Lu Anne has routinely been portrayed as a teenage slut—a sex bomb without much of a mind, which is certainly how she came off in the movie Heart Beat. We could impute this chiefly to the imagination of salacious filmmakers—and maybe to the fantasy life of many prurient biographers and critics as well—except that now, with a wealth of Beat primary source material finally being made public, we see that a good many of the Beats, Kerouac included, did not feel much differently about her—at least when their sexual hormones were flowing. Wandering Denver by himself in 1949, as Kerouac writes to Ginsberg, he “thought any moment LuAnne would sneak up behind me and grab my cock.” And after she visits him with Neal and Al Hinkle at his little Berkeley cottage in 1957—a scene Lu Anne relates in detail in the interview—Jack writes to Allen that “Neal and Al Hinkle floated into my Berkeley door just as I was unpacking boxful of On The Roads from Viking, all got high reading, LuAnne wanted to fuck me that next night…,” which is not how she relates the incident at all.1 To his credit, when Kerouac was one-on-one with Lu Anne in conversation, without any other males around to impress, and when his macho image was not at stake, she often found him a good listener and sympathetic friend.
Quite the opposite of the clichéd sex symbol or ditzy blonde, the Lu Anne we see in her interview is keenly observant, sensitive, and thoughtful not just about the lives of herself and her friends, but repeatedly about the human condition as well. One of the little pleasures of the piece is her attentiveness to how writers work. She describes John Clellon Holmes at his little typing table in the center of his busy Manhattan living room, and Alan Harrington plunked down at his typewriter in front of his little Indian hut, writing outdoors in the baking heat of the Arizona desert. If not for her powers of observation, we might not realize how unusual Kerouac’s own writing style was, constantly scribbling in pencil in his nickel notebooks wherever he found himself, whether in a car, on foot, or just sitting with a cup of coffee in some lost café midway across the continent. It is those same powers of observation that force us to see Lu Anne herself from a different slant. Paired with Cassady, who comes off as the sociopathic user of a young girl barely into her second year of high school, Lu Anne starts to look a lot more like an abused innocent. By the same token, Kerouac looks a lot less like the male chauvinist he’s been typed as, especially by female critics; and his repeated concern for Lu Anne’s well-being shows him to be a lot more compassionate and empathetic with women than most men of the day.
Despite the fact that Neal does such terrible things to her—forcing her to commit grand larceny and risk going to prison, at an age when most girls have no tougher decisions to make than what length of skirt to wear and which boy to go to the high school dance with—Lu Anne insists on seeing the good in Neal, and focuses on the purity of his heart and the grandeur of his mind, rather than his myriad bad deeds. Such vision is due not only to a special, almost saintlike largesse in her, but also to an extraordinary caring and concern for other people that seems to have been one of the lifelong trademarks of her character. We see Neal stomping through other people’s homes and devouring their food—not to mention taking their money, when it slips too near to the gravitational pull of his vast hunger and neediness—whereas Lu Anne wouldn’t think of staying at a strange woman’s home, such as Jack’s mother’s, without sweeping the floor once a day and replenishing the food in the icebox with her own funds, even if it means pawning a prized watch and a gold engagement ring.
In many ways, Lu Anne was like the conscience Neal didn’t have. That he kept coming back to her, even after he’d left all the other women in his life by the wayside or dead, speaks well for his own character, as if living without a conscience bothered him more than he ever let on. Lu Anne saw this too, and it is evident in the angry tirade she let loose near the end of the interview, where she railed against the many people, including his second wife, Carolyn, who considered Neal patently irresponsible.
Lu Anne had that rare ability to see people in their totality—their pluses and their minuses, their ups and downs, their ins and out—and to see each one as a whole person. Whatever Neal might do, she passed no judgment on him. She didn’t see a good person or a bad person, but just, “This is Neal.” In like manner, she had the ability to see what was precious in every person. It wasn’t a Pollyannaish sort of blind optimism. She was quite aware of how flawed people were, but despite their flaws, she could also see that there was a beauty, a unique and lovely flame, in every human being. It was the pursuit of that flame that set her life on its amazing course. In her ability to see, and cherish, the inspirational power in men like Kerouac and Cassady, she herself became an inspirational force, and left her own lasting impression on some of the finest writers of her time.
In July 2010, just prior to the filming of On the Road, I was invited by director Walter Salles up to Montreal to serve as the first “drill instructor” at the Beat Boot Camp he had set up for his actors. It was my job to somehow make these twentysomething kids (as they seemed to me) understand the essence of each of their characters. Kristen Stewart, who was about to play Lu Anne in the movie, was having a hard time making sense of how Lu Anne could still love Neal, despite his endless cheating on her. She had just learned that Lu Anne continued seeing Neal in later years, and she asked me, “How was she finally able to leave him? And what happened afterward?” She wondered if Lu Anne were just so stupid that she remained Neal’s dupe for much of her life; and if so, when did she finally figure out that she was being played for a fool?
Marie Lussier-Timperley, Kristen Stewart, and J. A. Michel Bornais, Montreal, July 2010. Lussier-Timperley and Bornais are relatives of Jack Kerouac. (Photo by Gerald Nicosia.)
I asked Kristen to turn that perspective around, and to see that Lu Anne was continually making her own choices to be with this man, to love him, to learn from him, and to give him the things he so desperately needed, starting with the tenderness he had been denied since growing up motherless, and with a dysfunctional wino father, on the skid row streets of Denver. I suggested to her that it was Lu Anne who actually taught Neal and Jack how to love each other. Later, listening to my taped interview with Lu Anne, Kristen said she found the key to playing Marylou in the movie was to see her “as her own woman, not Neal’s.” She would later tell Annie Santos, Lu Anne’s daughter, who also traveled to Montreal to coach the actors, that she’d come to see Lu Anne as the energy source for both men, and for On the Road itself. In Kristen’s words, “Jack and Neal needed that estrogen.” Kristen had gotten it—or it, as Neal might have said—better than I’d hoped.
But back to that puffy, pale, unwell 48-year-old woman in the Daly City living room. I couldn’t help thinking it must have been a strange journey that led her from a middle-class home in provincial 1940s Denver to hang with the wildest hipsters in New York City and San Francisco, digging jazz, free sex, and every sort of drug available—and then back again to the most conventional milieu this side of Ozzie and Harriet. Yet she never entirely lost her naïve quality; touches of that charming innocence remained, even during our interview, as when she wonders over the fact that she could recall so little of what happened after she and the boys smoked opium together after John Holmes’s big New Year’s Eve party.
A lot of Lu Anne was beyond me then, due to my own inexperience and the limits to my understanding imposed by a Catholic, middle-class upbringing. I only knew how grateful I was for the interview, and I sensed how great it was, though I would not grasp until quite recently how much Lu Anne had given me that day—how much of herself she had shared. The interview had been locked up for many years in a university archive until recently freed by a lawsuit I was forced to bring—but that’s a matter for another story, only barely tangential to this one. Even after the interview was once again released to my custody, it lay buried away until Walter Salles coaxed me to bring it along up to Montreal to help Kristen better inhabit her part in the movie. Listening to it just before I left California, and then again wi
th the actors in Montreal, I was finally blown away by its incredible power—the depth of Lu Anne’s insights and the stunning revelations that she made so offhandedly they might have been cups of coffee she was handing me during the interview. I was reminded of how Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had lain gathering dust, unwanted and unviewed, in his Parisian studio for seven and a half years, until someone noticed it and asked him to put it in a show, and then it proceeded to stand the twentieth-century art world on its head.
My point here is that I was not prepared to ask Lu Anne what had happened to her, nor did I feel I had the right. Clues would come to me only slowly, in small installments, over the years. I remember one such clue came in a story Al Hinkle told me, about how Neal came to him right after he’d met Lu Anne, brimming with the sort of excitement, not to say bald-faced lust, that only a new, beautiful woman could inspire in him.
“I just found the perfect woman!” Neal told Al. “She’s got absolutely everything I always wanted.”
Al recalled how a dark cloud suddenly passed across Neal’s face.
“So what’s the matter, then?” Al asked.
“The only trouble with her,” Neal said, “is she’s too much like me.”
He had found his female equivalent, and he knew it would be trouble for both of them, and indeed it was.
I did get one clue that day, however. As I packed up my tapes and recording equipment, Lu Anne approached me with a worried look on her face.
“I have to ask a favor of you,” she said. At that point I would likely have done anything she asked, but she seemed anxious about the request she was about to make. I also thought I sensed a little fear in her face—I wasn’t sure what of. Perhaps fear that I would turn her down.
“I have to have twenty dollars,” she said. “Can you give me that much?”
Twenty dollars was a lot more in 1978 than it is today, and I was traveling on a pretty thin margin in those days. But I handed her the twenty without question, nor did either of us say anything about paying it back. For my part, I figured she’d earned it by all the work she’d done that day talking into my tape recorder. I didn’t feel used or taken advantage of. If anyone had been leaning on another’s good will, it had been me leaning on her for an interview that was going to help me put my book over the top.
I was curious about it, though. I brought it up with Larry Lee before I left California.
“She acted almost desperate for that money,” I told Larry. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with her?”
Just as he knew everyone, Larry also knew the dirt, the lowdown, on the life of everybody he dealt with. I don’t know how he knew it, but good journalists do that. It’s part of their job. And Larry was one of the best journalists there ever was.
“She needed the money for a fix,” Larry said. “She’s a junkie.”
And he left me to mull that over all the way back to Chicago.
NOTE TO THE TRANSCRIPTION
Turning transcribed interviews into a readable text is a fine art. In this case, I was working with two different interviews, one that I had taken down in handwriting in a notebook, and another that I had taped and then transcribed on a typewriter. The pitfalls are many. Most verbatim interviews are barely readable—broken syntax, too many false starts, repetitions, thoughts left hanging and picked up many pages later. The editor has to “clean up” the interview, but there is a great danger in overcleaning. There is a tendency to correct all incorrect grammar, to replace all slangy expressions with higher-class vocabulary words, and so forth. On the other hand, a reader stumbling through a too-faithful rendition of the words out of an interviewee’s mouth can lose patience very quickly and feel that the text is not worth the trouble of reading, let alone trying to understand.
