Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  At some point in the middle of the school year, Joni moved out of her rented room in a private house and formed what was, in early 1964, an avant-garde arrangement: she took a second-floor loft in an old warehouse in town with her boyfriend, a tall, thin, goateed fellow art freshman, Rick Williams. Joni kept the cohabitation secret from her parents.

  Rick Williams hailed from a small town in British Columbia and had a warm laugh. Their loft, Doug Bovee recalls, “had a mattress thrown on the floor, a few drapes, and a lot of paintings against the wall—a great place for a party, and they had them. People would drift in and out on the weekends. There was booze, and someone might bring in some pizza. They played ‘heavy’ stuff: Dylan, jazz, maybe some early Beatles. No Motown. We were ‘deep.’ Everyone went to see Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring at the local film festival. We were hippies.” The word hippie was one year shy of coinage, but the concept was emerging. “We wore casual clothes, our ratty hair tied back. And acid was the drug of choice.”

  Acid, of course, was LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), which was openly traded in class for $2 a tab, having freshly become available through a rapid-fire underground grapevine of psychology and art students all through North America. At a time when many long-distance phone calls were still made through an operator and Special Delivery was the fastest—and emergency-only—means of travel for messages exceeding telegram length, the speed of the news about consciousness-expanding drugs (and the dissemination of those drugs themselves), even to the hinterland likes of Calgary, Alberta, spoke volumes about an inchoate readiness for a new sensibility: a deeper window into mind and body, spirit and human connection.

  LSD was first created in 1938 in a chemical lab by adding compounds to a base of lysergic acid (which is found in a grain fungus, ergot). In the 1950s, extra-medical interest in it and natural sister compounds was revived by Aldous Huxley’s reports of his experiments with mescaline and then later in the decade stoked by a Life magazine article that described the use of psilocybin mushrooms in indigenous Mexican religious ceremonies. Harvard psychology lecturer Timothy Leary and professor Richard Alpert soon began conducting research on psilocybin and LSD with graduate students; the professors’ pro-ecstatic bent (“[W]e are attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art,” Leary wrote) resulted in their dismissal from Harvard, whereupon their mystique intensified. While Joni was living with Rick Williams in their painting-strewn party loft, to the west and down the coast in northern California Augustus Owsley Stanley III was perfecting the mass manufacture of LSD, opening the way for its more efficient dissemination, which would, along with other forces, spark the psychedelic era. Riding the toggle switch of her high good girl/bad girl life, Joni Anderson in 1964 could probably not imagine that the earmarks of the gentler, pensive side of psychedelic style (verbal free association; emotional depth and bravery; flowing hair and raiment; serpentine graphics) would be her ticket to the success that she was only now beginning to actively desire.

  Increasingly, Joni spent weekends in nearby Edmonton, where she performed at the Yardbird Suite. Sometimes she ventured to coffeehouses in Regina and Winnipeg. “So I was leading this dual life, half in art and half in music,” she has said. Her insecure first efforts at the Louis Riel, where everyone had thought her voice “weird,” had given way, through these months of hootenannies and club performing, to a developed vocal style and a confidence at the microphone. Folksinger Chick Roberts first saw her in the Regina and Winnipeg clubs, “doing covers of others’ songs,” of course—“and she knocked me out. She was very gorgeous, very ethereal, lovely, with her blond hair.” Her voice tone had modulated. “She sang great.”

  With her folksinging career modestly launched, Joni was growing frustrated by the strictures of art college. “You wouldn’t touch color until semesters of black and white; you had to have a lot of basic aesthetic and skeletal understanding of anatomy,” says Beverly DeJong. Joni has told interviewers that she became “very disillusioned that there were people around me getting C’s because their technical ability was only average, even though their creative ability and originality was greater than mine. This was something I recognized, so at the end of the year I quit art college and began a search through music.”

  True enough, to a point. Joni did leave at the end of the first year, and to pursue music. But she had an additional motive.

