I asked Kristen to turn that perspective around, and to see that Lu Anne was continually making her own choices to be with this man, to love him, to learn from him, and to give him the things he so desperately needed, starting with the tenderness he had been denied since growing up motherless, and with a dysfunctional wino father, on the skid row streets of Denver. I suggested to her that it was Lu Anne who actually taught Neal and Jack how to love each other. Later, listening to my taped interview with Lu Anne, Kristen said she found the key to playing Marylou in the movie was to see her “as her own woman, not Neal’s.” She would later tell Annie Santos, Lu Anne’s daughter, who also traveled to Montreal to coach the actors, that she’d come to see Lu Anne as the energy source for both men, and for On the Road itself. In Kristen’s words, “Jack and Neal needed that estrogen.” Kristen had gotten it—or it, as Neal might have said—better than I’d hoped.
But back to that puffy, pale, unwell 48-year-old woman in the Daly City living room. I couldn’t help thinking it must have been a strange journey that led her from a middle-class home in provincial 1940s Denver to hang with the wildest hipsters in New York City and San Francisco, digging jazz, free sex, and every sort of drug available—and then back again to the most conventional milieu this side of Ozzie and Harriet. Yet she never entirely lost her na?ve quality; touches of that charming innocence remained, even during our interview, as when she wonders over the fact that she could recall so little of what happened after she and the boys smoked opium together after John Holmes’s big New Year’s Eve party.
A lot of Lu Anne was beyond me then, due to my own inexperience and the limits to my understanding imposed by a Catholic, middle-class upbringing. I only knew how grateful I was for the interview, and I sensed how great it was, though I would not grasp until quite recently how much Lu Anne had given me that day—how much of herself she had shared. The interview had been locked up for many years in a university archive until recently freed by a lawsuit I was forced to bring—but that’s a matter for another story, only barely tangential to this one. Even after the interview was once again released to my custody, it lay buried away until Walter Salles coaxed me to bring it along up to Montreal to help Kristen better inhabit her part in the movie. Listening to it just before I left California, and then again with the actors in Montreal, I was finally blown away by its incredible power—the depth of Lu Anne’s insights and the stunning revelations that she made so offhandedly they might have been cups of coffee she was handing me during the interview. I was reminded of how Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had lain gathering dust, unwanted and unviewed, in his Parisian studio for seven and a half years, until someone noticed it and asked him to put it in a show, and then it proceeded to stand the twentieth-century art world on its head.
My point here is that I was not prepared to ask Lu Anne what had happened to her, nor did I feel I had the right. Clues would come to me only slowly, in small installments, over the years. I remember one such clue came in a story Al Hinkle told me, about how Neal came to him right after he’d met Lu Anne, brimming with the sort of excitement, not to say bald-faced lust, that only a new, beautiful woman could inspire in him.
“I just found the perfect woman!” Neal told Al. “She’s got absolutely everything I always wanted.”
Al recalled how a dark cloud suddenly passed across Neal’s face.
“So what’s the matter, then?” Al asked.
“The only trouble with her,” Neal said, “is she’s too much like me.”
He had found his female equivalent, and he knew it would be trouble for both of them, and indeed it was.
I did get one clue that day, however. As I packed up my tapes and recording equipment, Lu Anne approached me with a worried look on her face.
“I have to ask a favor of you,” she said. At that point I would likely have done anything she asked, but she seemed anxious about the request she was about to make. I also thought I sensed a little fear in her face—I wasn’t sure what of. Perhaps fear that I would turn her down.
“I have to have twenty dollars,” she said. “Can you give me that much?”
Twenty dollars was a lot more in 1978 than it is today, and I was traveling on a pretty thin margin in those days. But I handed her the twenty without question, nor did either of us say anything about paying it back. For my part, I figured she’d earned it by all the work she’d done that day talking into my tape recorder. I didn’t feel used or taken advantage of. If anyone had been leaning on another’s good will, it had been me leaning on her for an interview that was going to help me put my book over the top.