Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Fort Macleod was a barely populated town in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies (a fifty-mile straight shot north from Montana’s western border) that had been, sixty years earlier, a snowbound, wind-mauled Mounties outpost in Blackfoot territory. Raised as an infant in that 2,000-resident town, in wartime conditions of quaintness (mail and water coming in open wagons) and privation (soap scarce enough that when you got it, “You washed your dishes and your hair and your clothes with it, whether it was detergent or shampoo,” Joni has said), then moving northeast with her parents to a succession of towns on the flat, wheaty plains of midwestern Canada, Roberta Joan took her entertainment the old-fashioned way: from family stories. Those about her parents’ mothers stood out most. She heard aunts’ accounts of her Grandmother Anderson and Grandmother McKee, and she made these women into supporting characters in her own life narrative, turning their unfulfilled talent into her legacy and their frustrated ambition into her obligation. “There must [have been] some kind of genetic thrust,” she’s said, of the career that both her grandmothers had desired. “I’m the one who got the musical gene; it landed in a female, and it had to be taken home for the sake of these women.”

  As a fourteen-year-old Norwegian farm girl, Joni’s paternal grandmother had longed to be a pianist, but she knew that dream was out of the question, so she’d “wept…behind [the] barn,” Joni has said, then ordered herself, “‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl! You will never have a piano.’ She became a stoic.” She and her family moved to New Norway—a newly incorporated but primitive village in Alberta that attracted Scandinavians and Scandinavian Minnesotans looking for cheap, fertile land—in the first decade of the twentieth century. There she met and married a fellow Norwegian émigré, a young man named Anderson, who was, as Joni has called him, “a nasty drunk”; with him she had “baby after baby,” Joni has said. “She raised eleven children and lived a horrible life: giving, giving, giving—a self-sacrificing animal to her many children.” Still, “through all the hardship, she never wept.” Such reiningin of emotion seemed to Joni a heroic refusal of weakness.

  One of those eleven children was William, a good-natured boy who liked to play the trumpet and who inherited his mother’s rectitude. Bill escaped the chaos of home by joining the Royal Canadian Air Force and by avoiding marriage throughout his twenties.

  On Joni’s mother’s side was Canadian-born Sadie McKee, descended from a man who, in Scotland, had worked on the estate of Sir Walter Scott. Unlike Grandmother Anderson, Sadie McKee wasn’t an old-world peasant; she hailed from a long line of classical musicians. She didn’t tearfully jettison her musical gifts as a young adolescent; she played the organ, wrote poetry, and listened to opera on the gramophone well into her years as a frontier farm wife. She wasn’t a baby-making doormat but rather a snob. (She married “an oxen-plowing prairie settler and thought she was too good for him,” Joni has said.) And she most definitely wasn’t a stoic; she was “a spitfire, a tempest, the opposite of long-suffering [and] good-natured. She was always having fiery fits [and she felt] that she was too good [for her fate]—a poet and musician stuck on a farm.” In the midst of one fight with the tempestuous Sadie, her husband threw his wife’s treasured gramophone records to the floor; Sadie retaliated by kicking a door off its hinges. If Joni inherited from her father’s mother the stoicism that Duke Redbird would be so struck by in the Huron Street rooming house, then she inherited from her mother’s mother what she has called “the Irish blood: fight before you think.” (Joni never kicked a door off the hinges, but she did once throw a drink in Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner’s face when he supposedly smirked at the sight of her struggling to enter an awards show, unaided, through a mass of fans. And in the midst of separate emotional fights with two women close to her—one was her housekeeper, Dora—Joni slapped them both on the face.) The lesson that any ambitious, talented girl in the Canadian prairie might draw from these matriarchs seems clear: having babies in poverty and desperation, and remaining in the provinces, will destroy your dreams almost before you can dream them.

  Sadie’s daughter Myrtle McKee was raised on the farm that her mother disdained, and she was as proud and particular as her mother was—determined to move up and out. She passed up offers to marry common men—farmers, policemen—biding her time as a teacher in a rural school and feeling so superior to the materials she had to work with, she often made her own schoolbooks. When she was still unmarried at thirty, Myrtle took a job in a bank in the big city of Regina, Saskatchewan. After expressing her frustration at the lack of eligible men in town (it was 1942 and they were all in wartime military service), she was introduced by a friend to Bill Anderson. They married on his two-week air force leave; their only child, a daughter, was born within the year. She was named Roberta, but almost immediately everyone called her by her middle name: Joan.

