Never a Lovely So Real

by Colin Asher

  “And I’ll tell you what else. Everyone of those women, and their men too, sat there for hours just having themselves one hell of a time. I mean they were enjoying their lives all the way.”

  The Super Chief, a luxury train, pulled into Union Station in Los Angeles on Wednesday, January 26, 1955, and when it stopped, Nelson stepped out of one of its red-trimmed cars. He was planning to slip away and find a taxi before anyone recognized him, but he failed.#

  An employee of the Jaffe Agency spotted Nelson when he exited the train, and soon they were driving west together through the California afternoon, into the sunset. They parked at an Art Deco hotel called the Beverly Carlton a few minutes later, and Nelson checked into the room that had been reserved for him. Inside, he found a neatly made bed, cups bearing seals that promised they were germ-free, and windows that looked down on a pretzel-shaped pool and a fountain spraying pink water.

  Nelson was in town for work, but even a few days earlier, he had had no idea that this would be the case. The week before, an agent from the Jaffe Agency had reached out to ask if Nelson would be interested in working on a screenplay for The Man with the Golden Arm. The query was a surprise. The last Nelson had heard, Bob Roberts owned the rights to make a film from the book, and there was no chance of it being produced in America because of the motion picture production code. But the Jaffe Agency said a director named Otto Preminger had purchased the film rights and was willing to pay Nelson a thousand dollars a week to work on the script.

  Nelson’s phone rang the morning after he checked into the Beverly Carlton, and someone on the other end of the line said, “Mr. Preminger is coming by in his car. Would you mind being outside so he doesn’t have to get out of the car or park the car. Be on the curb.”

  Nelson didn’t move. He waited in his room instead, and didn’t leave until the concierge called to say someone was asking for him. Then he went downstairs to meet the man who wanted to put Frankie Machine in a movie.

  Nelson and Preminger greeted each other in the lobby, and then got into a red Cadillac. Preminger was a veteran of more than twenty films and a powerful figure in the industry, but Nelson had never heard of him and his first impression was not good. He was wearing a bespoke suit, spoke with a thick eastern European accent that sounded affected, and he seemed imperious and condescending.

  Preminger pulled into traffic, began driving toward Hollywood, and tried to make small talk. There was a newspaper on the seat next to him, and its headline said a wealthy stock manipulator and convicted draft dodger named Serge Rubenstein had been strangled. Preminger tossed the paper to Nelson. “Old friend,” he said, indicating Rubenstein. “Terrible man.” Then he mentioned The Man with the Golden Arm—the book, not the film he was planning to make. “How come you know such terrible people you write about?” he asked Nelson.

  Few questions could have offended Nelson more. He had written his book out of compassion, and only after getting to know and care about the people his characters were patterned after. Their names were Bill Hackett, Paula Bays, and Richard Majewski, and each of them were less venal than Serge Rubenstein.

  The red Cadillac stopped at the Columbia Pictures lot on Gower Street after about fifteen minutes, and by then Nelson had made two decisions. He distrusted Preminger, but he would try to work with him anyway because he needed the money and wanted to protect his book.

  Preminger gave Nelson a tour of his offices when they arrived, and Nelson bristled as Preminger badgered his staff and issued orders. At one point, a man walked into a room smoking a pipe, and Preminger told him to extinguish it. The man obediently tapped the smoldering tobacco out on his coat, but Preminger sent him out of the room anyway. “Now you and pipe oudt!” he hollered.

  Nelson returned to his hotel that evening intending to work on his film treatment, but before he made any headway, he began receiving unsettling information.

  Someone from Preminger’s office contacted Nelson to say that his salary had been reduced from $1,000 a week to $750. Then, in a separate call, they said it had been reduced further to $500, and told him to go back to Chicago if he didn’t like it. Later, an agent from the Jaffe Agency asked Nelson if he was “politically clear” to work in Hollywood, and said Preminger had purchased the rights to Golden Arm from Bob Roberts a year earlier, but kept his acquisition a secret.