  At some point in the second semester Joni and Rick Williams broke up, and another first-year art classmate with whom Joni had been friends became her boyfriend. His name was Brad MacMath. He was from Regina, and he was very handsome: extremely tall with piercingly deep-set, up-slanted eyes and high cheekbones. Like Joni, he switch-hit straight and wild, though on campus he, too, cut a deceptively clean-cut figure. “He seemed more Ivy League, button-down,” Bruce Sterling says. Yet he was such a freeloader and a cigarette bummer that, Joni would later wryly recall to friends, for his birthday, she bought him a glass-bottomed pewter mug, with the endearment “The Mooch” engraved on it. And in their subsequent hitchhiking, Brad’s reluctance to bathe left him with, as her friends say she reported, “the worst BO she ever smelled.”

  Joni has told the media and even confidantes (who believe the story, which she imparted with great conviction) that Brad MacMath was her first lover and that, as she put it to a reporter as recently as 2001, “I lost my virginity and got pregnant all in the same act.” It’s striking that she felt the need to present herself this way. Did the shock of the long-ago doctor’s remark, the panic felt by D’Arcy Case and other girls “caught” pregnant, and Myrtle’s stern moralism all weigh on her so heavily that, decades and a counterculture later, she still had to see herself as the Good Girl, paying for her first lapse from grace?

  In the summer of 1964, Joni and Brad MacMath boarded a train east, for Toronto. The two were headed for the Mariposa Folk Festival, a three-year-old, three-day event held in the nearby town of Orillia. But the almost-cross-country trip had a second purpose. Whether knowingly or just out of instinct and common sense, Joni was following the current Canadian practice for unmarried pregnant young women: going far from home to bear her child in secrecy. She just wasn’t doing it in the traditional—protected—way.

  At the time, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of secret maternity homes for Canadian girls who had gotten themselves “in trouble.” Parents of girls who were lucky enough to secure placement (waiting lists had lengthened with the beginning of emboldened sexual activity) sent their daughters 3,000 miles, from Vancouver to Toronto, or vice versa—or two-thirds of that distance across the country—to live in the private maternity homes that sprouted up in every Canadian city and sizable town.* There, as Canadian TV journalist Anne Petrie (a 1967 alumna of one such home) recalls, in her book Gone to an Aunt’s: Remembering Canada’s Home for Unwed Mothers, the rule was “No last names—ever.” “[T]he girls just disappeared” from their own communities, Petrie writes. “The cover stories were vague. ‘Gone to visit an aunt’ was typical.” Until Petrie wrote her book in the late 1990s, her own siblings never knew of their sister’s secret baby, born and given up for adoption thirty years earlier. Parents eager to protect the “family name” were key in the process. Says Sandra Jarvies, president of the main organization, Canadian Birth Mothers United, of those women who gave up their babies for adoption: “Of the about 300 single mothers who gave birth in the mid-1960s and gave up their babies for adoption whom I’ve talked to, almost all used their parents to help them; if you couldn’t tell your parents, you were really in trouble.”

  Canadian girls who decided to forgo, or had to forgo, the help of their parents—who wanted or needed to hide their pregnancies from them—could still get into these secret maternity homes, with their hot meals and dorm-style beds, by traveling to another province and registering confidentially. But in mid-1964—in addition to the girls whose parents helped them, and in addition to the girls who got into the pregnancy homes by themselves—there
began to appear a third type of pregnant, unmarried Canadian girl: the bohemian girl who rejected the hypocrisy and constriction (and the coddling) of being hidden away. Many of these girls were making a statement—“I’m pregnant and unmarried and not ashamed of it.” Joni Anderson was one of these girls, but only up to a point. She rejected the idea that she should feel shame, and yet family disgrace was not a concept she was thumbing her nose at, by any stretch of the imagination. She was going far from home, but no one—neither her parents nor a proprietress of a protective maternity home—would be helping her. She would be out in public and self-supporting, even though she had no plan for how she’d make money, yet manage to conceal the pregnancy from her parents at all costs. In short, she was choosing the path of greatest risk and least protection.

  What help Brad might provide was questionable from the outset. The help that Joni wanted from Brad was also questionable. Unlike D’Arcy, who’d desperately wanted to marry Rudy (and did so, to disastrous results, divorcing him soon after their daughter was born), Joni was not in love with Brad MacMath.

  The unwanted pregnancy seems to have spurred Joni to take new creative risks—to write her own songs; she wrote her first, what she called a feeling-sorry-for-myself song, “Day by Day,” on the train ride to Toronto. The closer she got to delivering her baby (in increasingly desperate circumstances), the more her work—singing and starting to write—seemed to preoccupy her, perhaps both to distract from the frightening inevitability of imminent birth and possibly to set up an emotional and moral bargain: if I give up this unsought baby, then I’m not going to do so for nothing. If I make this serious relinquishment, I will use my reclaimed life to “give birth,” as it were, to something else. In the months after she had her baby, who was put temporarily into foster care and then put up for adoption, Joni would write a flood of songs so beautiful and original, no one who’d heard her covering the folk standards at those midwestern Canadian coffeehouses or hootenannies could have anticipated their volume or virtuosity. It was as if she heard her grandmothers say: “We had babies in provincial poverty and we never reached our creative potential. If you heed our warning by refusing the first path, then when you go the second path, make it worth it—put your whole heart into it.”

  Joni herself seems to have believed that the loss of the baby equaled the beginning of the songs. Though she has today firmly settled on a narrative that blames her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, for the adopting-out of the baby (something Chuck Mitchell adamantly disputes), she spontaneously reacted differently the very first time an interviewer (for Greater London Radio, in June 1990), playing “gotcha” journalism, outed her airtight secret. After the setup, “Do you miss having a close-knit family?” to which Joni replied, “Well, we [she and her second husband Larry Klein] have cats and also I have a lot of godchildren. I haven’t had children by choice, really,” the interviewer pounced: “You did have a child, didn’t you, when you were very young? Do you know what happened to him or her?” Seemingly stunned, Joni confessed [emphasis added]:

  “I do and I don’t. Maybe I do. Maybe I know a little. Maybe I don’t know anything. I’ll tell you by that I think I’ve done my—people are too possessive about their children, too egocentric with their children, anyway. I reproduced myself. I made a beautiful child, a girl. When—but at the time I was penniless. There was no way I could take—she would have been—I was not the right person to raise this child. There was no indication that I would—I don’t have a good education, I couldn’t keep her. It was impossible under the circumstance. I had no money when she was born, none. Imagine, I mean—none of the music could have come out. We would just have been—I would have been waitressing or something. It wouldn’t have been—fate did not design this to occur.”

  Once they disembarked the train in Toronto. Joni and Brad took a bus to Orillia, but there they discovered that the Mariposa Festival was hastily being moved to Toronto—“at the last minute,” recalls festival organizer Martin Ornot, “the township’s council ruled that we could not present the show because a lot of people were hanging out.” Ornot turned to three youngsters who had just traveled to the concert, sleeping bags under their arms—Joni, Brad, and a third person—and asked them to help load the trucks. “Joni was very attractive and really sweet,” Ornot recalls. “Brad was tall and good-looking, and she introduced him as her boyfriend. They were a nice couple, and definitely affectionate. Joni and her friends helped load things on the truck, and I made arrangements for them to get passes for the festival, which was held at an old baseball stadium, in exchange.”

