One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road Review

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One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road ReviewWhen I read bio books, I am looking for the story behind the story. I found it in "One and Only: The Untold Story of `On the Road'. Kerouac scholar, Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos, daughter of Lu Anne Henderson, collaborate on this bio, based on transcriptions of tapes from interviews that Nicosia did with Lu Anne Henderson in 1978. Henderson was Neal Cassady's first wife and the inspiration for the Mary Lou character in Kerouac's novel, "On the Road". The book is beautifully written and based on scholarship.
Nicosia maintains that Lu Anne Henderson played a pivotal role in the development of the relationship between these two men, but that's never been well understood or accepted. In fact, it's been all but ignored or sexed up and romanticized by Hollywood (as in the movie, Heart Beat) and that's all we remember. The Beat girl friends, lovers, wives, and ex-wives, they all seemed like cardboard cut-out characters, easily interchangeable, forgettable, marginalized. Not this time.
"One and Only" looks deeper into the role that Lu Anne Henderson played as a connecting force between these two unlikely friends. She was non-judgmental, an empathic woman who understood men and their needs. A man could be a mama's baby--Jack, or a horrible philanderer-- Neal, but Lu Anne didn't seem to hold it against them. She was in the middle, a trusted confidant, a touchstone for two very different men. And they loved and respected her for it. And she loved them back. And this was way before the sexual revolution.
Anne Marie Santos tells how her mother sheltered her daughter from all the tawdry Beat stuff. Lu Anne, by now a divorced single mother, managed the Pink Elephant, a jazz club on Broadway in San Francisco for many years. During that time, Lu Anne made a life for her daughter, but never cut Neal Cassady off. Al Hinkle handled their meet ups in New York or wherever. Anne Marie tells the story of the time Neal Cassady came to their house in Daly City. She had no idea of who this guy was, some old friend of her mother's, that's all. As manager of a jazz club, her mother had a lot of strange friends,including Mayor George Moscone.
Now I can't wait to see the movie of "On the Road". I was worried that when the movie was finally made, they would ruin it! Thank goodness, this time Hollywood relied on good sound character research rather than the same tired old clichés. (Nicosia and Santos are pictured on the set of "On The Road" in the book so they were involved--hooray!) I am hopeful that Mary Lou (Lu Anne) will be portrayed for what she was --a woman of influence with a big heart who played a big role in the lives of these two iconic men and Beat history.
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