Suburban swansong: Visiting Beat's great dame

Ten years ago, I went to the home of Carolyn Cassady in the outer reaches of the English capital. Our audience was a last chance to meet one of the most important women in this cultural milieu

I NOTICED quite recently that the 1958 movie production of Eugene O'Neill's play Desire Under the Elms was on British TV. The picture starred a leading Hollywood name in Anthony Perkins and featured the US debut of a little-known Italian actress called Sophia Loren.

It reminded me of a highly memorable experience back in 2012, a whole ten years ago now, when I joined my American friend Mark Bliesener, musician, rock writer and band manager and friend of the three Cassady children, on a trip to Carolyn Cassady's home in the west London suburb of Bracknell.

Cassady was, of course, one of the important figures who mingled with the original Beat Generation group. She was married to Neal Cassady, was a friend, then lover, of Jack Kerouac and knew Ginsberg, too, as part of that dynamic circle.

Pictured above: Carolyn Cassady during the war years. ‘Mom during the war at Occupational Therapy training school at Mills College, Oakland, CA’, Cathy Cassady

Much later, she wrote one of the best accounts of those relationships. Entitled Off the Road and published in 1990, it reminded readers that when her husband and Kerouac disappeared for long periods – a cross country trip, an extended night on the town in bars and jazz clubs – she was the steady presence who kept an active family life in gear and on track.

I had met Carolyn a few times before. In 1996, she was in Edinburgh for the arts festival, aiding journalist Steve Turner to launch his Kerouac biography Angelheaded Hipster and we said hello. In fact, in that year’s Scottish culture jamboree, there was a play about the romantic triangle of Cassady, Kerouac and Carolyn. I reviewed it; I think she even attended a performance.

In the later 1990s, she then turned up in the unlikely location of market town Batley in the heart of West Yorkshire in a live showcase organised by my friend and punk poet Nick Toczek and Carolyn and I shared a few, fleeting words.

In 2008, I had a closer encounter when the University of Birmingham hosted the first UK exhibition of the famed On the Road scroll in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts on the city campus. Principal organiser Dick Ellis, Carolyn, poet Michael Horovitz and myself all spoke from the platform on an exciting night for Beat scholars and fans.

But let’s return to where we came in. Some weeks before I headed to the suburban outskirts of London to visit Carolyn’s latter-day home, I had seen Kirsten Dunst play her in the new, and long-awaited, cinema version of On the Road, overseen by the much-vaunted Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles.

In the movie Carolyn was depicted in a Denver bar with Kerouac/Paradise (Sam Riley) and Cassady/Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) enthusing about her college studies and how she had produced a theatrical design for the stage play Desire Under the Elms.

Pictured above: Loren and Perkins in the movie Desire Under the Elms

I travelled to London that autumn from Leeds and late in the 200-mile journey spotted a poster from an Underground train window trumpeting a new production of the O'Neill play, which was opening in the capital. It offered a perfect area of conversation to later explore with our host.

When Mark, who in subsequent years would run the annual ‘Birthday Bash’ for Neal Cassady in Colorado’s Mile High City, and I arrived at Carolyn's home, we made suitable small talk with the grand dame of the central Beat clique.

It became livelier when she described an earlier visit from actor Hedlund, a four-hour encounter that had not gone down particularly well. The young star and the slightly worldweary literary veteran had tussled somewhat, as they discussed his role as her other half on screen, while outside the unprepossessing bungalow a taxi meter ratcheted up a huge fare. 

Pictured above: Carolyn Cassady in later years with photograph of her with Neal

However, and I still had that small ace – Desire Under the Elms – to discuss with this legendary femme and lighten the mood: did she remember her work on the mid-1940s show? And might she be planning to see the revival of the play in the West End?

We chatted for an hour and a half – I admired a wonderful portrait she had created of Allen Ginsberg with strong echoes of mystic/artist/poet William Blake – and, finally, I had the chance to raise the O'Neill matter. After all, hadn't she tired of interviewers only talking about the men in her life rather than her own interests and achievements?

Pictured above: Carolyn Cassady’s compelling painting of a young Ginsberg with his mystic muse William Blake powerfully referenced. It was completed in 1991

Anti-climax: Carolyn could remember nothing about college production, was quite unaware about the latest presentation in a London theatre, in fact barely seem to know the dramatic work at all!

Still, a small moan; the chance to meet Carolyn Cassady for a final time – she would sadly die, aged 90, the next year – was a wonderful and strange get-together in a chintzy lounge on the grey outer reaches of an English metropolis and Neal's one-time wife still as sparky and spiky, assertive and uncompromising, as she had always been, a formidable spirit transplanted to the quieter culs-de-sac of a subdued, almost anonymous, Berkshire parish.

Credit: I would like to thank the elder daughter of Neal and Carolyn, Cathy Cassady, for her kind help in locating and sharing some images with me, particularly the painting based on Blake and featuring Ginsberg

Notes: There are other articles about the Cassadys in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation. See – ‘Johnny Depp accepts Beat Laureate prize’, September 6th, 2022; ‘Interview #9: John Cassady’, August 4th, 2022; ‘Graphic memoir: Portrait of Dean as a young boy’, May 2nd, 2022; ‘Dreaming of Cassady’, April 7th, 2022; ‘Down Mexico way: Memories of a father’, February 23rd, 2022; ‘Correspondence #4: Cathy Cassady’, January 27th, 2022; and ‘Covid spikes Cassady “Bash”’, January 9th, 2022.