Nick Nolte didn’t seem anything like Neal to her. “Neal moved much faster than Nick Nolte,” she said. “When I met Neal, he had six books under one arm, a pool cue in the other hand, and started necking with me at the same time.”
A whole flood of memories came back to her; I was trying to take notes, but it was hard for me to keep up. Suddenly she was living back in those days—names of people were coming back to her hot and fast. She told me about three guys standing up at her wedding to Neal—Bill Tomson, Jim Holmes, and Jimmy Penoff. She was only 15, and her mom consented in order to get her out of the house, where Lu Anne was having a lot of problems with her stepfather and had become rebellious, more than her mom could handle. She laughed about Bill Tomson, one of Neal’s rivals in the local pool-hall gang, a guy who fancied himself as much a ladies’ man as Neal. Bill wouldn’t get out of their room on their wedding night; he wanted to share in the honeymoon. Again she laughed at one of her memories—how she had to kick Tomson out of the honeymoon suite, which was just a room Neal had rented in a private house, and where she worried that their noisy lovemaking that night kept the other residents up.
Lu Anne’s eyes sparkled when she talked about Neal. She said Neal was always reading to her. She said he always wanted her back, that she didn’t force herself on him, as Carolyn always claimed. Then she went into a reverie—she was thinking of Neal’s letters, and her eyes got a little moist and unfocused. It was as if she left the hospital room with me for a few moments, her spirit traveling back decades and across a thousand miles of continent—as if she were being hit by waves of bittersweet pain, thinking of something that was once too beautiful, and way too beautiful to lose. “He wrote me the most marvelous love letters,” she said finally. “It was when he had just come to San Francisco, and I was still in Denver, and he wanted me back in his life. He told me that he was a ‘rudderless ship’ without me, and other lovely things like that. The things he wrote overwhelmed me.”
But it was the battle with Carolyn that obsessed her that afternoon in the hospital—a battle she had long ago lost, a defeat which the making of the movie now seemed to confirm and memorialize for all time. “Carolyn was a woman to me,” Lu Anne pleaded for my sympathy. “What chance did I have? I was sixteen, and she was in her twenties. Carolyn’s making herself look good in this movie. She portrays herself as this beautiful and sophisticated woman, this siren, that two brilliant and experienced men fell madly in love with. That’s not the way it was at all. Carolyn had merely got herself pregnant.”
She went after Carolyn in a way that I would learn was not characteristic of her. Lu Anne was usually the most forgiving of people. She was also known for being gracious. It may have been her current situation, being sick and helpless in a hospital bed while Carolyn romped with movie stars and ate at glamorous five-star restaurants down in Hollywood. Lu Anne was almost penniless at the time, though I didn’t know it then. It may also have been, as her daughter later pointed out to me, the bad temper that sometimes accompanied Lu Anne’s coming down off her many medications.
“Carolyn and Neal weren’t making it together,” Lu Anne said. “Only a short time after they got married, the sex had stopped. It was that simple. That’s why he was so desperate to get me back.”
We talked for a while more, until she started to tire. I was trying to get as much information as I could from her, but this wasn’t the sort of full interview I had wanted. She didn’t know when she would be out of the hospital, and I didn’t have the money to stay in San Francisco much longer. I figured whatever I got from her that day was all I was going to get. She told me I’d have to go—she needed her rest.
“When you come back, I’ll buy you lunch,” she told me, batting her eyelashes at me. I couldn’t believe it. She was flirting with me—mildly, it’s true, but still flirting. “Then we can sit in the park and hold hands.”
I was twenty years younger than she, but completely smitten. She was beautiful, she was clearly wounded, and she was unbelievably charming.
“Then we’ll have something to look forward to,” I said. I must have looked like a puppy dog in love.
She told me she needed some candy and a pack of Winstons, and I set off on the run for the commissary. It’s kind of amazing to look back and remember that in the 1970s you could still buy cigarettes in a hospital—for all I know, they even had a lounge for patients where Lu Anne could have smoked them. In any case, I returned in a jiffy and handed her the Winstons and the three candy bars she’d requested.