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The Beat of New York in the Fifties

By JERRY TALLMER

It’s not every woman who has been held in the arms of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) and Marlon Brando (1924- ). In Joyce Glassman Johnson’s case, Brando actually came first.


	Photo by Tony Torn John Ventimiglia and Amy Wright

But since “Door Wide Open,” the memory-stirring play she has crafted from her 1950s letters to Kerouac and his to her, is now at the Bowery Poetry Club for the next six or so weekends, it seems appropriate to start there.

She was then, in the 1950s, Joyce Glassman, an Upper West Side blonde beauty, described by Kerouac in his “Desolation Angels” as “an interesting young person, a Jewess, elegant, middleclass sad and looking for something. She looked Polish as hell.”

She was also an aspiring, very gifted young writer, “determined,” as she puts it, “to write about sex frankly, unusual for a young woman at the time.”

Fresh out of Barnard College, where she’d matriculated at 16, she was indeed promising enough for Random House (subsequently Atheneum) editor-in-chief Hiram Haydn to give her a contract and a $500 advance a couple of years later on her beat-generation novel “Come and Join the Dance.” And before all that, thanks to the ambitions of her mother, she’d been a child actress.

“I had run down to the Village ever since high school,” says the Joyce Johnson of today, nursing a cup of herbal tea at sunset in the back garden of La Fortuna, a small, comfortable bistro in the West 70s near where she lives. “I’d go down from Hunter to hang out with the folk singers in Washington Square.”

Her best friend in high school, Elise Cowen—who figures all through the play, as she did all through the tangled web of 1950s relationships—in turn had a friend, young psychology instructor Donald Cook, who had gone to Columbia University with Allen Ginsberg.

“So,” says Ms. Johnson, “at one of Donald Cook’s parties on West 112th Street, Elise met Allen, and she and he began a relationship which meant much more to her than to Allen. This was when Allen was still trying to be straight. Peter Orlovsky [Ginsberg’s young lover over the long haul] was not yet on the scene.

“Then Allen went out to San Francisco, and in the fall of 1956 we heard about his famous reading of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery out there. Then he moved back to New York, and he and Peter moved in with Elise at her apartment in Yorkville.”

It was later that fall that Jack Kerouac showed up in New York and became involved, as the cliché goes, with a young woman named Helen Weaver.

“She kicked him out on the advice of her shrink,” says Joyce Johnson matter-of-factly, “and Jack went down to Florida to see his mother”—this is all in the play—”and in January 1957 he returned to New York. Allen, who always looked out for Jack [and for everybody else, be it said], told Jack about me, and one day when I was up at Elise’s Yorkville apartment, Jack called from a phone booth and asked to speak to me.

“He said: ‘If you’ll come down to the Howard Johnson on Eighth Street, I’ll be waiting at the counter in a red and black shirt.’”

“I’d read his first novel, ‘The Town and the City,’ had heard a great deal about him, and was anxious to meet him. When I got to the Howard Johnson, he was totally broke. He’d bought a pack of cigarettes with a $20 bill, and had been given change for $5—a disaster. I bought him a dinner of franks and beans, and that’s how it started.”

And Allen Ginsberg was the matchmaker.

That night Kerouac came back with her to her apartment on 113th Street near Columbia. She was 21. Kerouac was 35. The bombshell of “On the Road” was 10 months away.

“We lived together sporadically. He was there six or seven weeks, until he sailed for Tangiers to help William Burroughs whip ‘Naked Lunch’ into shape.”

The book that preceded the play was “Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1956-58” (Viking Penguin, 2000), the title coming from her permanent invitation by cable to the wandering boy who, whenever he showed up, would look at her novel-in-progress, approve of it, then lecture her to quit her job (editorial secretary, $50 a week), “go on the road, and open myself up to experience…”

Her 1983 memoir of the beat days, “Minor Characters” (Houghton-Mifflin), would win a National Book Award, but in it she couldn’t draw upon “all these letters from Jack that I still had. His widow, Stella Sampas Kerouac, his third wife, was still alive, and she didn’t want anything of Jack’s used. I got a categorical ‘No.’

“A few years later she died, and her younger brother, John Sampas, became executor of the Kerouac estate. He has huge Jack archives. One day he called me and said: ‘Guess what turned up’—all the letters I had written to Jack. I was amazed. I didn’t know they still existed.

“The Sampases, a Greek family in Lowell, Mass., had been very important to Jack when he was growing up. Jack’s best friend had been John’s older brother Sebastian, one of the few people in Lowell beside Jack who had literary aspirations; he wanted to be a poet. Sebastian was killed in World War II.

“Lowell,” says Joyce Johnson, who has been there often, “is a haunting town, with its redbrick factories and a little Kerouac memorial in a park near the river. In it, passages from Jack’s works are carved into slabs of granite.”

It was John Sampas who first suggested to Joyce that her letters to Jack, and Jack’s letters to her, might be woven into an interesting book.

“I didn’t commit myself until I’d read both sets of letters back and forth.”

Kerouac’s chief epistolary endearment had been to call her “My little secretary. With the long black stockings.”

Perhaps the letter that made up her mind to go ahead and try a play was Kerouac’s from Mexico City, July 28, 1957, the morning after a terrifying earthquake. “Come on [down to me],” he wrote, “we’ll be 2 young American writers on a Famous Lark that will be mentioned in our biographies. Write as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting for your answer.”

It was, she thought, and still thinks, “the closest to a love letter” of any she would ever get from him.

When she had a first draft of the play, she took it to Tony Torn, director/actor son of Rip Torn and Geraldine Page. “I’ve known Tony all his life, he went to the Bank Street School with my son Daniel Pinchbeck” (her husbands, painters both— “good painters”— both now dead, were James Johnson and Peter Pinchbeck).

“Tony read the script, was very interested, and made some suggestions. He said I should do something more dramatic with the narrator, who was my older self. It evolved from there into a dialogue”—in and around the letters—“between my older self and my younger self. And that changed everything.”

The Sanctuary Theater production, directed by Tony Torn, will have music by David Amram—most appropriately, since Amram was an integral part of the beat scene and a costar with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, Delphine Seyrig, et al, in that marvelous nutty 1950s film “Pull My Daisy.”

Award-winning actress Amy Wright plays the Joyce Johnson of today, Dave Amram’s daughter Adira Amram plays the Joyce Glassman of then, Meg Brooker plays Elise Cowen and Helen Weaver, Bob Holman appears in a supporting role. But who, oh who, would play Jack Kerouac?

“When we tried to cast it,” says the original Joyce Glassman Johnson, “we had this procession of totally hopeless people come in to try to play Jack. John Ventimiglia [Artie Bucco of ‘The Sopranos’] came at the very end of the audition. We were sitting around in despair.

“And then this guy read, and I thought Jack was in the room. Phrasing, timing, even to body language—it was uncanny.”

So that’s who’ll be playing Jack Kerouac in “Door Wide Open,” Saturdays and Sundays at 7:30 p.m., at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery: John Ventimiglia.

It might be expected that a girl who in her early teens would hang out with the folk singers in Washington Square might not often be on the best of terms with her father, an auditor for the Metropolitan Tobacco Company, and her mother, who had dreams of being a singer of Schubert lieder.

Still, it was because of mama’s aspirations that Joyce Glassman found herself on stage, at age 8, on Broadway, in “I Remember Mama,” which may be remembered as the drama in which a 19-year-old named Marlon Brando also made his Broadway debut.

Even before that, Joyce had been in a play directed by Erwin Piscator at the New School, down on 12th Street. It was called “Bobino,” it was by Stanley Kauffman, and in it Elaine Stritch played a cow, Marlon Brando played a bear and also a tumbling soldier, and tiny Joyce Glassman played Cupid.

“And each performance, Brando would carry me in his arms across the stage, wrapped up in a blanket, and say in my ear: ‘Okay, kid, tonight I’m gonna drop ya.”

As a lover, Joyce Johnson says in the play, Jack Kerouac “was kind of brotherly.” Maybe she should have stuck with Marlon Brando.