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| Natalie Jackson |
Jackson, who was a model of Robert LaVigne's, gained Beat notoriety from having an affair with Kerouac's muse, Neal Cassady. She killed herself by slitting her throat and throwing herself off the roof of 1051 Franklin Street (reached from her apartment's roof at 1041) in San Francisco, supposedly over her fear of the consequences from having impersonated Neal's wife, Carolyn, to help Neal get money from the bank for a race track betting scheme. Kerouac describes Jackson's death in The Dharma Bums Chapter 15 thus:
The musicians and I drank up all the wine and talked, till about midnight, and Rosie seemed to be all right now, lying on the couch, talking, even laughing a bit, eating her sandwiches and drinking some tea I'd brewed her. The musicians left and I slept on the kitchen floor in my new sleeping bag. But when Cody came home that night and I was gone she went up on the roof while he was asleep and broke the skylight to get jagged bits of glass to cut her wrists, and was sitting there bleeding at dawn when a neighbor saw her and sent for the cops and when the cops ran out on the roof to help her that was it: she saw the great cops who were going to arrest us all and made a run for the roof edge. The young Irish cop made a flying tackle and just got a hold of her bathrobe but she fell out of it and fell naked to the sidewalk six flights below. (Penguin Books, 1976, p. 112)
Note that I reported she cut her throat but Kerouac said wrists. I depended on Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac for the throat detail (University of California Press, 1994, p. 499). And it seems Natalie didn't necessarily throw herself off the roof, but may have accidentally fallen off while backing away from the police officer who attempted to grab her. It's hard to say if she would have survived cutting herself had the police been successful in preventing her fall.
Either way, Natalie died tragically and too young, one of several Beat figures to do so (e.g., Bill Cannastra and David Kammerer).
RIP, Ms. Jackson.
Natalie Jackson left us with an interesting tape recording:
ReplyDelete"There's also talk of making a record album of JAZZ OF THE BEAT
GENERATION, it was recited on a tape by a girl, Natalie Jackson, who
committed suicide last Fall, supposed to be so good they want to make an album (in LA), so if so, I'll contact you with the people, the owner of the tape and also the record publishers."
[Kerouac to his agent, Sterling Lord, September 1956]
Have you heard the tape recording? About 30 years ago I heard one that contained Neal reading Proust while Jack corrected his French, then Natalie doing a real Kerouassidian rant then singing a beautiful rendition of It Might As Well Be Spring.
ReplyDeleteHi. Do you have a link to the recording at all? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it exists but will check into it....
ReplyDeleteThe tape of Neal reading Proust, corrected by Kerouac, is a separate recording, made in 1952.
ReplyDeleteThe Natalie Jackson tape, from 1955, features her reading Kerouac's "Jazz of the Beat Generation," singing "It Might as Well Be Spring," and goofing off.
The love of neals life
ReplyDelete