Lu Anne has routinely been portrayed as a teenage slut—a sex bomb without much of a mind, which is certainly how she came off in the movie Heart Beat. We could impute this chiefly to the imagination of salacious filmmakers—and maybe to the fantasy life of many prurient biographers and critics as well—except that now, with a wealth of Beat primary source material finally being made public, we see that a good many of the Beats, Kerouac included, did not feel much differently about her—at least when their sexual hormones were flowing. Wandering Denver by himself in 1949, as Kerouac writes to Ginsberg, he “thought any moment LuAnne would sneak up behind me and grab my cock.” And after she visits him with Neal and Al Hinkle at his little Berkeley cottage in 1957—a scene Lu Anne relates in detail in the interview—Jack writes to Allen that “Neal and Al Hinkle floated into my Berkeley door just as I was unpacking boxful of On The Roads from Viking, all got high reading, LuAnne wanted to fuck me that next night…,” which is not how she relates the incident at all.1 To his credit, when Kerouac was one-on-one with Lu Anne in conversation, without any other males around to impress, and when his macho image was not at stake, she often found him a good listener and sympathetic friend.
Quite the opposite of the clichéd sex symbol or ditzy blonde, the Lu Anne we see in her interview is keenly observant, sensitive, and thoughtful not just about the lives of herself and her friends, but repeatedly about the human condition as well. One of the little pleasures of the piece is her attentiveness to how writers work. She describes John Clellon Holmes at his little typing table in the center of his busy Manhattan living room, and Alan Harrington plunked down at his typewriter in front of his little Indian hut, writing outdoors in the baking heat of the Arizona desert. If not for her powers of observation, we might not realize how unusual Kerouac’s own writing style was, constantly scribbling in pencil in his nickel notebooks wherever he found himself, whether in a car, on foot, or just sitting with a cup of coffee in some lost café midway across the continent. It is those same powers of observation that force us to see Lu Anne herself from a different slant. Paired with Cassady, who comes off as the sociopathic user of a young girl barely into her second year of high school, Lu Anne starts to look a lot more like an abused innocent. By the same token, Kerouac looks a lot less like the male chauvinist he’s been typed as, especially by female critics; and his repeated concern for Lu Anne’s well-being shows him to be a lot more compassionate and empathetic with women than most men of the day.
Despite the fact that Neal does such terrible things to her—forcing her to commit grand larceny and risk going to prison, at an age when most girls have no tougher decisions to make than what length of skirt to wear and which boy to go to the high school dance with—Lu Anne insists on seeing the good in Neal, and focuses on the purity of his heart and the grandeur of his mind, rather than his myriad bad deeds. Such vision is due not only to a special, almost saintlike largesse in her, but also to an extraordinary caring and concern for other people that seems to have been one of the lifelong trademarks of her character. We see Neal stomping through other people’s homes and devouring their food—not to mention taking their money, when it slips too near to the gravitational pull of his vast hunger and neediness—whereas Lu Anne wouldn’t think of staying at a strange woman’s home, such as Jack’s mother’s, without sweeping the floor once a day and replenishing the food in the icebox with her own funds, even if it means pawning a prized watch and a gold engagement ring.
In many ways, Lu Anne was like the conscience Neal didn’t have. That he kept coming back to her, even after he’d left all the other women in his life by the wayside or dead, speaks well for his own character, as if living without a conscience bothered him more than he ever let on. Lu Anne saw this too, and it is evident in the angry tirade she let loose near the end of the interview, where she railed against the many people, including his second wife, Carolyn, who considered Neal patently irresponsible.
Lu Anne had that rare ability to see people in their totality—their pluses and their minuses, their ups and downs, their ins and out—and to see each one as a whole person. Whatever Neal might do, she passed no judgment on him. She didn’t see a good person or a bad person, but just, “This is Neal.” In like manner, she had the ability to see what was precious in every person. It wasn’t a Pollyannaish sort of blind optimism. She was quite aware of how flawed people were, but despite their flaws, she could also see that there was a beauty, a unique and lovely flame, in every human being. It was the pursuit of that flame that set her life on its amazing course. In her ability to see, and cherish, the inspirational power in men like Kerouac and Cassady, she herself became an inspirational force, and left her own lasting impression on some of the finest writers of her time.
In July 2010, just prior to the filming of On the Road, I was invited by director Walter Salles up to Montreal to serve as the first “drill instructor” at the Beat Boot Camp he had set up for his actors. It was my job to somehow make these twentysomething kids (as they seemed to me) understand the essence of each of their characters. Kristen Stewart, who was about to play Lu Anne in the movie, was having a hard time making sense of how Lu Anne could still love Neal, despite his endless cheating on her. She had just learned that Lu Anne continued seeing Neal in later years, and she asked me, “How was she finally able to leave him? And what happened afterward?” She wondered if Lu Anne were just so stupid that she remained Neal’s dupe for much of her life; and if so, when did she finally figure out that she was being played for a fool?
Marie Lussier-Timperley, Kristen Stewart, and J. A. Michel Bornais, Montreal, July 2010. Lussier-Timperley and Bornais are relatives of Jack Kerouac. (Photo by Gerald Nicosia.)