INDIANAPOLIS -- Jim Irsay's appearance in the wood-paneled library of his palatial mansion is an event, and not just because he is two hours late for an interview at his own home. There's his look: The owner of such items as the Indianapolis Colts, one of Elvis Presley's guitars, and now the legendary scroll upon which Jack Kerouac typed On the Road is tall and beefy, with the shoulders of a linebacker and the pale, shiny suit of a hippie loan shark.
There's his voice: a Dylan-esque drawl that lingers, lovingly, on words such as "c-o-o-o-l" and "a-u-u-u-ra."
But, most of all, there's his energy. Whether he's stubbing out cigarettes just inches away from his fragile and irreplaceable draft of On the Road or fondly recalling how he gave reporters the finger after buying the manuscript, or stripping down to a tie, an artfully placed guitar and little else in the course of a photo shoot, Irsay is, depending how you look at it, either a party permanently in progress or an accident waiting to happen.
A year after Irsay, 43, bought the Kerouac manuscript at auction for a record $2.43 million, scholars' responses range from mild concern to outspoken condemnation.
"It's a disgrace," says Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia, upon being informed that, during a recent interview, Irsay smoked near the open manuscript and allowed an open bottle of water to sit two inches away from it as it lay in a non-waterproof box.
"This guy is a spoiled, rich millionaire. ... I guess if you've got that much money, you can buy a Picasso and put a cigarette out on it, but it's a disgrace. Jack Kerouac belongs to the American people. He was one of our greatest writers of the 20th century, [and] his materials should all be publicly available for study."
Irsay says the scroll is safe and he is willing to make it available to scholars. And, in a madcap three-hour interview conducted in the library, indoor basketball court and basement stage of his leafy estate on the outskirts of Indianapolis, he goes further, suggesting that precisely those qualities of his that make literary purists squirm make him the ideal guardian of the most storied relic of the 1950s countercultural awakening that was the Beat movement.
"To me, it's already got this mystical aura to it," Irsay says of the scroll. "And it would be really cool to add to that. And I think I have the capabilities and the creative thinking to do that in a way that's viewed as fun, but universally viewed as safe and respectful."
Um, uhhhh, uhhm
In discussing On the Road, Kerouac's lightly fictionalized 1957 book about a series of freewheeling cross-country road trips, Irsay offers that he recently wrote a song about a similar topic.
"It was definitely about being on the road and about Woody Guthrie and about Jack Kerouac and, ummm, it was, uh, it was actually recorded last night, um, uhhhhh, and um, it just really, really spoke to the exact same thing we're talking about.
"About, um, being on the road and, um, uhhm, about, just about the changes and just about uhhm, the aspect that uhhm, that occurs by, you know, getting on the freight trains with the hobos in the boxcars and going across the plains of America and um, and, you know, changing, um, uhhh, and laying the groundwork for, ahem, changing, uh, the country."
This leads him to a digression on Gary, Ind., and the Industrial Revolution, but Irsay eventually returns to the topic at hand.
"Uh, basically, um, uhhm, [the song] just spoke of um, exactly what the road's about, and that's about, you know, traveling and going through, um, Americana, and, um, you know, planting the seeds um, uhhm, and just, uhhh, you know, just really influencing and laying the groundwork for those to come after them.
"I mean, because, there has to be, you know, the torch that gets handed, you know? I mean, it's like Martin Luther King said, in one of his famous speeches, he said, you know, 'I won't be there, you know? I won't see the day. But you all will, you know?' "
An eccentric father
It's hard to talk about Jim Irsay's eccentricities without mentioning those of his late father, Bob, the controversial Colts owner still reviled in some circles for a 1984 decision to move the football team from Baltimore to Indianapolis -- literally, in the middle of the night.
The elder Irsay, a Chicagoan who made his fortune in the heating and air conditioning business, was given to angry outbursts, bad trades and erratic public behavior. His own mother was quoted in a scathing 1986 Sports Illustrated profile as saying, "He's a devil on earth."
The younger Irsay is himself no slouch in the flamboyance department. This is a man described by journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose tales of drug-addled mischief are the stuff of counterculture legend, as a force to be reckoned with.
"I am a moderating force when I am with Jim," Thompson told Chicago magazine. But if the father is the standard against which his son is to be judged, Jim Irsay can be considered mild-mannered and predictable. Think: Bob Irsay Lite.
