I was curious about it, though. I brought it up with Larry Lee before I left California.
“She acted almost desperate for that money,” I told Larry. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with her?”
Just as he knew everyone, Larry also knew the dirt, the lowdown, on the life of everybody he dealt with. I don’t know how he knew it, but good journalists do that. It’s part of their job. And Larry was one of the best journalists there ever was.
“She needed the money for a fix,” Larry said. “She’s a junkie.”
And he left me to mull that over all the way back to Chicago.
NOTE TO THE TRANSCRIPTION
Turning transcribed interviews into a readable text is a fine art. In this case, I was working with two different interviews, one that I had taken down in handwriting in a notebook, and another that I had taped and then transcribed on a typewriter. The pitfalls are many. Most verbatim interviews are barely readable—broken syntax, too many false starts, repetitions, thoughts left hanging and picked up many pages later. The editor has to “clean up” the interview, but there is a great danger in overcleaning. There is a tendency to correct all incorrect grammar, to replace all slangy expressions with higher-class vocabulary words, and so forth. On the other hand, a reader stumbling through a too-faithful rendition of the words out of an interviewee’s mouth can lose patience very quickly and feel that the text is not worth the trouble of reading, let alone trying to understand.
When the interviewee is dead, as Lu Anne now is, there is an even heavier responsibility to try to keep the exactness of her meaning, since she isn’t around to correct the misrepresentation of it. I tried to err on the side of fidelity, rather than on the side of a suave-sounding text. But there was something more going on as I tried to render those tens of thousands of taped words into a coherent, readable narrative. Lu Anne had little formal education, but her language had its own flavor, its own homespun charm, much like the tinge of western accent with which she spoke. I tried very hard to keep the sound of her voice in the printed interview. She had a way of repeating certain words for emphasis—“a beautiful, beautiful house,” for example—that was very typical of her speech patterns. That sort of repetition tends to get cut immediately by editors, but I left most such instances in, because it was a unique signature of her speech and, even more importantly, part of the way she thought. She was excitable; she was filled with enthusiasm—those were things Jack Kerouac and others loved about her. That enthusiasm showed up so clearly in her doubling of words—as well as in the frequent “My Gods,” a smattering of which I also left in. Furthermore, I chose to keep solecisms like “we laid in the grass,” “he was gonna write,” and such incorrect but common usages as “I could’ve cared less”—because this is the way she talked. She didn’t sound like a high-society lady, and I didn’t intend to make her sound like one.