One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  So there I was, dressed up like my mom 60 years ago, meeting Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley, who were dressed up like Neal and Jack 60 years ago. The thing was, everyone was so excited to have me there. I talked to Rebecca Yeldham, one of the producers who had followed the filming from state to state and country to country. They’d been on the road themselves for almost five months. Rebecca told me, “It’s been such a long shoot, everybody’s so tired. This is just what we need to put some fun and excitement back into the movie. It brings us full circle to where we started.” Everybody on the set was so up to have me there; they were all laughing and having so much fun with the idea that I was playing Kristen playing my mother.

  Garrett Hedlund (Neal Cassady), Gerald Nicosia, Sam Riley (Jack Kerouac), Kristen Stewart (Lu Anne Henderson), on the porch at “Beat Boot Camp.” (Photo courtesy of Gerald Nicosia.)

  We were supposed to zoom up Filbert Street in the Hudson and round the corner almost on two wheels onto Leavenworth, then shoot on up the hill and out of view. The gag was that as we were coming up the hill on Filbert, this extra, a young woman in a 1940s outfit, had to hurry across the street to get out of our way. But during the first few takes, the Hudson didn’t get close enough to her to satisfy Walter, so we had to keep redoing it.

  After the third take, Sam Riley, who was playing Jack, looked at me and said, “I want you to remember this moment. Every time you see this scene in the movie, you must remember the three of us sharing this moment together. You must remember that we shared our own on-the-road moment, and when I see this scene I’ll think of our moment together too. I’ll never forget this scene.” Sam was unbelievably sweet.

  Jack was supposed to be carrying a book with him across the country. Just before we’d start up the hill, Sam would put the book up on the dash; and then when Garrett would go squealing around the corner, the book would slide off. It became a little game with Sam that he’d always try to catch the book as it came hurtling toward him. Everything needed to be exactly the same in each take. But when we paused at the bottom of the hill between takes, the guys would throw open the car doors and roll down the windows, and crew members would come up and give us something to drink or just talk to us. During all the previous takes, all four windows had been rolled up; but on one of the last takes, as we started up the hill, I realized they’d forgotten to crank up one of the windows. I yelled, “Window! Window! Window!” and they cranked it up just as we came into range of the camera. Sam looked at me with a smile and said, “Nice catch!”

  Garrett seemed like he was still acting out Neal’s character even inside the car. As the extra was hurrying across the street in front of us, he’d laugh and taunt, “You better hurry up there, girl! Get your butt off the street before I hit you!” On the last take, he almost did hit her, and she had to jump out of the way. Walter yelled, “That’s a wrap!”

  Sam and Garrett were like two kids together. They kept saying, “Can you believe we’re in On the Road?” They were laughing like two boys who were playing hooky from school, or like two kids who’d just won the grand prize on some game show. They told me, “We have to keep telling ourselves we’re actually here, acting in this movie. We can’t believe how lucky we are.”

  Before I left, I showed Sam and Garrett the photograph of my mom I had brought along, tucked inside my bra, right next to my heart. I wanted to make sure that my mom got to take part in the movie. I was in the picture too; it was taken when my mom was about 60 and I was about 40. Sam commented, “Oh, she was lovely!” Then he seemed a little embarrassed, and said, “Of course, so are you!”

  There was a funny moment later at the cast party at Francis Ford Coppola’s restaurant, Café Zoetrope, in North Beach. The restaurant was closed to the public, and my friend Erin and I got there late, after the dinner had already been served. Carolyn Cassady was sitting in the back room, talking with Walter, Garrett, and some of the other celebrities. Roman Coppola was there too. I had never met Carolyn, so I went into the back room to introduce myself to her. She just kind of looked at me for a few minutes, as if she were trying to see my mother in me. “Oh, sit down, honey, oh please, we need to talk,” she said finally. At that moment a couple of people came up to her and said, “You wanted a chance to smoke. The smokers are all going outside now.” Then Garrett stood up and several of the others who were smokers too started for the door, and Carolyn got up and filed out with them. I never saw her again.

  My mom told me that Carolyn had once said to her, as if she were apologizing for writing her book, “I had to sell this story—I have children to take care of.” Carolyn chose to become famous, and she did. But she didn’t have the ideal life. Being married to Neal wasn’t easy. I think my mother probably had a better life than Carolyn did. But my mother was after something very different.

  If my mother had wanted a life with Neal, it wouldn’t have been the life of driving frantically around San Francisco looking for kicks, and it wouldn’t have been the life Neal had later with Kesey and all those hippies taking acid on the bus. If Lu Anne could have had her dearest wish, Neal would have gone to college, he would have become the writer that he wanted to be. He wouldn’t have become the Merry Prankster. If they had stayed together, this would not be the story.