  Then Nelson began collecting rumors. He heard that Roberts made money on the sale of the film rights, but didn’t intend to pay Nelson the portion he was entitled to.** The transfer obviated the clause in the contract that guaranteed Nelson a percentage of the film’s profits, and Preminger made his job offer under false pretenses. He was hoping to keep Nelson from filing a lawsuit challenging his ownership of the film rights by putting him on the payroll. More troubling still, Preminger was planning to have the film in theaters before the end of the year, no matter what. That was a serious problem because a director named Jack Kirkland had been developing a stage version of Golden Arm that was scheduled to open around the same time, and the film was likely to destroy the play’s chances of earning money. If that happened, Nelson would be left in the cold. He was guaranteed almost half of the profit from the Kirkland production, but nothing from the movie.

  Nelson was supposed to deliver a film treatment to Preminger a few days later, but he no longer wanted anything to do with the man, so he went for a walk instead of working. While he was out, he passed a movie theater playing B films, and noticed a poster out front featuring a woman wearing a leopard skin and a caption that read, WHITE GODDESS NOT GO THAT PART OF FOREST. He bought a ticket, went inside, watched the movie, and then returned to the Beverly Carlton and tapped out a twelve-page film treatment.

  Preminger parked his red Cadillac outside the Beverly Carlton on Sunday, January 30, and began honking the horn. Nelson was in the middle of typing a letter to Jack Conroy when he realized he was being summoned, and chose to complete it before rising. The letter said Hollywood lures people in by promising them a ride on the Super Chief and thirty-five dollars “a day just to stand around looking willing.”

  “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 grabbed the treatment, got in the Cadillac, and accepted a ride to Preminger’s house in Malibu. When they arrived, Nelson handed over his work.

  “So little pages,” Preminger said. Then he began reading. He stopped when he reached the part of the script where Nelson had Frankie Machine say, “White Goddess not go that part of forest.”

  Preminger set the papers down and looked at Nelson. This is not a story I will pay for, he said. Then he called the Jaffe Agency, and said, “Mr. Algren and I have agreed that he doesn’t care to do the sort of script I want.”

  Nelson moved into a dive on Hollywood Boulevard called the Hotel Vermillion the next day. His room had a view of a parking garage, and a red neon sign that burned through the night. It said:

  G

  O

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  B

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  The Jaffe Agency assigned a young agent named Clancy Sigal to Nelson, and they spent February trying to dredge up work. They moved from studio to studio and packed their days with meetings, but their time together soon developed a cruel monotony. Everyone they spoke to swore they loved—just loved—Nelson’s books. They respected him as an artist—they really did. But the only work they had available at the moment was beneath him—rewriting, fixing dialogue, gangster flicks, and cheap romances.

  “Trouble is that, though I need the dough,” Nelson wrote to Amanda, “I don’t have the heart for their kind of assignments. In fact I don’t know what I’m doing here at all. Never felt so lost and fish-out-of-waterish in my life. Would sure like to get out.”

  The Jaffe Agency informed Nelson that Preminger wanted to compensate him for his travel expenses, but Nelson was not inclined to
accept. He was so wary of the man, by then, that he feared taking the money would put him in a precarious position if he decided to go to court to sue for control of his film rights, so he turned down Preminger’s offer and memorialized their rift with a letter. I heard you were planning to reimburse me for my expenses, it said. “Though your thoughtfulness is appreciated, I must in turn advise you that this money was spent for no purpose to which you are member. Thank you all the same.”

  Nelson’s trip to Hollywood was a waste of time and money, with one exception: a tender reunion with Bill Hackett. Nelson had heard that Hackett had become a sign painter, so after he stopped looking for work, he left his name, his number, and a message, at the office of the local painter’s union.

