'Kerouac trial today," says the man in the baggy blue suit as the bailiff scans his bag on the X-ray machine. "Hi, Gerry Nicosia — Kerouac biographer. Big day." The bailiff doesn't seem too interested in the information, but for Gerald Nicosia Oct. 13 is indeed a big day. After waiting 10 years, he has come to the Pinellas County Courthouse in Clearwater for a trial that he hopes will redirect the estate of Jack Kerouac, who died in St. Petersburg almost 35 years ago.
The trial would not turn out exactly as Nicosia had hoped. But for a man who sees himself as a custodian of Kerouac's spirit, it was one more step in reestablishing his connection with the life and legend of a literary anti-hero.
Nicosia first read Kerouac in 1973 as a grad student in literature at the University of Illinois. He was blown away. "The guy was a genius." He was shocked that none of his professors agreed. "I vowed to write his biography," Nicosia says.Memory Babe, published in 1983, was hailed by USA Today at the time as the definitive Kerouac biography. Nicosia was an exhaustive researcher, conducting over 300 interviews in the six years it took him to write the book. "It was a very powerful experience," he says. "It was hard not to feel like I was following his footsteps."
What started in grad school as the romantic connection so many young men find in Kerouac's books evolved into a relationship that has defined much of the rest of Nicosia's life.
"It was hard for [Nicosia] to separate the biographer from the man, the writer from the fan," says Ann Charters, a Kerouac biographer herself and a professor at the University of Connecticut.
"I love this man," Nicosia says about Kerouac. He wouldn't have come from San Francisco to see the case on his own dime if he didn't.
The court battle, a convoluted twist of cross-claims and counter-suits, was originally filed by Kerouac's only child, Jan, in 1994. She claimed that the will left by Jack Kerouac's mother, Gabrielle, which gave all of Kerouac's writings and belongings to his third wife, Stella Sampas, was a forgery. Two-thirds of the $20 million estate was rightfully hers, she said. When she filed the case, the entire collection was still intact and in the hands of Stella Sampas' siblings, who had inherited it when their sister died in 1990.
The case is finally coming to trial, though the participants have changed. Jan Kerouac died in 1996, and Nicosia became literary executor of her estate. He vowed to continue the case, now in the name of Paul Blake, Jr., Kerouac's nephew. But a 1999 decision in a suit brought by Jan Kerouac's ex-husband removed Nicosia from his position. Any direct involvement he'd had with the case, and any chance he might have had for financial gain, were gone.
But Nicosia stayed.
"I'm here because I love Jan, and I'm a friend of Paul Blake's," Nicosia said at a press conference he called for himself the day before the trial. "They want vindication."
Blake, who appeared in several Kerouac novels as the character Lil' Luke, was close to his uncle when they lived in the same house in Orlando, which is where Kerouac wrote his novels Big Sur and The Dharma Bums. Blake is now homeless and suffering from emphysema in California. He's the kind of down-and-out character that Kerouac wrote about — the kind of character many think Kerouac became during his last years in St. Petersburg.
"[He] was a severely diseased man," says Bob Kealing, author of Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends, referring to the notorious drinking habit that ultimately killed Kerouac. "This is not a life to be imitated."
But is it a life to be commodified?
Since the case was filed in 1994, Nicosia has been involved in a dispute with the estate's executor John Sampas, Stella's brother. Sampas was criticized by Kerouac fans and scholars, including Nicosia, for selling off pieces of the Kerouac estate in the early 1990s, including a raincoat to Johnny Depp for $15,000. Sampas later sold the most valuable item in the archive, the original scroll of On the Road, for $2.4 million to Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts.
Nicosia says his issue with Sampas is over access to the Kerouac archive. "How are you supposed to study something when you can only see a few feet of it, under three feet of glass?" he says referring to the scroll, which has made a tour of the country for people to see, but not to study. "Paul Blake Jr., and Jan Kerouac wanted Jack's things in a library," he says.
Sampas dismisses Nicosia's complaints, citing the estate's sale of the rest of the archive (which Kerouac himself meticulously filed) to the New York City Public Library in 2001. There is a hold on the collection until 2005 to allow historian David Brinkley exclusive access to do research for a Kerouac biography.
A day before the trial, Nicosia is standing in front of Kerouac's house in St. Petersburg, now owned by the Sampas family."We're a part of each other's lives," he says of Kerouac. The living have a charge to carry on for the dead, he says, and he believes that Kerouac would have wanted his estate to go to Blake. Then he bends down to grab a stick "just in case Sampas is looking through the window," and lights up as he tells a story about the writing room on the end of the house. (Later he explains that he was taking the twig as a souvenir, not as a preparation for battle.)
According to a letter Kerouac wrote to Blake the day before he died in 1969, Nicosia is right about the author's final intentions. Kerouac wrote that he wanted to leave "everything" to someone in his bloodline, and didn't want to leave a "dingblasted fucking goddamn thing to my wife's one hundred Greek relatives."
Still, there is no chance that any major part of the estate will be turned over to Blake, even if the will is found to be a forgery. When Stella Sampas willed the archive to her siblings, Blake's attorney Bill Wagner says, all of its contents were made legally theirs. Stolen goods, if left in a legal will, become legal property. (In the same decision last March, Judge George Greer dismissed the Sampases as defendants.)
"This may be a wild goose chase," says Wagner, who is working the case on a contingency basis.
Even if the plaintiff's lawyer thinks his client's chances are slim, Gerald Nicosia remains optimistic. He has to — he's been waiting for too long to lose hope now.
Seconds after he walks through the courtroom doors, Nicosia is directed by Wagner to the witness' chambers. He may be called to verify a letter being used by Wagner's handwriting expert to prove that Gabrielle Kerouac's will was forged.
The case never gets that far. In fact, it never even starts.
Nicosia has flown 3,000 miles to sit isolated in the next room while Judge Greer rules that the case has to be put on hold until Wagner can find an independent party to stand in for the Sampases.
It'll be tough, says Wagner, but he vows to bring the case to trial. Even if he wins and the will is ruled a forgery, however, Blake would only have a right to materials that Stella Sampas sold before she died — if any can be found.
So why is Gerald Nicosia still here?
He's here for the Kerouacs and the Blakes. If the will is found to be a forgery, he hopes, "Maybe there will at least be some moral pressure on the Sampases and on the people who bought this stuff to give it back."
And he's here for Nicosia.
"It comes down to control, to who gets to write about Kerouac," Nicosia says. "If the will is a forgery, I think [Kerouac biographers and conferences] will stop letting Sampas dictate everything."
Maybe then he will get to see the archive, and get the recognition he feels he deserves as a Kerouac scholar.
Maybe then Gerald Nicosia's trials can end.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2004.