The younger Irsay's journey into Kerouac territory began in the 1970s, when he was a high school student at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Ill. That was when he read On the Road, a gritty, ecstatic celebration of the open road, played out against a backdrop of desert, prairie and smoky jazz joints.
The book spoke to him, he says. "Very much so, because I spent a lot of my time in the city, on the South Side of Chicago, in the blues clubs and at Biddy Mulligan's."
By the time it reached Irsay, the 120-foot scroll on which Kerouac wrote the most important draft of On the Road already had a remarkable history. Typed by an obscure writer in a caffeine-fueled 20-day marathon in 1951, it was rejected by a string of publishers. But when it finally was released six years later, it became a best seller and a rallying point for those rebelling against the materialism and conformity of the 1950s.
There were other Beat literary masters -- William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg -- and other important works treasured by black-clad post-war artistes. But none came to embody the era as much as On the Road, the book in which Kerouac would declare: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time."
For all of these reasons, the scroll, last owned by relatives of Kerouac's deceased third wife, Stella Sampas, was a valuable literary property.
"The fact is, it's an icon of 20th-century American literature," says Anthony Bliss, a rare books curator at the University of California at Berkeley's Bancroft Library.
Record price
Irsay paid $2.43 million for the scroll, a price that, according to Christie's, set a world record for a literary manuscript sold at auction. The new owner celebrated by lifting his middle finger to reporters covering the story.
The gesture, Irsay says, was a way of telling reporters, "You all didn't have any interest in this man in 1951 and now here you are, all covering the greatest amount of money ever spent for a manuscript, you who didn't believe."
Not everyone would share Irsay's elation. Some scholars and curators say that such an important literary holding should, ideally, be in the hands of a public institution, such as a major library. Among their concerns: the scroll, which was typed on cheap pieces of paper attached to each other by means of paste and tape, is fragile. It is also of immense value to scholars, who have not yet performed comprehensive studies of the hand-written corrections that dot the manuscript. Another potentially fruitful area of study is the difference between the scroll and the finished book, over which Kerouac had little editorial control.
"It bothers me and a lot of others enormously that it is not likely to be available for research," says UCB's Bliss.
In the year that has elapsed since the purchase, Irsay has had extensive preservation work done on the scroll at the respected Lilly Library at Indiana University, but, if anything, he has distanced himself from earlier statements suggesting that he would donate the scroll, perhaps to the New York Public Library.
For this, he blames others.
"Why don't people get off their [butt] and do something?" he says. "I had this concept, and it was a done deal," he says, describing an offer he made to the New York Public Library, in which he would donate the scroll in exchange for a library fund-raising campaign, which would in turn raise $2.43 million for victims of Sept. 11. "They didn't lift a finger to get behind it," he says.
Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, disputes aspects of that account, saying that the library, which has a policy against fund-raising for other causes, offered a different kind of assistance: It would coordinate the complex logistics of a fund-raising tour featuring the scroll.
"We did give [Irsay publicist Myra Borshoff] some counsel in terms of how to set up a nonprofit corporation. I gave her some advice in terms of different venues. So we were far from unhelpful," Gewirtz says.
Scroll unprotected
Today, the scroll lies on the glass coffee table in Irsay's library. For the first part of the interview, it sits in a buff-colored box made of the same material as a hardcover book. The box, which is not waterproof, lies two inches from an open water bottle, while Irsay, who is chain-smoking, stubs out cigarettes in a glass about a foot away.
Irsay continues to smoke when the manuscript is taken out of the box, placed on the coffee table and partially unrolled on a strip of white fabric. Smaller than a roll of paper towels, the scroll is so yellowed it's toast-brown, but the single-spaced type and hand-scrawled corrections are perfectly legible.
The wine glass that Irsay is now using as an ashtray is about six inches from the open scroll, a situation that does not escape the attention of Borshoff. As soon as he leaves the room, she reaches out to remove the offending object.
Borshoff also looks concerned when Irsay talks about how he likes to "pull out the scroll and just, under candlelight, just read, you know?"
"Ahhhh!" Borshoff says, emitting a choked sound of distress.
"I know," Irsay says, as if calming an anxious child. "Distant candlelight."
Nara Schoenberg is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune.