In the wake of his failure to grab an Oscar for playing Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper plans to return to the bio-pic business by portraying the Chicago writer Nelson Algren, focusing on his 17-year love affair with that French writer-feminist Simone de Beauvoir, author of “The Second Sex,” who is said to be played by French actress Elsa Zylberstein.
Good luck with all that.
I knew Nelson Algren. He was a close friend of my parents and had a love affair with my aunt. I have read what he wrote, including his novel “The Man with the Golden Arm,” which won the first National Book Award in 1950, the magnificent “City on the Make,” and everything else. I met him a number of times before his death in 1981. I have written much about him, including reviews of two documentaries about his life.
Though I admire his writing, I was no fan of the man. Still, I am intrigued by this Bradley Cooper project and so asked a few people with deeper “relationships” with Algren what they thought of this movie news.
Mary Wisniewski is a former Tribune colleague and author of the terrific book, “Algren: A Life.” She tells me, “I hope that Algren will get some deserved recognition with this film. His writing is so relevant to the time we’re living in now — he knew how the deck was stacked against the poor, and he knew about the cons that were being played by the people in power. Now is the time to be reading Algren. He was a prophet. I think Bradley Cooper would be great in this role. I just hope the people in the production consult with some Chicagoans so they get the look and sound of things right for Chicago in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”
Gary Houston, long a fixture as actor/director on the theater scene, is Algren’s voice in the audio version of Wisniewski’s book and in 2000 he played Algren in the world premiere of the play “Nelson and Simone,” written by John Susman, and presented at the bygone Live Bait Theater.
In reviewing it for the Tribune, Richard Christiansen wrote that Houston and Rebecca Covey (as Simone), “deliver excerpts from the books convincingly, and they give credible physical and intellectual portrayals of their subjects.
“Houston recreates Algren’s laconic, sardonic delivery, minus the cigarette smoking. (He and) Covey create the strange, powerful chemistry of egos that existed in the long, erratic romance of these two volatile individuals.”
Houston told me over the weekend, “Sorry to learn, as much as I have admired the work of (screenwriter) Sir Christopher Hampton, that a Chicagoan or at least an American didn’t write the script. Anyway, I’m hopeful since Bradley Cooper is an American and a fine actor. (Nelson) was the gifted jester and in terms of an inward character you can’t overlook his contradictions as a cad, a cynic, a critic of our society, while also someone yearning for the good postwar American life with wife and perhaps kids, which is why he was serious about marriage to Beauvoir. But he could be mean, some would say petty, about more successful writers like Saul Bellow.
“I think at some point he was aware that his best fiction was behind him, and his trajectory to follow was one of depression and decrepitude — and gambling and hookers. And don’t forget the lack of public appreciation for him, even in Chicago. By the way, it was a dark joy to play him.”
Richard Bales is the author of two fine Algren books, 2022’s “The Short Writings of Nelson Algren: A Study of his Stories, Essays, Articles, Reviews, Poems and Other Literature,” and last year’s “Nelson Algren: His Life, Work and Colleagues,” which has chapter devoted to Algren’s relationship with my parents, Herman and Marilew Kogan, and an essay about how, while Simone was writing “I will love you forever” letters to French philosopher (and her longtime mate) Jean-Paul Sartre she was writing love letters to Algren.
Bales says, “I think this is a brilliant idea. I am amazed that it has not been done before. I would have loved to have been given the chance to write the screenplay. It could be a great movie, and the script writer would not have to make anything up. In this case, the truth, and only the truth, truly is stranger than fiction, and it would be a fantastic, bigger-than-life movie: Algren and Simone meeting in Chicago, the trips back and forth between Chicago and Paris, the vacation together, and finally, the big breakup, with Nelson badmouthing her for years to anyone and everyone who will listen.
“I sent a copy of my book to Bradley Cooper’s agent. I never received a response.”
Algren hated Hollywood, feeling it had butchered “The Man with the Golden Arm,” directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra in 1955. He also thought he was cheated out of money, threatened a lawsuit and had nasty things to say about the film.
Bales told me that he thought Kevin Bacon might be a fine choice to play Algren and that reminded me that some years ago another possible Algren movie was announced. It was said that it would star Johnny Depp and his then-girlfriend Vanessa Paradis. The movie was to have been titled, “My American Lover.” Never got made.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
