Beat-era figure’s sexy, literary letter fuels fracas

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The one-month custody battle over a long-lost letter to Beat generation author Jack Kerouac from his driving character, Neal Cassady, has caused more cross-country subplots, side trips and diversions than Cassady and Kerouac took in “On the Road.”

The latest detour: A law firm in Florida, where Kerouac died, has filed a motion to have his estate reopened on behalf of Kerouac’s nephew, so that its property — namely the letter — can be redistributed.

Meanwhile, Cassady’s heirs have hired a famed Los Angeles copyright litigator to engage in the battle over “the Joan Anderson Letter,” a crucial Beat artifact that had been lost for more than half a century and could be worth millions.

“This case is turning out to be a real mess,” said Cathy Cassady, one of Cassady’s three living children. “Stay tuned.”

Neal Cassady’s 1950 letter to Kerouac, named for a fling whom Cassady described in amorous detail, was a 16,000-word, single-spaced spree that inspired Kerouac to dump his writing style and adopt the free-form, jazzy technique that became his trademark with “On the Road.”

The dispute over the letter — which heated up when The Chronicle reported that it would be auctioned on Dec. 17 — has been festering for decades, and is rooted in a battle over Kerouac’s royalties between his blood relatives and relatives by marriage.

The family feud began after Kerouac died in 1969 while living with his mother, Gabrielle, in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was on his third marriage at the time but left everything to his mother, with his nephew, Paul Blake Jr., second in line.

By Florida law, Kerouac’s estranged wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, was entitled to a share of his estate, which a judge decreed to be one-third.

Then things got more complicated. Stella was the caretaker to Gabrielle, and when Gabrielle died in 1973, her will left her estate, including two-thirds of her son’s assets, to Stella.

This meant that Stella now had full control of the assets of Jack Kerouac: the one-third already decreed by the Florida court and the two-thirds willed to her by her former mother-in-law.

Assets to siblings

When Stella Kerouac died in 1990, her will left the Kerouac assets to her siblings, to be administered by her brother, John Sampas, who has held an iron grip over it ever since.

“Jack’s interest descended to Stella and her siblings,” said Sampas, who is 80 and lives in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Mass. “I control his name, likeness and titles.”

But it was not long before that control was challenged. The first salvo came from Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack Kerouac and his second wife, Joan Haverty. Jan Kerouac had been left out of her father’s will.

Jan filed suit in 1994, maintaining that Gabrielle’s will, which left everything to Stella, had been a forgery. Jan Kerouac died in New Mexico in 1996, before the case had been tried. She had no kids of her own, so the case continued on behalf of her cousin, Paul Blake.

While that case was proceeding, Sampas asked the court to rule that even if the will was forged, Blake was not entitled to any Kerouac assets that had already been claimed by the Sampas family. The judge agreed in 2004, and since Kerouac had been dead for 35 years, the Sampas family got pretty much everything.

“I own the estate by law,” Sampas said. “Everything went to the Sampas family in 2004. It cannot be opened. It’s all over.”

Except maybe for the Joan Anderson letter. In 2009, a Florida court determined that Gabrielle Kerouac’s will was a forgery, a ruling that was upheld on appeal.

The ruling was not retroactive, but still to be determined is whether any future Kerouac assets must be divided by the original distribution order — one-third to the heirs of Stella Kerouac, and two-thirds to the heirs of Gabrielle Kerouac. This includes Blake, Kerouac’s nearest blood relative, who lives with his son in Arizona.

“This poor Blake family should be millionaires,” said Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, “and instead they are living in dire poverty.”

Over the years, Sampas said, Kerouac’s estate has earned “not much — maybe $5 million or $10 million.” But Nicosia puts it closer to $20 million or $30 million.

This figure is sure to rise if the Anderson letter is determined to belong to the Kerouac heirs. The original scroll of “On the Road” sold for $2.4 million in 2001, and there is speculation that the letter will be worth more than that.

Auction canceled

Jean Spinosa, a Southern California woman who found the letter in the papers of her late father, originally claimed it as her own. In an event at San Francisco’s Beat Museum earlier this month, she announced plans to auction the letter on Dec. 17. But under threat from Sampas, she canceled the auction and has not commented since. The letter remains at the auction house while its ownership is sorted out.

This is what triggered the motion to reopen the Kerouac estate, filed Dec. 12 by the firm Wagner, Vaughan & McLaughlin in Tampa, representing Blake and other heirs of Gabrielle Kerouac. The purpose of reopening the estate is to “collect assets of the estate,” said Alan Wagner, who is handling the case, “and the Anderson letter is an asset.”

In his mind, the asset must be split three ways, between Sampas, the heirs of Jan Kerouac, and Paul Blake. Since the letter itself cannot be divided, it would have to be sold, the proceeds split three ways.

“Sampas is trying to say that the letter belongs to him because it was Jack Kerouac’s and he is the executor of Jack Kerouac’s estate,” said Wagner. “We don’t think he is the executor, and he never was.”

Reached at home in Lowell, Sampas was unaware of the legal motion to discredit his claim, but he suggested that Nicosia, a Corte Madera poet and Beat activist, is behind it.

“What this is all about is that Gerald Nicosia is putting this guy in Florida onto this,” Sampas said. “He (Nicosia) ... has been doing this for years. He thinks he’s Jack Kerouac.”

“What a joke,” said Nicosia, who believes the letter belongs to the Cassady heirs.

“I want to see the Cassadys helped. All the evidence is that the manuscript should be returned to them,” said Nicosia, who helped the Cassady heirs retain Marc Toberoff, an artistic-rights attorney who has been listed in Forbes as being among the “Seven Most Powerful People in Hollywood.”

Toberoff will argue the Cassady position that the Anderson letter was not a letter but a manuscript, and though he mailed it to Kerouac, it was called a novella and meant for the marketplace.

“As far as the physical letter, it is form over substance to say the letter is addressed to Kerouac, therefore the Kerouac heirs are entitled to it,” Toberoff said. “If it was a manuscript and treated the exact same way, it belongs to Cassady’s children.”

Toberoff also said that the blood relatives of Kerouac “feel empathetic to the Cassady position. The real question is Sampas.”

The answer: “We’ll take care of that problem,” said Sampas of the Cassady claim. “That doesn’t intimidate us. The letter was written to Jack, not to them.”

Sampas doubts that the court will reopen the Kerouac estate, and he is certain that Kerouac himself would be against it. “He’d be furious about the fighting,” Sampas said. “He did not like this sort of thing.”

Whatever the case, a bigger battle may be coming.

“You are going to have the Kerouac family fighting the Cassady family in court,” Nicosia said, “and that is the worst possible thing.”

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