Ordinary Stupid People: Joan Vollmer’s Life Before the Beats Began, researched and written by Cathy Marshall and Simon Johnson, was published in October 2024 by Moloko Print, Schönebeck (Elba), Germany. The catalogue entry can be located on the Moloko+ website.
This is the first monograph to explore Joan Vollmer’s development as a young adult in New York City, drawing context from the two early marriages which preceded her involvement with what would come to be known as the Beat Generation.
The book is a first extract from a wider biographical work on Joan Vollmer Burroughs which has received support and encouragement from members of the Vollmer family, as well as from James Grauerholz, literary executor of the estate of William S. Burroughs.
Ordinary Stupid People can be purchased online via Sea Urchin Editions in the Netherlands. Copies are also available via Water Row Books in the US.
OLIVER: Your book focuses on Joan’s first two marriages, before she started what would turn out to be the last quarter of her short life. Can you say something about the project of trying to discover more about those little-researched early years—the challenges, the finds, the dead-ends, the payoff in terms of understanding Joan better?
CATHY: A casual web search for “Joan Vollmer” in late 2013 surfaced two things I’d never seen before. The first was the 1940 Keeler-Vollmer marriage announcement that appeared in Albany’s Knickerbocker News. It’s Image 12 of our book. The other was a secondary source I’d never encountered before: Chris Carmona’s 2013 master’s thesis about Joan, which reprinted some of her archival letters as an appendix. I knew of Joan’s letters, but had never seen her neat printing. I completely forgot about settling the argument about Joan that had provoked the search in the first place.
I hadn’t heard the name Keeler before. Was this the right Joan Vollmer? A brief factual biography in the wedding announcement convinced me it was. The newspaper announcement said the wedding had taken place more than ten days earlier in North Carolina. Why would Joan marry in North Carolina? She and her groom were New Yorkers. Was it because she was still only sixteen? I had dim recollections that underage women often took advantage of lax marriage laws in the US South. And the wedding had occurred on a Tuesday. Shouldn’t Joan have been back at school? On the day of Joan’s wedding, Dean Gildersleeve of Barnard College, New York, had held a mandatory assembly about the freshman class’s upcoming final exams week.
Intrigued, I sent the Vance County, North Carolina records office a letter (on paper) requesting a copy of the Keeler-Vollmer marriage paperwork. I received a folded xerox after only two weeks (a response time that spoiled me for further government records requests). The reason for the swift response was soon evident: North Carolina was in the midst of a records digitization effort. The record would be online by 2015.
Soon after, I began writing to Barnard, to Columbia, and to the Columbia Law Library in search of more information about Joan and about her second husband, Paul Adams. What else was out there?
Several of the librarians, archivists, and administrators I contacted mentioned how odd it was that two people were requesting the same information at the same time. That’s how I met Simon. I’d only been researching Joan for a few months. Of course, the professionals I contacted didn’t offer Simon’s name. They just mentioned that there was another person asking the same questions I was (with a short head start, I noted grimly to my friend Yoram, who was helping me get started). Yoram pushed me to find out who this other researcher was.
I first encountered Simon on Twitter—it was obvious to me from his tweets that I had the right person. We approached each other cautiously: how much did our research efforts overlap? As we shared what we had found so far—and went on information-seeking quests about Paul Adams together online—we quickly became friends. For me, our friendship and research collaboration are the best thing that’s come from a decade of work. I’ve learned so much about biographical research from working with Simon.
SIMON: It was a pleasant surprise to hear from Cathy, via Twitter, in 2014. I had recently provided unpublished research for use in Barry Miles’ Burroughs biography Call Me Burroughs. This left a trail from which Cathy was able to locate me via social media. Over several years prior to that, Burroughs’ literary executor, James Grauerholz, had become a very generous and trusted friend. James and I had worked together for a while on researching the background of the Burroughs family, an extensive project (around 25,000 words at the last count) which I am currently revisiting with a view to publication. During this period, the realisation of Burroughs’ two marriages really interested me, as biographical works on Burroughs seemed light on details. I had planned a research paper ‘Burroughs Before the Beats’, which would focus on Burroughs’s marriages to Ilse Herzfeld and Joan Vollmer. Although I made some progress on researching Burroughs’s German first wife, I was very happy, several years later, to cede ground on this research to an academic who was much better placed than I to progress research into Ilse Herzfeld. As such, my sole focus switched to Joan Vollmer.
