THE MOST INCREDIBLE BEAT DREAM in the world, it's near St. Rita's church, on that street from Moody, but as my mother and sister Nin and I are traveling up Mammoth Road on some kind of train a woman rushes up shouting "I want to see Dinah Shore!" — She, Dinah, lives right up the street, right at the location of that grammar school — in a house — she has a "canary yellow" jeepster or convertible, which I point out to the lady saying, "That'll be her house there, Olivia DeHaviland has a canary yellow car" — (confusing the names) — My mother and sister accompany the woman: but I stay behind in a kind of suddenly transplaced Sarah Avenue house, it's Sunday, I'm the 30 year old beat brother and loafer of the family — "Dinah Shore" is standing in front of her house, and, seeing that I had directed the woman autograph hound to her she says, bleakly looking at me in an "official" or "Hollywood courteous" way — Wont you come in with us?" (for a bleary visit) —
"Oh no — I'm busy — " but, they can see that I'm yielding and in my head I've started calculating advantages I can get from knowing "Olivia de Haviland" — So I gave in, but in such a beat obvious way, and we go on in —
"I'm a novelist," I announce forthwith," you should read my book," I say to the hostess — "Your husband is a writer too — a very great writer, Marcus Goodrich." Then the persistentifiction I have that Dinah Shore is really Olivia de Haviland has to break down here and I say "Oh well, of course, yes, you're Dinah Shore, I keep thinking you're Olivia de Haviland" — but this is so gauche — and I havent shaved and stand there in her parlor, she is bleakly attentive, I'm like a thinner younger Major Hoople who really had a small taste of early success but then lost it and came home to live off his mother and sister but goes on "writing" and acting like an "author" — on the little street — But now, my sister sees that I am botching everything so she steps in and in an even more beat awful gauche way begins to try to impress Dinah with a kind of halting Canuck-English speech (attempts at 'social smartness') (and really painful to hear) goes into some speech about how this and that, and so on, to show how really chic she's been at one time, we've been, our really more elegant real backgrounds than what shows (and in spite of this pitiful brother, and she's spoken up really to cover me up and also cut me, as she has her own ideas about how to impress people like Dinah Shore) to which Dinah listens even more bleakly — and my mother standing by like the original lady who wanted an autograph — it ends on this bleak beat note . . .with me all anxious and chewing my nails —the comic opera of our real days —
I'm also a neighborhood self-styled roue' ready to make all the housewives but they don't really want any part of me, except a few of the older ones who want to have something on my mother —
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JACK KEROUAC
Book of Dreams
(unabridged edition)
City Lights 2001
Dinah Shore entertains US troops at a show in France, Aug 1944
