One and Only (22 page)

A final fact that convinces me that Lu Anne knew who she was, and at least glimpsed the grandeur of her own accomplishments, was the way she reacted to the movies that were being made about her. She was angry that
Heart Beat
had caught only the superficial aspects of her rebellion—and had reduced her choice to love freely, across all the moral boundaries of the day, to a decision to live with poor hygiene. By the same token, she told her daughter that she was greatly looking forward to, and held high hopes for, the new film that would be made of
On the Road
, and hence of her early life, by Walter Salles, a director known for his respectful treatment of political and cultural revolutionaries. It is one further, sad irony of Lu Anne's life that she died so shortly before that film finally went into production.

One can but hope that actress Kristen Stewart, who got to listen to Lu Anne's taped interview and to talk extensively with her daughter, Annie, before playing the role of Lu Anne on camera, will finally give the great courage and innovative spirit, as well as the vast heart of this woman, their long-deferred due.

 

 

A
l Hinkle was probably Neal Cassady's best friend. In
On the Road
, he is portrayed as Big Ed Dunkel, the extraordinarily faithful sidekick and helper who will do anything for Neal, even abandon his new wife (Helen) a quarter way across the continent, so that they can get to North Carolina and Neal's other good buddy, Jack Kerouac, a little quicker and with a little less hassle.

Born in the same year, 1926, Neal and Al met in Denver when they were both 13 and performed together in a YMCA circus. They did a high-wire-and-trapeze act together—with a net under them—and Neal, ever the athlete, was the one to fly across, somersaulting in midair, while Al, who was a lot taller than Neal, was the one waiting on the other side to catch him. A few years later, in 1946, they met again through a mutual friend, the gimpy, bug-eyed pool hustler Jimmy Holmes, down at Pederson's Pool Hall. As soon as Neal, who as usual was drifting with no job, no money, and often no place to sleep, learned that Al had both a job and his own car, a 1936 straight-8 LaSalle convertible, Neal glommed on to Al as the
guy who could put him behind a wheel (something he desired probably more than beautiful young women) and provide him with the one absolutely vital component of his life: mobility.

In fact, the day they remet at the pool hall, now both 20, Neal asked Al to let him drive the LaSalle down to the local drive-in restaurant on Spears Boulevard, where his wife was working as a carhop. Al was amazed to hear that the handsome but ne'er-do-well, penniless Cassady actually had a wife, but he was even more astounded when he saw Lu Anne come running out to them in her frilly carhop's uniform, complete with low-cut blouse and ultra-short skirt that showed off her long, perfect legs. Her blonde hair was long too, and her skin strikingly pale. Lu Anne Cassady was the most beautiful woman Al had seen up till then, but Cassady casually kissed her as if having this gorgeous 16-year-old heartthrob gush all over him was no big deal. He never even bothered to get out of the car; he had her bring them Cokes. Then Neal turned the car around and headed back to Pederson's Pool Hall, where Al got yet another shock.

A few minutes after they got back, two young women walked in from the alley—one of them Al recognized from junior high school, a barely pretty blonde with stringy hair and an aggressive attitude named Jeannie Stewart. “Oh, this's my girlfriend Jeannie,” Neal explained. It turned out Neal was living at her house, a circumstance he explained as being due to his inability to rent a place for himself and Lu Anne. Whenever Lu Anne saved up a couple of bucks from her carhop tips, Neal would later tell Al, they rented a room (with no bath) for the night at the nearby Trentham Arms flophouse. Al would also soon learn that Neal was not only living with, and having sex regularly with, Jeannie, but he was also having regular sex with Jeannie's mother and grandmother, who lived in the same house—and who demanded Neal's servicing as a condition for allowing him to stay there.

It was to finally pry Neal away from Jeannie, according to Al, that Lu Anne insisted they leave Denver together and go live with her aunt and uncle in Nebraska—the moment in the story where her long interview printed in this volume begins.

Al would subsequently have hundreds of adventures with both Neal and Lu Anne, and eventually become the confidant of both as well. He remained friends with both of them until their respective deaths, Neal's in 1968 and Lu Anne's in 2010. He probably knew more about them than anyone on the planet—and certainly knew more about them even than they knew about each other.

Al paints a picture of Lu Anne as a smart and very pretty girl, shuffled around by divorced parents busy trying to survive the Great Depression—a girl who became sexually active very early. Although Al admits he cannot verify all the things he heard about Lu Anne, he feels fairly sure that the reason her father sent her back from Los Angeles to her mother in Denver, when Lu Anne was only 12, was that his daughter had been “growing up too fast” in L.A. and had already become, or was close to becoming, sexually involved with an older guy. Al also learned that the reason Lu Anne's mom agreed to let her marry Cassady was that Lu Anne's stepfather was pressuring her to have sex with him. Lu Anne later admitted as much to Cassady biographer Tom Christopher. Lu Anne had been deeply troubled by her stepfather's advances, but it wasn't due to any sexual naiveté or inhibitions on her part. Al relates that at 14, Lu Anne and her girlfriend Lois had already been getting “presents” from a well-to-do Denver storekeeper, in exchange for sexual favors, including oral sex, in the back room of his store. He says Lu Anne told him this story herself.

