Lu Anne, her second husband, Ray Murphy, and baby Annie, Stanyan Street, San Francisco, circa 1951. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
Neal’s obsession with her, his need for sexual connection with her, never stopped. And Murphy proved an exceptionally jealous, violent, and physically abusive husband, especially when he was drunk, which was often.
Lu Anne:
After Jack left on that bus for New York, I didn’t see him again for about two and a half years. The next time I saw him was in 1952, when he was living with Neal and Carolyn on Russell Street, on Russian Hill.
Not long after Jack went back to New York, Neal and I decided to get back together again, to actually live together as a couple, and we moved into a hotel downtown. We got into this terrible fight, and he took a swing at me, but he hit the wall instead of me! Later, he would always say that was his own retribution for taking a swing at me. But anyway, he hurt his thumb pretty badly. I don’t remember if I ran out of the hotel room, or if he left; but in any case, one of us left the room. Neal ran to his mother, as usual. Jack had a real mother to go to; Neal had Carolyn. After Carolyn took him to the hospital, he called me from the hospital—Carolyn not knowing this, of course. Then I rushed out to the hospital, and Carolyn was there in the waiting room. As soon as I saw Carolyn, I turned around and left. I don’t know if she realized Neal had just called to let me know where he was; otherwise, I would have had no way of knowing what happened. I had no idea he had broken his finger. I had no idea that anything had happened.
Neal had to wear a cast for months. His thumb got infected, and he lost part of it. The whole thing went on for about a year. He hurt it again after he hurt it the first time. Neal always said, “I had no business taking a swing at you anyway.” He felt that was why the thing was causing him so much trouble. He ended up hurting it some other way—something else happened to it—and the next thing I know, he had all these wires on it, and it was encased in plaster and everything else. He really had a bad time with that thumb.
Jack came to see him that summer, I think. That was when Carolyn threw them both out, and he and Jack drove back to New York together. Neal got involved with Diana Hansen there, got her pregnant and married her, and then divorced her in Mexico, or so he claimed. Anyway, by 1952 he was back in San Francisco, living with Carolyn and working on the railroad. They had two more children by then, Jami and John.
The next time I saw Jack was when Neal brought him over to see my baby, Annie Ree, who was a just a little over a year old. And then I saw him, met him, one afternoon—I don’t know if Neal ever knew about it, if Jack ever told him about it. It took place one afternoon, right around the corner from my house, when I lived on College Avenue and Mission Street. It was just kind of a sweet time—we spent about four hours together. We met in a café, and we finally went back over to the house and talked for a while more, because I had the baby, and she was still small then. He was telling me that he thought he had things pretty well together. He wanted to know if I was happy, and if things were going right for me. Things weren’t going right, but I didn’t tell him anything about that. I told him that everything was fine and that I was happy with the baby. And he told me that he was getting along.