The Lost Photos of Jack Kerouac

In 1959, Robert Frank—fresh off the publication of his seminal book of photography, The Americans—went on assignment for PLAYBOY to photograph his friend Jack Kerouac. author of On the Road and the face of the Beat aeneration. Fiftv-

three years later, we offer these never-before-seen photos.

ack Kerouac was a great camera subject. After the publication of On the Road in 1957 made him a star, his face was everywhere. He was on TV explaining "the Beat gen­eration." He was running from shut-terbugs who were sure that wherever Kerouac was, history was too. The most characteristic shot of the time might be Fred McDarrah's 1958 pho­tograph of Kerouac leaving a New Year's Eve party at the Artists' Club in New York City. Caught in a crush out the door, his hair straggly with sweat, his eyes wide and angry, his mouth open in something like shock: Is this really what I wanted?

It was an explosion of celebrity, something Kerouac deeply wanted. Going back and forth over pos­sible titles for his book as revisions on his three-week-fever-dream, one-paragraph manuscript neared their conclusion, he kept casting about

for the one that would make the most noise, that would best marry pub­licity and literature. Should it be On the Road? Souls on the Road? The Beat Generation? The Hip Genera­tion? WoWt The Rock and Roll Road? He was thinking like an advertising man—and it makes perfect, just barely subconscious sense that on Mad Men, as the series began in 2007, set in the late 1950s, Jon Hamm's Don Draper was all but Jack Kerouac's doppelgan-ger. It wasn't simply their faces, though Hamm's resemblance to Kerouac might have been part of why he was cast. It was the Draper character as the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, brought him into focus: the Madison Avenue smoothy in a dark suit and wing rips, with a blonde wife and kids

in the suburbs, dreaming of escaping to Paris to become a writer, sneaking off from the office to watch odd foreign films or visit his beatnik girlfriend in Greenwich Village, reading Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency and feeling stabbed in the heart: "Now I am quietly waiting for/The catastrophe of my personality/To seem beautiful again,/And interesting, and modern."

Those lines, from 1957, could go right on top of the McDarrah photo­graph. That is why the pictures Robert Frank made of Kerouac—and himself— in 1959 are such a relief: such a different story.

Frank was born in Zurich in 1924. He came to the United States in 1947. After the great American documentary photographer Walker Evans helped him

receive a Guggenheim fellowship in 1955, Frank set out to photograph the country, from New York to New Orleans to Los Angeles to San Francisco. In 1957 he met Kerouac in New York and showed him some of his road pictures. When Frank's The Americans was published in 1959, Kerouac's introduction blew the trumpet: "The faces don't editorialize or criticize or say anything but This is the way we are in real life and if you don't like it I don't know anything about it 'cause I'm living my own life my way and may God bless us all, mebbe'...'if we deserve it.'" In 1959, Frank, correcting with Alfred Leslie, made his first film, Pull My Daisy. Based on Kerouac's play The Beat Genera­tion, it featured painters Larry Rivers and Alice Neel, Beat poets Allen Ginsberg

and Gregory Corso, and Delphine Seyrig, the luminous actress who two years later would become the icon of New Wave cinema for her performance in Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad. Kerouac provided a voice-over: 'There's nothing out there but a million scream­ing 90-year-old men being run over by gaso­line trucks. So throw a match on it."

