Sam and Garrett were like two kids together. They kept saying, “Can you believe we’re in On the Road?” They were laughing like two boys who were playing hooky from school, or like two kids who’d just won the grand prize on some game show. They told me, “We have to keep telling ourselves we’re actually here, acting in this movie. We can’t believe how lucky we are.”
Before I left, I showed Sam and Garrett the photograph of my mom I had brought along, tucked inside my bra, right next to my heart. I wanted to make sure that my mom got to take part in the movie. I was in the picture too; it was taken when my mom was about 60 and I was about 40. Sam commented, “Oh, she was lovely!” Then he seemed a little embarrassed, and said, “Of course, so are you!”
There was a funny moment later at the cast party at Francis Ford Coppola’s restaurant, Café Zoetrope, in North Beach. The restaurant was closed to the public, and my friend Erin and I got there late, after the dinner had already been served. Carolyn Cassady was sitting in the back room, talking with Walter, Garrett, and some of the other celebrities. Roman Coppola was there too. I had never met Carolyn, so I went into the back room to introduce myself to her. She just kind of looked at me for a few minutes, as if she were trying to see my mother in me. “Oh, sit down, honey, oh please, we need to talk,” she said finally. At that moment a couple of people came up to her and said, “You wanted a chance to smoke. The smokers are all going outside now.” Then Garrett stood up and several of the others who were smokers too started for the door, and Carolyn got up and filed out with them. I never saw her again.
My mom told me that Carolyn had once said to her, as if she were apologizing for writing her book, “I had to sell this story—I have children to take care of.” Carolyn chose to become famous, and she did. But she didn’t have the ideal life. Being married to Neal wasn’t easy. I think my mother probably had a better life than Carolyn did. But my mother was after something very different.
If my mother had wanted a life with Neal, it wouldn’t have been the life of driving frantically around San Francisco looking for kicks, and it wouldn’t have been the life Neal had later with Kesey and all those hippies taking acid on the bus. If Lu Anne could have had her dearest wish, Neal would have gone to college, he would have become the writer that he wanted to be. He wouldn’t have become the Merry Prankster. If they had stayed together, this would not be the story.
That was Lu Anne’s great sadness, that Neal didn’t become everything she thought he could be, and that she didn’t become everything she thought she could be with him. There was a song Barbra Streisand sang, an adaptation of Johnny Ashcroft’s “Little Boy Lost,” that hit my mom very hard when she heard it. That song was very profound for her, because the words were exactly what she felt for Neal. It went something like “Little boy lost in search of little boy found You go on wondering, wandering… Why are you blind to all you never were really are nearly are….” The song was about a boy, or it could be a man, who keeps searching for something that is really close by, but he never realizes it, and keeps wandering farther and farther from those things which are really most important to him.
My mom felt that Neal remained the Little Boy Lost, that he was never done traveling and “always unraveling,” as the song says. For Lu Anne, that song was talking about how, after Jack’s book came out, Neal was stuck in the role of the guy searching on the road, and he couldn’t get beyond it. My mother told me that she and Neal were looking forward to everything in the early days. Everything was a possibility then—going to New York, becoming a writer. Neal was reaching for something better, and then somehow he got sidetracked. She said if she ever wrote the book about Neal, she would call it “Little Boy Lost.”
The loss of Neal for Lu Anne wasn’t like a daily loss, like the loss of someone who’s been with you every day. They didn’t interact that much during the later years of their lives. But it was the loss of youth, and the dream of youth, and the possibility of youth. When she lost Neal, all her youthful dreams were shut down. The future had been something that seemed open to her, and suddenly it was finalized—it was over. My mother wasn’t visibly affected by his death—I mean, you didn’t necessarily know by looking at her how much she was affected by it. But I’m sure that emotionally it affected her very much. Over the years, she talked about how he died too young, but the thing that bothered her the most was that he died sad. Their youth, their dream, was gone.
It’s why when she was alone, when she was sick, she still needed contact with Neal. A lot of the time, he was hurting and lonely too. They reached out for each other at those times. When they were hurting and lonely, they would seek each other out. Even though they both had separate lives, in those moments when life was the hardest, they always reached out for that one other person they felt really knew them, understood them, and could comfort them. For Neal, it was always Lu Anne. And for Lu Anne, it was always Neal Cassady.
Neal Cassady, San Francisco, 1963. (Photo by Larry Keenan, Jr.)