I had identified Joan’s mysterious first husband, Hal Keeler, and located a few biographical details via correspondence with a relative of his second wife. In January 2014, shortly before my first contact with Cathy, I learned of the recent death of Joan’s second husband, Paul Adams. A post had been submitted to an online message board by one of Paul’s friends, who had been aware that Paul had been married to the wife of William S. Burroughs. This post found its way to James G, who asked me to undertake some research into Paul. I corresponded with Paul’s friend, who recalled that he and Paul “used to be among the coterie of retired geezers who hung out at the bookstore-in retirement at the corner of Hicks and Middagh Street [Brooklyn Heights, New York], that was open on weekends and run by Jack and Frances Biblo, formerly of Biblo & Tannen, the used book store on Book Row in Manhattan.” Paul’s friend provided me with a photograph of Paul in later life, and I was fascinated to finally put a face to the name of the mysterious “law student” Joan had briefly been married to during the 1940s. This later turned out to be an example of Joan’s habitual dissembling of the truth, as Paul was never a law student, and there is no evidence of him having had any interest in law.
The timing of Cathy contacting me was perfect, as we were both heavily engaged in researching Joan and Paul at that stage. The knowledge of another researcher covering the same ground would ordinarily set off alarm bells, but there was an immediate feeling of trust between Cathy and I, a common purpose in wanting to render Joan accurately, and a sense that we could be easy collaborators, which turned out to be the case. Having the opportunity to work with a researcher of Cathy’s calibre is a real honour, and has been a fascinating learning curve for me.
CATHY: Simon and I reached dead ends frequently, especially in the early days before we knew as much as we do now. One of the more consequential ones involved the search for Paul Adams’s belongings. Because I had a US phone, Simon urged me to call the New York City Public Administrator’s Office after Paul Adams’s son (and only heir) had died. We had just met online. Simon tells the story in the book’s introduction. We thought it might be a good idea to submit a bid on the lot that contained Paul’s property. It seemed like a pretty big risk—we didn’t know what else was in the lot, but we’d heard from Paul’s friends that he had kept the letters Joan wrote him while he was in the Army.
Paul Adams was a rare book dealer for the last half of his life; we were told that Thomas Mann first editions were among Paul’s belongings. Joan loved Thomas Mann too. Joan’s brother, David Vollmer, had told me that he’d seen a family photo of his sister at fifteen or sixteen reading The Magic Mountain. David might’ve grumbled about how the photo was all for show, but we think Thomas Mann’s novels brought Joan and Paul together.
It would’ve been so cool to find the letters that Joan sent to Paul. We contemplated the logistics of sifting through an elderly stranger’s belongings. What would be in them? The question became moot when the representative of the Public Administrator’s Office told us there’d be no way to identify Paul’s lot at auction. We should’ve been relieved, but we were disappointed. Somewhere, in an antiquarian bookstore, stashed away in a filing cabinet, there very well could be a bundle of old letters, written in Joan’s distinctive hand.
Other dead ends and surprises met us when we tried to locate some of the names we’d heard. It turned out that Edie Parker didn’t know Joan’s old friends very well. Ruth Clark. Herb Kiesewetter. Grover Smith. Dickie Goebel. Janie Goodpaster. Lucius Woods. Even Paul Adams. Other researchers had sometimes misidentified them after the Beats became famous, because even unique names can have convincing doppelgangers if you don’t have a good way to distinguish them, especially in the pre-Internet period.
Joan’s pre-Beat friends were by and large part of a different, more musical, social circle than the people she ran with once she met Edie Parker. You can see glimpses of these people in Parker’s memoir You’ll Be Okay. But because they weren’t central to memories of the primary Beat apartment on W118th Street, #62, the second apartment of the three the women shared, Joan’s old friends rarely appeared in biographies to-date.
In the library’s reading room at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I went through the notes remaining after Edie Parker and co-author Tim Moran attempted to contact some of these people when they were working on Edie’s memoirs. I was surprised to discover they’d been rebuffed by Dickie Goebel. It turned out the reason for this was simple: they’d contacted a doppelganger who didn’t know Joan at all. Far from being a “a Broadway street person” (Nicosia, Memory Babe, p.111) or “just five feet tall” (Parker and Moran, You’ll be Okay, p.76) Richard Henry Goebel had been a Columbia University grad student who was 5’5” (short, but not conspicuously so). He got his master’s degree in 1941. It’s likely Joan met him when she was still a student at Barnard. Goebel was openly gay during those repressive years and was eventually fired from his government job during the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy era. He would’ve been an informative source.
It didn’t take long for Simon and me to realize that the whole story of Joan Vollmer Burroughs is more complicated than it is usually portrayed. For example, Allen Ginsberg, who was a frequent source for anecdotes about Joan, didn’t get to know her until most of Joan’s initial Morningside Heights social set (including her second husband, Paul Adams) had moved on. Early on we realized that many published facts about Joan were apocryphal: she wasn’t a Barnard graduate; she hadn’t gone to journalism school at Columbia; Paul Adams was never a student at Columbia Law School; Joan’s father wasn’t the plant manager at General Aniline, and her family didn’t belong to a country club. So much of the lore crumbled. And that’s what we wanted to write about.
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OLIVER: You present many new facts about Joan’s life and yet I notice how often you balance interpretation of them with caveats about Joan’s unreliability as a narrator. Can you speak about the difficulty of, on the one hand, gathering and presenting empirical data and, on the other hand, recognising a seemingly elusive subject?
CATHY: Less than 10 minutes into my first face-to-face interview with Joan’s brother, David Vollmer, in a noisy café in Santa Cruz, he asserted that his sister “wasn’t very truthful.” I thought, “oh! I’ve never heard that before.” But it turned out to be a very important clue.
That’s why Simon and I relied so much on primary sources. Some of Joan’s lies were just transactional and ordinary. She probably told Edie Parker that Paul Adams was a law student during their earliest conversations because Edie could be so openly status-conscious. Paul’s foot fungus, another of Joan’s inventions, seems to have been designed to keep Edie out of the shared apartment while Paul was visiting on his Army furlough. Joan’s stories about her father following her on high school dates were a normal kind of exaggeration to prevent Edie from realizing that Joan’s high school life was not a wild social whirl, but rather one of books, writing, schoolwork, and imagination.
But Joan’s more vivid lies were those of omission and reflect her concerns about social norms and taboos of the 1940s and early 1950s. Although she was unselfconsciously non-monogamous and unconcerned about defying sexual mores of the day, she was a lot cagier about mental health-related issues. You can see signs that some of her earlier friends (like John Fitzgerald and Ruth Clark) knew she’d been hospitalized for a breakdown early in her pregnancy with Julie, but she certainly didn’t reveal that to her newer friends. Later, Joan was only too happy to let Burroughs attribute her 1946 confinement at Bellevue to amphetamine psychosis. While amphetamines may have amplified her bizarre behavior, they were not the sole cause. Accordingly, Joan spoke openly about her second hospitalization without mentioning the first.
The other reason to gather contemporaneous data is that anecdotes relayed in interviews are often unmoored from both calendars and real events. It’s common for people to revise their episodic memories over time, filling in elusive bits and morphing an oft-told story to include themselves. It’s not so much that people are trying to deceive an interviewer; it’s just that memories evolve, especially over many retellings or if a different interview prompt recovers a memory.
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OLIVER: I was thinking about the title of your book: Ordinary Stupid People. Joan was clearly not ordinary; as you say, she and others around her knew she was extraordinary. But was she not also rather stupid—at least insofar as marriages are concerned? Do you see a trajectory across all three, a pattern, or was there change over time?
“Ordinary stupid people” was a phrase used by Burroughs, in an interview with Ted Morgan, to describe Joan’s first two husbands. Joan must have told Burroughs about her previous marriages, perhaps during the long car ride to Texas at the beginning of November, 1946, when they began to chart a future together. It’s difficult to picture Joan calling either ex-husband ordinary or stupid, but it’s easy to see how Burroughs would conclude that they weren’t at Joan’s level intellectually.
Joan’s first marriage might’ve been startling if the circumstances were different. She was a shy, bookish freshman, still sixteen, brought up by liberal, loving parents, and attending a top-flight women’s college on a merit scholarship. Her reported ambition in the St. Agnes’ yearbook (Image 9 in our book) was simply to move to New York City. Nothing more. She didn’t covet a thoroughbred horse, an impressive education, a new Cadillac, or an adoring husband. She wanted out of the suburbs.
Barnard likely disappointed Joan in a way. Despite its intellectual rigor and the opportunities it offered to hang out with other women who were in every way her peers, Barnard was also inward-focused, cloistered, safe, and intellectually measured. It wasn’t risky. Joan was already an avid reader when she was living at home—she felt herself capable of finding and absorbing difficult material on her own. What she sought in 1939 was experience and excitement. Hal Keeler, her first husband, was good-looking, theatrical, and a practiced dissembler himself. Although he was a freshman at Columbia, he was three years older than Joan. Running away to Henderson, North Carolina with Keeler was a big adventure. Getting birth control in a small town in the South (even as a married woman) felt transgressive.
Hal Keeler wasn’t just Joan’s first husband. He was her first boyfriend. Joan’s brother said that the stories about their parents being overprotective were apocryphal. At sixteen, Joan hadn’t yet dated. She’d recently shed weight and with her mother’s help, had gotten her stick-straight hair permed into an attractive style with a bit of curl.
Joan’s marriage to Hal Keeler was great fun while they were staying in Henderson’s Little Motel. In fact, life was the adventure she had imagined until the newlyweds returned to New York. Not only was she back in the suburbs, her New York City adventure over, but also the Keeler household wasn’t what she expected: an absent father-in-law, a conservative, status-conscious mother-in-law, an invalid sister-in-law, and not enough money. Just as Joan saw Hal Keeler as a way to inject excitement into her life, Hal saw Joan as a means of adding financial and emotional stability to his. David Vollmer speculated that Joan had misrepresented her own situation: “[Hal Keeler] may have thought he was marrying someone with money. He may have thought he was marrying into a rich family.”
Lucky Joan. She had a ‘get out of jail free’ card. Her Aunt Helen was an attorney with no children of her own. Helen Vollmer could erase her niece’s mistake: she filed the necessary paperwork in the Kings County Court to extract the underage Joan from a premature marriage. Secretly her parents worried about the interventions of Joan’s indulgent aunts. Were Helen and Grace Vollmer spoiling their impulsive niece? Would Joan learn any lessons from failed marriage #1?
To Joan, marriages one and two might’ve seemed farther apart in time. Two years is a long time when you’re eighteen. Paul Adams, for all the fun Kerouac makes of him, read the same books that Joan did and had serious political commitments aligned with Joan’s. Joan relished the idea of being a War Bride and joining the ranks of young women whose new husbands had been sent overseas to fight Fascism. So romantic! War Brides were in the headlines in 1942.
Similar to Hal Keeler, Paul was at a vulnerable point. His mother was dying. Anna Adams passed away in Roosevelt Hospital not long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was only 48; her sons were barely grown men. It was an inflection point: Paul’s older brother married at the beginning of 1942 and immediately enlisted in the Army. Paul followed suit in April: he married Joan and left for basic training nine days later. Joan seems to have been attracted to Paul’s vulnerability.
But Army service changed Paul both physically and ideologically. Joan wasn’t pleased when her tall, skinny, hollow-chested husband returned for his first furlough a broad-shouldered soldier. It’s not clear that he could’ve remained the man he was when he left New York, nor that Joan would’ve been satisfied if he had, but Joan used these changes to justify a series of love affairs. Paul tolerated them as long as he could; several years later he was even willing to raise Joan’s daughter Julie as his own child. But finally, in 1945, he’d had enough of Joan’s boundary-pushing. In the end, Paul’s desertion seems to be exactly what she wanted. Maybe marriage just wasn’t for Joan. If her first two marriages were impulsive, Joan immediately regretted what she’d done.
Joan remained married to Paul, despite her regrets and dalliances. Women didn’t have the latitude to experiment and Joan didn’t want to wind up living in Loudonville with her parents. First Hal Keeler’s garment district job, then Paul’s allotment gave her a measure of independence. She also worked at secretarial jobs, and later as a ghostwriter. At the end of the summer of 1945, before she had taken up with Burroughs, in a letter to John Kingsland, Joan lamented that when the men came home from war, she’d no longer have her choice of employment: “I could always get some kind of job again, but now there are such beautiful ads in the papers, and soon they’ll all be gone.” It’s not that Joan was averse to work; it’s that women’s jobs were tedious, unrewarding, and poorly paid. Even becoming a writer would’ve required that she find support for herself and her daughter while she developed her voice and produced work to sell.
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OLIVER: That’s just Joan’s first two marriages. Was Burroughs just as ill-suited to Joan as the other two men?
From today’s perspective, it’s hard to even imagine the match between Burroughs and Joan, especially since Joan was well aware that Burroughs had what she would refer to in Freudian terms as a “psycho-sexual disorder.” She coped with this mismatch by flattering him, invoking the famous line that Burroughs was “as good as a pimp in bed.” Nor was Joan enthusiastic about marriage’s legal protections and restrictions. As late as January 1947, she admitted to John Kingsland that she and Burroughs “sort of expect to get married sometime or other—Bill got his divorce last summer in St. Louis—but I’m exhausted by the mere thought of getting one myself.”
Yet the couple looked and acted as if they were married, if not legally, at least in practice. Was Joan’s third marriage just as impulsive as her first two? It certainly appears that it was, despite Allen Ginsberg’s rosy matchmaking stories and Joan’s instructions to Edie Parker to call her “Mrs. W. S. Burroughs.” Edie would later imply that Joan and Bill were just the last two people left in the apartment and that Joan had been pregnant and desperate. The performative year-end letter from Joan, the first communication Edie had received from her friend in a long time, apparently pissed off Mrs. J. de Kerouac, née Parker, now a divorcee living in her mother’s house in suburban Detroit.
Phil White (and his older wife, Kay) provided both Burroughs and Joan with a less conventional model of married life—Joan would be Bill’s ‘old lady’, the stalwart partner who knew enough to bring a few Nembutals along with bail. Joan had gotten to know Phil and Kay fairly well in advance of her relationship with Burroughs; she was willing to play the part of Bill’s ‘old lady’ in trade for a life more varied and intellectually stimulating than the one she’d otherwise lead. Incidentally, Kay White had led a more free-wheeling and interesting life than Huncke would attribute to her in his later writings. Joan would’ve known this.
