“Thanks, honey,” she said. I was rewarded by the warm, glowing smile of a well-loved woman. It was clear she was used to attention from men, and she still liked it. Something about her expression reminded me of a purring cat—the visual equivalent of a cat’s purr.
I extended my hand to her. Still a Midwesterner, I was ready to part with a handshake. But she grabbed my hand with both her good hand and the bandaged one, and gave me a loving squeeze.
“Get well soon,” I said, trying to convey a little burst of healing energy in her direction. I was no longer thinking of my much-sought interview. I just wanted her to be well, to be happy. The fact is, she had charmed the socks off me—no mean feat for a middle-aged woman with no makeup, a bandaged hand, and dressed in a baggy hospital gown. I left the room with her oodles of charisma trailing after me—feeling as if I had just been granted a meeting with Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner.
Then, the next day, came yet another surprise. I got a call from Lu Anne. She was out of the hospital and staying with an old friend, Joe DeSanti, in Daly City. She wanted to do the full, taped interview I had talked of with her. A day or two later, when she was rested enough, I drove down to Joe’s tract house in Daly City, carrying a shoulder bag full of notebooks, tapes, and recording equipment.
Daly City is a working-class suburb in the heavy-fog belt just south of San Francisco. The sky is always gray, and the small, single-story houses are grayish too and tend to be almost indistinguishable from one another. The town has always comprised a lot of immigrants and those who can’t afford the pricey rents of the city itself. It is a bedroom community with few businesses and restaurants and no nightlife whatsoever. One didn’t expect to find Marylou of On the Road there, even a recuperating Marylou just out of the hospital.
I spent almost eight hours with her there that day, and for most of that time she remained in a dark-colored, maybe green, overstuffed armchair. I had my tape recorder set in front of her, on a low, round, polished, middle-class coffee table. The furnishings were tasteful but sparse. The house did not look lived-in at all, and the only other resident was apparently Joe himself. There were large glass windows—a California trademark—but they were almost all covered with heavy drapes. Privacy seemed to be the word of the day here. The coffee table also held a large ashtray for her many cigarettes an hour.
Lu Anne looked puffy and unwell, and her voice was slow and not nearly as strong or energetic as it had been in the hospital a couple of days before. But I could see the strength and determination in her. She could easily have made a poor-health excuse and bowed out of the engagement, but she was determined to tell me everything she had to say, and she kept going even when I began to wear down myself. She kept going even though Joe frequently interrupted with hints that she quit for the day. At one point he even suggested that it was time for her to visit her daughter Annie Ree, who was living close by and raising her own baby now. Lu Anne brushed him off like a queen whose word is unchallengeable. She made it very clear to him how important it was for her to do this interview with me. In some ways, her sedulous insistence on getting her whole story told was an extension of the feelings she’d expressed earlier, in the hospital, about her horror at seeing her role in Beat history distorted and mistold in the movie Heart Beat and elsewhere. Having already been gravely ill several times, she now strongly feared that her real story would never get told correctly. And so she filled cassette tape after cassette tape with the interview I could hardly believe I was finally getting. And what an interview it was!
Listening to the tapes now more than 30 years later, I realized how much of what she’d said that day I had forgotten—and how much else had simply gone over my head, because I was not yet old enough, nor had I lived enough, to appreciate all the profound life lessons she was sharing with me. If there’s anyone with more insight into Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady than Lu Anne, I have yet to encounter them. I used to think John Clellon Holmes in his several essays, especially “The Great Rememberer,” had the most profound insights into Kerouac. In some ways, perhaps, he still does. But he did not see the whole other dimension of Jack that a woman, especially a sensitive woman like Lu Anne, saw; and Holmes was not nearly as sharp or empathetic about Cassady.