When her classmates, almost none of whom had ever been on a plane, heard that Joan had been flown to the hospital, a pall of tragic glamour hung over her in her absence. “It was so dramatic, so Joni, it took my breath away,” recalls Anne. “I confess, my first unforgivable reaction was one of envy, before reality and fear set in.” As for Joan’s parents, they “were devastated—you could read it in their faces—but they never cried. Oh, no! No crying from Joan’s mother,” says Sandra. “She was very strong.”
The polio unit at St. Paul’s was run by the locally legendary Canadian order the Sisters of Charity, also known as “Grey Nuns.” Well before the caseload doubled, the Grey Nuns had been scrambling worriedly to accommodate the glut of new patients who were rolled into the ward daily with high fevers, throbbing headaches, and the virus racing toward their nervous systems. On August 25, 1952, a Grey Nun had written in the group’s log: “The polio epidemic is at its full…We pray Mary to protect the youngsters from this sickness,” only—less than a month later—to have to amend the assessment: “Polio cases are multiplying. To help our overworked nurses, the public health department is sending six additional nurses…. Nine iron lungs are working all the time; eight of which are borrowed from other hospitals in the province.” (Iron lungs were tank respirators into which polio victims were slid on large trays with only their heads exposed. The loudly hissing tanks pushed air pressure into the patients’ diaphragms and chests, doing their breathing for them.) At year’s end the hospital had treated 358 polio patients; 15 died.
As 1952 had turned to 1953, bad had turned to worse, and by April 20, 1953, plans were made to enlarge the polio ward to a polio department, with a separate entrance, so that the highly contagious new patients “would not pass through the main part of the hospital,” as the nuns put it. It was through that new quarantine entrance that Joan Anderson was wheeled—past the mortifying phalanx of iron-lunged children—and settled into a bed in the full children’s ward. As if the terror, the fever, and the isolation weren’t punishment enough, the ten-year-old was subjected to a torturous-seeming regimen: she was wrapped in almost scalding hot compresses several times daily—this treatment pioneered by a World War I–era Australian military nurse nicknamed Sister Kenny, who had devised the method after she’d observed Aboriginals successfully treating their polio victims that way.*
Joni has said that her back muscles were affected by the polio (“It ate muscles in my back” is how she put it), and that for a while, as she lay in the hospital and submitted to the scalding compresses, she didn’t know if she would walk again. Fortunately, she would not be left with a limp or a shortened leg, which were common effects of the illness (“She ran all over the place! She ran up and down stairs; she didn’t complain,” says Chuck Mitchell, of Joni eleven years later), although she would complain, in the 1980s, of vague effects of post-polio syndrome. The real effect was emotional. Her second husband, Larry Klein, says, “Joni’s bout with polio at a young age was probably the one crisis—well, that, and the baby—that sculpted her inner resolve and sensitivity into the form that led to her strong talent as an artist. She certainly talked about polio as the thing that changed her: she had been a very outgoing child, and that illness was a huge experience that forced her inward.” As Joni has said: “I think the creative process was an urgency then. It was a survival instinct.”
“Survival” is apt; young Joan fought her polio. She has said, “I remember, the boy in the bed next to mine was really depressed. He didn’t even have polio as bad as I, but he wasn’t fighting it—he wasn’t fighting to go on with what he had left…I had to learn to stand, and then to walk [again]. Through all of this, I drew like crazy and sang Christmas carols. I left the ward long before that boy, who had a mild case of polio in one leg [and] lay with his back to the wall, sulking.” She has also said that she made a promise to the Christmas tree in the ward that if she recovered, she would “make something of myself.”
Selfless though the Grey Nuns may have been, even in tending severely ill children they did not relax their unforgiving moral code. One of them excoriated Joan for moving in such a way on her bed that her bare legs were visible to that sulky little boy while she was singing him a Christmas carol. “I was nine years old…and he was pouting and picking his nose and…telling me to shut up, when a nun rushed in and practically beat me up for showing my legs. A nine-year-old to a six-year-old!” Joni would later say. (On the other hand, she got along well with the ward’s charismatic Sister Mary Louise, who eventually became mother superior and whose charity Joni admired. After she became famous, Joni sang at events at the sister’s behest. “She grabbed me by the ear and put me to work,” Joni has recalled. “She wanted me to join the order and write my memoirs.”)
Joan was discharged from the hospital after six weeks, and her recovery was supervised by Myrtle, who homeschooled her for a year—blackboard, homework, and all. It was during this intense bonding between punctilious mother and convalescing daughter that an exchange occurred in a pediatrician’s office that, Joni has told friends, was central to her life. One of a number of those to whom Joni has recounted this incident says, “Joni never really put this together in her mind until much later, in her adult life, but then she started seeing it as so central—as the crux of things. Here’s what happened: she was ten—it was after the polio.” A medication she had been taking (she would much later deduce) caused secretions, and Myrtle took her to the doctor, who performed a kind of external gynecologic examination. “The doctor said, ‘You’ve been a naughty girl, haven’t you?’ He was accusing her of having sex. She was ten! Joni looked at her mother, like, ‘What?! I didn’t do anything!’ But, instead of defending her, her mother took the doctor’s side and humiliated her in front of him. Joni felt she’d lost her mother’s trust. Then she started thinking, Maybe she’d been raped?—things like that. Later, she realized the discharge was from an antibiotic. She’s confronted her mother about it, and her mother says, ‘Poppycock! I never did that.’ But whatever was said that day, it affected Joni. She said, many times, that she didn’t want to be a mother—not [in 1965], not ever—because she didn’t want to be her mother.”
Joan began wrestling with the good girl/bad girl duality provoked by that upsetting accusation of the doctor. She rejoined the church choir, but one night, after all the pious singing, she slipped around to a frozen pond with a friend who possessed a purloined pack of Black Cat Cork, Canada’s version of Camels. While the cigarette-dispensing friend and several other ten-year-olds were choking and gagging from the inhaled nicotine, Joan liked the experience. “I took one puff and felt really smart,” she has said. “I thought, ‘Whoa!’ I seemed to see better and think better.” She became a secret preteenage smoker—initiating a habit that, over fifty years later, she still has not defeated.
Something even more significant happened in her tenth year: she fell in love with the idea of writing beautiful music. It was the majestically romantic “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” that did it. Composed in 1934 by Sergei Rachmaninoff at a make-or-break time—his Fourth Piano Concerto had been a failure and he’d been blocked for five years—the composition’s almost over-the-top emotionality made it a favorite for movie soundtracks. One movie that utilized it, The Story of Three Loves, arrived in the North Battleford theater in 1953. Joan was in the audience. Set on an ocean liner (an exotic site for a girl thousands of miles from any ocean), the movie consisted of three melodramas. As a kind of fantasy stand-in for transgression in the ultraconformist decade, melodrama was a cinematic staple aimed at women (director Douglas Sirk perfected the genre) and this trio was no exception. The first story essayed forbidden love: a boy (Ricky Nelson) becomes magically transformed into a man, only to fall in love with his female governess (Leslie Caron); in the second, a ballerina (Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes star Moira Shearer) has a fatal heart attack while auditioning for a choreographer (James Mason), who then stages the ballet she inspired for her to view from heave
n. In the third, a trapeze artist (Kirk Douglas) who is agonizing over his partner’s death rescues from suicide a woman (Pier Angeli) who blames herself for her husband’s murder by Nazis. These two fall in love, of course.
Joan left the movie intent on tracking down the music. She went to Sallows and Boyd Furniture Store, which stocked 78s and let customers listen without buying. Joan asked for “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and listened to its fevered twenty-three minutes. “It was the most beautiful melody I’d ever heard,” she has said. She returned to the store’s listening booth again and again, “and I would just go into raptures over it—it was the melody; it killed me, killed me.” She’d already had a memorable brush with the emotive possibilities of the female voice—when she was seven, she’d heard an Edith Piaf record at a French-Canadian girl’s birthday party. At the point in the song when Piaf’s voice plaintively soloed and then joined the male chorus, “I had goose bumps,” she has said. “I dropped my cake fork.” The hours at Sallows and Boyd furthered that impact. Voice, melody: two of songwriting’s three elements were now lodged in her subconscious.
With Bill Anderson’s next promotion, the family made its final move, to Saskatoon, a hundred miles south of North Battleford, a real city at last. They purchased a new green house, at 1905 Hanover Avenue, the nicest of the Anderson homes, right next to Lathey’s Swimming Pool. It was 1954—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry were just about to sharpen the idea of the teenager as rebel. Joan was eleven years old and loosened from the sweet grip of her family’s church-centered life in the smaller town.
For a girl who was considering rebellion, midwestern Canada in the mid- to late 1950s was fertile territory. At a time that was already the peak of anxious traditionalism everywhere, that region (more Britishly proper and “more ‘nosegay’ than America,” as Joni has put it) was filled with women like Myrtle: newly middle-class, distancing themselves from farm childhoods through an almost exaggerated respectability. Between 1955 and 1957, the women’s pages of one of the Andersons’ main local papers, The Leader-Post, brimmed with notices of social events both festive (“Mrs. S. C. Atkinson entertained at an evening party in honor of Mrs. C. Hay. Mrs. W. B. Ramsay poured from a table centred by pale mauve tulips and tall white tapers”) and functional (“A demonstration of various kinds of sewing machines will be a feature of a tea, sponsored by the Regina Home Economics Club”). These pages also called for a harder line on children. Opinion pieces lashed at the “permissive” parenting that had virtually redefined child rearing since the 1946 publication of Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. One Fred Rawlinson called it a “joy to hear recently in Regina that every parent and every teacher said ‘no’ to a child at least once a day.” “Mrs. Muriel Lawrence, the Mature Parent,” ridiculed lenient mothers. Psychologist A. E. Cox said parents who drove their kids everywhere were abetting “a pattern of evolution that might result in a physically useless, big-headed human race.”
Yet amid all the self-conscious refinement and the keeping of children in their places was an inspiring paean, by local poet Ella Davis, to a tougher heroine of a former era. The poem was simply called “Amelia,” as if that first, distinctive name alone were enough to describe the brave aviatrix who had gone alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Davis praised her “high dreams” in “all out altitudes.”
Did thirteen-year-old Joan Anderson (who was now defying Myrtle by sneaking out to the jazz-and-burlesque tent at the Mile Long Midway carnival) notice that poem in the newspaper on that summer 1957 day and feel a stab of romantic identification? “Amelia”: the intimacy of that first-name-alone as a title. “Dreams.” “Altitudes.” One wonders.
Starting junior high at Queen Elizabeth School in Saskatoon provided Joan with the third key to her future as a songwriter: a mentor—a task-master, really—for poetry writing. Within weeks of starting school, she’d established herself as the class artist, just as she had in North Battleford. She was hanging up paintings she’d made for an evening PTA meeting when a teacher she remembers as “a good-looking Australian came up to me and said, ‘You like to paint?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said to me, ‘If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words. I’ll see you next year.’” The teacher was fifty-year-old Arthur Kratzmann, who had previously noticed, as he would later say, “how beautifully she could paint” when he walked into another class and watched her dabbing watercolors.
Next year, in seventh grade, Joan Anderson did indeed have Arthur Kratzmann for English. By now, she was fascinated by the man, whose background was somewhat romantic. Kratzmann, the son of an Australian sharecropper, had been a track star in Australia and had taught on Canadian Indian reservations. For his part, Arthur Kratzmann viewed Joanie Anderson as a “slim, blond-haired, blue-eyed, respectful, obedient, quiet, responsive student.” Kratzmann prided himself on being able to really teach English composition—to see his students as “artists who put down words and phrases and sentences that nobody else ever had in the world,” he has said. “The kids rise to the challenge. Joni Mitchell was one of them. She didn’t strike me as the most outstanding person I’ve ever had in the field, but she wrote well.”
But first he had to shake her up. He’d observed that she was derivative. “She’d see a painting of a landscape and she’d duplicate it, and when we’d be writing poetry, she’d have a tendency to, say, pick Wordsworth’s daffodils and write a poem about tulips but use the same rhyme scheme and style.” He was determined to push imitation out of her.
For her first assignment, Joan wrote a poem about a stallion. She went riding at a nearby stables, so she knew something about horses. Seeking to impress her teacher, she looked in Reader’s Digest for verbal images. Kratzmann handed the poem back to her, with “Cliché,” “Cliché,” “Cliché,” “Cliché” scrawled in the margins and lines drawn to the many words he’d circled. “He marked me harder, I think, than American college professors mark,” she later opined. When she approached him after class to talk about it, Kratzmann grilled her: “How many times have you seen Black Beauty?” She answered, “Once.” “What do you know about horses?” She told him about her riding. He shot back: “The things that you’ve told me that you’ve done on the weekends are more interesting than this.” Then he said: “You must write in your own blood.” He’s later explained, “At the time I was studying Nietzsche, who used to tell people that they must do things in their own blood, so I turned the quotation on her.” Arthur Kratzmann’s exhortation had the same effect as Rachmaninoff and Piaf. The phrase “Write in your own blood” became a motto for the preteenager and triggered her lifelong love of Nietzsche. “She picked up on that and started to write about her life,” Kratzmann has recalled.
In fall of 1957, Joan entered Nutana Collegiate High School, while the school in which she would spend the balance of her high school years—Aden Bowman Collegiate—was being built. Gifted art students at Aden Bowman took art classes at Saskatoon Technical Collegiate, and it was here that Joan studied—and argued—with the Abstract Expressionist painter Henry Bonli. The Bonlis kept a studio in Toronto, but he and his wife, Elsa, had spent time in New York, where they’d befriended the most authoritative critic, Clement Greenberg. Bonli’s sophistication leapt out at Joan, but she was as stubborn with painting as she had been with backyard circuses, and as forthright with her art teacher as she had been with her Sunday school teacher. “I know she objected to the way I was teaching, and she didn’t like my colors,” says Bonli. “She didn’t like putty; she liked bright colors.” But Bonli indirectly gave her something else: permission to spruce up her name. At a time when Susans were becoming Susi, Barbaras Barbi, and Pattys Patti, Joan Anderson, beguiled by the jaunty final i of her teacher’s last name (and, possibly, by the hit parade singer Joni James), became Joni Anderson.
At Aden Bowman Joni’s best friend was another tall, thin, blond Joan, Joan Smith, who lived on nearby Cumberland Avenue. A third friend, Marie Brewster Jensen, says, “The
two Joans looked so much alike they could have been sisters.” (Joan Smith Chapman disagrees: “Joni’s features were more severe than mine; she had high cheekbones.”) Joan Smith was even-keeled and conventional; she would marry her high school beau at nineteen. Joni Anderson was looking for something more. “Neither of us were very absorbed in school,” Joan Smith Chapman says. They lived for the weekends, when they’d go to the YMCA dances at the Spadina Crescent and dance: first, to Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard and then—with less enthusiasm on Joni’s part—to the late-1950s American Bandstand regulars like Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Donny Kirshner’s friends Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. “Nobody knew Joni Anderson had polio; she loved to dance,” says a boy in their crowd, Bob Sugarman, whom everyone called “Sugie,” and who was friends with Tony Simon, the “nice, smart fellow” Sugarman says Joni “bummed around with, but I don’t remember Joni hooking up with anybody in particular. I wouldn’t say Joni was in the popular group; she was too reserved and individual. She was going by the beat of her own drummer.”
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