Kerouac and Frank were speaking the same language. There are lines in On the Road, especially in its first-draft, real-names 1951 version, that can match the faces, postures, gestures and settings of the 83 photographs Frank collected in The Americans: "...old bum Neal Cassady the Barber" —Kerouac's road brother Neal Cassady's father—"dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West" (it's that "one by one" that sears the im­age into your mind, that gives the line such an awful, inescapable rhythm); "At the end of the American road is a man and a woman mak-

ing love in a hotel room." But while 55 years after its publication On the Road was still sell­ing 100,000 copies a year, Frank's pictures may have sunk more deeply into the American imagination. What perhaps drew the Rolling Stones to The Americans in 1972, when they scavenged Frank's work for the blazing photo collages that make up the sleeve and liner art of Exile on Main Street, and led them to hire Frank that same year, in a retracing of his steps from the 1950s, to film their tour from coast to coast—or what, 17 years after that, led David Fincher, shooting the video for Don Henley's song "The End of the Innocence," to re<reate images from The Americans as if they were common coin (so naturalistically American they had no author, only witnesses) —may be what is most indelible in the book: pictures of men and women doing what they know how to do best. Pictures of people doing what they are most at (concluded on page 189)

KERDUAC

(continued from page 69) home doing: watching a parade, attending a funeral, picking out a song on a jukebox, standing behind a lunch counter, sitting be­hind the wheel of a car, pulling over to the side of the highway. That the pictures—in the faces they capture, in the way people hold themselves, in dimming shadows or the glar­ing brightness of a room lit by a single, shade-less bulb—communicate more than anything else fatigue, resignation, anonymity, failure and wariness only reinforces the sense of fatalism that drives The Americans across the map it makes. You are seeing people in tune with themselves and their world, and with a stolid presence that implies a profound choice has been made about life or that there is no choice at all. It's this duality that makes Frank's pictures at once delicate and brutal, frightening and peaceful. They are pictures of people coming to terms with fate.

That same feeling moves through Frank's pictures of Kerouac. It's still 1959, at the height of Kerouac's fame, and you are in a room filled with quiet and doubt. Kerouac is at his desk, working on the sort of little note­books he filled on his car trips with Cassady. His face is slightly puffy. In one strong profile portrait, his hair is slicked bark in a way that suggests a working-class model for characters Marlon Brando and James Dean have al­ready played: someone who, having invented what turned out to have been a timeless American look, was there before The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause and who, with not a hair out of place, is still here now. There's confidence and determination, and maybe an edge of defeat, in the way he looks down on what he's been writing. Another picture shows only Kerouac's hands on a notebook, and his hands seem weathered and old. And why not? This was Jack Kerouac at the end of his era, with a friend there to make pictures

that might seal their friendship—as you can see in the shot of Frank and Kerouac together reflected in a mirror, with the photographer seeing something his subject doesn't—or me­morialize it. The photographs, and the tired, uncertain man they show, were a lx;t on the future. Kerouac had 10 years left.

In 1975 Robert Frank appeared in Wheeler Auditorium al the University of California at Berkeley to screen Cocksutker Blues, his banned, already legendary film, for the first time. "I made this film with the Roll­ing Stones in 1972," he told the audience. "It seems like 200 years ago. It was very difficult to make. I'm happy to show it, even if it isn't completely legal." He laughed, and Frank is not a man with laughter all over his face.

The film was banned by the Rolling Stones, who owned it, because—Frank told me at the time—the 16-millimeter pic­ture, with staged scenes of groupies being stripped and having sex in the band's plane and junkies shooting up, did not cel­ebrate anything. It wasn't a presentation of the Rolling Stones as the trademarked greatest-rock-and-roll-band-in-the-world. 11 was only a search for images. Faces on a bill­board appearing and then disappearing as a car passed beneath it in slow motion. A hand waving from a jail cell as another car sped by. The film has since become slightly more visible than it was in 1975. Because of a legal settle­ment between Frank and the Stones, Cocksudter Blues can be shown, but only in a nontheatrical setting and only with Frank present.

This year, the movie version of On the Road— Kerouac, it's said, originally saw Brando as Cassady and himself as himself—will finally appear, directed by Walter Salles and featuring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. You can imagine that, that day in 1959, Kerouac and Frank might have talked about Frank doing it. But he already had, and he would do it again.

KERDUAC AND FRANK WERE SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE. KEROUAC BLEW THE TRUMPET FOR FRANK.