This Beat Battle Goes On and On

They say it’s about Jack.

Yeah, there’s a pudgy pile of wills and lawsuits and mean chatter-chatter blah-blah, but look what’s at stake--the future of Jack Kerouac’s legacy. Hard to tell, though, with all that mad jazz going on fortissimo, so fortissimo that you wonder where Kerouac is in all this.

The Beat Generation legend might have laughed--collapsed into giggles, really--at the fight over his estate, between a scholar who never met him and the youngest brother of his third wife. Not to mention the subfight over who gets to be the Great Biographer of Jack Kerouac, who died sad and drunk in 1969 when he wasn’t worth much more than the butts he used to forage for smokes. Where were all these people then? Has everybody flipped?

Or is it that his $53,280 estate--Underwood typewriter, pocket notebooks, royalties--is now worth roughly $10 million, give or take two bits? Or that Kerouac has morphed into a pop-tart of a pop icon on CD-ROM, in Gap and Volvo ads, in poetry read by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder? Rattle-ti-boom, all the hullabaloo threatens to overshadow the writer whose 1957 classic, “On the Road,” is a mad, hip ode to anti-materialist frenzy.

The muck-slinging started in 1994 with a lawsuit filed by Kerouac’s only child.

Then it turned into a fight that was not so much about Kerouac as about who owns Kerouac.

The prize? A literary treasure chest of Kerouac’s journals, letters and unpublished works--and the right to control the property of a man who hopped freight trains and hung with shipboard messmen. Oh, how Kerouac would have howled Whooee! at the guerrilla warfare waged to commandeer his antihero of a life. In this tiny Kerouacian-turned-Gilligan’s Island sorta universe, every bobble of a coconut is eyeballed as a weapon of mass destruction. Here, the voices are few, righteous, demanding, like bullhorns in a fog.

Who can say, “It’s about Jack,” loudest?

Take your pick:

There’s John Sampas, Kerouac’s brother-in-law. He is lanky and low-key, a 65-year-old retired Army researcher who can put steel into his New England drawl. Chain-smoking Parliament Lights, he keeps a fierce hold on the estate, which he runs from his cluttered Victorian cottage in Lowell, Kerouac’s hometown.

There’s scholar Gerald Nicosia, 48, who wrote one of the two major Kerouac biographies. He is squat and drive-all-night punchy. His voice often pitches to a whine or a shout--especially when he’s raging about Ann Charters, the first Kerouac biographer. Or about Douglas Brinkley, the estate’s handpicked biographer, who might end up trumping them both.

With a court date pending, Nicosia and Sampas are each trying to off-road the other. Nicosia’s style is the frontal attack (sample Internet posting: “YOU’RE A LIAR!”), while Sampas directs behind the scenes, trotting out his attorney to deny allegations that he is selling off truckloads of Kerouac’s papers and belongings. (Sample criticism: “Sampas does not talk to anyone unless they have it in mind to buy a pair of the master’s underpants”--the Observer, a London newspaper.)

What rankles Beat fans is how the melodrama is eclipsing Kerouac himself. Twice in 1995, Nicosia heckled Charters on a book-signing tour; one store owner hired bodyguards for the 61-year-old English professor. An ensuing flame war recently shut down Beat-L, an Internet discussion forum for about 250 Beat scholars and fans. Beat-L’s founder had tried to stop the crude exchanges over the estate fight but then gave up.

Sampas tracks the media to find out what Nicosia is up to but insists he is too busy running the estate to respond to “lies and slanders.” Besides, he says, “I like [Nicosia] scratching on the windowpane.”

“Mr. Sampas,” sniffs Nicosia, “isn’t a literary man.”

Signature on Will Was Forged, Daughter Said

Jack Kerouac was a madman bum and angel, who sometimes wrote all night in a benny-popping rush on fat rolls of Teletype paper, no time to work sheet by sheet. He turned out poetry and essays, but what he’s most famous for are the novels (including “Visions of Cody” and “Dharma Bums”) and the bohemian life they celebrated. He died at 47 in St. Petersburg, Fla., of a stomach hemorrhage after too much hard drinking. He thought no one cared.

In a 1 1/2-page will, he left a bunch of junk to his mother, Gabrielle Kerouac. Gabrielle died in 1973. She left everything to Stella Sampas, Kerouac’s wife of three years. Stella died in 1990 and willed the estate to her brothers and sisters, who appointed John Sampas, the youngest, as executor.

Enter Jan Kerouac, the daughter.

Four years ago, Jan filed a Florida lawsuit, charging that the signature on her grandmother’s will was forged. (In a previous wrangle in the early ‘80s, she had negotiated with Stella Sampas for 50% of Kerouac’s considerable U.S. royalties.) If the courts agree, Jan’s estate will get part of her father’s archive. So will Jan’s cousin, a struggling Northern California carpenter.

Jan, who had been battling kidney disease, died at 44 in Albuquerque before the suit went to trial.

Which is where Nicosia comes in. Jan’s friend and literary executor, he awaits a New Mexico court’s decision on whether he can carry on her fight against the Sampas family. But what’s the fight for?

What Jan wanted, says her lawyer, Thomas Brill, was a father. “The closer Jan got to her death, the less she cared about getting money out of a lawsuit and the more she thought about her dad being her dad, and how to get close to him. The lawsuit was the only way to live out that hope.”

Kerouac abandoned Jan’s mother in 1951, just after he wrote “On the Road.” They had been married for six months. He denied being Jan’s father until he was slapped with a lawsuit for child support.

The last time Jan saw her father was in Lowell. She was 15, pregnant and running away to Mexico, where she delivered a stillborn child. In her memoir, “Baby Driver,” she wrote that he sat in a rocking chair, a foot from the TV, chugging whiskey and watching “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

As she got older, everyone said Jan looked like a young Jane Fonda. She was as restless as her father. She turned tricks for gas money or heroin; she worked as dishwasher or maid. At the end, in bad health, she was living off the royalties, her portion of which ran as high as $125,000 a year. She used to say she had nothing of her father’s but his DNA.

Jan met Nicosia in 1978, when he was researching his biography, “Memory Babe.” They talked on the phone almost every day; just before she died, she sent chocolate Easter bunnies to his baby daughter. He was the one who first showed Jan a copy of her grandmother’s will, which, she thought, looked like it was signed “Keriouac.” That set into motion a legal tug of war involving a disputed witness to the will--and the long-running sideshow.

Last year, on a World Wide Web site, Sampas declared: “Gerald Nicosia’s poisoned hand will never touch the Kerouac archive. His touch is the touch of death.”

In April, Nicosia sent a pleading 10-page letter to about 100 Beat scholars and writers, saying he was the target of a hate campaign and had received a death threat.

A biggie here is who’s selling what. Sampas sold Kerouac’s tattered raincoat to actor Johnny Depp for $10,000. “He put it on, it was like magic,” Sampas said. “It looked like it was made for him.”

Hucksterism! Nicosia cried.

Hypocrisy! Sampas countered.

On a radio show, Sampas had his lawyer call in to ask Nicosia why he and Jan had sold the arrest warrant charging her father with failure to provide child support.

According to Sampas, even Jan tried to get out from under Nicosia’s thumb. In April 1996, two months before she died, her lawyer drew up a document to yank Nicosia as literary executor--but Jan never signed it. She had authorized the document after a fight with Nicosia, according to her lawyer, but put it aside when they made up.

Still, Sampas accused Nicosia of dragging Jan into the lawsuit. So does Jan’s ex-husband, John Lash, who is general executor of her estate. A New Age writer who lives in Belgium, Lash wants to settle with the Sampas family. Nicosia and Lash don’t speak to each other anymore.

According to Nicosia, one of their last conversations went something like this: “He screams at me on the phone, ‘You piece of s---, you killed Jan Kerouac!’

“ ‘I killed her, John? . . . The lawsuit killed her?’

“I said, ‘It gave meaning to her life. . . . At least she had something to be involved in. Did you want her to sit on the couch and look at her fish all day?’ ”

Instead, she fought.

Two Biographers Have a Falling Out

In June 1995, Jan Kerouac and Nicosia traveled to a New York University conference on her father. The Beat bigwigs were there: Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure. Jan unfurled a banner reading, “Save Jack’s Papers!” and university police kicked her out with Nicosia, who tried to defend her.

Most Beats, including Ginsberg, refused to take sides but privately complained about the rat-a-tat-tat. “It keeps Kerouac from being published,” said Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore.

Kerouac wanted all his writings made public, but his widow didn’t. After his death, Stella Sampas packed his manuscripts away, in a big REVIEW THIS to the critics who had dismissed her husband as a self-indulgent windbag. (In a famous put-down, Truman Capote once declared that Kerouac’s work was typing, not writing.) Kerouac scholars pined for more than 20 years until John Sampas took over.

Relying on Kerouac’s literary agent, Sterling Lord, for advice, Sampas has authorized publication of 10 Kerouac collections--poetry, letters, essays--since 1991. There is still plenty of unpublished material, including a noir novel, “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” co-written with William S. Burroughs in the 1940s.

Sampas has approved the use of Kerouac’s image in ads. Last year, his 32-year-old nephew produced a tribute CD that includes an unpublished Kerouac poem read by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.

When he took over the estate, Sampas also sought help from Charters, the first biographer, because he remembered that his sister liked her. Charters agreed to edit “The Portable Jack Kerouac” and “Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956.” Until then, she and Nicosia were cordial.

She gave a nice blurb to his biography. He thanked her in the acknowledgments. But now Charters calls him “tiresome” and “a wannabe,” and Nicosia tells everyone she sold out to Sampas. Nicosia and Jan Kerouac shouted accusatory questions at Charters on her tour to promote the two anthologies.

“Yes, it was confrontational, but so what?” Nicosia said. “I come out of the ‘60s. We did a lot of confrontation in the ‘60s. That’s how we stopped the Vietnam War.”

Here the voices are fading, like aging raconteurs. The question is who’s gonna end up the James Boswell of Jack Kerouac?

Take your pick:

Nicosia, who is working on a book about Vietnam veterans, has a master’s degree in literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He edited Bob Kaufman’s collection, “Cranial Guitar,” which won a PEN Center USA West 1997 literary award for poetry. Nicosia’s Kerouac biography “is the best of them,” a Washington Post article said last year.

Charters, who teaches at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, has a doctorate in American literature from Columbia University. In 1966, she spent two days with Kerouac in Hyannis, Mass., while compiling a bibliography of his works. Her biography is “still the most widely read,” a reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly wrote two years ago.

“They both are well respected,” said USC English professor Leo Braudy. “Charters broke a lot of ground. Nicosia’s is more voluminous.”

“Nicosia’s biography is by far the most useful for scholars,” said English professor Jim Jones of Southwest Missouri State University. “It’s not easy to read, but if you want to find anything about Kerouac, it’s in there. Charters is the one who turned the world on to Kerouac . . . except it’s full of inaccuracies.”

Charters concedes that she made “some bad mistakes.” For instance, she wrote that Kerouac’s sister committed suicide in 1966; in later editions, a correction explained that Carolyn Kerouac Blake died of a heart attack in 1964. Charters said she was in a hurry to finish because she wanted to beat an authorized biography rumored to be in the works.

Some critics tore into Charters’ editing of the Kerouac letters. One scholar wrote an essay called “1,400 Dots,” a reference to all of Charters’ deletions.

“I didn’t take out anything that would surprise you,” said Charters, who is working on a second volume of Kerouac letters for the estate. “There wasn’t a love affair taken out between [Ginsberg] and Jack . . . to make him heterosexual. . . . There’s no attempt to whitewash him, nothing.”

In “Memory Babe,” Nicosia describes several sexual encounters Kerouac had with men. “He was trying to make Jack out to be a flaming homosexual when he wasn’t,” said Sampas.

“Both Sampas and Nicosia have an agenda,” said Mitchell Smith, editor of the Kerouac Connection, a journal. “Sampas is trying to make Kerouac a clean-cut character. Nicosia is doing a Freudian reading with all sorts of sexual innuendoes that make people uncomfortable.”

A good Kerouac biography--and there aren’t any out there, if you ask Sampas--will build a portrait of the writer from his journals and notebooks, he said. That’s why last year he approved historian Douglas Brinkley, the director of the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans, to write the authorized biography.

Brinkley, 36, just published a well-reviewed biography of President Jimmy Carter. He has also written a biography of Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s secretary of state; edited a collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters; and written an account of a bus trip across America with undergraduates.

Don’t ask him about the estate fight. “I swear to you,” he said. “I just don’t follow it.”

“Douglas Brinkley?” scoffed Nicosia. “You’re going to pick a guy who’s known for driving kids around the country on a painted bus? Why him and nobody else gets to see [the archives]?”

Oh, the world will get its shot at Kerouac’s papers, Sampas insists. In good time. When Brinkley is finished. You don’t want to ace your biographer.

Already, Sampas says, he has made several Kerouac manuscripts available by selling them to the New York Public Library--precious few, and incomplete ones, Nicosia charges. On deposit at the library is the frail roll of parchment-like paper on which Kerouac typed “On the Road.” According to several reports, Sampas turned down $1 million for the scroll. Sampas says he never tried to sell it. Though he might, with the right offer, to an institution.

But the estate is not for sale, Sampas says, adding that the rumors started after a rare books dealer he once worked with tried to get him to unload everything. Sampas says he sold only a few letters and other items to make money for estate expenses. For Jack.

Every week or so, Sampas visits Kerouac’s grave, a few miles away from the house he shares with assorted cats. One afternoon, he wore a faded red baseball cap pulled low and an untucked denim shirt with jeans. He knelt in the dirt to examine offerings from fans, including a Bic pen, cigarette butts and an empty cabernet bottle.

“I’ve come here from Oregon via Hitchhiking & Freight Train all the way,” reads a note, anchored by pebbles on the gravestone. “I’m finnaly here. . . .”

“Isn’t that fantastic?” Sampas says, shoving the scrap of paper into his jacket pocket. “Isn’t that something?”

“They certainly loved Jack, didn’t they?”