What evidence convinced us that the union with Burroughs was impulsive? Three things: first, Joan hadn’t really planned to leave New York City when the apartment on W115th Street broke up. If she had, the path of least resistance would’ve been to temporarily move back to Loudonville. Instead, Joan hoodwinked her mother into an unplanned two-and-a-half-month babysitting stint that surely further strained her relationship with her parents. Second, Joan’s correspondence during this crisis period suggests that she had no expectation of a long-term romantic relationship with Burroughs. Finally, Joan’s father’s Special Delivery letter to Allen Ginsberg (in the Stanford Ginsberg Collection) shows that Joan’s parents weren’t aware that she’d left for Texas with Burroughs, even though Joan had talked to them not long before she was released from Bellevue.
It’s only dumb luck that Burroughs arrived in New York City at the same time Joan was released from Bellevue; he could’ve shown up a week earlier and been unable to find her. On October 25, Burroughs sent Ginsberg a telegram “ARRIVE ABOUT NOON TOMORROW WILL CONTACT YOU ON ARRIVAL”. He still didn’t know where Joan was. Yes, he was concerned about her well-being. But no concrete plans had been made. Burroughs’s October 10 letter to Allen Ginsberg revealed that he “may bring [Joan] back with me to Texas.” The word “may” does some heavy lifting here: Joan hadn’t promised him anything. Her pre-hospitalization letters to Burroughs may have been both manipulative and alarming. Huncke’s October 8 letter in response to Joan’s gives us some indication that she talked openly about her recent affair, about her loss of the apartment on W115th, about her dire financial straits, and about her own rudderless future. John Kingsland was sufficiently alarmed that he took the train to New York City from Rensselaer Polytechnic—where he’d just begun teaching—on a moment’s notice.
In her distress and mania, Joan sought to arouse jealousy and concern among the men who might provide a way out from what surely must’ve looked to her like an inevitable return to Loudonville. So, it’s unlikely that Joan thought through the move to Texas very carefully. She knew Burroughs was enchanted with the ‘gentleman farmer’ life his friend Kells Elvins had laid out for him. And, as she had before, Joan impulsively took the most interesting path. And it remained the most compelling choice for Joan until the fall of 1950.
As we know from the brief glimpse Junky gives of Bill’s domestic life, during the fall of 1950, Joan had wearied of watching Bill slide back into addiction; it was boring and routinized. For the first time since she considered herself Mrs. W. S. Burroughs, Joan was seeing other men and summoning the strength to make a life on her own, now with two children. She planned to stay put in Mexico City and begin anew. But she foresaw financial problems. As Joan informed Jack Kerouac, “It’s pretty hard to get any kind of job here, for an American—against the law—but you might find some tutoring or something.” It seems that she had looked into the work situation.
Not long before Christmas 1950, Joan renewed contact with her parents, informing them that she’d left Burroughs and requesting an infusion of cash. The Vollmers were pleased to hear from their daughter; she’d been all but estranged from them for the last few years. With the letter, Joan had sent photos of the children wearing frumpy clothes and shoes with conspicuous holes in them. Her parents were concerned. They especially worried about Julie; they’d cared for her during at least four multi-month periods, twice when Julie was very young, and twice more when she was a toddler. It is inarguable that Joan’s adventurous life was hard on the amiable, well-behaved little girl.
Instead of promising on-going financial support—which would’ve been unusual for a thrice-married woman to receive from her parents—the senior Vollmers urged Joan to come back home if her third marriage was on the rocks. Mental health problems had periodically plagued Joan, and they were no doubt uncomfortable with the letter’s tone. They made quiet plans to take their next driving vacation to Mexico City to check in on Joan and their grandchildren.
So, in the end, it was money that drove Joan back into the unworkable marriage with Burroughs. After the first of the year in 1951, Burroughs would once again send Allen and Jack “best regards” from Joan and the children. They’d been separated less than three months.
So, was Joan stupid about her three marriages? Probably not. Selfish and manipulative on occasion, perhaps, but in a mostly justifiable way for a woman living in the early 1950s. Many of the intelligent women around her made similar compromises to guarantee financial support for themselves. Joan was adventurous and intellectually curious; there were few better ways to lead the life that Joan wanted to lead during the late 1940s and early 1950s than marrying Bill Burroughs.
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OLIVER: On a personal level, it’s clear how committed you both have been to researching Joan’s life, for over a decade now. I get the impression you want to do her memory justice—but what would that look like for each of you?
CATHY: I know “authenticity” is a buzzword of our digital era. But that’s what I hope to reach in the end, an authentic portrait of Joan that considers everything we now know about her, without hewing too closely to a mythology that’s grown up around her over the last 70 years or to the specific indictments that have been levelled against her without a more careful look at contemporaneous primary sources.
Joan was an extraordinary woman. Burroughs knew that. But there were things he didn’t know, things he didn’t notice, and things he didn’t care to discuss about her. In the end, I think most of us rely on how we present ourselves (say, in social media, or in Joan’s contemporaries’ cases, in letters) to spackle over our flaws.
But Joan didn’t have the luxury of a long life over which she could reframe her youth or play out her creative aspirations after the kids were older. Nor do we know what changes would’ve been wrought by her mental health.
It’s taken more than a decade to reach a more nuanced, evidence-based, fleshed-out portrayal of Joan and her social circle. Joan Vollmer is truly singular. The trick is to get her right on the page—that’s what would do her memory justice.
SIMON: Cathy’s comments on “authenticity” are really important here. To illustrate this, I’ve just now undertaken a Google search for “Joan Vollmer photographs”. I have on my screen two separate web articles. One, relating to Joan’s death, shows a photograph of a young woman seated on the railings of a small wooden bridge. No credit is provided. The photograph is presented as being Joan Vollmer, though clearly isn’t her. The other article about Joan, dated January 2025, relates to the film Queer, featuring a photograph of two young women, captioned as “Edie Parker & Joan Vollmer”. No credit is provided. This is not Edie Parker and Joan Vollmer, not even a close approximation. These images appear to have originated from a spurious collection of old photographs which have been shared via various social media channels (and for sale on eBay), purporting to be a batch of photographs of Joan, Bill, and various members of Bill’s family. The collection is in no way connected to any of these individuals.
When I started my own research into Joan, circa 2011, so few photographs of her were available. The most widely circulated images were Joan’s 1939 matriculation photograph for Barnard College (which was used in reports of her death in 1951, and was frequently misdated), and Allen Ginsberg’s 1945 candid of Joan walking on a sidewalk near Columbia University. Since then, two 1947 candids of Joan at the New Waverly, Texas, farm were made widely available online (from the Ginsberg papers at Stanford), and a very small number of additional images of Joan at high school and college have surfaced online as a result of newspaper digitisation projects, and via Cathy and I making Doane Stuart School at Rensselaer, New York, aware of Joan’s significance to the school.
I was really surprised, when watching Howard Brookner’s 1983 film Burroughs: The Movie, to see a photograph purported to show Joan appear on the screen during an interview with Joan and Bill’s son, Billy. A cursory glance shows that the woman in the photograph is not Joan—in fact, the photograph is now included in the Ginsberg papers at Stanford and shows Lucien Carr’s wife, Cessa, and their baby son Simon.
In terms of “authenticity”, I mention the above because more than 40 years passed between Brookner’s 1983 documentary film, and the aforementioned 2025 article about Joan in the context of the film Queer, yet there remains a very low bar in terms of the efforts being made to provide authenticity when writing about Joan. Of the examples provided above, the main frustration isn’t so much the internet being flooded with spurious misidentified images (although that is certainly frustrating), but rather a tendency for writers to reproduce them as fact without validating sources.
Over recent years, there has been a move towards writers focusing on the supposed deliberate erasure of Joan’s influence. This simply isn’t the case; rather, it highlights a tendency to only scratch the surface of oft-repeated secondary sources. Our intention with the research for Ordinary Stupid People, and of Cathy’s wider research into Joan’s life, is to render Joan as accurately as possible through new primary source material. Several photographs of Joan, which had never previously been shared publicly, have been reproduced in the book, thanks to the kind assistance provided by members of Joan’s family.
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OLIVER: Joan has been played on screen several times in various forms—by Judy Davis in Naked Lunch (1991), Courtney Love in Beat (2000), Amy Adams in On the Road (2012), and so on: has any actor captured a truth about her, or are they for you just worthless misrepresentations?
The filmic portrayals of Joan have their place. If the characters are nothing like Joan, that’s okay. They’re meant to realize Joan as she’s mythologized. Courtney Love’s version of Joan in Beat is the riot grrl Joan, the one that’s the most anachronistic (surely, she’s a creature of the 1990s, aspirationally wild and free) and probably the farthest from the Joan we’ve seen in contemporaneous correspondence and in interviews with her family.