  Hackett called Nelson early in the morning about a week later, and they arranged to meet the same afternoon. When Hackett arrived at the Vermillion, he looked like a new man. He was wearing a sweater and a little white hat, and his skin looked healthy and his eyes were clear. He had been off heroin for years, and his wife, who had joined him in California, was clean as well.

  Nelson stayed with the Hacketts that weekend in their new home in a subdivision called La Mirada. Their neighborhood was a maze of identical houses sitting on gently undulating land, but somehow they fit in. They had a lawn, a car, and a pair of TVs, and they were happy. Hackett’s “one big worry,” Nelson told Amanda, “is that he is only working 7 hours a day.”

  The weekend Nelson spent with the Hacketts lifted his spirits, but his friends’ contentment also put his own troubles in stark relief. He decided it was time to end his marriage—with or without Amanda’s consent. “Coming back to Gary is just something I can’t do,” he wrote from California. He said he would get his own apartment in Chicago when he returned, file for divorce, get another poker game going, finish his novel, and then leave America. “I’ll sign the ‘I’m not-and-have-never-been’ [a Communist] clause” on the passport application, he said, and get as far away as I can. “If I don’t make France I’ll make Havana and if I don’t make Havana I’ll make the slammer.”

  When Nelson returned to Chicago, he rented a single room in an apartment building not far from where he had lived while writing Never Come Morning, and then he settled down to finish writing his novel.

  The book was almost complete by then, and bore only a faint resemblance to Somebody in Boots. Nelson’s new protagonist was a boy named Dove Linkhorn, the last in a long line of Scottish Linkhorns who had been talked out of their ancestral lands by “unremembered” kings, came to America with nothing, and several generations later, had nothing still.

  The Linkhorns were “fierce craving boys,” Nelson wrote, and they knew only two things for certain. “Weaker men, full of worldly follies” always beat them, and no matter how low they fell in the world, their whiteness would ensure they always had people to look down on. “Slaveless yeomen,” Nelson wrote, “—yet they had seen how the great land-owner, the moment he got a few black hands in, put up his feet on his fine white porch and let the world go hang. So the Linkhorns braced their own narrow backs against their own clapboard shacks, pulled up the jug and let it hang too.”

  Dove’s father is a “pore lonesome wife-left-feller” named Fitz Linkhorn, and his brother is an unemployed drunk named Byron who putters around the family’s shack performing “useless” tasks. The two of them fight endlessly, and Dove has no feeling for either.

  Fitz is an old-school street preacher who mounts the steps of the local courthouse each night carrying a bottle of “Kill-Devil” and announces the approach of the end of days. “Un-utter-uble sorrows is in store for all,” he proclaims. “Invasion by an army! A army of lepers! Two hundred million of flame-throwen cavalry! A river of blood and burnen flesh a hundred mile long!”

  His audience is always the same. Farmers gone broke. Drifters. Drinkers. Men just cagey enough to know that egging the preacher on will earn them a swig of his liquor—and Byron, who taunts and mocks his father. “O God who scorns the shoeless—forget our daily bread but hasteth thy vengeance!” he cries into the night. “Hasteth!”

  Dove is ignorant and adrift. He’s sixteen but not in school, unemployed, illiterate, and on his own because neither his father nor his brother provide for him. He can be cagey, though, and eventually he finds work at a café and gas station on the edge of town that’s run by a woman named Teresina Vidavarri. He starts off changing tires, sweeping the floors, and making coffee, but when he earns Vidavarri’s trust, she takes him under her wing and begins teaching him how to read.

  They grow close, and make love—something Vidavarri enjoys, but then regrets. She fires him afterward and refuses to see him again, and her rejection devastates Dove. He decides to run away, but before he goes, he stops by Vidavarri’s café and rapes her. Then he boards a train on its way out of town—a motherless child, an illiterate boy from a town of only seven hundred souls, a guilty fool who hurt the only person who ever showed him kindness.

  Nelson’s five most recent books can be read as constituent pieces of a single literary project—each volume building on the one that preceded it. Never Come Morning asserts that no person can be defined solely by the economic and cultural constraints brought to bear on them. The Neon Wilderness is a chronicle of men and women struggling to orient themselves within a world that seems to grow colder and less forgiving by the day. The Man with the Golden Arm champions those same people, makes a bold claim for their humanity and individuality, and prophesies that every indignity they suffer will be visited upon the rest of society in due time. Chicago: City on the Make places the books preceding it in a historical and political context, and Nonconformity argues for their artistic relevance and articulates the ideas that guided their creation.

  But the novel Nelson completed in the spring of 1955 is different. Its tone is bitter and cynical, and it’s more concerned with its protagonist’s environment than his inner life, and for those reasons, the book doesn’t cohere the way its antecedents do. Instead of a deeply reported account of individuals wrestling with guilt and existential doubts, it’s a picaresque tale about a comically naïve boy with no personality to speak of.

  Once Dove leaves home, he wanders until he reaches New Orleans. He’s an empty vessel, and as he moves through the world, Nelson uses his innocent gaze to present America as a cruel, hypocritical, and immoral place. Dove is constantly falling in with unsavory characters, and because he’s so guileless, people regularly offer him unsolicited advice and opinions. Each of their edicts is dark and amoral, and their pronouncements give voice to the fatalistic turn Nelson’s mind had taken in the six years since he completed The Man with the Golden Arm.

  “Everybody got to eat,” someone says, “everybody got to die.”

  “You know what the best kick of all is, Red?” another asks. “It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best.”

  “Never play cards with a man called Doc,” an inmate advises Dove at one point. “Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let anybody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ’em all and I know. They don’t work.”

  Dove spends a good deal of time in search of employment, and usually offers his labor for free. “It’s just the boys who were willing to work just for the experience got to be the millionaires!” he says. But despite his eagerness to be exploited, Dove has a hard time finding a job that suits. He sells coffee, scams people by selling fake beauty certificates, manufactures condoms, and works as a salesman for Watkins products—but none of those positions lasts long.

  Dove becomes a success only when he hires on as a performer at a sex show run by a pimp named Finnerty. He begins going by the name “Big Stingaree,” and when it’s time to perform each day, he enters a room and finds a woman waiting for him. The prostitutes in Finnerty’s employ take turns working with Dove, and e
ach, when it’s her time to perform, pretends to be a virgin and tries, and fails, to fight him off to preserve her chastity. This scene—enacted again, and again—contains both elements of the social critique at the book’s core.

  Dove’s success makes a mockery of the meritocratic ideal because he failed to earn a living legitimately and makes more as a sex worker than he ever imagined. “Couldn’t read my name were it wrote a foot high on the side of a barn,” he announces once, “but I make more in a single day than some educated fools earn in a month.”

  And Nelson uses the scene to puncture the sense of superiority he imagines readers will bring to the text. Dove, though he makes a spectacle of himself each night, is not the freak in the story. The only debased characters in the book are the people who pay to watch his act through peepholes—men who had “been sheltered all their lives” and “gave no sign of knowing that the country was in the very depths of an economic disaster.” Each of them believes he’s witnessing a rape, not a performance, but leaves feeling smug and superior. My deepest suspicions have been confirmed, one thinks; “a man was a two-legged animal and a woman a four-legged one, nothing more.”

  Each of these men, Nelson wrote, is more despicable at his best than Dove is at his worst because they have used their privilege to seal themselves off from humanity. They “wanted to know of life—‘What’s the answer?’ Without pausing once to wonder what was the question.”

  Eventually, Dove falls in love and leaves Finnerty’s. It seems, for a short while, that his story might end well—but then it takes another dark turn. Dove’s girlfriend has a jealous former lover, and eventually, that man beats Dove so savagely that he loses his sight. After he goes blind, Dove returns to Texas and goes looking for Teresina Vidavarri. He hopes she’ll forgive him, but the story ends before he makes it to her door to ask.