That silence has now been broken by Carolyn Cassady, Neal’s long-suffering second wife.
Women–whether Cassady’s innumerable girlfriends and three wives or female critics unimpressed by his exploits as cocksman extraordinaire–have by and large remained pointedly silent. Most of the Cassady legend has consisted of fictionalized or anecdotal accounts, set in a romanticized Beat or hippie era and usually related by adoring acolytes, mostly men. Babbs apparently wanted nothing to interfere with his cherished image of Cassady as heroic heterosexual. Allen Ginsberg has said that Ken Babbs, a Kesey associate and an editor at Kesey’s journal Spit in the Ocean, once turned down a manuscript Ginsberg submitted describing the first time he and Cassady slept together. Even Cassady’s most devoted disciples remember him selectively. As powerful as his personality was, he’s come to seem ephemeral, an empty mirror in which everyone saw images of his or her own choosing. Yet the “real” Cassady has remained elusive. Several generations of movie and TV roadrunners, from the adventure seekers on Route 66 through the postapocalyptic mutants of Road Warrior, have gotten much of their fuel from Neal at the wheel of his endless succession of gas-guzzling chariots. Think of the mythologized passions and highway death of James Dean, the apocalyptic persona and imagery of Jim Morrison, and the more recent road-to-the-promised-land visions of Springsteen and his various clones. Survivors of that era still speak and write of him with reverence.Ĭassady has insinuated himself into the popular imagination beyond the wildest dreams of even his most ardent admirers. His mad appetite for pleasure and his speed-crazed monologues, recounted faithfully by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, made him a counterculture folk hero. A few years later, just when America thought it was safe to drive again, he came roaring back, in the flesh this time and crazier than ever, as the pilot of the bus Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters” took cross-country in the psychedelic 60s.
The wild young man dashing madly down the highways of experience, liberated from conventional restraints and searching for sex and salvation in the American night, sent chills of horror down the spine of respectable society in 1957, when Kerouac immortalized him as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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