One and Only (21 page)

When Neal Cassady told her, “You are my one and only wife,” he was recognizing something in her that droves of subsequent biographers and annotators have failed to notice: that Lu Anne Henderson Cassady played a unique and irreplaceable role in that great man's life, and hence, by extension, in all the lives he touched, which were some significant lives indeed. She was not a fungible commodity, not just one more instance of the teenage pussy—“young stuff in filmy sheer no underclothes dresses,” as he described his dream girls in a letter to Jack—of which he seemed able to gather an inexhaustible store. She was the impetus and sine qua non of a change in Neal Cassady that allowed him to become
the
Neal Cassady we know today, the prototype of so many rebel and outlaw clichés, and the begetter of the Beat Generation itself.

It is pretty well accepted that there would have been no Beat Generation had Jack Kerouac not met Neal Cassady. But along with that justifiable assumption there usually comes another tacit one, not really justified at all: that once Neal met Jack, it was like the sperm meeting the egg—that after the conception, it was only a matter of time before the embryo matured and the Beat Generation was born. The fact is, Neal meeting Jack was not enough to have created one of the most important literary, social, and cultural movements of the twentieth century. When they met—as Lu Anne tells eloquently in her interview—they didn't even like each other, and they certainly didn't understand each other.

From vastly different backgrounds—Neal having been orphaned
from any real sense of family or social position almost from his birth, while Jack was steeped in family to his very bones, and sought every sort of conventional validation, from school to sports to a useful role in society, and more—it was almost preordained that they would not trust each other at all, and, moreover, they had no basis for building that trust. Mutual friendship with two or three guys like Hal Chase and Ed White would not have been enough, since Chase and White barely trusted Neal themselves. There needed to be a very special key that would unlock Neal and Jack's hearts toward each other, and that key was Lu Anne Henderson.

What gave the Beat Generation so much potency was its embodiment and unification—in a harmony that would previously have been thought impossible—of great opposites. The postwar period—the late 1940s and early 1950s—was arguably the most polarized period in American history. One was either a Communist or a democratic American, a churchgoer or an atheist, a practicer of marital fidelity or a promiscuous sex fiend. It was all either-ors, no in-betweens. The founders of the Beat Generation were, above all, seekers of gradations, explorers of the possible gray areas of human life. Kerouac and Cassady were, at the start, too far apart to bring each other the new possibilities that they eventually offered in the way of expanded humanity. It was Lu Anne who saw their similarities—who saw their heart, their caring, their desire to do good across the old boundaries and deep into a new world where the old values just didn't make sense anymore. She coaxed and cajoled and argued them into accepting and valuing each other; she almost single-hand-edly brought them together into a deep friendship. That may seem like an extreme statement, and there may be no way of proving it. But I'd bet money on it if I could.

The fact is, when Jack and Neal first met, they had trouble talking to each other—this has been well-documented in the observations
of many friends—beyond simply comparing their achievements: how far they could pass a football, how many books they'd read, how many Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins songs they knew by heart, and so forth. But each of them had long, soulful talks with Lu Anne. She was, among other things, one of the world's great listeners. They both told her, separately, their most intimate life stories. She would then share what she'd learned from Neal with Jack, and what she'd learned from Jack with Neal. Their respect for, and trust of, each other began to grow, precisely because they both respected and trusted her.

Although she had little formal education, she had a profound understanding of people—and all those close to her saw it immediately. People, especially Jack and Neal, trusted her judgments. And so she made them both believe that each was worthy of the other's love and concern. It didn't hurt that she also tied them all together in one big love knot. But with or without the shared sexual bonds, she was a powerful cement that held them together. And the nature of that cement was precisely the goodness and honesty she brought to every relationship. Her love for Neal made Jack see, and
believe in
, things he had never suspected in Neal earlier; and ditto for Neal with Jack. Furthermore, she made them see that they loved each other equally—that each one's love and respect for the other was fully reciprocated—something both men doubted for a long time. But when Lu Anne told them it was so, they had to believe it.

Lu Anne brought Neal and Jack close enough for the nuclear fusion to finally occur—and with it, the explosion that changed life in America forever. Neal's relentless action joined with Jack's endless weighing of possibilities, Jack's dawdling over details with Neal's speedy pursuit of the macrodestination; Jack's excessive Catholic conscience joined with Neal's forced pragmatism of a homeless street kid; Jack's rigid (but often sharp and canny) working-class
politics and political categories joined with Neal's apolitical pursuit of the greatest common good; and Jack's belief in a personal God in the clouds joined with Neal's homegrown pantheism, his belief that God was as much in a car's gears or a woman's thighs as in any traditional religious heaven.

While all of these assertions can be argued or contested, there can be no doubt that the overall impact of two such very different men joining forces, and
joining consciousnesses
—or as poet Michael McClure would later put it, joining their respective
sensoriums
—especially since that union was so well-documented in books like
On the Road
,
Go
, and other ongoing discourse and legend of the time, created at least one of the viable starting points for all the seismic social and cultural shifts of the sixties and later decades. The beatniks were born; the hippies were born on their heels; and after the short stutter step of the early seventies, the punks were born. All owed a huge debt to the coming together of Kerouac and Cassady, the confluence of those two very different energies. And the coming together of Kerouac and Cassady owed a great debt to Lu Anne Henderson. Who says one person can't profoundly change the human universe?

That Lu Anne's role has remained so largely unacknowledged is due to many things. One could spend a whole essay on the media's proclivity for male over female heroes. Once they had Kerouac and Cassady as figureheads of countercultural dissent and dissatisfaction, why should they muddle the snappy narrative by introducing a woman's role into the story? But I think we need to look further, into the fact that Lu Anne was a deeply troubled person, barely able to keep her head above water—keep herself in the world of the living—let alone try to leave her mark on the culture by writing books or creating a public persona, as Kerouac did.

For that matter, would a character as troubled as Cassady ever
have managed to leave his mark without the dozens of hardworking, and for the most part far more survival-oriented, artists (including Kerouac, Holmes, Kesey, even Tom Wolfe) who turned his life into the durable artifacts of printed articles, books, photographs, and film? In that respect, as Neal claimed, Lu Anne was too much like himself. In the one letter to him that survives, she speaks of how difficult it is for her to get through the intense “torment” she sometimes experienced. She had broken too many barriers—gone too far out into unexplored territory—and there was no safety zone for her to retreat to. She was forced to keep going forward with her life, but as marriage after marriage, and dream after dream, failed, she had no idea where she was going. As she reports in her long interview, Neal asked her near the end of his life, “Where do we go from here, Babe?”—doubtless aware that she was then as hopelessly adrift as he.

But in going so far out, she was pioneering new roles for a woman, for women's sexuality and personal freedom—though nobody, to my knowledge, has acknowledged her as a precursor to Friedan, Steinem, and the feminist movement that came along two decades later. For a “decent” middle-class young woman of the mid-1940s, it was unthinkable to fall in love with—let alone run away with, steal for, break a host of laws for—a wild, homeless, lower-class, convicted criminal, as Neal Cassady was when she met and married him. Then to go on, not only to accept his promiscuous sexuality (which was something women were often forced to do in those days) but to welcome multiple sexual partners herself, put her in a social Coventry that would have seemed beyond redemption in post-World War II America.

But far from feeling shamed, humiliated, doomed, etc., as she was supposed to—according to the tenets of American society at the time—she was glad of her life, she loved her life, she loved all the people in her life, she rejoiced in the ever-widening spectrum
of experience that came her way. And she did not shy from the notion—which terrified so many people back then—that it is possible to love more than one person at a time. Lu Anne sought to love as many people as she could—whether sexually or platonically did not seem a significant difference to her. Love was love to her, and each person brought a new richness to her life that she ardently desired and forever treasured. Men had been taking that approach since the dawn of time, but until then it had been unthinkable for a woman—to use the words of Thoreau—to demand such a “broad margin” to her life, to declare that she had as much right to go through every open door as a man had.

Lu Anne was mostly uneducated, and so she did not embark upon all these revolutionary behaviors with some sort of theoretical underpinning or philosophical framework to guide her actions—nor did she aim to share her experiences in a way that would influence the behavior of other women. There was, after all, no feminist movement at the time that she could join or see herself as part of. But she was not ashamed of her actions either; and although she wanted to “call” Kerouac on some of the distortions of her life that she felt he put into
On the Road
, she never regretted his making the essence of her life public in print, and known to the world. Nor did she ever recant or apologize for her unconventional life. In some ways, it's true, she tried to raise her daughter to a more conventional life than the one she herself had led, but that was mainly to shield Annie from some of the pains and problems—not to say near debacles—that she herself had experienced. She also, eventually, told Annie the full details of her past life—told them with great humor and in a way that would allow Annie to benefit from all the revolutionary dues Lu Anne had had to pay to ride, not just in the vanguard of the Beats, but in the vanguard of new role models for women of the late twentieth century.

 

One final question that might be asked, I suppose, is if—or to what extent—Lu Anne realized the revolutionary role she played on the twentieth-century American stage. Having spent only two days, and less than a dozen hours total, with Lu Anne, I may not be the best person to answer this. But I can honestly say that the dignity and self-worth she radiated—as strongly as the warm sunshine of her smile—were far beyond that of the ordinary homemaker of Daly City, California. You could not be with her more than a few minutes without feeling as if you were with someone special, and someone who was well aware of how special she was.

That she was known to, and respected by, people from all walks of life—everyone from the mayor of San Francisco to rock promoter Bill Graham—as her daughter reports, is significant testimony to the evident power she felt in herself and reflected to others. For, I believe,
others could not have recognized Lu Anne's unique character if she did not recognize it, and wear it comfortably, herself. It is significant that many of the important people she impressed, whether a singer like Johnny Mathis or a topless dancer like Carol Doda, did not know her specifically as “Marylou” of
On the Road
, though they might have known her as a strikingly independent woman in some other capacity, such as North Beach club owner or power broker in the city's underground politics.

To me, it was also significant that she expressed such a strong longing to get back in touch with some of the major artists she had once mingled so easily with—often asking me what had become of people whose names came up in the course of the interview, or, as in the case of John Holmes, asking me to send along her best regards to him. It was clear she missed her days closer to the center of artistic creation, visionary exploration, and cultural change. There was also a touch of sadness I would see in her eyes or hear in her voice, from time to time, as she probably realized the almost insurmountable obstacles that now lay between her and the kind of freedom and significance her life had once had.