Larry called me around the middle of October, just as I was getting set to return to my mother’s house in a Chicago suburb named Lyons, which was my home base at that time, the place where I was finally beginning to turn years of research into the thousands of lines of inked typeface that would eventually become Memory Babe. “I know where Lu Anne is,” Larry told me. “Would you like to know?” Was the pope Catholic?
Lu Anne, as it turned out, was at that very moment in San Francisco General Hospital. As much as I wanted to interview her, she was in no condition to endure a barrage of questions while I ran a tape recorder on her; but she could receive visitors, I was told. Larry may have spoken to her about me—I don’t remember. I had also recently interviewed her good friend Al Hinkle. That might have helped too. I don’t remember all the steps exactly, but she consented to see me, and I got down to San Francisco General as fast as my rental car would carry me.
San Francisco General, for those who don’t know, is not a hospital for the rich and privileged. It is a place where insuranceless patients routinely get shuffled, where bloodied gang members routinely get treated. It also, later, became a center of treatment and mercy for the hordes of needy sick during the AIDS epidemic. It is a large gray building with numerous wings down at the base of Potrero Hill, in the less-than-fashionable southern annex of San Francisco. The staff there are notoriously dedicated, and the atmosphere in the hospital has always been one of cordiality and heartfelt helpfulness.
I entered Lu Anne’s hospital room not knowing what I would find. Those years of cross-country travel and hundreds of interviews had been a dizzying roller coaster, meeting crazy alcoholic barroom bruisers who threatened my life, and a few poets who threatened my life too, as well as some of the loveliest, sweetest people in the world, people who were ready to do anything to help someone (me) write the truth about their late friend or relative Jack Kerouac. What I saw was a large (larger than I’d expected), beautiful fortyish woman with a full head of blonde curls, in a blue hospital gown, with one hand swathed completely in white bandages, giving me the softest, kindest, most understanding smile I’d seen in a long, long time. She was absolutely radiant, beaming at me with an expression of gentleness and intelligence that reminded me of various Marys I had seen in the Catholic churches of my boyhood. I think I was a little in love with her before she even spoke.
I told her who I was, that I wanted to talk to her about Jack Kerouac for the book I was writing. Then a look of sadness crossed her face, and she told me that too many people wanted to learn about her life, and the lives of her friends, but it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to know why she and her friends had done the things they did. To her, the most important thing was finding out why people acted in certain ways. Once you understood them, she felt, their actions almost always made perfect sense. They stopped being freaks or criminals or outcasts or whatever else the world had labeled them as, and they became instead someone like yourself—a friend. It baffled her, it truly did, that so many writers, as well as the legions of Beat trekkies that were beginning to hit the roads of America, were smitten by the flashy and often trashy surface of the Beat movement, but had failed to understand—actually seemed incapable of understanding—that the Beats were ordinary people, just as they were.
Lu Anne told me that she had recently visited the set of Carolyn’s movie Heart Beat, and that she was enormously disappointed by what she had seen there. The first thing she saw—in a scene being filmed—was Ann Dusenberry, the actress who was playing her, supposedly peeing in a washbowl and then calling for a towel. “I wasn’t a slob,” Lu Anne objected, “and besides, there’s no need to show something like that. There’s no redeeming value in that.”
Then she watched the filming of a scene where Sissy Spacek, playing Carolyn Cassady, comes into a hotel room in Denver and acts “so indignant” to find Neal (Nolte), Lu Anne, and Allen Ginsberg (Ray Sharkey) all in bed together. “What did she have to be indignant about?” Lu Anne asked me. “After all, Neal was my husband—not hers, yet.” Lu Anne winked at me, and a wry smile crossed her face. I was beginning to get the sense that she was a bit of a card, as they used to say. For the past few months, I had been spending quite a bit of time with Carolyn Cassady. I liked Carolyn, but she could be a bit pompous and ponderous with her lectures on Edgar Cayce, karmic debts, and reincarnation. Carolyn did not have much of a sense of humor, and not at all the sort of quick humor that Lu Anne had.
