Over the years, Al said, he often visited with Lu Anne on his day off; or sometimes they’d have lunch, and she would drive him back to the railroad afterward. They often reminisced about Neal, Jack, and the wild times they’d had together. For several years, she worked as a cocktail waitress at San Francisco Airport, making great tips and meeting lots of important people.
Then she surprised Al one day, in about 1953, when she told him about a Greek man named Sam Catechi, a San Francisco nightclub owner whom she’d met while cocktail-waitressing in North Beach. Catechi had quickly proposed marriage, and she’d just as quickly accepted. He was several decades older than she, a dapper guy who looked something like an overweight Clark Gable. In Al’s view, he appeared incongruous next to the gorgeous, youthful-looking Lu Anne, who was still getting carded at bars even in her late twenties. Soon after their marriage, Catechi bought her a home in Daly City. Al’s take on the marriage was that Lu Anne had sought security for herself and her young daughter, which Catechi gave them. Catechi acted as a father toward Annie Ree, who took his last name, and Lu Anne kept the house even after they divorced two years later. Their parting was amiable, and Lu Anne appeared to feel gratitude toward him for more than just his financial support. She told Hinkle she’d learned a sophistication from Catechi that she’d never had before.
Lu Anne’s fourth husband, Bob Skonecki, came along in 1960, and she married him in 1963. He was another merchant seaman, the sort of big, handsome, muscular guy who was much more her type. But like Murphy, he was away at sea for long periods; and there were new, troublesome factors in her life—including serious failings of her health—that kept their marriage from being just a happy ride into the sunset together.
Around 1953, perhaps through her connection to Sam Catechi and his Little Bohemia club, Lu Anne met another San Francisco club owner named Joe DeSanti. A powerful figure, with five clubs in the Barbary Coast and North Beach, DeSanti was romantically drawn to Lu Anne, but their affair didn’t last long. For whatever reason, he wasn’t her ideal lover; but eventually the relationship grew into a very close friendship—she often described them as like a brother and sister, looking out for each other and taking care of each other whenever necessary. At that time, Lu Anne was already growing seriously debilitated from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which she’d suffered from since childhood. With Lu Anne’s health growing ever more problematic, she clearly needed someone she could rely on during bouts of illness or in other troubled times. DeSanti became a kind of de facto godfather to Annie Ree as well. He even bought a house only a few blocks from Lu Anne’s in Daly City. When Joe went to jail for two or three years on a federal tax evasion charge, he asked Lu Anne to manage one of his North Beach nightclubs for him.
DeSanti’s club was on Broadway, right in the middle of the North Beach strip, and those years when Lu Anne ran it, 1959 to 1961, opened up a new world to her. The group of San Francisco club owners and entertainers were a close-knit community, and in this small world she met people like future superpromoter Bill Graham, who often frequented Basin Street West, where everyone from Lenny Bruce to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles performed; the political glad-hander George Moscone, who would become one of the city’s most famous, and later tragic, mayors; and local songster Johnny Mathis, the golden-voiced alumnus (and former star athlete) of San Francisco’s George Washington High School, whom Joe turned down after an audition at his club, thinking the kid didn’t show much promise, but who got work soon after at the Jazz Workshop next door. Lu Anne liked the experience so much that when Joe got out of jail, she went on—possibly with DeSanti’s or Catechi’s help—to buy her own club on Broadway, the Pink Elephant, which she personally ran from 1961 to 1963. Her daughter remembers Lu Anne’s years managing that nightclub as some of the happiest of her life—mingling with all sorts of celebrities and powerful people, as well as getting to assert her independence and show off her management and people skills, which were considerable. But Hinkle saw a darker side to it.