In Conversation with Carolyn Cassady
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ย. 2024
- A short interview with Carolyn Cassady filmed at her home in June 2013 for the UK Kerouac Convention. Carolyn discusses a range of things including, of course, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, her family and the recent "On The Road" film.
This interview was filmed three months before Carolyn passed away in September, 2013. To our knowledge, this is the last interview she gave.
www.14167films.com
Such delightful memories of the day. We had tea and biscuits and she showed us through her photos and archives. A lovely lady.
I like this interview since Carolyn was born and lived thru the same era as my parents. Yet, she and the rest of Beat Generation, had nothing in common with my parents or any of the older folks of the Greatest Generation.
Based on her stated age call mom death date and the physical surroundings of this interview she would’ve passed away within 4 to 5 months after this video was made. She was obviously a very intelligent and talented lady.
There's a nice remembrance of her on the Brian Hassett web site.
She was a friend and someone I loved very much and am so sorry she's not still here to correct history and grammar ;-) - but it's is so karmically fantastic - and like her - that she did this interview shortly before check-out - and was her regular sharp self right up until the end.
RIP CC
Rest In joyous Peace
Gerald Nicosia, the author of the best Kerouac biography, MEMORY BABE, published in 1983 and updated in 2022, also wrote a very interesting book about LuAnne Henderson, Neal Cassady's first wife, his 16 year old bride. The book is THE ONE AND ONLY. It is worth the read.
To get more information I recommend Carolyns' book "Off the Road".I'm sure Carolyn and Neil both influenced Kerouacs' books.
NEAL
Couldn’t help but wonder if those talkative birds in the back were the spirits of Neil & Jack, just yakking away? They sure are talkative birds! RIP Carolyn. I’ll love you forever, my sister ❤
Thought I heard Allen!😮
She seemed really disappointed with the movie. What a shame it wasn't better, if the wife of Neal Cassady says, it was in accurate, then by god I believe it
She commented that she felt the casting for the movie was really off. She said she'd met the actors and they were all lovely people, but they were Hollywood versions of the book. She particularly commented on how masculine and 'strong' Jack Kerouac was and how she felt Sam Riley did not capture this. She was quite positive about Kirsten Stewart though. She also felt the movie was more heterosexualised than the book.
Same
Hearing her description of Neal sure sounds like Thomas Jane captured Neal very well in the film Last Time I Committed Suicide about the letter about Joan that started it all for Kerouac --
Fantastic ,, and wonderful woman too :) Go Jake and Neil !! and all the rest.
NEAL
RIP To Camille of on and off the road fame .
R.I.PX I bumped into Carolyn in the early ninties in Compendium in Camden town. By synchronicity / coincidence, I'd been in there buying a new edition of Kerouac's S.F. Blues. Carolyn must've been in there shopping herself I guess. Today, by coincidence / synchronicity, I'd been checking out some Burroughs then Kerouac pieces on TH-cam and just thought I'd check Carolyn's Wiki page to see how things were going only to find she had very recently passed. Hadn't bothered with beat lit for years
I loved that shop. Great Beats section. Incidentally, I wrote to Carolyn several times in the early to mid 1990s about her experiences with Kerouac etc and had some lovely replies. One that really spring to mind is ‘I was a real square. Jack too, actually.’ I always liked that comment and it revealed a lot about the essential shyness and conservativeness of that incredibly expansive mind.
It's interesting that after all the years, she yet has a trace of her childhood Tennessee accent.
R.I.P
RIP
I saw the film 1 time and I can agree with her. It didnt have the FEEL
she don´t show respect at all for Keruac, but without him who the hell will even intretsing in one thing about this woman?
King Crimson: Neal and Jack and Me.
Magnifique de lucidité cette femme ... Et elle me confirme l'appréciation que j'ai eue du film "on the road" : pas le bon casting, pas les bonnes attitudes, focalisation sur le sexe et la débauche et quasi absence de poésie alors que le livre est une poésie géante sur l'Amérique.
In On The Road by Jack Kerouac is this Mary Lou or Camille
+Ali Coates Camille... Dean's (Neal's) second wife.
Ali Coates Read her book, Off the Road.
Mary Lou was LuAnn Henderson, Cassady's first wife (and on-again/off-again lover in later years). Cassady married her when she was fifteen, by the way.
I wanted to learn about Jack and Neil , She didn't much about them or the times.
Every interview I've watched with her she basically bad mouths Jack. Jealousy perhaps? He was a genius and he sacrificed his whole life to get all of their story out. Without him nobody would care who she is. I get that she knew him personally etc but I just wish she had a little more respect for what he did for all of us...
