Neal and Carolyn Cassady with their son John.
At one point in the documentary “Love Always, Carolyn” son John Cassady, [Neal Cassady’s son with the Carolyn of the title], says, “In a secret way, I dig the attention.” Someone should break it to John that his love of the spotlight is no secret; it comes through loud and clear in this documentary made by Swedish filmmakers Malin Korkeasalo and Maria Ramstrom. This underscored when Malin shared, after the film screened in Chicago at the Chicago Film Festival, that John, now in his sixties, drives around in something dubbed “the Beatmobile.”
Swedish filmmaker Malin Korkeasalo.
Asked how this documentary about Carolyn Cassady came to be made, how the filmmakers gained access to her, Malin said, “I did a short portrait of Carolyn for a magazine and, afterwards, she wanted help with her photographs.” Added Malin, “I was surprised at how eager she was to have her children involved (in the documentary).”
Carolyn Cassady was not the only woman in Neal Cassady’s life. He had a previous marriage (to LuAnne Henderson in 1947, which was annulled), became a bigamist with Dianne Hansen (he had another son named Curtis in 1950). When he died in Mexico at age 41, he had yet another woman (Anne Murphy) in his life. Said Carolyn, “Every woman fell in love with him.”
Swedish filmmaker Maria Ramstrom.
Apparently every man did, as well, since Neal and Alan Ginsberg had a well-documented homosexual relationship that spanned 20 years. I saw Alan Ginsberg come onstage to give a poetry reading at the University of California at Berkeley in the summer of 1965. A less attractive physical specimen would be difficult to find, “Howl” notwithstanding.
Neal Cassady, on the other hand, was physically handsome and very charming, but his upbringing with his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado was far from normal—although Carolyn, in the documentary says, “There is no such thing as normal.” Carolyn also says, “I don’t regret knowing Neal, but I regret all the artificial self-promoting stuff that has come after it. You just can’t get away from it.”
Maria Ramstrom and Malin Korkeasalo.
At this point in her life, nearing her 89th birthday (April 28) Carolyn has begun divesting of various mementos of her life with Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, her lover from 1952 until 1960 at Neal’s urging. As Carolyn explains in the film, “It was Neal’s wish to share me with Jack. I was against it, to begin with, but it was a survival for me to keep the man I loved.” Puffing on one of many small cigarillos, she says, “You have to go with the flow…There isn’t any hard and fast thing called love…Your heart is too big to just hold one sometimes.”
Going with the flow must have been difficult for Carolyn Cassady, who describes herself in the documentary as frigid ever since an older brother (she is one of 5 children) molested her in adolescence. Said Carolyn, “I was totally frigid from then on, but from then on I sold it for affection.” As she told the filmmakers, “You just do what you have to do. You get on with it and do it.”
Maria Ramstrom during the Q&A.
Carolyn’s early life in Lansing, Michigan and Nashville, Tennessee was fairly repressive. The youngest of 5 children, she describes a very solid Victorian upbringing, with a good home and a good education. “There was no touching or cuddling after infancy. My nanny was the only hugging I ever got. Almost anything you did, you never were quite good enough.” Carolyn left home at 16 to study drama and theater and became an accomplished painter and costumer of theatrical productions.
She met Neal and Jack in Denver at age 24 (1947) and says, “Some clog just clicked on a wheel. That’s just how it felt and I knew this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.” Unfortunately, her parents strongly disapproved. Her mother wrote Carolyn a letter in which she told her “what a horrible horror I was” and her parents eventually disinherited her.
To this day, Carolyn has money issues. At the film’s outset, her son John says of her situation that she has only 200 pounds in her British bank. (John: “She was down to 200 pounds in the bank last week, and I don’t know what we’re gonna’ do next month.”) (*Carolyn moved to Bracknell, England, outside London, at age 63 and lives there alone, as her 3 children with Neal Cassady all live in the United States. At one point in the film she jokes that the sheets she is folding have been around since 1954 and that “maybe I should sell them to Johnny Depp or somebody.”) There is also a line about “all those pictures that have been supporting me ever since” and Carolyn is heard verbally admonishing a representative of Penguin Books, who is selling a book that has a picture of Neal and Jack on the cover that Carolyn took. (“Well, shame on you! You used my photograph without permission or payment!”)
“I think we learn by our mistakes, by our wrong choices,” says the 89-year-old in the film. “The hardest part of my whole life is ending up alone.” She repeated the theme, “It’s a real drag that I ended up my life completely alone,” yet it was Carolyn who moved thousands of miles away from her children. She pronounced possible men in her age range after Neal to be “married or gay or impossible.”
When she looks back at Neal’s constant departures and irresponsible behavior as a husband and father she says, “You don’t do that (leave on a road trip) when you have a new wife and baby.” But, she adds, “He’d always talk himself back…Throwing them out never worked.” She says wryly, “He couldn’t quite get the marriage thing together.”
Cassady also “hated himself like that” when he would play the fool while high on drugs. Neal told her, “They all just look at me and I get high and behave like an idiot.” Added Carolyn, “Which is so sad. He hated himself for it. I asked him, ‘Then why do you do it?’ He responded, ‘I don’t know. They just all expect it.’” Several times, Carolyn murmurs, “Such a brilliant mind. Just horrible that he wasted it all on drugs.”
Carolyn has been quoted in Notes from the Underground as saying, “As far as I’m concerned, the Beat Generation was something made up by the media and Allen Ginsberg.” Her marriage to Cassady suffered tremendously when she refused to post his $5,000 bail after he was arrested for offering 3 marijuana cigarettes to an undercover policeman and he did 5 years in prison at San Quentin as a result. Said Carolyn, “We had some good times after that, but always in the background was resentment. He never ever really forgave me. I couldn’t risk the house, could I?”
The throngs of college students cheering for Carolyn and John Cassady at their appearances on campus seem to have bought into what Carolyn dubbed the myth of the Beat generation, without considering the consequences to the participants. Sad is the biggest emotion that comes through.
Carolyn says, “I watched both of them destroy themselves. It was hell.” She quotes from a letter written to Neal discussing their young son John, who is acting out in adolescence, and says, “I don’t know how I can stand to watch him go the way you have, at what expense?”
Maria Ramstrom and Malin Korkeasalo.
Carolyn Cassady may have lived an interesting and memorable life that she has chronicled in her own book Off the Road, but this documentary takes a look at an almost 90-year-old woman who is living alone, trying to sell off memorabilia from her past with two of literature’s notorious Merry Pranksters in order to survive. What is even more distressing is that her three children seem to also have the idea that living off their always-absent father’s name is desirable. (One daughter wanted to market a wine with the pictures of Kerouac and Cassady on the jug.)
Far from leaving the film feeling envious of a woman who has experienced this history up close and personal, it just made me feel sad. Sad for Carolyn Cassady now, and sad that her life was spent in thrall to a man who had numerous women other than Carolyn in his life. (LuAnne Henderson, his first wife, in 1947; Diane Hansen, who gave birth to Curtis in 1950; Anne Murphy when he was in Mexico, where he was found dead alongside the railroad tracks just 4 days shy of his 42nd birthday.)
As for Jack Kerouac, he drank himself to death at age 47.
Allen Ginsberg, bearded, disheveled and unkempt, in 1965 had to be physically carried offstage by the janitor at Berkeley, since squatting on the floor playing finger cymbals and mumbling incoherently didn’t really fall under the heading of “poetry reading.”
Adjectives like “ineffectual,” “powerless” and “desperate” are employed by the central figure in the film. Carolyn says of herself, “I was overwhelmed,” but adds, “That’s what makes life interesting is all these complications. Mine was pretty messed up.”
