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Beat interviews that now exist, Lu Anne’s interview with me is a unique document, I think. Unlike so many of the other women who have written about Kerouac—including Joyce Johnson, Edie Parker Kerouac, and Helen Weaver—she resists the temptation to shift the focus of the story from Jack (or in this case, Jack and Neal) to herself. Through an almost seven-hour interview, Lu Anne stays on point about those two men, the American countercultural icons of the twentieth century. And she sees them with an objective accuracy that is uncanny, but also with a compassion and nonjudgmental
attitude that is worthy of a bodhisattva—which, forgive my presumption, I would make the claim that she was.
    Beat fans, who want the same shopworn but comforting portraits of their two favorite happy outlaws, the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the 1950s, need be prepared to go down the Rabbit Hole and through the Looking-Glass. For what they will find in Lu Anne’s memoir are two men who may be almost unrecognizable to them—and certainly neither one of them are anything resembling an outlaw hero or even antihero. Kerouac may have written some of the greatest and most innovative books of the twentieth century, but Lu Anne portrays him as a man who couldn’t go out and find a job to pay the rent when it was crunch time—a man who, when the pressures of the ordinary world built up too high, froze in his tracks and had to let a teenage girl show him the way forward.
    Neal she shows to be a man of enormous vulnerability around both men and women—a man who would rather pimp his wives and girlfriends to other men than risk having them choose another lover on their own; a man who, when he finds another man, a large strong young man, kissing his wife, does nothing but scream and scream and then demand everyone in his party turn tail and flee. Cassady’s male bravado, which became as much a symbol for the age as Brando’s sneer, is revealed to be a mask for his own monumental uncertainty. Lu Anne shows Neal to be a man for whom decisions of any kind were inordinately hard; hence we see his endless crisscrossing of the country, San Francisco to Denver to San Francisco to New York and back to San Francisco, ad infinitum, to be less the intrepid travelings (to borrow a phrase from Neal’s later master, Ken Kesey) of a New Age explorer, and more the futile and endless missteps of a man who could never truly figure any real direction for himself in life.
    Lu Anne has routinely been portrayed as a teenage slut—a sex bomb without much of a mind, which is certainly how she came
off in the movie Heart Beat. We could impute this chiefly to the imagination of salacious filmmakers—and maybe to the fantasy life of many prurient biographers and critics as well—except that now, with a wealth of Beat primary source material finally being made public, we see that a good many of the Beats, Kerouac included, did not feel much differently about her—at least when their sexual hormones were flowing. Wandering Denver by himself in 1949, as Kerouac writes to Ginsberg, he “thought any moment LuAnne would sneak up behind me and grab my cock.” And after she visits him with Neal and Al Hinkle at his little Berkeley cottage in 1957—a scene Lu Anne relates in detail in the interview—Jack writes to Allen that “Neal and Al Hinkle floated into my Berkeley door just as I was unpacking boxful of On The Roads from Viking, all got high reading, LuAnne wanted to fuck me that next night…,” which is not how she relates the incident at all. 1 To his credit, when Kerouac was one-on-one with Lu Anne in conversation, without any other males around to impress, and when his macho image was not at stake, she often found him a good listener and sympathetic friend.
    Quite the opposite of the clichéd sex symbol or ditzy blonde, the Lu Anne we see in her interview is keenly observant, sensitive, and