Amy Adams probably took Kerouac’s naive (and somewhat vindictive) narrative picture of Joan to heart when she thought about how to play her. Recall that by 1946, Jack Kerouac felt snubbed by Joan. Call to mind the young writer who went to her apartment to rubberneck as Joan’s mental health deteriorated during September of 1946. When he wrote about Joan, he wasn’t going to highlight her quiet intelligence or her acerbic wit. Instead, he felt inclined to show Joan as her mousiest and most eccentric self. Amy Adams did pick up on Joan’s natural shyness and her tendency to gaslight people she thought of as naive. What we see in On The Road is Joan the way she appeared to Helen Hinkle during her short period of being ‘billeted’ at the Burroughs household and how Kerouac described her in the wake of his frenetic Algiers stopover with his On The Road companions.
Judy Davis’s portrayal of Joan in the movie rendition of Naked Lunch is the closest to how Joan wanted to be seen. Glamorous. Sophisticated. Intelligent. Funny. Joan (and John Kingsland) idolized Tallulah Bankhead; they both wanted to be Tallulah Bankhead. That’s Joan in her own mind. Judy Davis was Joan’s Joan.
But in truth, Joan was far from Tallulah Bankhead. Joan was introverted. Like her mother, Joan’s best (and funniest) comments were made sotto voce. You have to remember, the brilliant Joan Adams only got an A- in Sociology, material she could’ve discussed intelligently, at length, running circles around most of her classmates, “because I don’t talk”. That’s what she confessed to Herb Kiesewetter, who was cheering on Joan’s return to college. In front of a few friends, Joan could easily spark controversy. In a crowded room or with strangers, however, she retreated. Her most subversive commentary—on the level of a Burroughs routine—was taken literally.
There is, however, one scene in Beat that we’d like to highlight because of how much it resonated with our research. Courtney Love’s Joan is shown struggling to write. One of the most tantalising new primary sources discovered during our research was a letter Joan sent to John Kingsland, in 1945. Joan laments “Leave us face it, I can’t write anything of any interest. I’ve really tried, and I’ll continue to do so, but I close up and can’t think of anything. I’m afraid that’s out, and I’ll have to manage a job somehow.” So, this provided us with the first evidence that Joan, too, wanted to be a writer. When Joan wrote the letter in question, she was spending the summer with her parents in Loudonville and had only arrived there a week prior with her one-year-old daughter in tow. As such, it is no surprise that Joan was unable to seriously concentrate on writing at that point.
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OLIVER: One specific question: your book cover reproduces images from the home movies you discovered. Can you say something about how you obtained them and what they reveal that the very few still photographic images we have can’t?
CATHY: Joan’s father was an avid technologist. He owned some early home movie cameras, mostly aiming the viewfinder at his family and the bright flowers of the garden. Billy Vollmer already owned a color movie camera in the early 1940s—thus the flowers.
The films were not only taken early on; unfortunately, they were also digitized early on, so the footage is low resolution. I was given temporary access to the digital version of Joan’s family’s home movies with a promise my focus would be on Joan in action. I was also interested in seeing her immediate family. For example, her mother, Dorothy Vollmer, seemed to have a rare air of calm unflappability in the clips, even when her husband filmed her eating a picnic lunch; Joan absorbed that way of being, saving anger for brief flashes.
The home movies of Joan cover three brief periods: her trips home from college for the 1939 Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays; the spring and summer after her first marriage had ended in 1940; and the summer following Julie’s birth in 1944. There is no footage of Joan thereafter. To our disappointment, there’s no coverage of Joan and Paul’s 1942 wedding at the Yonkers courthouse, even though Joan’s parents attended, and no footage of Joan during her visit home in late 1946, just before she took off for Texas with Julie. We would’ve loved to see more of the adult Joan.
What do the movies tell us beyond what we saw in the photos? The pensive stills we chose for the book’s cover were from the footage of Joan after she’d returned home from her first few months at Barnard. She is filmed smoking a cigarette at the family table. It’s more sweet than transgressive. Cigarettes were nothing new. She’d already taken up smoking before she left for Barnard.
Joan is all smiles in the films. She’s dressed in smart, fashionable outfits. One segment, I’m speculating, shows her dressed up for her first secretarial job. Generally, she’s wearing a hat (as women did back then)—we know how you appreciate a hat, Oliver! She appears in a different setting in early 1940 in the company of her beloved maiden aunts. Another clip shows her and the family dog, Eric, walking through her childhood neighborhood with her grandpa Vollmer. At sixteen, Joan is chic, in a leopard print coat. Dorothy is partially responsible for Joan’s wardrobe—she shopped skilfully and bought Joan (and later Julie) beautiful clothes.
I dated the brief segments using the weather, the way people are dressed, and inferring why an occasion merited filming. For example, Billy Vollmer filmed Joan’s brother David on the day of the 1940 solar eclipse, which reached totality over Albany. David is holding a chunk of dark glass so he can look at the sun. Sometimes current events helped me put an exact date on the movies. People weren’t as casual photographers as they are now—the cost and effort of purchasing and developing film is easy to forget as we whip out our phones and use sophisticated video editing tools on digital footage.
