Free One and Only by Gerald Nicosia Page B

love—gay or straight—was not the simple matter he had thought it. And Cassady was about to go on the ride of his life.
    The stage was set for a huge drama to unfold—the drama that would give narrative bones to one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Poor Lu Anne, slaving away at a hamburger joint to save money for her husband’s return, had no inkling of all that was coming down the pike at her.
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    Lu Anne:
    Jack came out to Denver in the summer of 1947 to see Neal, but I didn’t learn of that until much later. When Jack was in Denver in 1947, I didn’t know it. It seems almost inconceivable to me that Jack was in Denver seeing Neal without my knowing about it. I know Jack wrote about it, and Jack’s biographers say it happened, and a thousand people have said that he was there, but what was so strange was that Jack never talked about it with me. The big thing when we left New York together in 1949, Neal and Jack and I, was
the fact that Jack had never been west before—at least I remember us talking about that all the way from New York to New Orleans. That’s why when we took off through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, Jack and Neal were so excited about the trip. 6
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    Lu Anne in front of car, Denver, circa 1947, during the period when Neal rejoined her after their first trip to New York. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)

    But I need to back up a little. A couple of months after I left New York, and left Neal up in Hartford, he came back to Denver to get me on my birthday, the first day of March, 1947. From that moment on, I was completely involved with Neal again, and that’s why it’s so unbelievable to me that I wouldn’t have known if Jack
was anywhere in the vicinity. Naturally I knew that Ginsberg was there, because Allen and Neal and I were all together after Allen came. I know Carolyn says she met Neal in Denver that summer, but I don’t remember seeing her there either. If I did meet her then, she couldn’t have made much of an impression. I still have a hard time believing he met her there. I may not have the most fantastic memory in the world, but I don’t remember either Jack’s or Carolyn’s name coming up when I was with Neal that summer. Neal didn’t even stay in Denver that long, because he’d planned to go to Texas with Allen, and then out to the Coast to join up with Jack.
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    The evidence of letters indicates that Neal got to Denver later in March, more than a week after Lu Anne’s birthday. It’s also unclear exactly when Neal met Carolyn Robinson, the Bennington graduate then enrolled at the University of Denver.
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    Carolyn Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Cathy Cassady, San Francisco, 1952. (Photo by Al Hinkle.)

    What is known is that during the summer of 1947, Neal was doing his best to share himself with three different lovers—Lu Anne, Carolyn, and Allen Ginsberg—while attempting to keep each one from knowing the depth of his involvement with the others. Clearly, from Lu Anne’s insistence that she didn’t even see Carolyn in Denver (although Neal’s pal Al Hinkle says they did meet briefly in a social encounter at Carolyn’s hotel room), Neal had compartmentalized his life to an extraordinary degree. Neal also managed to keep Lu Anne away from all the wild adventures, the big parties and swapping of sexual partners, that Kerouac chronicled in On the Road . Eventually Lu Anne and Allen came to share the same bed with Neal—and while not totally happy with the arrangement, neither seems to have felt excessively threatened by the other. But when Carolyn walked in unexpectedly one day and found Neal in bed with Allen and Lu Anne—with Neal in his usual position, in the middle—the sight horrified her so much that she ran out the door and headed straight for the West Coast.
    A lot of what followed is murky. Different players have left