Agreed he was a genius. maybe he gravitated toward women who were the antithesis of him. and then out of duty he bequeathed the fruits of his legacy toward his obligations. Just a theory. but in all her interviews, she does not seem like a fan of his work necessarily. And maybe what has distilled to the present day is not who he truly was, more what his idealistic self wasStriving for. Nevertheless, quite an achievement. And one that hs taken its own shape and form. She basically admitted that she had no interest in literature during her formative years. Not to take away from the role that she played, That of the antithetical anchor.
Jack let alcohol sacrifice him
She didn't bad mouth him. I knew her. She loved Jack but she thought he was playing a part. She felt he was trying to be a macho type when he was in fact a tender man. She also told me that On the Road was not a favorite of hers. She said it was about what Jack and Neal were doing while they were out adventuring and she didn't want to know what they were doing. She knew Neal was still seeing Lu Anne and was meeting up with her wherever she happened to be.
She often said Jack was a genius and that he believed in life. She never stopped loving him. She was very sorry to see him go downhill -- she and Neal both.
As for jealousy -- just no. I can see where it sounds as if she was dismissing Jack's work by mentioning Neal's letters, but she wasn't. She thought Jack was great. But she was very close to him and to Neal, so she couldn't see Jack's work the way other people could, and she says that in this interview.
agree!
Neal Cassady as described by Jerry Garcia married to this calm woman?
Grail stuff like this.....
prior to today. Meaningfull coincidences abound......
Probably despises that beautiful sharp chick marylou
I corresponded with her for awhile from about 2009 to 2012. I asked her about Lu Anne. She didn't despise Lu Anne but she didn't much care about her, either. She wasn't curious about Lu Anne or what had happened to her.
@@ernestitoe did you write her?
@@intoxicatingmooneyes9150 I had heard she had reissued her book about the beats, called Off The Road. For the hell of it, I got her email address from a Kerouac website and sent a letter. I thought I would get a simple thank you. But she seemed to like chatting with me. So we kept corresponding. I talked to her on the phone a few times. It was fun talking to her.
@@ernestitoe I’m so jealous!!! Did she say anything interesting about dean or jack? I’m obsessed with Kerouac and his style of writing and of course the blue light of dean!
@@intoxicatingmooneyes9150 Actually, she didn't say much about Neal or Jack she hadn't already written about in her book, except that when I said it seemed Jack was chronically depressed and wrote about death (mostly the death of his brother Gerard), she said Jack believed in life and was life-affirming. On the Road was not a favorite of hers, she told me, because she didn't want to know what Jack and Neal were up to when they were off adventuring. She was certain Neal's detour to Denver in one of their early trips was to see Lu Anne ("Marylou"), and so it was. I ran by her a passage in Hunter Thompson's book Hell's Angels: “The party [at Ken Kesey's place] continued for two days and nights, but the only other crisis came when the worldly inspiration for the protagonist of several recent novels stood naked on the private side of the creek and screamed off a long, brutal diatribe against the cops only twenty yards away. He was swaying and yelling in the bright glare of a light from the porch, holding a beer bottle in one hand and shaking his fist at the objects of his scorn: 'You sneaky motherfuckers! What the fuck's wrong with you? Come on over here and see what you get. . . goddamn your shit-filled souls anyway!' Then he would laugh and wave his beer around. 'Don't fuck with me, you sons of shitlovers. Come on over. You'll get every fucking thing you deserve.'
"Luckily, somebody pulled him back to the party, still naked and yelling. His drunken challenge to the cops might have kicked off a real disaster. In California and most other states the police cannot legally invade private property without a search warrant unless (1) they are reasonably certain a crime is being committed or (2) they are invited by the owner or occupant of the property. His performance could have been interpreted either way if the cops had been in the mood, and at that stage in the evening a raiding party could not have made it across the bridge without violence.” Carolyn wasn't familiar with the passage; I asked her if that sounded like Neal. She said, "I'm afraid it does." At that time, she told me, Neal didn't care if he lived or died. When Neal was driving Ken Kesey's bus, he was at that stage. He told Carolyn he felt like a performing animal, but he never could deny people the pleasure of being entertained by him.
When I read articles about Jack's work in French, and asked her if she had been aware of it, she said she remembered seeing some of Jack's notebooks containing writings in French, but she didn't try to read it and didn't ask him about it. One of the things I've read about Jack's writing comes from interviews with French-Canadians. They said it was obvious Jack was thinking in his first language, the working-class dialect of Québécois French. They call it "Joual," their pronunciation of the word cheval (horse). I can find the articles. If you want to friend me on Facebook, I can PM you with material I find and anything else I can remember.
Geller was always a con artist. She ought to have known that after being married to Neal Cassady. Sounds like she was attracted to that sort of guy.
She had a blind spot when it came to psychic phenomena. I knew her well enough to try to point out the inconsistencies and the outright fraud involved with such phenomena, but she wouldn't hear of it.
She made it to 90.....good effort. But it was after an emergency appendectomy, that is rather lame.
RIP