Beat letter triggers cash conflict with Kerouac, Cassady estates

Allen Ginsberg, 1959. Allen Ginsberg, 1959. Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Beat letter triggers cash conflict with Kerouac, Cassady estates 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

The estate of Jack Kerouac has laid claim to a share of the proceeds from the planned sale of a long-lost letter that’s considered a crucial document in the history of the Beats, the famed literary and cultural movement that launched from San Francisco in the 1950s.

As reported this week in The Chronicle, the letter from Beat prototype Neal Cassady to “On the Road” author Jack Kerouac was showcased for one day only at the Beat Museum in North Beach. The letter is in possession of Jean Spinosa, who found it in the effects of her late father, a San Francisco record producer. She has scheduled its auction for Dec. 17, but the Kerouac estate maintains that she has no right to do so.

“We want the return of the letter. The letter belongs to the estate,” said John Sampas, brother of Kerouac’s third wife, Stella, and literary executor of the Kerouac estate. Sampas’ attorney, George Tobia of Boston, said that if an agreement cannot be reached before the auction, a lawsuit could be imminent.

“We’re working on an arrangement whereby the letter can still be sold with an agreeable split of the proceeds,” Tobia said. “This is Brooklyn Bridge stuff. You are selling something that you don’t own.”

Cassady heirs’ claim

In addition to the Kerouac claim, the heirs of Cassady claim ownership of the words in the letter, under copyright law.

“The Cassady estate is in the process of stopping the auction until its authenticity and copyright (have) been verified by all parties,” said Jami Cassady, middle child of Neal and Carolyn Cassady, who has also retained counsel to stop the document’s sale.

“We never call it a 'letter.’ It is a 'manuscript’ always meant for publication. To call it a letter is like calling 'Naked Lunch’ a lunch.”

A lot of money could be at stake here, because the original scroll of Kerouac’s “On the Road” sold for $2.4 million in 2001, and now comes the letter that inspired Kerouac’s classic. Given Cassady’s stature as not only the main character of “On the Road” but also a key figure in Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters,” it is possible that the letter could be worth more than the scroll.

Extraordinary market

“There is an enormous market for Cassady and Kerouac which goes beyond the normal market for signed first editions,” said Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.”

“Kerouac and Cassady. People say their names together like Abbott and Costello. They fall into a category where you find James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. They are icons of popular culture, and these are the most sought-after in the collector’s market.”

“The Joan Anderson Letter,” as it is called, was written from Cassady’s home, 29 Russell St., on Russian Hill, and dated Dec. 17, 1950. Typed single spaced on both sides of nine sheets of paper, the letter’s 16,000 words are of great literary interest because its stream-of-consciousness style is what caused Kerouac to scrap his more traditional style and create the jazzy template that became “On the Road,” published in 1957 and still considered the bible of the Beats.

A portion of the “Anderson Letter” was retyped on a separate piece of paper, either by Cassady or poet Allen Ginsberg, and was published in Cassady’s 1971 memoir “The First Third,” which came out after both men had died — Cassady in 1968 at age 41 and Kerouac in 1969 at age 47.

At some point in 1951 or ’52, Sampas says, Kerouac passed the letter to Ginsberg, and the letter went missing until it turned up in 2011 in the Los Angeles home of record producer Jack Spinosa, who had died.

Spinosa’s daughter Jean found it and spent two years researching its authenticity and ownership before offering it for auction.

Neither Jean Spinosa or the auction house Profiles in History responded to requests for comment.

If the letter sells to a collector who tucks it away in a vault, “the world will never be able to read it and scholars will never be able to examine it to see how Neal’s words influenced Jack’s style of writing,” said Jerry Cimino, owner of the Beat Museum. Cimino has put together a crowdfunding plan (www.kerouac.com) to bid on the letter at auction, if an auction ever happens.

“It’s been missing for 60 years and has surfaced for three weeks,” he said. “We can’t allow it to once again disappear forever.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf