One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  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.

  Too often she took responsibility for the misdeeds of the men in her life. Partly this self-abnegation and deference toward men seems to have come from her childhood, from the guilt she felt for leaving her real dad in Los Angeles, at about 12 years old, to go live with her mom and new stepfather in Denver. But part of giving men more than they deser
ved also came, according to Hinkle, from her strong sex drive, her great need to have forceful male lovers in her life, and so she would put up with a lot to keep them. She told Al that no lover ever satisfied her as well as Neal had. But she put up with a lot from her second husband, Ray Murphy, too. She’d vacillated about marrying him—especially when it seemed she might have a chance of connecting permanently with Jack Kerouac—but in the end she felt obligated to marry him because she’d taken his ring and promised him she would. She’d already glimpsed his heavy drinking and violent jealousy, but went ahead with the marriage anyway, blaming herself for Murphy’s instability and roughness with her because she had remained too connected to Neal.

  Though Murphy sired her only child, Anne Marie (unless we choose to believe Neal’s version that he was the girl’s father), the marriage was otherwise a disaster. Time and again, his jealousy exploded out of control, and he beat Lu Anne mercilessly for offenses which were mostly in his own imagination. Al recalls her showing up at the house on 18th Street and Valencia in San Francisco where he lived with his wife, Helen, only a few months after she’d married Murphy, with her face all puffy and black and blue. She begged him to allow her to spend the night, but refused to point the finger at Murphy for the pummeling she’d received, afraid that Al might go find Murphy and give him a taste of his own medicine.

  And Al would not have hesitated to avenge her. He admits that he had long before started to fall in love with her himself. “Her personality stood out as much as her physical beauty,” Al recalled, 60 years after she’d crawled into bed with him and his wife, and a year after Lu Anne’s death. “She was always so outgoing—so loving, kind, and considerate.” His eyes looked a little misty as he recalled how she went back to Murphy against his advice.

  And then Murphy came banging on his door the following night. As soon as Al let him in, Murphy lit into Al, accusing him of being a “go-between for Neal and Lu Anne,” and threatening to hurt Al if he continued doing this. In truth, Lu Anne was certainly still involved with Neal, but Hinkle had had nothing to do with helping that along. He didn’t even know where Lu Anne lived, and Neal had had no trouble finding her on his own. Hinkle told him, “I don’t agree with you beating the shit out of your wife,” and then offered to go outside with him and settle their differences right then and there. Murphy, he says, looked like a “tough guy,” but Al was bigger than Murphy and, since he worked on the railroad, had a few muscles of his own. Murphy, he says, turned in silence and left. Hinkle concluded that “he was a bully who preferred beating up women to fighting with other men.”

  As the years went by, Hinkle continued to see Lu Anne from time to time. She showed him her baby, Annie Ree (born December 18, 1950), when the girl was about three months old. He recalls that Neal continued to see her, off and on, through the early 1950s—and he maintains that their sexual relationship actually continued sporadically till the end of Neal’s life.

  But Lu Anne had a number of other boyfriends during this period too. Hinkle remembers one night in particular, in about 1957, when Lu Anne again showed up at his house in the middle of the night, this time with her seven-year-old daughter in tow. She told him she had to meet a guy in Los Angeles, and could she leave Annie Ree with him and his wife for a day or two? Al agreed to help her out, but he grew increasingly concerned as the days, then weeks, passed with no word from Lu Anne. The Hinkles placed Annie Ree in school with their own daughter, Dawn, but Al was virtually in a panic, since he did not know how to contact Lu Anne’s two half brothers or anyone else in her family. Finally, about three weeks later, Lu Anne returned to pick up her daughter. She was black and blue again. “The guy turned violent” was the only explanation she ever gave Hinkle about that episode.

  Lu Anne in her Lilli Ann fitted suit, with her third husband, Sam Catechi, Little Bohemia club, San Francisco, 1953. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)

  Over the years, Al said, he often visited with Lu Anne on his day off; or sometimes they’d have lunch, and she would drive him back to the railroad afterward. They often reminisced about Neal, Jack, and the wild times they’d had together. For several years, she worked as a cocktail waitress at San Francisco Airport, making great tips and meeting lots of important people.

  Then she surprised Al one day, in about 1953, when she told him about a Greek man named Sam Catechi, a San Francisco nightclub owner whom she’d met while cocktail-waitressing in North Beach. Catechi had quickly proposed marriage, and she’d just as quickly accepted. He was several decades older than she, a dapper guy who looked something like an overweight Clark Gable. In Al’s view, he appeared incongruous next to the gorgeous, youthful-looking Lu Anne, who was still getting carded at bars even in her late twenties. Soon after their marriage, Catechi bought her a home in Daly City. Al’s take on the marriage was that Lu Anne had sought security for herself and her young daughter, which Catechi gave them. Catechi acted as a father toward Annie Ree, who took his last name, and Lu Anne kept the house even after they divorced two years later. Their parting was amiable, and Lu Anne appeared to feel gratitude toward him for more than just his financial support. She told Hinkle she’d learned a sophistication from Catechi that she’d never had before.