One of the reasons that Al was able to become close to Lu Anne so quickly was that she was already close to his friend Jimmy Holmes. She liked Jimmy as a friend, but he was most important
to her as a source of information about her often absent husband. Whenever they'd get together, Jimmy would fill her in on Neal's whereabouts and latest extracurricular activities. Soon Al was going with Jimmy and Lu Anne once or twice a week to movies at the Broadway Theater, and Lu Anne talked freely with the two of them about her life. She knew that Neal was incorrigible in his pursuit of other women, and she had grave doubts about whether the marriage was going to work out. But she loved him, she made clear to Al and Jimmy, and that was why she was hanging in, giving it the best shot she could.

Al tells a surprising version of how Neal met his second wife, Carolyn Robinson, then a graduate student in fine art and theater at the University of Denver. It was the summer of 1947, and Neal and Lu Anne were living together back in Denver after their sojourn in New York half a year earlier. In her book
Off the Road,
³²
Carolyn writes that she had spent most of a day with her boyfriend Bill Tomson and Cassady before meeting Lu Anne, along with Al Hinkle and Lois, in Carolyn's hotel room later that evening. In Carolyn's account, she had developed a strong rapport with Cassady before learning that he was married; then, again by her account, she had to suffer a great deal of cattiness from Lu Anne in her hotel room, where Neal secretly signaled to her that he would return to see her at two in the morning. Carolyn's version is that Neal primly spent the night with her—no sex—and the next morning Lu Anne came over to give Carolyn her permission to date Neal, since she didn't want him anymore.

Hinkle relates that Bill Tomson brought his gang of friends—Hinkle and Lois, Neal and Lu Anne—to meet Carolyn at her hotel
room. According to Al, Lu Anne saw Neal paying attention to Carolyn, but she didn't get catty about it. Lu Anne didn't particularly like it, but she was used to Neal doing such things. He says Neal did sneak back to rendezvous later with Carolyn, but only stayed briefly—long enough to have sex—and then returned to Lu Anne. Rather than Neal switching his attentions to Carolyn, as she tells the story, Al says that Neal was still focused on trying to live with Lu Anne—and after she could no longer afford to rent her own place, Al let them use his stepfather's empty apartment as a love nest. Interestingly, after Neal left town briefly to take a carpenter's job that didn't pan out, Al recalls Bill Tomson bringing Carolyn by the same empty apartment to bed her there—so Carolyn's break with Bill, after she met Neal, was nowhere near as clear-cut as she has painted it.

Moreover, Al has no recollection of Lu Anne giving Carolyn permission to pursue her husband. Al also remembers Neal telling him around this time that he had a “real connection” with Lu Anne and that he expected they would always be together. What is most interesting about Al's version of the story is the different attitude he ascribes to Lu Anne. According to Al, Lu Anne was not the games-playing, opportunistic skank that Carolyn portrays her as; she was much more the long-suffering, even if only 17-year-old wife, who desperately wanted to keep her husband but didn't know how to deal with his endless roving, and was struggling through trial and error to figure out how much rope to give him.

The picture we get of Lu Anne from Al is of a woman who early on got used to life dealing her bad hands, but who never just lay back and passively took life's slings and arrows, or moped about her troubles—she was always on her feet and going forward, trying to make a way for herself. But she did not try to make her way opportunistically—she always cared about others who were on the journey
with her; she always gave more than she took. She had to drop out of high school when she married Neal, but she never complained about giving up her education. She was not afraid of hard work either. Neal, in Hinkle's words, “wasn't too big on working,” but Lu Anne was always ready to grab any job she could find, just so they'd have a roof over their heads and food on the table. Most of the time there was nobody, not even family, willing to take care of her.

Al recalls how when she got back to Denver in early 1947, while Neal was still in New York, she asked Al to get her a job at Rocky Built, a burger joint where he worked, so that she could afford a place for her and Neal to live when he returned—and he says that she worked long hours there for several months and used her salary to rent a small hotel room. She was certain he would return to her by June, and he actually returned to Denver just a couple of weeks after she did—though she didn't bargain on Neal meeting Carolyn that summer and all the other madness that followed.

Like a lot of people who have grown up in extreme poverty and been neglected by their family, Lu Anne had learned to bend and break rules, when necessary, to survive. But Hinkle remembers her as a woman with a conscience perhaps too big for her own good. He tells a story of how Neal talked her old boyfriend Don into driving him and Lu Anne to Colorado Springs; and how, on the way back, when Neal was driving and the cops pulled him over for speeding, he and Lu Anne quickly pulled the drunken, groggy Don under the steering wheel so that he'd get the ticket instead of Neal, who had no driver's license. Lu Anne said nothing to the police, to protect Neal, but she felt guilty for years that she'd been to blame for Don's arrest.