Neal Cassady, however, had lived pretty hard before marrying Lu Anne and dragging her off to New York to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a famous writer. (He’d already given up the dream of playing left end for Notre Dame.) Abandoned by his mother when he was six—in 1932, the depths of the Great Depression—Neal went to live with his barber father, a far-gone wino, on Larimer Street, the skid row of Denver. He was a sweet kid, a Catholic choir boy for a while, very bright as well as good-looking and athletic. He did his best at school and tried to keep his perpetually drunken father out of trouble. But he was also one of the most highly sexed males on the planet and couldn’t keep his hands off female bodies. By his own account, he began sex play with little girls when he was eight, and by the time he was 12 was having sexual intercourse regularly with both girls and grown women.
It wasn’t easy for a kid on skid row to find places to have sex, so at 14 Neal began stealing cars—joyriding it was called then—where he’d grab a car with the keys left in the ignition, or hotwire a car, go pick up his latest girl, whirl her up to the mountains for a quickie in one of those empty houses or cabins he knew so well, and try to get the car back before anyone noticed it missing. He later claimed to have stolen about 500 cars while still in his teens. The problem was that people did notice their cars missing, and Neal was arrested many times. He spent his youth in and out of reform schools, most memorably (and excruciatingly) at the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista, an institution nearly as brutal as an adult penitentiary.
Between skid row and jail, Neal learned that he could enjoy sex with males too. He always preferred his erotic pleasures with women, but men had one distinct advantage: they were usually willing to pay him for the privilege of a roll in the hay. Before he was incarcerated at Buena Vista, he had worked as a male hustler in Denver. One day he ran across a very powerful gay lawyer and high school counselor named Justin Brierly, who also served as an admissions advisor to his alma mater, Columbia University. Brierly often arranged for his favorite young men, if they were bright enough, to get accepted at Columbia. Brierly was totally smitten with Cassady, and there was no doubt that with his 132 IQ (which Brierly got tested for him) Neal was smart enough to handle college studies. But of course it was not going to be easy, Brierly knew, to get a high school dropout with a long criminal record into an Ivy League school.
Lu Anne, about age 13, and Dorie (wife of Lu Anne’s half brother Lloyd) in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
Brierly took the tack of introducing Cassady to some of the other young men whom he had helped to become successful students at Columbia, a group that included Hal Chase and Ed White. After corresponding for several months with Neal while he was in prison—and being highly impressed by Neal’s letter-writing ability—Chase met Cassady in person and became close friends with him. Chase also talked about Cassady, and showed Neal’s letters around, to his own gang at Columbia, including Kerouac and Ginsberg, who were quite intrigued. Chase went so far as to set up special oral examinations for Cassady with several Columbia professors—with the promise that, if he passed, he would be allowed to matriculate there. The exams were supposed to take place in September 1946; but in typical Cassady form, he didn’t show up to take them.
Lu Anne, age 13, in Rocky Mountains near Peetz, Colorado, where her family lived. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
He did have an excuse, however. Earlier in the year, he had walked into the Walgreens drugstore on 16th Street in Denver with his pool hall buddy Jimmy Holmes and his current girlfriend, Jeannie Stewart, and spotted two girls he didn’t know talking in a booth. One of the girls, the blonde, captured his heart and his imagination the instant he saw her. Neal never explained what impressed him so much—if it were her looks, her animated manner, or the sunshine that almost everyone claimed radiated from her face. In any case, he leaned over to Holmes and whispered, “I’m gonna marry that girl. I don’t know her, but she’s my ideal—the girl I want to spend my life with.” Jeannie said she knew both the girls from school—their names were Lois and Lu Anne. Neal suggested that the blonde, Lu Anne, would make a great date for their mutual friend Dickie Reed at a party they were about to have up in the mountains. Neal casually asked Jeannie to go over and get Lu Anne’s phone number; and Jeannie, unaware of the treachery, went over and did as he asked.
Three weeks later, Neal did indeed marry Lu Anne. He had no place to live with his new bride, however, nor did Jeannie want to let loose of him. Finding his life far more complicated than he’d ever imagined it could be, by the fall of 1946 Neal had a lot more on his mind than going to college.
Lu Anne: