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ff AAA vaa LTV/ »wa% U1IU OUCHVIO Ul IUIIUUO IUVUUU1IJ piujvvio 111 nu^u^i.N.M. judge rules Jan Kerouac’s literary executor can pursue Florida lawsuitALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A judge ruled Monday the literary executor for the estate of Jan Kerouac, daughter of literary giant Jack Kerouac, can ask a higher court for authority to intervene in a Florida case over control of Jack Kerouac’s multimillion-dollar estate.State District Judge Gerard W. Thomson also ruled that the literary executor, Gerald Nicosia, need put up no bond to do so.The general executor, who had challenged Nicosia’s authority in the case, sought to have imposed a $267,000 supersedeas bond to protect the estate pending appeal.“I’m rejoicing,” said Nicosia. “We won a tremendous decision. We won in every way. This outrageous, bond has been thrown out.”Rodney Schlagel, the Albuquerque attorney representing general executor John Lash, said he was disappointed with the ruling.“We feel there should be some protection of the estate in the interim,” Schlagel said.Nicosia said estimates of the Jack Kerouac estate’s value range between $10 million and $20 million.Nicosia’s lawyer, Jerome Field of San Francisco, said an appeal would be filed with the New Mexico Court of Appeals. The appeal will seek to restate Nicosia’s standing as literary executor so that he may intervene inthe Florida case.“We feel very optimistic,” Field said.In the Florida case, Lash, the ex-husband of Jan Kerouac, seeks to dismiss her 1994 lawsuit challenging the will of her grandmother, Gabrielle Kerouac.Nicosia, of Corte Madera, Calif., is trying to preserve that lawsuit.Lash has entered into an agreement with heirs to the Jack Kerouac estate, including dismissal of the Florida lawsuit, Schlagel said.Jack Kerouac died in 1969. Hisdaughter, who died here last June 6 following a long illness at age 44, had battled to her dying days to reclaim his archives. She had signed an agreement with the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley to keep the Kerouac files at Berkeley.The archives included manuscripts of several unpublished books plus numerous drafts of every manuscript and hundreds of notebooks, Nicosia said.Jack used to carry these breastpocket notebooks everywhere he went. He used to buy them a nickel apiece and put them in his breast pocket every morning,” he said.From those notes emerged such books as “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums” — the first rumblings of postwar alienation marked by the Beat Generation.Until Ms. Kerouac sued, Nicosia said Monday, the notebooks had been selling for $25,000 apiece on the collectibles market.In 1994, Ms. Kerouac sued relatives of her father’s last wife, Stella Sampas, who had inherited the archives.Jan Kerouac contended the will of her grandmother, Gabrielle Kerouac, leaving her son's effects to Stella Sampas, had been a forgery. Without that will, Gabrielle Kerouac’s estate would have gone to grandchildren Jan Kerouac and Paul Blake Jr., Jan’s cousin who lives near Sacramento, Calif.Ms. Kerouac had made her ex-husband, Lash, who lives in Brussels, Belgium, general executor of her estate believing he would carry on the 1994 lawsuit, Nicosia said.In a letter to Blake dated Oct. 20, 1969, Kerouac spelled out his wishes for his estate.“This is Uncle Jack,” the letter says. “I’ve turned over my entire esta.e, real, personal, and mixed, to Menere (his mother, GabrielleKerouac), and if she dies before me, it is then turned to you, and if I die thereafter, it all goes to you.... I just wanted to leave my ‘estate’ (which is what it really is) to someone directly connected with the last remaining drop of my direct blood line ... and not to leave a dinglasted ... thing to my wife’s one hundred Greek relatives.”And in a May 1996 interview with an Italian film company, a month before her death, Jan Kerouac said of her lawsuit: “I certainly hope and pray that I win.” She said she wanted to put her father’s archives in the Bancroft Library.“She told me: ‘I want dad’s archive and my archive in the same place,”’ Nicosia said.Kerouac had resisted acknowledging his daughter. The late Joan Haverty, Kerouac’s second wife and Jan’s mother, filed a paternity suit when Jan was about 10.But Nicosia said Kerouac knew Jan was his daughter and acknowledged it in letters to friends. Judge Thomson, in his written ruling Monday, restated that she is Kerouac’s daughter.She had met her father only twice. His will did not mention her, and nobody notified her when he died.“She heard it on the radio,” said her attorney, Thomas Brill of Newport Beach, Calif.“Jan loved him very much and was haunted by not having him,” Nicosia said. “It was a big hole in her life.”Bom Feb. 16, 1952, in Albany, N.Y., Jan Kerouac also had been a writer. Her first book, “Baby Driver,” published in 1981, dealt with her childhood in New York’s lower East Side during the turbulent 1960s. “Trainsong” (1988) was about her travels after that first book. It’s named after the community in Eugene, Ore., where her mother lived.
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Englewood Sun
Englewood, Florida, US
Tue, Apr 29, 1997
Page 8
Full Page
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University O.
MN, USA 08 Apr 2020
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