By Stuart Mitchner

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death…

—William S. Burroughs

A book of great beauty and maniacally exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor…

—Norman Mailer on The Naked Lunch

Joan Adams Vollmer. (Wikipedia)

Dreaming of another fantastical New Year’s Eve party like the Harpo Marx/Charlie Parker/Times Square centenary blast I arranged for 1911/2011, I checked celebrity births for 1924 on the Notable Names Database (NNDB: “Tracking the Entire World”), and found a star-studded cast headed by Marlon Brando, Lauren Bacall, and James Baldwin, with supporting players like presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter sharing a table next to one occupied by country singers Chet Akins and Slim Whitman. For comic relief, you’ve got Brando’s buddy for life Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers), Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker (All in  the Family), Dr. Strangelove’s Terry Southern, and Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, not to mention Bill Dana (“My name José Jiménez”) and Don Knotts (“Are you nervous?”) from the Steve Allen Show, plus Norm Alden, the coach who drowned in a bowl of chicken noodle soup on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Okay, let’s set this year’s party at Birdland just up Broadway from the Royal Roost, site of the 2011 celebration. Among jazz stars born in ‘24, there’s alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (runner up to Charlie Parker in the 1954 Downbeat poll), trombonist J.J. Johnson, pianist Bud Powell, drummer Max Roach, trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers, and tenor man Sonny Stitt, plus songs by Dinah Washington, the Divine Sarah Vaughan, and Doris Day, who got her start singing with Les Brown’s Band of Renown. At the ringside table with Brando and Cox are  Marlon’s co-stars Katy Jurado (One-Eyed Jacks) and Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront). Fresh from Paris and Rome, respectively, Charles Aznavour (Shoot the Piano Player) and Marcello Mastroianni (La Dolce Vita) are being interviewed by Truman (In Cold Blood) Capote, who is covering the Farewell ‘54 celebration for The New Yorker.

The Party Crasher

So far no one has taken any notice of  the 28-year-old party crasher haunting the scene. And why should they? Nobody’s heard of her. She’s there thanks to a fluke. NNDB’s “Born in 1924” list identifies her as “Joan Adams Vollmer (Occupation: Victim).” But even though the date of her sudden death by a bullet to the head is correctly recorded (September 6, 1951), her birth date slot contains no month or day, no doubt because she was born on February 4, 1923. Yet here she is, at the top of the 1924 list as the “common-law wife of William S. Burroughs,” who wrote his “wild and deadly” masterpiece The Naked Lunch for her — if you accept the rationale that he would never have become a writer “but for Joan’s death.” In the introduction to Queer (Penguin 1985), Burroughs expresses his “realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated” his writing: “the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Although Burroughs’s novella Queer was not published until three decades after he killed Joan during a drunken William Tell stunt, he began writing it while he was living with the constant threat of a murder conviction in Mexico City. Eventually returning to the U.S. after awaiting a “continuously delayed” trial, he was convicted in absentia of homicide and given a two-year suspended sentence.

Action Hero

Burroughs would be amused in absentia by the 21st century theatre of the absurd wherein he’s portrayed on screen by two action heroes, Kiefer Sutherland (aka Jack Bauer) in Beat (2000) and Daniel Craig (aka James Bond) in Queer (2024). Never a Bond fan, I was engrossed by Fox TV’s thriller machine 24, a fitting number on this 1924-2024 time-themed New Year’s Eve. Thanks mainly to the heroics of the Counter Terrorism Unit’s Bauer, my wife and I surrendered ourselves to six seasons of sheer excitement, ears ringing and eyes glazed, as multiple cliffhangers descended on us at the end of each hour in a pounding delirium that propelled us headlong into the next action-packed 24-hour cycle. 

“I Dare You”

In 24, Sutherland was manly, magnetic, and totally  believable as he accomplished impossible missions. In Gary Walkow’s Beat, which must have been filmed just before (or even as) he took on the role of his life, Sutherland played Burroughs by the numbers right up to the moment he nervously pointed a gun at the glass of gin on his wife’s head, pulled the trigger, and missed — maybe accidentally on purpose (the “Ugly Spirit”) or maybe because Courtney Love’s deeply bored, insolent Joan had been needling him about his pursuit of young men, her lips a shiny, succulent red, seen in close-up mouthing the words: “I dare you.”

