badly and at once and for keeps. He has been around for a long time but only the pros knew about him. . . . Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.

  Hemingway’s praise sounds hyperbolic and intended to maximize its effect on sales, but his regard was genuine and he repeated it privately. He told the critic Malcolm Cowley, “Algren is probably the best writer under 50, and name your own figure, writing today.” And he wrote a note inside his personal copy of Arm that reads, “OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I’ll never fight you in Chicago. Ever.”

  Nelson pressed Ken McCormick to use Hemingway’s letter to promote the novel, but McCormick resisted. He said it would be best to wait until sales slowed. Then, when that happened, he said he was afraid the quote would offend Faulkner’s fans, and Wolfe’s, and do more harm than good. Nelson kept insisting, though, and eventually McCormick had someone at Doubleday create an advertisement built around Hemingway’s letter and made plans to have it published in New York and Chicago papers. McCormick showed it to his peers at Random House and Harper & Brothers before he ran it though—Wolfe’s publisher and Faulkner’s publisher, respectively—and he shelved the advertisement when they asked him to.

  “[P]lease don’t consider that we’re being derelict in our duty by not running an ad using this particular quote,” McCormick pleaded.

  Nelson let the issue drop, but he wasn’t pleased. He kept Hemingway’s letter, though, and hung it prominently in his apartment.

  Nelson was famous by early 1950, and entirely unprepared. He had no idea what to do with the money he was making, and hadn’t even considered trading up for more acceptable friends. He felt indebted to the people he associated with on West Madison Street, so after his novel became a hit, he tried to repay them for the support they had shown him while he was writing, and their toleration of his endless questions.

  He kept in touch with Richard Majewski, who was back in Cook County Jail, and he tried to help Paula Bays get sober again. He let her withdraw in his apartment for a second time, and then he paid for her and her husband, John, to travel to John’s family’s home in Monroe, Ohio.

  “Nelson, I’d like to say again, thanks for everything, you were more than fine and I shant forget, not ever,” John Bays wrote when they arrived. Paula is resting, he said, but she says to say hello. “She thinks there is no one quite like you. She says you possess a natural goodness of which you are quite unaware.”

  No one benefited from Nelson’s largess more than Bill Hackett. Nelson had created Frankie Machine by combining the characteristics of several men, but Hackett was primary among them: some of Frankie’s dialogue came from Hackett’s mouth, they were physically similar, and they both shot dope and dealt cards. Nelson felt obligated to Hackett as a result, and when he was offered an opportunity to travel to Hollywood, he showed interest, and pushed to secure an invitation for his friend.

  A man named Bob Roberts approached Nelson about turning The Man with the Golden Arm into a film when he was passing through Chicago.¶ He had already purchased the option to the book, and he owned a production company that had recently released a boxing movie called Body and Soul with John Garfield, a major star at the time. He said Garfield was interested in playing Frankie Machine, and asked if Nelson liked that idea.

  Nelson thought Roberts was just talking. The Motion Picture Association of America enforced a production code that prohibited movies containing profanity, sex, or drug use from being screened in American theaters, so there was little chance Arm would ever be released.

  Roberts said he was serious about the project, though, and offered to pay for Nelson to travel to California to discuss it.

  Nelson was curious, so he agreed with one caveat. “I don’t have any firsthand acquaintance with drugs,” he told Roberts, “but I know a guy who has. He could be your technical adviser.”

  “Bring him out,” Roberts said. Then he had a contract written up, and put Hackett’s name on it, right along with Nelson’s.

  Nelson bought a pair of train tickets and told his friend the good news. Hackett was excited about the trip and the opportunity it would give him to get clean, but he very nearly missed it.

  Nelson’s phone rang the day before he was scheduled to leave Chicago, and when he picked it up, a man’s voice came through the line.

  “This is your brother,” the voice said.

  “Well, I don’t have a brother,” Nelson replied.

  “Well, I’m talking for your brother,” the man said.

  Then Nelson realized what had happened. Hackett had been arrested, the police were holding him, and he had asked someone to call Nelson on his behalf. So, Nelson went to the station. The police there knew Hackett, and they didn’t think much of him. One officer in particular couldn’t stand him, and often picked him up for vagrancy.

  Nelson approached that officer and asked about Hackett. “Well, that son of a bitch is no good,” the officer said. “He’s a junkie.”

  “No,” Nelson corrected him, “he’s John Garfield’s technical adviser.” He had the contract Roberts had given him in his pocket, and he produced it to make his point.

  The officer was surprised. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said.

  “No,” Nelson insisted, “he’s going to take part in a play. You know, he might take the lead,” he exaggerated for effect.

  The police released Hackett. Nelson left with him, and the next day, they made their way to Dearborn Station to catch their train.

  They must have made quite a scene when they arrived. The station was a red-brick building with marble floors and a large, sunlit atrium at its center. There were skylights cut into the ceiling, and a clock tower rose five stories above the roofline like a castle’s spire.# They, in contrast, were an unmarried forty-year-old writer who lived in a cold-water flat behind an empty lot, a card dealer whose shirtsleeves concealed years’ worth of track marks, and an entourage of about a dozen junkies.

  The crowd from West Madison Street met Nelson and Hackett at the station to say their goodbyes. They were a random sort of family, bound by circumstance and shared experience instead of blood, but connected all the same, and their parting must have been bittersweet. The trip west was the start of something new for Nelson and Hackett, but an end for the people they were leaving behind. Nelson’s head was full of Hollywood dreams, and there was no reason to expect he would continue visiting Jack’s apartment to listen to records.
Hackett swore he was never coming back, so the group knew the farewells they exchanged were almost certainly final.

  Nelson and Hackett moved into the Chateau Marmont when they reached Hollywood, and though they were only a couple thousand miles from home, they felt like visitors to an alien world. When I step onto my balcony, Nelson wrote to a friend, I see “a thousand merry-go-rounds going around and around and around way down below.” In Los Angeles, he said, “everybody is a millionaire, nobody ever goes home, we all hate money and everything is love.”

  At first, Nelson and Hackett had nothing to do. John Garfield was in New York for work and not expected back for several days, so Nelson called Amanda and asked her to show him and Hackett the city. She agreed, and for several days she played chauffeur. She drove them to visit an acquaintance from Chicago who had moved west, to dinner with Sanora Babb, an old friend from the League of American Writers, and to Chasen’s, where Nelson swooned when a twenty-five-year-old actress named Angela Lansbury sat at a table nearby.

  The trip felt like a dream, and like a dream, its promise disappeared as suddenly as it had manifested itself. Nelson began negotiating with Bob Roberts after settling in, and their talks soured quickly. The problem was money. Roberts offered Nelson fifteen thousand dollars up front for the rights to Arm, but no cut of the film’s profits if it earned any. Nelson thought he could do better, so he pushed for more, but Roberts had the advantage.** Nelson’s agent hadn’t accompanied him, and the representative she had arranged in Hollywood seemed to be looking out for Roberts’s interests.

  Tension built between Nelson and Roberts, and built. Nelson felt he was being treated like a child, or a fool. Roberts was eager to finish the deal and have Nelson begin working on a script, but he wasn’t willing to increase his offer. Nelson said he was going to meet with other producers, and by the end of the first week, they were trading insults freely.