Like a lot of people who have grown up in extreme poverty and been neglected by their family, Lu Anne had learned to bend and break rules, when necessary, to survive. But Hinkle remembers her as a woman with a conscience perhaps too big for her own good. He tells a story of how Neal talked her old boyfriend Don into driving him and Lu Anne to Colorado Springs; and how, on the way back, when Neal was driving and the cops pulled him over for speeding, he and Lu Anne quickly pulled the drunken, groggy Don under the steering wheel so that he’d get the ticket instead of Neal, who had no driver’s license. Lu Anne said nothing to the police, to protect Neal, but she felt guilty for years that she’d been to blame for Don’s arrest.
Too often she took responsibility for the misdeeds of the men in her life. Partly this self-abnegation and deference toward men seems to have come from her childhood, from the guilt she felt for leaving her real dad in Los Angeles, at about 12 years old, to go live with her mom and new stepfather in Denver. But part of giving men more than they deserved also came, according to Hinkle, from her strong sex drive, her great need to have forceful male lovers in her life, and so she would put up with a lot to keep them. She told Al that no lover ever satisfied her as well as Neal had. But she put up with a lot from her second husband, Ray Murphy, too. She’d vacillated about marrying him—especially when it seemed she might have a chance of connecting permanently with Jack Kerouac—but in the end she felt obligated to marry him because she’d taken his ring and promised him she would. She’d already glimpsed his heavy drinking and violent jealousy, but went ahead with the marriage anyway, blaming herself for Murphy’s instability and roughness with her because she had remained too connected to Neal.
Though Murphy sired her only child, Anne Marie (unless we choose to believe Neal’s version that he was the girl’s father), the marriage was otherwise a disaster. Time and again, his jealousy exploded out of control, and he beat Lu Anne mercilessly for offenses which were mostly in his own imagination. Al recalls her showing up at the house on 18th Street and Valencia in San Francisco where he lived with his wife, Helen, only a few months after she’d married Murphy, with her face all puffy and black and blue. She begged him to allow her to spend the night, but refused to point the finger at Murphy for the pummeling she’d received, afraid that Al might go find Murphy and give him a taste of his own medicine.
And Al would not have hesitated to avenge her. He admits that he had long before started to fall in love with her himself. “Her personality stood out as much as her physical beauty,” Al recalled, 60 years after she’d crawled into bed with him and his wife, and a year after Lu Anne’s death. “She was always so outgoing—so loving, kind, and considerate.” His eyes looked a little misty as he recalled how she went back to Murphy against his advice.
And then Murphy came banging on his door the following night. As soon as Al let him in, Murphy lit into Al, accusing him of being a “go-between for Neal and Lu Anne,” and threatening to hurt Al if he continued doing this. In truth, Lu Anne was certainly still involved with Neal, but Hinkle had had nothing to do with helping that along. He didn’t even know where Lu Anne lived, and Neal had had no trouble finding her on his own. Hinkle told him, “I don’t agree with you beating the shit out of your wife,” and then offered to go outside with him and settle their differences right then and there. Murphy, he says, looked like a “tough guy,” but Al was bigger than Murphy and, since he worked on the railroad, had a few muscles of his own. Murphy, he says, turned in silence and left. Hinkle concluded that “he was a bully who preferred beating up women to fighting with other men.”
As the years went by, Hinkle continued to see Lu Anne from time to time. She showed him her baby, Annie Ree (born December 18, 1950), when the girl was about three months old. He recalls that Neal continued to see her, off and on, through the early 1950s—and he maintains that their sexual relationship actually continued sporadically till the end of Neal’s life.
But Lu Anne had a number of other boyfriends during this period too. Hinkle remembers one night in particular, in about 1957, when Lu Anne again showed up at his house in the middle of the night, this time with her seven-year-old daughter in tow. She told him she had to meet a guy in Los Angeles, and could she leave Annie Ree with him and his wife for a day or two? Al agreed to help her out, but he grew increasingly concerned as the days, then weeks, passed with no word from Lu Anne. The Hinkles placed Annie Ree in school with their own daughter, Dawn, but Al was virtually in a panic, since he did not know how to contact Lu Anne’s two half brothers or anyone else in her family. Finally, about three weeks later, Lu Anne returned to pick up her daughter. She was black and blue again. “The guy turned violent” was the only explanation she ever gave Hinkle about that episode.
Lu Anne in her Lilli Ann fitted suit, with her third husband, Sam Catechi, Little Bohemia club, San Francisco, 1953. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)