I entered Lu Anne’s hospital room not knowing what I would find. Those years of cross-country travel and hundreds of interviews had been a dizzying roller coaster, meeting crazy alcoholic barroom bruisers who threatened my life, and a few poets who threatened my life too, as well as some of the loveliest, sweetest people in the world, people who were ready to do anything to help someone (me) write the truth about their late friend or relative Jack Kerouac. What I saw was a large (larger than I’d expected), beautiful fortyish woman with a full head of blonde curls, in a blue hospital gown, with one hand swathed completely in white bandages, giving me the softest, kindest, most understanding smile I’d seen in a long, long time. She was absolutely radiant, beaming at me with an expression of gentleness and intelligence that reminded me of various Marys I had seen in the Catholic churches of my boyhood. I think I was a little in love with her before she even spoke.
I told her who I was, that I wanted to talk to her about Jack Kerouac for the book I was writing. Then a look of sadness crossed her face, and she told me that too many people wanted to learn about her life, and the lives of her friends, but it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to know why she and her friends had done the things they did. To her, the most important thing was finding out why people acted in certain ways. Once you understood them, she felt, their actions almost always made perfect sense. They stopped being freaks or criminals or outcasts or whatever else the world had labeled them as, and they became instead someone like yourself—a friend. It baffled her, it truly did, that so many writers, as well as the legions of Beat trekkies that were beginning to hit the roads of America, were smitten by the flashy and often trashy surface of the Beat movement, but had failed to understand—actually seemed incapable of understanding—that the Beats were ordinary people, just as they were.
Lu Anne told me that she had recently visited the set of Carolyn’s movie Heart Beat, and that she was enormously disappointed by what she had seen there. The first thing she saw—in a scene being filmed—was Ann Dusenberry, the actress who was playing her, supposedly peeing in a washbowl and then calling for a towel. “I wasn’t a slob,” Lu Anne objected, “and besides, there’s no need to show something like that. There’s no redeeming value in that.”
Then she watched the filming of a scene where Sissy Spacek, playing Carolyn Cassady, comes into a hotel room in Denver and acts “so indignant” to find Neal (Nolte), Lu Anne, and Allen Ginsberg (Ray Sharkey) all in bed together. “What did she have to be indignant about?” Lu Anne asked me. “After all, Neal was my husband—not hers, yet.” Lu Anne winked at me, and a wry smile crossed her face. I was beginning to get the sense that she was a bit of a card, as they used to say. For the past few months, I had been spending quite a bit of time with Carolyn Cassady. I liked Carolyn, but she could be a bit pompous and ponderous with her lectures on Edgar Cayce, karmic debts, and reincarnation. Carolyn did not have much of a sense of humor, and not at all the sort of quick humor that Lu Anne had.
Lu Anne told me more about the reenactment of that infamous three-way sex scene in Heart Beat. She felt the director, John Byrum, had done his best to make it seem as tawdry and kinky as possible. “When the three of us went to bed together,” Lu Anne said, “Neal always used to be in the middle, and Allen and I would be on either side of him. The two or three times we all actually had sex together, it was very nice.” She smiled again at me—not the wry smile, but almost the Mother Mary smile again. “There was nothing obscene about the sex we had with each other—nothing you couldn’t show on a screen or that you’d need more than a PG-13 rating for,” she averred.
Of course she won me over that quickly. I had never known any women like Lu Anne, who could talk so easily about sex and yet also make it seem so natural and healthy, nothing to be ashamed of or to make a big deal about at all. She was as at ease talking about sex as she was talking about anything else in her life. Remember, this was a good two decades before we had a program like Sex and the City. And always, everything—even the painful stuff—was conveyed with her irrepressible sense of humor.
She told me a story I had never heard—that when she had come to New York with Neal in 1949, and then he turned around and wanted to drag her right back to the West Coast, she figured out a way to thwart him. She loved New York, and she was starting to love Jack Kerouac at that time, and she wanted to stay in the Big Apple at least a while longer. Ginsberg, too, didn’t want Neal running off so fast. So she and Allen announced their plans to live together in New York, and Allen was going to “go straight.” She let out a big laugh before she continued with the story. “Our real motive,” she confided, “was to make Neal jealous, because he’d never want to lose Allen and me to each other! He’d be back east in two days if we ever really did that.” The plan fell through, she said, only because Allen was less than keen about actually trying to become her lover.