From the Vault of Art Shay: Happy Birthday, Nelson

One of our friends was the mime Marcel Marceau. When he came to town to perform, Nelson and I would show him the sights. This picture was actually shot by Marceau . He was picking up atmosphere for doing a pool hustler bit - which he did that very night at the Civic Center. My main contribution was getting Nelson to stand behind the eight ball - a conceit that the great artist David Levine copied line for line with Nelson for his magazine illustration. The magazine (and also The New Yorker, each paid me $250 for abrogating my copyright and each printed a letter vouchsafing my byline). One editor said he thought I was dead and my heirs would send a bill.

These are my Algren books that Johnny Depp\'s agent asked me to send to him to help research the part of Nelson he plans to play in a movie.

Several books, including mine entitled \<em\>Chicago\'s Nelson Algren\<\/em\>, had adumbrated Nelson\'s great love affair with Jean-Paul Sartre\'s common-law wife, the great philosopher and so-so novelist, Simone de Beauvoir. Here they are in front of 1523 Wabansia in 1950.

In 1956 Simone won the Goncourt prize for her novel \<em\>The Mandarins\<\/em\>, a \"no-holes-barred\" (\<strong\>Ed. Note:\<\/strong\> \<em\>I had no idea this was supposed to be a pun.\<\/em\> &#151 CS) \<em\>roman a clef\<\/em\> of her affair with Nelson. Not only did he hate it, but he panned it in several serious reviews, accusing her of invading her own privacy and observing that he had been in whorehouses all over the world and even in the Far East \"they had the decency to pull down the blinds.\" When Madame, as he called her, wept to him about his review and asked whether he did or did not love their lovemaking as much as she did- he told me, \"I said, \'Yes!\' But I wasn\'t reviewing the fucking. I was reviewing the fucking book.\" When I showed him the above printed dedication to him Madame had written in this first translation into English, Nelson whipped out his fountain pen and painstakingly imitating the great lady\'s handwriting wrote \"account he is mah ideel..\" and forged her signature. Of course, making Simone sound like a semi-literate hillbilly was part of his payback for her using him and their love as the skeleton of her, to him, opprobrious novel.

Critics have wondered what made Simone love Nelson. \"It\'s partly,\" he said, \"because I reminded her of Marcel Cerdan.\" Cerdan was the boxer who was Edith Piaf\'s lover. In addition to loving Nelson\'s mind, Simone loved the abs he built up working on the heavy bag at the Division Street Y four days a week.

The penny postcard - often used twice - was the Algren era\'s email and twitter. We were kicking around a title for a planned book when he sent this card from Hollywood where he was briefly working on \<em\>The Man with the Golden Arm\<\/em\> (which he abhorred and for which Sinatra would be nominated for an Oscar as a Milwaukee Avenue addict - with Kim Novak for a girlfriend). The postcard made a bad pun of \"Pennington Press.\"

This is the Ashland Avenue restaurant/pool hall in which Algren had worked as a ball-boy when he was in high school.

He loved Viola Larsen, whose Ashland Avenue store saved the lives of many a stray.

[Transvestite to Judge: Female impersonation isn\'t just a silly hobby with me: it\'s my bread and butter. Algren at far left.] The muscular guy-gal described his technique: \"I would squeeze until the guy\'s wallet popped out voluntarily.\"

As I do, Algren loved Gypsies, like this on Maxwell Street.

Milwaukee Avenue kids gun down the author.

Christmas on Van Buren, under the el.

Early Cabrini Green action caught our attention. We often got mugged and twice I had to buy back my Leica. I used an old black beat-up Model F with a rare Zeiss Angulon wide angle lens on it on it.

Nelson would take out of towners like Norman Mailer and Simone to the daily show-up at police HQ at 11th and State. I hid the camera in a sheaf of newspapers plus a hat with a hole for the lens.

Nelson loved missions like this one on State Street. He logged a lot of time, quotations and coffee at missions like this early on when he lived in the Southwest.

Adjoining the city\'s Municipal Hospital was the Washem School of Undertaking. There was no scarcity of homeless bodies on which to practice embalming. An attendant shows Nelson a worked-on body. Camera hidden in my cap. Exposure - 1/2 second at F 2.8. 100 ASA film. Hand-held. Sound of shutter covered by my fit of coughing. The skeleton in the closet was a bonus. Life had this picture laid out for 2 pages before they aborted the story as too downbeat.

Before staying over on the couch in our Deerfield living room, in 1958, Nelson enjoyed reading to and drawing cat pictures for my son Richard, right, my daughter Jane, rear, and for his godson Harmon, at left. Harmon would be murdered two weeks before his 2lst birthday in the Hippie haunts of Florida in 1972. The police have never solved the murder nor found his body.They explained that there were too many swamps, construction sites and alligators to make this feasible.

Nelson had a lagoon-fronted cottage on Forest Avenue in Miller Beach, IN. This day in 1952 we drove Ken McCormick, the editor in chief of Doubleday (whom Nelson regarded as tight-fisted) to the cottage in my 1949 Pontiac.Nelson was clowning penury and servitude. Nelson\'s mother Goldie was with us. Ken was focused on making a book out of the 1951 article Nelson and I had worked on for \<em\>Holiday\<\/em\> Magazine. \"We need a title,\" Ken was saying,\"that shows Chicago as a rough town, a tough town, a city on the make that--\" I cut in :\"That\'s the title \" \<em\>Chicago- City on the Make\<\/em\>.\" Goldie shrieked, \"Yes!\" And it still sells briskly. It\'s a book as close to Walt Whitman as one can find. The U. of Chicago Press edition at $11 is a bargain introduction to his work.

The pinnacle night of Nelson\'s career came in 1950, when \<em\>The Man with the Golden Arm\<\/em\> was chosen as the best novel of the nearly 1600 published that year. He won the applause of Eleanor Roosevelt sitting to his right, a thousand dollar prize, and a gold medal he pawned later for $250. \<em\>Life\<\/em\> Magazine still can\'t find my roll of film covering Nelson renting his tuxedo for $9 just off Sixth Avenue. After 3 years as a \<em\>Life\<\/em\> reporter, this was my first assignment as a photographer.