  Lu Anne’s fourth husband, Bob Skonecki, came along in 1960, and she married him in 1963. He was another merchant seaman, the sort of big, handsome, muscular guy who was much more her type. But like Murphy, he was away at sea for long periods; and there were new, troublesome factors in her life—including serious failings of her health—that kept their marriage from being just a happy ride into the sunset together.

  Around 1953, perhaps through her connection to Sam Catechi and his Little Bohemia club, Lu Anne met another San Francisco club owner named Joe DeSanti. A powerful figure, with five clubs in the Barbary Coast and North Beach, DeSanti was romantically drawn to Lu Anne, but their affair didn’t last long. For whatever reason, he wasn’t her ideal lover; but eventually the relationship grew into a very close friendship—she often described them as like a brother and sister, looking out for each other and taking care of each other whenever necessary. At that time, Lu Anne was already growing seriously debilitated from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which she’d suffered from since childhood. With Lu Anne’s health growing ever more problematic, she clearly needed someone she could rely on during bouts of illness or in other troubled times. DeSanti became a kind of de facto godfather to Annie Ree as well. He even bought a house only a few blocks from Lu Anne’s in Daly City. When Joe went to jail for two or three years on a federal tax evasion charge, he asked Lu Anne to manage one of his North Beach nightclubs for him.

  DeSanti’s club was on Broadway, right in the middle of the North Beach strip, and those years when Lu Anne ran it, 1959 to 1961, opened up a new world to her. The group of San Francisco club owners and entertainers were a close-knit community, and in this small world she met people like future superpromoter Bill Graham, who often frequented Basin Street West, where everyone from Lenny Bruce to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles performed; the political glad-hander George Moscone, who would become one of the city’s most famous, and later tragic, mayors; and local songster Johnny Mathis, the golden-voiced alumnus (and former star athlete) of San Francisco’s George Washington High School, whom Joe turned down after an audition at his club, thinking the kid didn’t show much promise, but who got work soon after at the Jazz Workshop next door. Lu Anne liked the experience so much that when Joe got out of jail, she went on—possibly with DeSanti’s or Catechi’s help—to buy her own club on Broadway, the Pink Elephant, which she personally ran from 1961 to 1963. Her daughter remembers Lu Anne’s years managing that nightclub as some of the happiest of her life—mingling with all sorts of celebrities and powerful people, as well as getting to assert her independence and show off her management and people skills, which were considerable. But Hinkle saw a darker side to it.

  To truly understand this part of the story, one has to get a fuller picture of just how ill she
had become. As with many people who have chronic illnesses, which erupt and then subside, it was not always easy to see how sick Lu Anne was. When not having an acute attack, she could look well, her beauty still shimmering, her mood still upbeat—the very picture of health. But, in fact, she had come close to dying at least three times already. In 1957, in Tampa, an attack of her IBS had caused her so much pain that she’d been hospitalized. Annie recalls that her survival was touch and go for a few days, and that when she was finally released, she was still extremely weak and fearful that she would not recover. That was when she drafted a desperate letter to Neal, printed later in this book, that she may or may not have ever mailed.

  Then in 1962, in San Francisco, she had a hysterectomy, which led to the discovery of 20 stones in her gallbladder that were removed a week later. The two back-to-back surgeries led to severe blood clotting. They had to pump three cups of clotted blood out of her femoral artery; her artery was clogged from her leg all the way to her lung. She remained in the hospital for three months, during which time she almost died twice; and at one point, Joe and Annie were summoned to the hospital because she was being given last rites. Lu Anne was put on Coumadin, a powerful blood thinner, which kept her alive but resulted in frequent bleeding under her skin, which would sometimes leave whole patches of her body black for weeks on end.

  Her IBS grew worse too, and for the rest of her life she suffered enormous amounts of pain. She began using Miltowns as well as powerful prescription painkillers. As Annie points out, during the sixties a wide variety of opiate drugs became easily available, and Lu Anne did not shy from using anything that helped her. But according to Al, her moving up to morphine and heroin had much more to do with the connections she retained to San Francisco’s club scene through her frequent part-time jobs as bartender and waitress. At some point in North Beach, she met a guy known as Peepers,33 who was always trying to find people to help him score hard drugs. He would often start by offering friends a taste of whatever he was using, as a way to get them interested in acquiring more. According to Al, Peepers got Lu Anne hooked on heroin; and for several years in the mid-1970s, her life went straight downhill.