One of the reasons that Al was able to become close to Lu Anne so quickly was that she was already close to his friend Jimmy Holmes. She liked Jimmy as a friend, but he was most important to her as a source of information about her often absent husband. Whenever they’d get together, Jimmy would fill her in on Neal’s whereabouts and latest extracurricular activities. Soon Al was going with Jimmy and Lu Anne once or twice a week to movies at the Broadway Theater, and Lu Anne talked freely with the two of them about her life. She knew that Neal was incorrigible in his pursuit of other women, and she had grave doubts about whether the marriage was going to work out. But she loved him, she made clear to Al and Jimmy, and that was why she was hanging in, giving it the best shot she could.
Al tells a surprising version of how Neal met his second wife, Carolyn Robinson, then a graduate student in fine art and theater at the University of Denver. It was the summer of 1947, and Neal and Lu Anne were living together back in Denver after their sojourn in New York half a year earlier. In her book Off the Road,32 Carolyn writes that she had spent most of a day with her boyfriend Bill Tomson and Cassady before meeting Lu Anne, along with Al Hinkle and Lois, in Carolyn’s hotel room later that evening. In Carolyn’s account, she had developed a strong rapport with Cassady before learning that he was married; then, again by her account, she had to suffer a great deal of cattiness from Lu Anne in her hotel room, where Neal secretly signaled to her that he would return to see her at two in the morning. Carolyn’s version is that Neal primly spent the night with her—no sex—and the next morning Lu Anne came over to give Carolyn her permission to date Neal, since she didn’t want him anymore.
Hinkle relates that Bill Tomson brought his gang of friends—Hinkle and Lois, Neal and Lu Anne—to meet Carolyn at her hotel room. According to Al, Lu Anne saw Neal paying attention to Carolyn, but she didn’t get catty about it. Lu Anne didn’t particularly like it, but she was used to Neal doing such things. He says Neal did sneak back to rendezvous later with Carolyn, but only stayed briefly—long enough to have sex—and then returned to Lu Anne. Rather than Neal switching his attentions to Carolyn, as she tells the story, Al says that Neal was still focused on trying to live with Lu Anne—and after she could no longer afford to rent her own place, Al let them use his stepfather’s empty apartment as a love nest. Interestingly, after Neal left town briefly to take a carpenter’s job that didn’t pan out, Al recalls Bill Tomson bringing Carolyn by the same empty apartment to bed her there—so Carolyn’s break with Bill, after she met Neal, was nowhere near as clear-cut as she has painted it.
Moreover, Al has no recollection of Lu Anne giving Carolyn permission to pursue her husband. Al also remembers Neal telling him around this time that he had a “real connection” with Lu Anne and that he expected they would always be together. What is most interesting about Al’s version of the story is the different attitude he ascribes to Lu Anne. According to Al, Lu Anne was not the games-playing, opportunistic skank that Carolyn portrays her as; she was much more the long-suffering, even if only 17-year-old wife, who desperately wanted to keep her husband but didn’t know how to deal with his endless roving, and was struggling through trial and error to figure out how much rope to give him.
The picture we get of Lu Anne from Al is of a woman who early on got used to life dealing her bad hands, but who never just lay back and passively took life’s slings and arrows, or moped about her troubles—she was always on her feet and going forward, trying to make a way for herself. But she did not try to make her way opportunistically—she always cared about others who were on the journey with her; she always gave more than she took. She had to drop out of high school when she married Neal, but she never complained about giving up her education. She was not afraid of hard work either. Neal, in Hinkle’s words, “wasn’t too big on working,” but Lu Anne was always ready to grab any job she could find, just so they’d have a roof over their heads and food on the table. Most of the time there was nobody, not even family, willing to take care of her.
Al recalls how when she got back to Denver in early 1947, while Neal was still in New York, she asked Al to get her a job at Rocky Built, a burger joint where he worked, so that she could afford a place for her and Neal to live when he returned—and he says that she worked long hours there for several months and used her salary to rent a small hotel room. She was certain he would return to her by June, and he actually returned to Denver just a couple of weeks after she did—though she didn’t bargain on Neal meeting Carolyn that summer and all the other madness that followed.