  The young family moved around a lot, as Bill advanced—from butcher-grocer to manager—in his work for a regional supermarket chain. They lived in Fort Macleod until Roberta Joan was a year and a half, then moved to Maidstone, Saskatchewan, a village of just over four hundred residents, where the family entertained itself by listening to the Andrews Sisters’ and the McGuire Sisters’ mellifluous close-harmony, piped through the console radio. Myrtle was a controlling mother. “I have a very early memory of being walked on a leash,” Joni has said. “You know, they used to put children on these leashes.” Hearing Victrola music tin-speakered out the front of a Woolworth’s, “I stopped on my leash and began to bounce up and down and sing with great enthusiasm. My mother gave me a tug, and I remember thinking that was very insensitive of her.”

  When Joan was five, the family moved again, to nearby North Battleford, a town with a three-block-long downtown, of about 7,000 residents. Joan made friends with two children on the street: red-haired, freckle-faced, classical-music whiz Frankie McKitrick, the son of a school principal, and short-blond-haired Sandra Stewart, the daughter of a road contractor and a nurse. Sandra, who was called Sandy, remembers first meeting her new neighbor Joan—“this very, very fair-complected girl with wispy, shoulder-length white-blond hair.” All three children were in strict Mrs. Thompson’s first-grade classroom at the Alexander School. In a town of robust boys who threw rocks and sticks, Frankie was a hopeless misfit, so unathletic that he was excused even from volleyball, in love with the sonatas and rhapsodies he was learning to play (he would later become a choir director). Similarly, in a town where girls played with dolls (which Joan eschewed, though Myrtle did make her sparkly princess costumes), Sandy, to Joan’s approval, disdained the company of girls, “and I messed up a lot of playtimes by gathering up the boys and crashing the party,” Sandy recalls. Add Peter Armstrong, a mammoth boy with a glorious voice (he went on to have a singing career in Europe), and an Our Gang was formed: Frankie, the pianist; Joan, the artist; Sandy, the tomboy; and Peter, the fat boy with the celestial tenor.

  The foursome put on circuses in Sandy’s garage, and Joan was the choreographer of these efforts. “Joan always had to be the lead character—it had to be done her way; she always played the ringmaster, so she could be the boss, and a lot of the acts she came up with were not well received by those of us who had to do them,” Sandy remembers. Frank agrees: “Joan was unflinching. She and I would have serious arguments about how we would present a backyard circus. Her artistic temperament wouldn’t yield to mine, and I usually gave in.” Sandy wasn’t so good-natured. “Joan and I would have fights. We were both headstrong, but Joan liked to rule the roost.” When they weren’t playing circus, they were singing and dancing. Joni has recalled, “I danced around the room while Frankie played the piano, and we all did the hula on the lawn in the sprinklers.”

  Older than all the other children’s parents, exotically possessed of but a single child (in a neighborhood of medium-sized families) and a “house full of very nice things,” as Sandy says, the senior Andersons trained a startling, almost glamorous attention on their daughter—“Joan was to
tally indulged”—and displayed a notable gentility and decorousness. “Both of them were proper,” Sandy says. “It’s not that they were strict. Mrs. Anderson was a lovely mum, with the gentlest voice, but you felt you always needed to mind your p’s and q’s around them and be on your best behavior. Joan’s dad was very, very quiet—a gentleman to the nth degree: very proper.” Big band horn playing was his release. Frankie would come over to the Anderson house after school and play piano while Mr. Anderson tooted his trumpet (Leroy Anderson’s “A Trumpeter’s Lullaby” was a favorite duet for the two of them) and Joan made her paintings. “No one at school could hold a candle to Joan’s ability to blend color and draw; she absolutely excelled in art,” Frank says. Myrtle served juice—soda pop didn’t darken her door—and Joan would run around after her pet rabbit, nervously picking up the pellets it left outside the cage before her mother noticed. (Myrtle considered even cats barn animals and wouldn’t let Joan keep a kitten.)

  Perhaps in compensation for the fact that their Queen Street home was a “wartime house”—one of many identical, inexpensively built houses for veterans—Myrtle was doubly determined to make it an impeccable one. She vacuumed the garage daily and sniffed at neighbors’ housekeeping deficits. (“Mrs. Dawson across the street keeps a very, very dirty home, you know…,” Joni would paraphrase later.) Joni grew up in an atmosphere “almost Victorian, in the sense of such an emphasis on what neighbors would think, and on those relatively strict codes of what is proper,” says her second husband, Larry Klein, of the stories Joni told him about her childhood. But if Myrtle knew what her daughter must not be, she also guided her to what she should—and would—be: a lover of the arts and beauty. She trained her Joan to press flowers in scrapbooks and recite Shakespearean sonnets. And when Joan was eight, Myrtle and Bill and Harold and Katie McKitrick were the only parents who wrote permission notes to have their children excused from school to see the art film Tales of Hoffman, a sequel to The Red Shoes. “In strict, proper Canada, in 1951, to be released from school because your parents thought it was important for your development to see a movie—well, it just wasn’t done! And it was thrilling!” Frank recalls. The movie—with its ballets and romance (the male protagonist has love affairs with a mechanical doll, a Venetian courtesan, and a Greek singer)—captivated Joan. “I remember standing on the street with her afterward: she was reliving one of the characters, making an emerald appear in his hand,” Frank says.

  That Myrtle would want her young daughter to see a culturally uplifting movie doesn’t surprise Chuck Mitchell, whom Joni married when she was twenty-one. “From what Joni said, Myrtle was constrained in her own life, and she didn’t want her daughter to be constrained,” Chuck says. “She knew she had a gifted daughter, so she gave Joni her all—she was 140 percent mom, and an assertive mom—and she made it very clear that the only way Joni could escape the prairie was to go with her talents.” “Joan was completely different from her parents; she got a different gene somewhere” is how drummer John Guerin, one of the most significant men in her life, described Joni and her parents, in an interview he gave for this book, shortly before his January 2004 death. Guerin wore a puzzled smile and shook his head as he said, “I don’t know where she got it. ’Cause her mother and father are very straight-ahead, middle-class midwestern people.” Graham Nash remembers: “Myrtle! Oh, God! I once went to Joni’s parents’ house; I think it was 1970. Downstairs in the spare bedroom, which is where I slept. I’d been living with Joni for two years, but no, no, no, we couldn’t stay in the same room at Myrtle’s! I’m talking to Joan, I’ve got my hand on the door. I said to Joan: ‘What’s your mother like? Give me a clue here.’ And she said: ‘I’ll tell you what my mother’s like: run your finger on top of the door.’ Now this is downstairs in the spare bedroom. I run my finger across the top of the door. Not a speck of fucking dust anywhere! I said, ‘Wow!’ She said: ‘Myrtle.’”

  Myrtle’s exacting standards, fierce control, and faith in her daughter’s artistic gifts probably combined to keep Joan emotionally beholden to her. A mother who underestimates a little girl can eventually be written off as unsupportive, but a mother who sees her daughter’s best self even before she does is harder to disengage from. “When I knew Joni, her mom could upset her,” says Dave Naylor, a record producer who was involved with Joni in the 1970s. “A couple of times I’d be talking to her and then she’d get a call from her mother, and by the time I got over to her house she was a mess. I always wondered how this little old lady sitting in a rocking chair in Saskatchewan could reach out and grab her and still pull the chain. It amazed me.”

  When Joan was in fourth grade, a new minister, Reverend Allan Logie, arrived in town to take over the pulpit at Third Avenue United Church. The minister’s older daughter, Anne, became Joan’s new close friend. The same-aged girls were similarly dreamy and creative (under her subsequently adopted name Bayin, Anne would become a well-regarded photographer) and, like their friend Sandy Stewart, secretly rebellious. (“I found a kindred spirit in that one-stoplight town,” Anne would later write in a memoir about her friendship with Joni, published in the Canadian magazine Elm Street.) Both were ballasted by the same combination of propriety and artistic expressiveness: Anne’s mother, the minister’s wife, directed the community theater. Like Myrtle Anderson’s pressed-flower scrapbooks and Shakespeare quoting, Laura Logie’s trunks full of Elizabethan clothes fueled the girls’ drama lust. In the same way that proper Bill Anderson belted the trumpet to release his inhibitions, Allan Logie, when not sermonizing from the pulpit, wrote witty poetry. Unlike Sandy, who was as stubborn and willful as Joan, Anne had a more cautious spirit and let herself be led by her new friend’s charisma. “Joan was a force of nature, more daring than me,” Anne Bayin said, in the Elm Street memoir, adding: “She turned brooms into batons, she had a nose for fashion, she wore stars on her shoes and her dad’s ties to school. She was a trendsetter. Kids copied her.”

  Inspired by the royal domestic doings in the motherland (Princess Elizabeth bearing Prince Charles in 1948 and Princess Anne in 1950—and, upon her father’s death, ascending the throne as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952), Anne and Joan cut old curtains into wedding veils and held mock weddings and other ceremonies in their backyards. They also had a Wild West infatuation. Anne dressed up as Annie Oakley, while Joan—who adored Roy Rogers (and whose favorite TV show was Wild Bill Hickock)—decked herself out like Dale Evans. A photograph of Joan—standing on the wooden porch of her house in a cowboy hat and cowboy vest, one cuffed-jeaned ankle crossed over the other, arms akimbo, her left hand on the handle of her toy gun—exhibits a self-possession rare for a nine-year-old. She even dared ask her Sunday school teacher—and Reverend Logie himself—a question about an apparent incest suggestion in the book of Genesis: If Adam and Eve were all alone in the Garden of Eden, and had two sons, Cain and Abel, and then Cain had a child—well, who did Cain have the baby with? No elder could answer the question to young Joan’s satisfaction.

  Joan, Sandy, and Anne sang in the church’s junior choir, for which Frankie played the organ, under the direction of Mrs. Girling, whose loud voice thundered with vibrato. Singing star Peter was also the cutup; Sandy, Joan, and Anne got in trouble for laughing at him mid-hymn. During province-wide music festivals they’d wait their turn in the rear pew while junior choir after junior choir filed to the front, shuffled into neat rows, and, pigtails bobbing, sang “Hey, Nonny, Nonny, on yonder hill there was a maiden…’” while a stout woman sternly judged the entrants.

  At seven, Joni started piano lessons, “with a real rush, with a thrill to play; I wanted to jump immediately into playing the piano beautifully,” she’s said. But her teacher, Miss Trevellen, rapped her knuckles with a ruler when she improvised. Joni has blamed the place and times for curbing self-expression, and while that may have been true, even the more straitlaced teachers appreciated her spirit. Drab Miss Bready, who taught fourth grade at King Street School (to which the neighborhood children h
ad transferred and of which Frankie’s father was principal), wrote that Roberta Joan was “original.”

  Into this churchly, small-town primness strode a villain: the polio virus. One morning in early November 1953, a week before her tenth birthday, Joan got out of bed for a normal day in Miss Fulford’s fifth-grade class at King Street, but something was not right. She put on her pegged gray slacks, red-and-white gingham blouse with sailor collar, and blue sweater—but the dressing took some doing. As she has remembered it, “I looked in the mirror, and I don’t know what I saw—dark circles or a slight swelling under my face.” Something was wrong. Was this a flu? Walking to school, Joan felt achy, but she managed to get through the day. The next morning she had no energy. When, at Myrtle’s prodding (“Get up! Come!”), Joan couldn’t rouse herself, Myrtle yanked her daughter out of bed—and Joan collapsed. She ended up being airlifted on a “mercy flight” to St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon, the capital of the province. She was diagnosed with polio, a highly contagious viral disease that, in its rare bulbar manifestation (where the lower brain stem is affected, damaging the interior horns of the spinal cord), could cause paralysis.

  This was the height of the Canadian polio epidemic, which was well on its way to afflicting 8,878 people, mainly children, out of a national population of less than 15 million. While polio cases in the far more populous United States had decreased by a third (from 58,000 to 35,000) over the previous year’s figures, polio in Canada had almost doubled, from its 1952 tally of 4,755. (The wide availability, in 1955, of the polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk would virtually extinguish the disease in both countries.)

  The higher impact of the disease in clean, uncrowded Canada made sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, the polio virus had circulated endemically. Children in then typically large families were exposed to it as a matter of course and developed immunity, which was reinforced by the maternal antibodies they’d acquired from having been breast-fed by immune mothers. But as the practices of breast-feeding and having large families came to be eschewed as “low class,” these ostensibly better-nurtured children were deprived of an indemnifying brush with the virus. This is what made polio so horrific and ironic. Here were civilized families: small, clean, orderly. Yet, as if being punished for virtue, they were ravaged by this paralyzing virus. The poster child for postwar progress—a coddled only child raised in a home kept spotless by a class-conscious mother, in a roomy, clean-aired town—was a prime candidate for this nightmare.