One and Only (4 page)

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.

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?

 

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 with 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.