When my mother did finally start to tell me her Beat stories, they were mostly the famous ones that I’d already heard—about her running off to Nebraska with Neal when she was 16, stealing her aunt’s money, going to New York and meeting Jack Kerouac, and so forth. But there was one funny story I remember, about when Neal had taken her up to his cabin up in the mountains, and they were having a big drunken party with some of his friends, using pot too, and there were a lot of underage girls present. Somebody called the cops, and they all got arrested and taken to the jail in Golden, Colorado. At first, my mother refused to give the cops her name, so they locked her up with a woman who had murdered her baby. This woman was really tough; she claimed she knew gangsters from Chicago, and she told my mom they could break out of jail together. My mother played along with her. The woman asked Lu Anne if she could get a car. My mother said, “No problem.” Then the woman asked her, “Can you get any guns?” My mom answered, “Guns? Got ’em!” Of course, eventually Lu Anne had to give her name, and they released her to her family. But when she told Neal the story, he laughed, and whenever he wanted to tease her, he’d look at her and say, “Guns? Got ’em!” and they’d both crack up.
The thing was, my mother really seemed to have a lot of scorn for the people who wanted to learn about the Beats. In the early ’70s, and even into the ’80s, Lu Anne would kind of laugh about the way the Beat fans idolized them, how these people would think all their cross-country rides were the best of times. “We were just kids, just surviving,” my mother told me. “If we needed to go somewhere, we’d hop into a car and drive. Maybe the car didn’t belong to Neal, since if he needed to get somewhere he’d grab any car he could find. If you were freezing to death and you needed a coat, you just took it, or if you needed food and you were broke, you’d get up from a restaurant without paying. We were surviving—it wasn’t a joyride by any stretch of the imagination.” Lu Anne would scoff at people who would say, “Oh, you people must have had the time of your life—you were so freewheeling!”
But she laughed the most at the people who wanted to recreate what they’d done. In the 1970s, some woman came to see her and told her, “I took the same trips you took—I followed your footsteps across the country.” My mother said to me, “Who would want to recreate freezing to death and starving to death? We went for a purpose. Neal wanted to become a writer. Like everybody else does when they’re eighteen or twenty, you go somewhere, you might starve for a while, but you’re trying to build your life and your dream.”
When my mom finally told me these stories, she stressed to me that they had just been trying to live their lives; they weren’t thinking they were creating this generation that people were going to follow. And of course there was a slow evolution in her own understanding of it as well. Jack’s novel was a big deal when it came out in 1957; but then by the late 1960s, most of his books were out of print. No one was coming to see her then, no one was looking her up to ask her questions; and it wasn’t till the late 1970s, when people started writing books about them and Carolyn’s movie got made, that my mother began to realize that this is bigger than just about me, just my story, it’s something that a lot of people in the world want to know about. Earlier, in the ’50s and ’60s, she’d never dreamed that people were going to seek her out, that they would want to find out all about her life and the lives of her friends.
In the last few years, my mother became interested in the fact that Francis Ford Coppola, and then Walter Salles, was going to make a movie of On the Road, and her story was actually going to be told in a bigger and hopefully better way than it had been in Heart Beat. She kept waiting for them to get started with the filming, but it didn’t happen till after she died. I felt sad about that, that she didn’t live to see the movie come out. But I was glad when Walter Salles asked me to come up to Montreal to talk to the actors, especially Kristen Stewart, who was going to play my mom. It gave me a chance to try to tell the story she would have told them, had she lived.
When I went to Montreal, I was a little concerned about the fact that Kristen didn’t seem the right type to play my mother. I had to keep forcing myself to remember that she was representing a fictional character in a book, that this was not actually a biography of my mother. I didn’t think that Kristen could actually try to be my mother, because she’s totally opposite of my mother in so many ways. Kristen is small, petite, with an almost brooding type of personality, where my mother was bubbly, smiley, full of sunshine. My mother was gentle; Kristen swears quite a bit, she’s foul-mouthed and comes on tough. But once I met her, she was very curious about what it was like to grow up with my mother, what kind of experience I had as a child with a mother who had been through this whole adventure. Kristen just wanted to know about my whole experience as a child.
I found that Kristen is very, very committed to the part, that she wants to represent my mother in her own right, not as “a shadow to the boys,” as she put it. She was very protective of my mother, and very defensive about what Carolyn Cassady had written about her. Kristen felt that Carolyn was trying to make my mother look bad, that she treated my mother as if she was cheap and low-class. Carolyn had written the story as if she was the socialite, and as if my mother was just this young girl who was easy, who was brought along just as a sex object for these guys. Kristen felt that Carolyn had not portrayed my mother in a very good light, that she’d made her seem like just this young kid Neal happened to marry before he knew any better. She told me straight off that that was not how she wanted to play the role of Lu Anne.
Lu Anne’s best friend, Lois, and Lu Anne wearing her swing coat, Market Street, San Francisco, 1948. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)