Mad at the World by William Souder

Author:William Souder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck’s agent and confidante. (Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University)

And in so many ways, it was. In Europe. In the farm fields of California. And even right at home, where the biggest trouble didn’t come from the outside but from inside the pretty house on the pretty hill. Here there was no actual bloodshed. It was worse than that.

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A BOOK HAS TWO LIVES. The first is with the author, when it is like a difficult child being coaxed to behave. In the second, it leaves home and makes its way in an uncertain world as the author watches and hopes for the best. Some writers have two lives as well, one a time of apprenticeship and struggle, and the next in company with the consequences of success. Nothing is harder to live up to than your own finest moment, and when it comes early—as it did to John Steinbeck with The Grapes of Wrath—the way forward can be long and difficult. In the summer of 1939, Steinbeck embarked on his second life. Having become the writer he longed to be since childhood, he now set sail on the sea of fame. He would not be the same man. Almost inevitably, it started with a woman who wanted to meet the writer.

She was a nineteen-year-old lit fuse named Gwen Conger. Conger was a contract performer for CBS Radio in Los Angeles and also worked as a lounge singer at Brittingham’s, a restaurant and watering hole adjacent to the CBS studios on Sunset Boulevard. It was popular with show people. Steinbeck met her in June of 1939 while he was in Los Angeles, supposedly learning the movie business—though it was notable that after months of intense collaboration with Carol on The Grapes of Wrath, he was now finding reasons to be away from her.

As had happened with Ed Ricketts, there were multiple versions of the story of how Steinbeck and Gwen met. Steinbeck was introduced to Conger by his childhood friend Max Wagner. Wagner had moved to Hollywood in 1924 and had become a bit player in the movies—he had a small part in Tortilla Flat and decades later made a number of appearances on popular TV Westerns such as Gunsmoke and The Rifleman. Both of his brothers were in the film business. Jack Wagner was a screenwriter, and Blake Wagner a cinematographer. The three of them shared an apartment not far from Brittingham’s, and they sometimes said hello when Gwen walked by on her way to work. When Max finally went down and heard her sing, he was smitten. Gwen said Max fell in love with her and took her everywhere, but she wouldn’t sleep with him. She said that when he had a few drinks—which was often—Max liked to reminisce about his “friend from Salinas,” the writer John Steinbeck. Gwen was impressed. Everybody knew who John Steinbeck was that summer. Max had last seen Steinbeck in 1929, when the Steinbecks were living at Dook Sheffield’s place near Los Angeles.

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