Although people weren’t as used to seeing themselves in movies as we are now, Joan wasn’t self-conscious in these snippets. She didn’t seem to mind being recorded during the periods that she had access to a hair salon and fashionable clothes. Joan was a natural on camera—her smile wasn’t forced or awkward. The later filmic portrayals of Joan would’ve benefited from seeing Joan as she was.
I wish there were home movies from any period after the six candids shot on the New Waverly, Texas, farm. Film would reveal whether what we’ve heard about Joan’s limp, the hardness of her face, and her overall decline has been exaggerated. As Simon mentioned earlier, the photo that’s often used to represent Joan’s decline in Mexico City was actually her Barnard matriculation photo, when Joan was just sixteen years old. The only other post-1946 photos seem to be the ones taken after Joan’s death, obviously without her consent or willing participation. We don’t know the effect the sudden violence had on her expression or even the structure of her face. Had she been able to object to the photos, she no doubt would’ve.
Home movies in those days didn’t record sound. Joan’s voice would’ve been a revelation (like Edie Parker’s or Lewis Marker’s were to me). A voice further shapes your impression. Alas, the technology wasn’t there. I’m grateful to have seen the moving images.
But back to your original question: in the home movies, Joan becomes a real person, shy at times, with an evident personal magnetism. Someone who, as a young adult, is fashion-conscious and expressive. Most of the pictures that have circulated widely were taken in unflattering circumstances (like school photos and candids). With the Vollmer family’s permission, I hope to include a few more unseen photos and movie stills in the full biography, beyond those we published in Ordinary Stupid People.
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OLIVER: Finally, what can you say, Cathy, about the full-scale biography you’ve been working on: do you have a schedule for it and a publisher?
CATHY: I wish I could give you a straightforward answer, Oliver. I’ve rewritten the entire biography several times as I’ve dived deeper and deeper into different primary sources, checking facts, interviewing people, listening to earlier interviews, and discovering new contemporaneous material in archives and personal collections. It’s not just that I’ve revised event chronologies and figured out who lived in which apartment; rather, I’ve changed my mind about who Joan was. A full biography should render Joan throughout her life in greater fidelity, with empathy, in a way that reflects her intellect, her values, her flaws, and especially her subversive sense of humor.
As was the case with Ordinary Stupid People, Joan’s social circle has been an important element of my (and our) research. As Rob Johnson discovered when he identified William Burroughs’s crew in South Texas, it is revealing to know more about the people Joan knew. Expect to read more about characters like John Kingsland, Kay White, John Herrmann, and others. Using new evidence (and revisiting old evidence), I’ve also reevaluated Joan’s relationships with central Beat figures like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Edie Parker, and Herbert Huncke.
It’s been more than a decade since I began. My literary agent gave me feedback on completed chapters in 2015 and agreed I was almost done. I wasn’t, not by a long shot, as Herbert Huncke was fond of saying. This time, I feel more confident. As Simon and I discovered when we were researching Ordinary Stupid People, it’s way too easy to project a personality onto Joan, to mix contemporaneous values with contemporary ones, or to inadvertently slip into the perspective offered by Beat fiction. I expect to complete this revised version by the end of 2025.
I hope Joan’s biography will be as fun to read as it was to research!
IMAGE SOURCES
Image 1: Ordinary Stupid People, published by Moloko Print, Schönebeck (Elbe), Germany. Photographer: Ben Schot. Courtesy of Ben Schot of Sea Urchin Editions.
Image 2: Joan Vollmer pictured in the garden of the family home at Loudonville, New York, circa 1938. Photographer: David Wilbert Vollmer. Courtesy of the Vollmer family, with kind permission.
Image 3: Joan Vollmer’s second husband, Paul Adams, pictured circa 2000 at the bookstore at 48 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, New York, run by Jack and Frances Biblo. Photographer: Andrew Porter. Courtesy of Andrew Porter, with kind permission.
Image 4: Henry Allan (Hal) Keeler, Joan Vollmer’s first husband pictured circa 1940 when he and Joan were married. Photographer: unknown. Courtesy of Scott Keeler, with kind permission.
Image 5: Extract from the Official Military Personnel File of Joan Vollmer’s second husband, Paul Adams. Courtesy of National Archives, St. Louis, Missouri.
Image 6: Joan Vollmer’s parents, David Wilbert (Billy) Vollmer and Dorothy Harding Vollmer, pictured in 1938. Photographer: unknown. Courtesy of the Vollmer family, with kind permission.
Image 7: Joan Vollmer seated at the family home at Loudonville, late 1939. Still from a home movie shot by Joan’s father. Photographer: David Wilbert Vollmer. Courtesy of the Vollmer family, with kind permission.