While all of these assertions can be argued or contested, there can be no doubt that the overall impact of two such very different men joining forces, and joining consciousnesses—or as poet Michael McClure would later put it, joining their respective sensoriums—especially since that union was so well-documented in books like On the Road, Go, and other ongoing discourse and legend of the time, created at least one of the viable starting points for all the seismic social and cultural shifts of the sixties and later decades. The beatniks were born; the hippies were born on their heels; and after the short stutter step of the early seventies, the punks were born. All owed a huge debt to the coming together of Kerouac and Cassady, the confluence of those two very different energies. And the coming together of Kerouac and Cassady owed a great debt to Lu Anne Henderson. Who says one person can’t profoundly change the human universe?
That Lu Anne’s role has remained so largely unacknowledged is due to many things. One could spend a whole essay on the media’s proclivity for male over female heroes. Once they had Kerouac and Cassady as figureheads of countercultural dissent and dissatisfaction, why should they muddle the snappy narrative by introducing a woman’s role into the story? But I think we need to look further, into the fact that Lu Anne was a deeply troubled person, barely able to keep her head above water—keep herself in the world of the living—let alone try to leave her mark on the culture by writing books or creating a public persona, as Kerouac did.
For that matter, would a character as troubled as Cassady ever have managed to leave his mark without the dozens of hardworking, and for the most part far more survival-oriented, artists (including Kerouac, Holmes, Kesey, even Tom Wolfe) who turned his life into the durable artifacts of printed articles, books, photographs, and film? In that respect, as Neal claimed, Lu Anne was too much like himself. In the one letter to him that survives, she speaks of how difficult it is for her to get through the intense “torment” she sometimes experienced. She had broken too many barriers—gone too far out into unexplored territory—and there was no safety zone for her to retreat to. She was forced to keep going forward with her life, but as marriage after marriage, and dream after dream, failed, she had no idea where she was going. As she reports in her long interview, Neal asked her near the end of his life, “Where do we go from here, Babe?”—doubtless aware that she was then as hopelessly adrift as he.
But in going so far out, she was pioneering new roles for a woman, for women’s sexuality and personal freedom—though nobody, to my knowledge, has acknowledged her as a precursor to Friedan, Steinem, and the feminist movement that came along two decades later. For a “decent” middle-class young woman of the mid-1940s, it was unthinkable to fall in love with—let alone run away with, steal for, break a host of laws for—a wild, homeless, lower-class, convicted criminal, as Neal Cassady was when she met and married him. Then to go on, not only to accept his promiscuous sexuality (which was something women were often forced to do in those days) but to welcome multiple sexual partners herself, put her in a social Coventry that would have seemed beyond redemption in post-World War II America.
But far from feeling shamed, humiliated, doomed, etc., as she was supposed to—according to the tenets of American society at the time—she was glad of her life, she loved her life, she loved all the people in her life, she rejoiced in the ever-widening spectrum of experience that came her way. And she did not shy from the notion—which terrified so many people back then—that it is possible to love more than one person at a time. Lu Anne sought to love as many people as she could—whether sexually or platonically did not seem a significant difference to her. Love was love to her, and each person brought a new richness to her life that she ardently desired and forever treasured. Men had been taking that approach since the dawn of time, but until then it had been unthinkable for a woman—to use the words of Thoreau—to demand such a “broad margin” to her life, to declare that she had as much right to go through every open door as a man had.
Lu Anne was mostly uneducated, and so she did not embark upon all these revolutionary behaviors with some sort of theoretical underpinning or philosophical framework to guide her actions—nor did she aim to share her experiences in a way that would influence the behavior of other women. There was, after all, no feminist movement at the time that she could join or see herself as part of. But she was not ashamed of her actions either; and although she wanted to “call” Kerouac on some of the distortions of her life that she felt he put into On the Road, she never regretted his making the essence of her life public in print, and known to the world. Nor did she ever recant or apologize for her unconventional life. In some ways, it’s true, she tried to raise her daughter to a more conventional life than the one she herself had led, but that was mainly to shield Annie from some of the pains and problems—not to say near debacles—that she herself had experienced. She also, eventually, told Annie the full details of her past life—told them with great humor and in a way that would allow Annie to benefit from all the revolutionary dues Lu Anne had had to pay to ride, not just in the vanguard of the Beats, but in the vanguard of new role models for women of the late twentieth century.
Lu Anne, her mother Thelma, and her husband Sam Catechi, at club owned by Sam, San Francisco, 1953. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)