Lu Anne told me more about the reenactment of that infamous three-way sex scene in Heart Beat. She felt the director, John Byrum, had done his best to make it seem as tawdry and kinky as possible. “When the three of us went to bed together,” Lu Anne said, “Neal always used to be in the middle, and Allen and I would be on either side of him. The two or three times we all actually had sex together, it was very nice.” She smiled again at me—not the wry smile, but almost the Mother Mary smile again. “There was nothing obscene about the sex we had with each other—nothing you couldn’t show on a screen or that you’d need more than a PG-13 rating for,” she averred.
Of course she won me over that quickly. I had never known any women like Lu Anne, who could talk so easily about sex and yet also make it seem so natural and healthy, nothing to be ashamed of or to make a big deal about at all. She was as at ease talking about sex as she was talking about anything else in her life. Remember, this was a good two decades before we had a program like Sex and the City. And always, everything—even the painful stuff—was conveyed with her irrepressible sense of humor.
She told me a story I had never heard—that when she had come to New York with Neal in 1949, and then he turned around and wanted to drag her right back to the West Coast, she figured out a way to thwart him. She loved New York, and she was starting to love Jack Kerouac at that time, and she wanted to stay in the Big Apple at least a while longer. Ginsberg, too, didn’t want Neal running off so fast. So she and Allen announced their plans to live together in New York, and Allen was going to “go straight.” She let out a big laugh before she continued with the story. “Our real motive,” she confided, “was to make Neal jealous, because he’d never want to lose Allen and me to each other! He’d be back east in two days if we ever really did that.” The plan fell through, she said, only because Allen was less than keen about actually trying to become her lover.
Nick Nolte didn’t seem anything like Neal to her. “Neal moved much faster than Nick Nolte,” she said. “When I met Neal, he had six books under one arm, a pool cue in the other hand, and started necking with me at the same time.”
A whole flood of memories came back to her; I was trying to take notes, but it was hard for me to keep up. Suddenly she was living back in those days—names of people were coming back to her hot and fast. She told me about three guys standing up at her wedding to Neal—Bill Tomson, Jim Holmes, and Jimmy Penoff. She was only 15, and her mom consented in order to get her out of the house, where Lu Anne was having a lot of problems with her stepfather and had become rebellious, more than her mom could handle. She laughed about Bill Tomson, one of Neal’s rivals in the local pool-hall gang, a guy who fancied himself as much a ladies’ man as Neal. Bill wouldn’t get out of their room on their wedding night; he wanted to share in the honeymoon. Again she laughed at one of her memories—how she had to kick Tomson out of the honeymoon suite, which was just a room Neal had rented in a private house, and where she worried that their noisy lovemaking that night kept the other residents up.
Lu Anne’s eyes sparkled when she talked about Neal. She said Neal was always reading to her. She said he always wanted her back, that she didn’t force herself on him, as Carolyn always claimed. Then she went into a reverie—she was thinking of Neal’s letters, and her eyes got a little moist and unfocused. It was as if she left the hospital room with me for a few moments, her spirit traveling back decades and across a thousand miles of continent—as if she were being hit by waves of bittersweet pain, thinking of something that was once too beautif
ul, and way too beautiful to lose. “He wrote me the most marvelous love letters,” she said finally. “It was when he had just come to San Francisco, and I was still in Denver, and he wanted me back in his life. He told me that he was a ‘rudderless ship’ without me, and other lovely things like that. The things he wrote overwhelmed me.”
But it was the battle with Carolyn that obsessed her that afternoon in the hospital—a battle she had long ago lost, a defeat which the making of the movie now seemed to confirm and memorialize for all time. “Carolyn was a woman to me,” Lu Anne pleaded for my sympathy. “What chance did I have? I was sixteen, and she was in her twenties. Carolyn’s making herself look good in this movie. She portrays herself as this beautiful and sophisticated woman, this siren, that two brilliant and experienced men fell madly in love with. That’s not the way it was at all. Carolyn had merely got herself pregnant.”