In “real life,” Joan ended it all with a jest (“I’m turning my head; you know I can’t stand the sight of blood”) — the William Tell stunt being her idea, her way to break the spell of soul-deadening boredom no amount of drinking and drugging could dissipate. The only thing that kept the film itself from the same fate was Courtney Love’s charismatic, film-star-worthy presence. The real Joan Vollmer Adams would have been less attractive and far more verbally daring and pungently outspoken even at this low point in her life, when a recurrence of childhood polio had left her limping and drinking from eight in morning on, meanwhile dealing with two kids (briefly seen in Beat) and a husband who was chasing the boy of his dreams through the jungles of Guatemala.

Looking for Joan

From Jack Kerouac’s journal in The Unknown Kerouac (Library of America), September 8, 1951: “Even though poor Joan is dead I have to continue this self-satisfied diary.” October 16: “It’s like Joan Adams said… 1951 was a beat year … poor girl.” October 17: “Joan Adams was young & pretty & later told me I should have come back for her, or what she really said ‘That was the time when you should have tried (making love to me).’ “

Joan appears throughout Kerouac’s work, under various names, like Jane, June, and Mary. The best example of her take-no-prisoners attitude, however, enlivens Joan’s 1949 letter to Allen Ginsberg: “I was not much surprised to hear of your hospitalization, as I’ve been claiming for three years (today being my third anniversary from Bellevue) that anyone who doesn’t blow his top once is no damn good … No percentage in talking about visions or super-reality or any such lay-terms. Either you know now what I know (and don’t ask me just what that is) or else I’m mistaken about you and off the beam somewhere — in which case you’re just a dime-a-dozen neurotic and I’m nuts.”

Kerouac provides a more vivid picture of what Joan “knows” in The Town and the City (1950) by way of the Allen Ginsberg character [Leon Levinsky]: “What she has to say about the world, about everybody falling apart, about everybody clawing aggressively at one another in one grand finale of our glorious culture, about the madness in high places and the insane disorganized stupidity of the people who let themselves be told what to do and what to think by charlatans — all that is true! There’s only one real conclusion to be drawn … — everybody’s got the atomic disease, everybody’s radioactive.”

Joan and Bill

According to Todd Tietcen’s chronology in The Unknown Kerouac, it was after the news of Joan’s death in September 1951 that Kerouac began rewriting On the Road, wherein he describes the “marriage” of Burroughs and Joan: “His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull [Bill] liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and then Jane [Joan] talked and he listened; … there was a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations.”

Dreaming of Joan

In A Dream Record: June 8, 1955, Allen Ginsberg writes, “I lay asleep. darkness: I went back to Mexico City and saw Joan Burroughs leaning forward in a garden chair, arms on her knees. She studied me with clear eyes and downcast smile, her face restored to a fine beauty tequila and salt had made strange before the bullet in her brow…. Then I knew she was a dream: and questioned her — Joan, what kind of knowledge have the dead? can you still love your mortal acquaintances? What do you remember of us? She faded in front of me — The next instant I saw her rain-stained tombstone rear an illegible epitaph under the gnarled branch of a small tree in the wild grass of an unvisited garden in Mexico.”

A Late Arrival

Jimmy Carter’s death forces a reality check on my fantasy of New Year’s Eve 1954 at Birdland. I imagined him seated at a table with his post-presidency pal George H.W. Bush, who could have at least afforded a ticket to the Apple at a time when Carter had resigned from the Navy and was living with his wife Rosalynn and three sons in a Public Housing apartment in Plains, Georgia. Not to worry, this is a fantasy, after all, so I’m taking the sentimental liberty of imagining him nodding and smiling along to the music of Count Basie on my make-believe bandstand.

As for Joan Vollmer, I imagine her in 1944, fresh from Barnard, a stunning girl known for prowling bars like the West End near Columbia, “her appetite for books rivaled only by her appetite for men,” in the words of her roommate Edie Parker, Jack Kerouac’s first wife. At Birdland she’s a flirtatious ghost, whispering sweet nothings in Brando’s ear, ruffling Mastroianni’s hair, nuzzling Charles Aznavour, daring him to sit in with Basie, and teasing Truman Capote into dropping his pen, only to vanish into the midnight roar from the crowd on Times Square as 1954 makes way for 1955, and 2024 for 2025.