Edie Parker

Grosse Pointe and the move to New York, 1922–1940

Frankie Edith Parker was born in Detroit on 20 September 1922 and grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, the wealthy suburb along the lake east of the city. Her parents were Walter Milton Parker Jr. and Charlotte Maire Parker, and they divorced when she was about eight. Her mother controlled the family finances afterwards. Behind that was an inheritance from her grandfather's estate, still unprobated, which becomes important later in her story.

She moved to New York in 1940, at eighteen, to study art. Sources disagree about where: the finding aid to her own papers says she took art classes at Columbia University, while other accounts place her at Barnard College, and several say she studied under the German painter George Grosz. Her grandmother lived at 438 West 116th Street, near the Columbia campus, and it was in that building that she met Henri Cru, a school friend of Jack Kerouac. Cru introduced them. Whether that was in 1940 or 1942 is not settled either.

Parker's own account of the first meeting is one of her set pieces. Cru took the two of them to a New York delicatessen, she sat down and ate six sauerkraut hot dogs, and from that moment, she said, Kerouac was in love with her.

The apartment where the Beats came together, 1943–1944

Parker met Joan Vollmer, a Barnard student, at the West End Bar on Broadway, and the two women set up house together in a series of apartments on the Upper West Side. The best documented is 421 West 118th Street, where they were living in late 1943 and through 1944. Rent was shared with lodgers, among them Hal Chase and John Kingsland, a teenage Columbia student who became Vollmer's lover.

The household is why Parker has a place in literary history. Kerouac was living there with her. Allen Ginsberg was a Columbia undergraduate who knew her well by the summer of 1944. William S. Burroughs, then in his thirties, was visiting by early that year, brought in by Lucien Carr, the student who made most of the introductions. This is the address where those four writers coalesced into a group. Claims about which of them first met which are less reliable than the general fact, because Carr introduced people in several places over several months.

The better-known Beat commune at 419 West 115th Street was Vollmer's apartment and came later, in 1945 and 1946, after Parker had gone back to Michigan. The two addresses are often confused. Parker said she worked on the docks as a longshoreman during the war, and she kept the manuscript of Kerouac's first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, safe for him while he was at sea.

The Kammerer killing and a wedding from a jail cell, August 1944

On the night of 13 to 14 August 1944, after drinking at the West End Bar, Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer twice in the heart in Riverside Park. Carr was nineteen and a Columbia student. Kammerer was thirty-three, a former scoutmaster from St. Louis who had followed Carr from city to city for years. Carr weighted the body with rocks and rolled it into the Hudson.

At dawn he went to Burroughs, who told him to get a lawyer and give himself up, and then to Kerouac, who helped him bury Kammerer's glasses in Morningside Park and drop the knife down a drain. The two of them then spent the day at the cinema and the Museum of Modern Art. Carr surrendered on 15 August and was charged with second-degree murder. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and served about two years at Elmira Reformatory.

Kerouac was arrested at 421 West 118th Street as a material witness and held in the Bronx jail. His father refused to post bond. Parker's money could, but it was tied up in her grandfather's estate, and by her account the family's lawyer told her it would be released only if Kerouac became her husband. They married on 22 August 1944 at the Manhattan Municipal Building, with Kerouac escorted from custody and two detectives as witnesses, and her money then paid the bail.

The story that the marriage was purely a transaction is a simplification. The couple had reportedly already planned to marry and had taken blood tests before the arrest, so the jail wedding made an existing plan immediate. The date carries its own small puzzle. Most sources give 22 August, but the Allen Ginsberg Project says the 25th, and Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg that their wedding anniversary fell on the day Paris was liberated. Paris was liberated on 25 August.

Two months of marriage, and the annulment

In September 1944 the newlyweds moved into her mother's house in Grosse Pointe. Kerouac took a job at a war-production plant and stayed long enough to repay the family for the bail money. In October he left for New York and the merchant marine. The marriage had lasted about two months, though the couple saw each other again in New York afterwards. In January 1946 Kerouac wrote in his notebook that Edie was gone for good, and she returned to Michigan.

Parker filed for annulment on 18 September 1946. When the marriage formally ended is genuinely unclear: sources variously give 1946, 1948 and 1952, and the Archdiocese of Detroit invalidated it in April 1952, which is a church act rather than a civil one. Her remarriage in 1950 means a civil dissolution had come through by then.

Michigan, and fifty years of writing one book, 1946–1993

Parker spent almost all of the rest of her life in Grosse Pointe. She studied horticulture for a semester at Michigan State University in the autumn of 1948. She married Michael Dietz in 1950 and divorced him in 1959, then married Patrick Garvin in 1959 and divorced him in 1969, and lived alone afterwards.

Kerouac stayed in touch across the decades. Her papers hold letters and a telegram from him dated 1943, 1957 and 1969. She said he sometimes telephoned late at night and once shouted down the line at her second husband. About a month before he died in October 1969 he wrote to her about starting again, and closed the letter with the words that later became her book's title. She went to his funeral in Lowell, Massachusetts, and wrote afterwards about Ginsberg, serving as a pallbearer, turning to smile at her.

In 1982 she appeared at the Jack Kerouac Conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, the twenty-fifth-anniversary gathering for On the Road, alongside Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. On the women's panel she read from Joan Haverty's then-unpublished memoir. Through the 1980s she made appearances around the United States billed as Frankie Edie Kerouac-Parker, talking about the book she was still writing. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 1991 and died in Grosse Pointe on 29 October 1993, aged 71, after congestive heart failure. She left her papers and her manuscript to her friend Tim Moran.

You'll Be Okay, published fourteen years after her death

The manuscript Parker left behind ran to roughly 2,200 pages. Tim Moran and the Beat historian Bill Morgan cut it to 279 and City Lights published it in September 2007 as You'll Be Okay: My Life with Jack Kerouac, with their essays and photographs from her collection. It covers her Grosse Pointe childhood, wartime New York, the Columbia circle, the Kammerer killing and the brief marriage.

Reviewers were warm about the detail and cooler about the gaps. Rain Taxi praised it as a rare first-hand account by a woman who was there. Kirkus called it an affectionate if unrevealing portrait and thought general readers would do better with On the Road. Writing in Eclectica, Gilbert Wesley Purdy noted how lightly she passes over the separation and the annulment. The book is best used for her point of view rather than for dates, since she was recalling events fifty years later.

Kerouac wrote her into his fiction repeatedly. She is Judie Smith in The Town and the City (1950), Edna "Johnnie" Palmer in Vanity of Duluoz (1968), and Elly in Visions of Cody (1972). She is Janie in And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the novel Kerouac and Burroughs wrote together about the Kammerer killing in 1945 and which was not published until 2008. The 2007 scroll edition of On the Road prints her under her own name. Elizabeth Olsen played her in Kill Your Darlings (2013).