Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson from Lansing, Michigan, Carolyn Cassady, is 88 years old today. [April 2013, she makes 90 & see note on her passing in September 2013 – here]
“The only reason anyone’s interested in me is because I was married to Neal Cassady and the lover of Jack Kerouac”, she declares, forthrightly, at the outset, in the trailer for the new documentary movie Love Always, Carolyn, a movie made by two Swedish women, Maria Ramstrom and Malin Korkeasalo, on her blessed and cursed life (a blessed one, mostly!). “This is a film about a woman’s search for personal recognition”, the directors declare, “and the price of a life in the public eye”.
A revealing 2007 interview with Carolyn (by Barnaby Smith) can be read here.
Further (2011) interviews here and here
We at the Allen Ginsberg Project wish her a very happy birthday!
Good to see Carolyn’s birthday commemorated. And a shock to realise that it’s close to seven years since she died. I was in close contact with her for the last nine years of her life. Towards the end I was lobbying journalists and Members of the UK Parliament to allow John Allen into the country to care for her. We became acquainted after I was the 13th Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence in Orlando, Fla – the first Brit to have that honour.
I wrote a short account of our friendship. It appeared in the UK publication Beat Scene (issue No. 70, Spring 2013). I have since published it as an e-book on amazon. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078YY8B7Z
I wonder whether you would consider adding it to the links you have here. I think it’s informative and relevant.