Back in 1978, when I was traveling around the country doing interviews for my biography Memory Babe, there was a lot going on in the Kerouac realm. New Kerouac biographies were in the works by both Dennis McNally and the team of Barry Gifford and Larry Lee, but the hottest action was going on down in Hollywood—the filming of Carolyn Cassady’s memoir Heart Beat with such stars as Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, and John Heard. I counted myself lucky to be a friend of Carolyn’s, and through her I wangled an invitation to the set down in Culver City in early October of that year. I had just missed seeing my new friend Jan Kerouac, Jack’s daughter, there. I’d also managed to connect her and Carolyn, so that Jan got a bit part in the film—a part that was, unbelievably, left on the cutting-room floor. Jan was working on a memoir too, as were Jack’s ex-wives Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, as well as his quondam girlfriends Joyce Johnson and Helen Weaver. The women were surfacing, though it would be almost two more decades before they got their due in Brenda Knight’s landmark book, Women of the Beat Generation, as well as Richard Peabody’s lesser-known but equally important A Different Beat. One woman had notably been absent from all this neo-Beat hullabaloo, the woman every Kerouac fan knew as “Marylou” from On the Road: Lu Anne Henderson Cassady. No one had heard from her in a long time. No one seemed to know where to find her.
Then one day, while I was still out in California, I got a call from Larry Lee. Larry deserves remembering here. A Peabody-award-winning journalist for KRON television in the Bay Area, he was one of the first prominent gay men in San Francisco to die from that epidemic that would take so many thousands of lives out here—including, a little later, the tremendous writer Randy Shilts. It troubles me to see how quickly Larry Lee’s name has been forgotten in the Bay Area, and how people now routinely ask “Who?” when his name is mentioned. Time buries us all, but maybe those who die young get buried quicker, having had less time to leave a testament to their memory.
Larry was short, slender, with a walrus mustache and a pixieish smile. But his brown eyes could burn into you when he was after some critical information. He had one of the sharpest minds I had yet encountered, and he was nobody’s fool. But one thing stands out about him in my memory more than any other. Of all the Kerouac critics, scholars, and biographers running around then—and running in ever larger numbers nowadays, in veritable wolf packs, in fact—he was the only totally noncompetitive one I knew. Maybe he could afford to be noncompetitive because he was a journalist, only on the periphery of those bloody fields of literary combat, where every writer seems out to climb a step higher on the backs of his brothers. But I don’t really think that was it. Larry was just a kind man—that was the essential thing about him. When I first came out to the Bay Area and had no money to live on, he cashed a check for me that no one else would touch. When you looked at his face, you saw some past hurt there that had left him with a deep compassion for the whole human race, but I never knew him well enough to find out what that hurt had been.
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.