When the interviewee is dead, as Lu Anne now is, there is an even heavier responsibility to try to keep the exactness of her meaning, since she isn’t around to correct the misrepresentation of it. I tried to err on the side of fidelity, rather than on the side of a suave-sounding text. But there was something more going on as I tried to render those tens of thousands of taped words into a coherent, readable narrative. Lu Anne had little formal education, but her language had its own flavor, its own homespun charm, much like the tinge of western accent with which she spoke. I tried very hard to keep the sound of her voice in the printed interview. She had a way of repeating certain words for emphasis—“a beautiful, beautiful house,” for example—that was very typical of her speech patterns. That sort of repetition tends to get cut immediately by editors, but I left most such instances in, because it was a unique signature of her speech and, even more importantly, part of the way she thought. She was excitable; she was filled with enthusiasm—those were things Jack Kerouac and others loved about her. That enthusiasm showed up so clearly in her doubling of words—as well as in the frequent “My Gods,” a smattering of which I also left in. Furthermore, I chose to keep solecisms like “we laid in the grass,” “he was gonna write,” and such incorrect but common usages as “I could’ve cared less”—because this is the way she talked. She didn’t sound like a high-society lady, and I didn’t intend to make her sound like one.
Another reason I was hesitant to excise too much, even of her repetitions, was that she tended to think aloud as she was talking, to think things through even as she was recalling them to me; and it was clear she was learning new things about her life even as she purported simply to tell me what had happened to her over the years. I wanted the reader of this interview to get that sense of her thinking aloud and following her own thoughts down new and unknown trails. To some extent, I did follow the normal procedure in redacting an interview, bringing together passages on the same subject that might appear at different points in the conversation. Interviewees often start to talk about a subject, then go off to something else, then return to the first subject when some new thought or memory strikes them about what they had been saying previously. It can be too disruptive to the reader to print accounts of various events broken up the way that people actually remember and speak them. So, for example, when Lu Anne tells of her trip from Denver to North Carolina with Neal and Al Hinkle in December 1948, I meld the several incomplete versions of the trip she gave at different points in the taped interview. But there were several places where I chose to go with a much more faithful rendition of the actual flow of her speech.
One of the charms of listening to Lu Anne was the pleasure of watching the associative trains, and occasional leaps, of her thoughts—the way one memory triggered another somewhat deeper, and then another deeper still, or the way she would sometimes keep getting pulled back to retell a story by the insistent demands of feelings that had not yet gotten fully expressed. An example of the former process is how, early in the taped interview, when she is talking about meeting Jack Kerouac and being puzzled by how shy he was in approaching girls, her mind suddenly jumps ahead a couple of years to the infamous New Year’s Eve party chronicled in both On the Road and John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go. She uses an event at that party to drive home her point about Jack’s inability to be subtle with women, and his bitterness about his own ineptitude. Since she talked at length later on about that party, the traditional approach would have been to cut the party scene from the chronicle of late 1946, where it didn’t belong, and move it up to the passages about late 1948 / early 1949. But you learn a lot about Jack quickly by getting to that party scene early, and you also learn a lot about the way Lu Anne’s mind works in her remembering of it—so I left the flow there just as it came from her lips.
The latter reason for keeping the flow intact, the fact that she could not resist trying and trying again to get a story told right, until her own feelings were satisfied, is shown most strongly in the section of the interview where she relates how Neal, after a wonderfully companionable trip across the country together in Neal’s brand-new Hudson in early 1949, coldly and callously abandons Lu Anne and Jack on a street corner in San Fran
cisco. I retained the order of her thoughts in that long section exactly as they were recorded on the tape. In some ways, that section is the climax of the interview, just as Jack used that scene for the climactic moment in On the Road. Lu Anne tells how hurt Jack was by Neal’s deserting them, and how the incident merely reinforced her own knowledge and acceptance of Neal’s ability to inflict hurt; but then Lu Anne circles back to it, retells it with more detail, begins to focus more on the fact that she and Jack talked of getting married, revisits it again and reveals something she says she has told no one else, that Jack cried in her arms that first night at the Blackstone Hotel, and then, finally, comes back to it again and begins to muse on the prospect that, had the facts of the situation been only a little different, she and Jack might have ended up happily married and gone on to lead entirely different lives than the tragic and unfulfilled ones they did live.
I thought it was essential that the reader see—that is, listen to—Lu Anne going back again and again to that episode, as its impact and ramifications began to strike her with greater and greater force, as she let it sink into her own conscious mind, and allowed herself to understand what had really happened between her and Jack at that time. There is no question—after hearing Lu Anne’s account—that she and Jack had both reached a critical point in their lives during the two weeks they spent at the Blackstone Hotel. There can also be no doubt that, had she married Jack, her subsequent life would have been vastly different—perhaps not easier, but certainly less disjointed, less disconnected, and filled with a far greater satisfaction of her emotional needs, and perhaps a far greater flowering of her own gifts.
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