  That was Lu Anne’s great sadness, that Neal didn’t become everything she thought he could be, and that she didn’t become everything she thought she could be with him. There was a song Barbra Streisand sang, an adaptation of Johnny Ashcroft’s “Little Boy Lost,” that hit my mom very hard when she heard it. That song was very profound for her, because the words were exactly what she felt for Neal. It went something like “Little boy lost / in search of little boy found / You go on wondering, wandering… / Why are you blind / to all you never were / really are / nearly are….” The song was about a boy, or it could be a man, who keeps searching for something that is really close by, but he never realizes it, and keeps wandering farther and farther from those things which are really most important to him.

  My mom felt that Neal remained the Little Boy Lost, that he was never done traveling and “always unraveling,” as the song says. For Lu Anne, that song was talking about how, after Jack’s book came out, Neal was stuck in the role of the guy searching on the road, and he couldn’t get beyond it. My mother told me that she and Neal were looking forward to everything in the early days. Everything was a possibility then—going to New York, becoming a writer. Neal was reaching for something better, and then somehow he got sidetracked. She said if she ever wrote the book about Neal, she would call it “Little Boy Lost.”

  The loss of Neal for Lu Anne wasn’t like a daily loss, like the loss of someone who’s been with you every day. They didn’t interact that much during the later years of their lives. But it was the loss of youth, and the dream of youth, and the possibility of youth. When she lost Neal, all her youthful dreams were shut down. The future had been something that seemed open to her, and suddenly it was finalized—it was over. My mother wasn’t visibly affected by his death—I mean, you didn’t necessarily know by looking at her how much she was affected by it. But I’m sure that emotionally it affected her very much. Over the years, she talked about how he died too young, but the thing that bothered her the most was that he died sad. Their youth, their dream, was gone.

  It’s why when she was alone, when she was sick, she still needed contact with Neal. A lot of the time, he was hurting and lonely too. They reached out for each other at those times. When they were hurting and lonely, they would seek each other out. Even though they both had separate lives, in those moments when life was the hardest, they always reached out for that one other person they felt really knew them, understood them, and could comfort them. For Neal, it was always Lu Anne. And for Lu Anne, it was always Neal Cassady.

  Neal Cassady, San Francisco, 1963. (Photo by Larry Keenan, Jr.)

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  GERALD NICOSIA is a biographer, historian, poet, playwright, and novelist whose work has been close
ly associated with the Beat Movement as well as the 1960s. He came to prominence with the publication of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac in 1983, a book that earned him the Distinguished Young Writer Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters while it was still a work in progress. It was highly praised by writers as diverse as John Rechy, Irving Stone, Bruce Cook, and Allen Ginsberg, who called it a “great book.” Nicosia spent several decades in the Chicago and San Francisco literary scenes, making a name for himself as both a post-Beat poet and an organizer of marathon literary events, often in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library and the Friends of the Library. He has been involved in several video and film projects, including the public television documentary West Coast: Beat and Beyond, directed by Chris Felver, and the movie version of On the Road, directed by Walter Salles.

  A lifelong friend of peace activist Ron Kovic, Nicosia spent decades studying, working with, and writing about Vietnam veterans in their long process of healing from that war. His definitive work on that subject, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement, was picked by the Los Angeles Times as one of the “Best Books of 2001,” and has been praised by notable Vietnam veterans like John Kerry and Oliver Stone and also by veterans of America’s later wars, such as Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead, and leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War. He has taught Beat literature, the Sixties, and the Vietnam War literally around the world, including in China. His experiences in China, where he adopted his daughter Amy (Wu Ji), have found their way into a forthcoming book of poetry, The China Poems. He is also working on a book about racism and the death penalty in America, Blackness Through the Land, as well as a biography of Ntozake Shange titled Beautiful, Colored, and Alive, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press.

  ANNE MARIE SANTOS is the daughter of Lu Anne Henderson. She splits her time between Smithfield, Virginia, and San Francisco.

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  1 Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford (New York: Viking, 2010), p. 108 and p. 352.

  2 On the Road (New York: Penguin paperback edition, 1991), pp. 172–174.

  3 Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford (New York: Viking Press, 2010).

  4 She probably refers to the West End Bar.

  5 The Town and the City.

  6 It may well be that what Jack and Neal were so excited about, and kept talking about, was the fact that their trip that began in New York in January 1949 was the first time they had traveled west together.

  7 Neal Cassady Collected Letters: 1944–1967, edited by Dave Moore (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 55–57.

  8 Hinkle relates that one of his favorite memories of the trip was when he was driving, with his fingers practically frozen to the steering wheel, and Lu Anne—without seeming in the least coquettish—suggested he slip his hands, one at a time, down the front of her pants to warm them up.