She went after Carolyn in a way that I would learn was not characteristic of her. Lu Anne was usually the most forgiving of people. She was also known for being gracious. It may have been her current situation, being sick and helpless in a hospital bed while Carolyn romped with movie stars and ate at glamorous five-star restaurants down in Hollywood. Lu Anne was almost penniless at the time, though I didn’t know it then. It may also have been, as her daughter later pointed out to me, the bad temper that sometimes accompanied Lu Anne’s coming down off her many medications.
“Carolyn and Neal weren’t making it together,” Lu Anne said. “Only a short time after they got married, the sex had stopped. It was that simple. That’s why he was so desperate to get me back.”
We talked for a while more, until she started to tire. I was trying to get as much information as I could from her, but this wasn’t the sort of full interview I had wanted. She didn’t know when she would be out of the hospital, and I didn’t have the money to stay in San Francisco much longer. I figured whatever I got from her that day was all I was going to get. She told me I’d have to go—she needed her rest.
“When you come back, I’ll buy you lunch,” she told me, batting her eyelashes at me. I couldn’t believe it. She was flirting with me—mildly, it’s true, but still flirting. “Then we can sit in the park and hold hands.”
I was twenty years younger than she, but completely smitten. She was beautiful, she was clearly wounded, and she was unbelievably charming.
“Then we’ll have something to look forward to,” I said. I must have looked like a puppy dog in love.
She told me she needed some candy and a pack of Winstons, and I set off on the run for the commissary. It’s kind of amazing to look back and remember that in the 1970s you could still buy cigarettes in a hospital—for all I know, they even had a lounge for patients where Lu Anne could have smoked them. In any case, I returned in a jiffy and handed her the Winstons and the three candy bars she’d requested.
“Thanks, honey,” she said. I was rewarded by the warm, glowing smile of a well-loved woman. It was clear she was used to attention from men, and she still liked it. Something about her expression reminded me of a purring cat—the visual equivalent of a cat’s purr.
I extended my hand to her. Still a Midwesterner, I was ready to part with a handshake. But she grabbed my hand with both her good hand and the bandaged one, and gave me a loving squeeze.
“Get well soon,” I said, trying to convey a little burst of healing energy in her direction. I was no longer thinking of my much-sought interview. I just wanted her to be well, to be happy. The fact is, she had charmed the socks off me—no mean feat for a middle-aged woman with no makeup, a bandaged hand, and dressed in a baggy hospital gown. I left the room with her oodles of charisma trailing after me—feeling as if I had just been granted a meeting with Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner.
Then, the next day, came yet another surprise. I got a call from Lu Anne. She was out of the hospital and staying with an old friend, Joe DeSanti, in Daly City. She wanted to do the full, taped interview I had talked of with her. A day or two later, when she was rested enough, I drove down to Joe’s tract house in Daly City, carrying a shoulder bag full of notebooks, tapes, and recording equipment.
Daly City is a working-class suburb in the heavy-fog belt just south of San Francisco. The sky is always gray, and the small, single-story houses are grayish too and tend to be almost indistinguishable from one another. The town has always comprised a lot of immigrants and those who can’t afford the pricey rents of the city itself. It is a bedroom community with few businesses and restaurants and no nightlife whatsoever. One didn’t expect to find Marylou of On the Road there, even a recuperating Marylou just out of the hospital.
I spent almost eight hours with her there that day, and for most of that time she remained in a dark-colored, maybe green, overstuffed armchair. I had my tape recorder set in front of her, on a low, round, polished, middle-class coffee table. The furnishings were tasteful but sparse. The house did not look lived-in at all, and the only other resident was apparently Joe himself. There were large glass windows—a California trademark—but they were almost all covered with heavy drapes. Privacy seemed to be the word of the day here. The coffee table also held a large ashtray for her many cigarettes an hour.
Lu Anne looked puffy and unwell, and her voice was slow and not nearly as strong or energetic as it had been in the hospital a couple of days before. But I could see the strength and determination in her. She could easily have made a poor-health excuse and bowed out of the engagement, but she was determined to tell me everything she had to say, and she kept going even when I began to wear down myself. She kept going even though Joe frequently interrupted with hints that she quit for the day. At one point he even suggested that it was time for her to visit her daughter Annie Ree, who was living close by and raising her own baby now. Lu Anne brushed him off like a queen whose word is unchallengeable. She made it very clear to him how important it was for her to do this interview with me. In some ways, her sedulous insistence on getting her whole story told was an extension of the feelings she’d expressed earlier, in the hospital, about her horror at seeing her role in Beat history distorted and mistold in the movie Heart Beat and elsewhere. Having already been gravely ill several times, she now strongly feared that her real story would never get told correctly. And so she filled cassette tape after cassette tape with the interview I could hardly believe I was finally getting. And what an interview it was!
Listening to the tapes now more than 30 years later, I realized how much of what she’d said that day I had forgotten—and how much else had simply gone over my head, because I was not yet old enough, nor had I lived enough, to appreciate all the profound life lessons she was sharing with me. If there’s anyone with more insight into Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady than Lu Anne, I have yet to encounter them. I used to think John Clellon Holmes in his several essays, especially “The Great Rememberer,” had the most profound insights into Kerouac. In some ways, perhaps, he still does. But he did not see the whole other dimension of Jack that a woman, especially a sensitive woman like Lu Anne, saw; and Holmes was not nearly as sharp or empathetic about Cassady.
Carolyn Cassady has now written and rewritten several memoirs, but to my mind they are more about her than they are about Neal and Jack. And Carolyn, not to put too fine a point on it, belonged for better or worse to the square world that Jack and Neal were always trying to run away from. She was more a friendly opponent than somebody who understood from the inside the world they inhabited.
But Lu Anne was unquestionably on the inside, and remained there even after spending decades exiled from the Beat world in the squaresville suburb of Daly City. Even amid the plethora of Beat interviews that now exist, Lu Anne’s interview with me is a unique document, I think. Unlike so many of the other women who have written about Kerouac—including Joyce Johnson, Edie Parker Kerouac, and Helen Weaver—she resists the temptation to shift the focus of the story from Jack (or in this case, Jack and Neal) to herself. Through an almost seven-hour interview, Lu Anne stays on
point about those two men, the American countercultural icons of the twentieth century. And she sees them with an objective accuracy that is uncanny, but also with a compassion and nonjudgmental attitude that is worthy of a bodhisattva—which, forgive my presumption, I would make the claim that she was.
Beat fans, who want the same shopworn but comforting portraits of their two favorite happy outlaws, the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the 1950s, need be prepared to go down the Rabbit Hole and through the Looking-Glass. For what they will find in Lu Anne’s memoir are two men who may be almost unrecognizable to them—and certainly neither one of them are anything resembling an outlaw hero or even antihero. Kerouac may have written some of the greatest and most innovative books of the twentieth century, but Lu Anne portrays him as a man who couldn’t go out and find a job to pay the rent when it was crunch time—a man who, when the pressures of the ordinary world built up too high, froze in his tracks and had to let a teenage girl show him the way forward.
Neal she shows to be a man of enormous vulnerability around both men and women—a man who would rather pimp his wives and girlfriends to other men than risk having them choose another lover on their own; a man who, when he finds another man, a large strong young man, kissing his wife, does nothing but scream and scream and then demand everyone in his party turn tail and flee. Cassady’s male bravado, which became as much a symbol for the age as Brando’s sneer, is revealed to be a mask for his own monumental uncertainty. Lu Anne shows Neal to be a man for whom decisions of any kind were inordinately hard; hence we see his endless crisscrossing of the country, San Francisco to Denver to San Francisco to New York and back to San Francisco, ad infinitum, to be less the intrepid travelings (to borrow a phrase from Neal’s later master, Ken Kesey) of a New Age explorer, and more the futile and endless missteps of a man who could never truly figure any real direction for himself in life.
One and Only Page 2