  9 Hinkle tells that he even sold his .38 pistol, which he’d retrieved from Neal—the one Neal had tried to kill himself with—to a gas-station owner for $5 and a tank of gas.

  10 Lu Anne assumed Neal had seen Jack again in New York, but in truth Neal stayed only briefly in New York and left before Jack returned from the West Coast.

  11 Kerouac continued to work on the revisions of The Town and the City manuscript, which was already under consideration by Harcourt, Brace. The book would finally be accepted by Harcourt on March 29, 1949, but revisions on it would continue until the middle of November 1949. During this entire period, he was also trying to write an early version of On the Road. These early drafts of On the Road were nothing like the printed version; the characters were all fictional in the traditional sense, with most of their background invented.

  12 Ed Uhl had grown up on a ranch in Nebraska and met Neal when his family moved to Denver, where he and Neal went to the same high school and frequented Pederson’s Pool Hall together. Married shortly after his high school graduation, Ed and his wife, Jeanne, moved to a ranch in Sterling, Colorado. Neal was on parole from Buena Vista at the time; and when he got in some fresh trouble, Ed suggested to the police captain that, rather than sending Neal back to jail, they should just let him work off the rest of his parole time on Ed’s ranch in Sterling. Neal only stayed three months, and since it was winter, he didn’t do much actual ranching. Nor, by all accounts, was Neal much of a horseman. But Neal would later utilize the experience, especially when picking up girls, by describing himself as a former “cowhand.”

  13 The title of the radio series was The Shadow.

  14 Heart Beat, the first version of the longer memoir she later published under the title Off the Road. Heart Beat was published by Creative Arts, a small Berkeley press run by Don Ellis and Barry Gifford.

  15 This was actually about three months before Neal and Carolyn were married.

  16 Neal’s showing up at her apartment with a gun took place on February 8, 1948. Cathleen Joanne Cassady was not born until September 7 of that year.

  17 Melany Jane “Jami” Cassady and John Allen Cassady.

  18 Anne Marie Murphy was born on December 18, 1950, which was only about a year and a half after Lu Anne married Ray Murphy.

  19 Kerouac did include a very condensed version of this scene in On the Road.

  20 Al Hinkle claims Neal told her, “You can sleep with anyone on this trip—just not with Hinkle.” Al says he later asked her why Neal didn’t want her to have an affair with him in particular. He says Lu Anne told him that Neal was jealous of him. When Al asked her, “Why would Neal possibly be jealous of me?” she told him, “He sees you as a success, and he thinks of himself as a failure.”

  21 During the spring of 1949, after Jack returned to New York, Neal continued to live with Carolyn and his baby, but at the same time he resumed his love affair with Lu Anne, who had decided to go ahead and marry Ray Murphy. Murphy knew about Neal and wanted to kill him, while Neal was furious at Lu Anne for her willingness to “betray” him by marrying anyone else. In the midst of one of their violent arguments, Neal took a swing at her, but his hand struck the wall instead, and he broke his thumb. It was put in a cast and later became infected, perhaps because he had to stay home every day taking care of the baby, and changing diapers, while Carolyn went to work to support the family. The tip of his thumb eventually had to be amputated, which Neal considered his “karma” for having attempted to punch Lu Anne in the face.

  22 Lu Anne either didn’t know of, or had forgotten, the publication of The Town and the City in 1950.

  23 Natalie Jackson was a lover with whom Neal had set up housekeeping in San Francisco. He talked her into forging his wife Carolyn’s signature on a bank document, so that he could withdraw $10,000 to implement his latest betting scheme at the racetrack. Neal lost the money; and Natalie, filled with guilt and afraid that she was about to be arrested, jumped to her death from the roof of her apartment building.

  24 Neal was
found unconscious beside some railroad tracks, his body unclothed, his blood filled with downers and alcohol, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in February 1968. He was pronounced dead from exposure a few hours later.

  25 Joan Haverty was Jack’s second wife. They married in November 1950; but when she got pregnant a few months later, Jack abandoned her, refused to admit paternity of her daughter, Janet Michelle, and refused to pay child support until he was compelled to do so by a court of law.

  26 Neal had been arrested in 1958 for handing two narcotics agents three marijuana cigarettes in exchange for a ride to the train station one morning. As a result, he received a felony conviction for both possessing and dealing marijuana, and served two years in the California state penitentiary at San Quentin. After his release, he was not allowed to return to his job on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

  27 In the early 1960s, Cassady joined the countercultural band called The Merry Pranksters, which was led by novelist Ken Kesey and based at La Honda, California. The Pranksters rode around the country in a psychedelically painted old school bus dubbed “Furthur,” and Neal became their celebrated driver, as well as a sort of mascot for the entire group.