  Joni and Brad remained in Toronto, living at a rooming house. Calling back her post–high school experience, she got a job at Simpson’s Department Store to save enough money for the $150 musicians’ union dues, and she and Brad fell into the hippie life. (“Brad was the original hippie—proud that he never had a job for more than four months,” says one who heard the story from both Brad and Joni.) In the early autumn weeks after Mariposa, Martin Ornot would see Joni around Yorkville Village, the charming eighteenth-century neighborhood of cul-de-sacs and one-way streets bounded by Yonge Street, Avenue Road, the Toronto Museum, and the University of Toronto, which was the spawning ground for folk clubs: the Purple Onion, the Mousehole, the Riverboat, the Cellar Club, the Gates of Cleeve, the Penny Farthing, the Night Owl, and many others, perpetually opening and closing. “I didn’t notice that she was pregnant,” Ornot says, “and I would have noticed, if it was visible, because I was myself thinking about pregnancy—my wife had just given birth.” Joni had a fetching look—“she wore long gowns or jeans, leather jackets, holding her guitar, she had long hair”—and a compelling way about her. “She seemed quiet. If vulnerability can be translated into people wanting to do things for her, then she was vulnerable. You really wanted to be around her and help her, if you could. It wasn’t that she was needy; it was that she was so nice.” Joni had apparently begun writing, though not playing, her songs. “When we spoke, it was usually about her songs,” Ornot recalls. Toronto was the big league—established artists like Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, and Buffy Sainte-Marie played the Toronto clubs. “I assisted her,” Ornot says—in recommending clubs to seek work in, in giving her repertoire advice—“in any way I could.”

  Eventually, Brad left for Regina (he would later journey to Haight-Ashbury and be one of the original residents in that quintessential hippie community) and Joni moved into the Huron Street and Avenue Road rooming house, across the hall from young Ojibwa Indian poet Duke Redbird. “We were all like flower children,” Redbird recalls. “Dylan and Baez were saying that things should change, and we in Yorkville felt that way. We were kids; give peace a chance.” While Joni never talked about her increasingly visible pregnancy—and Redbird “assumed she was getting through a difficult period”—she talked about “spirituality,” Redbird recalls. “Because I’m a native person, we talked about earth and spirituality. She was from the prairie; she brought an innate amount of spirituality with her. She was composing. The conversations we had were about her music and her lyrics,” none of which Redbird can remember. Redbird, in speaking of the plight of his fellow First Nations people, as Native Canadians call themselves, experienced the same kindness that Joni had visited on polio-stricken Doug Bovee. “She had this immense reserve of feeling for people who were having difficulty—the downtrodden and unaffiliated.” His friendship with her “represented a bridge between the WASP world, which she belonged to, and the world of the disenfranchised.”

  As the weather grew colder, the population of Yorkville shrunk. Gone were the thousands of tourists who’d swarmed around all summer, primed as they’d been by “beatnik” cartoons in the Toronto Telegram, such as one showing a suited young man bearing a milk bottle, a loaf of white bread, and an oven-ready fowl, approaching a couple—bearded, sandaled guy and long-haired, capri-pants’d girl—entwined under a dangling bare bulb, and saying, with puzzlement: “But I thought you said to bring a chick, a bott
le, and some bread.” Now only a couple of hundred people—club owners, folksingers, students, and shopkeepers—remained. Without Brad around to help at all, Joni played as many gigs as she could, in a variety of coffeehouses. Folksinger Jeanine Hollingshead remembers a visibly pregnant Joni at the Sunday and Monday night hootenannies. “She was showing—we all knew—but, gosh, she kept working.” The women on the scene wore short mod dresses with swirly paisley prints and high go-go boots, or longer skirts, but whatever you wore, getting on six and seven and eight months, you couldn’t hide a pregnant belly. “The question” among the folksingers, Hollingshead recalls, “was always, who was the daddy? And would she keep the baby? But it was nobody’s business and nobody asked. We had all left our small towns to get away from that gossip, that judgment.”

  Joni was by no means the only pregnant unmarried girl in Yorkville. “There were many, many,” Hollingshead remembers. Some were folksingers—a girl named Cathy Young, for example. “But not all were folksingers. Some of them probably came here because they were pregnant and didn’t want to be at home.” Joni herself has said that she met fifteen-year-old pregnant girls living lives of precocity, risk taking, and abandon that shocked her. Still, Joni stood out; her dignity and beauty made her an unbidden focus of attention. “Joni was shy,” Jeanine Hollingshead recalls, “and she seemed very sad to be going through it alone.” Yet despite the apparent melancholy, the poverty, the conspicuous pregnancy, and her aloneness (or perhaps because of these things), Joni exuded charisma. The whole last year and a half—of watching performers at the Louis Riel and of performing, there and at SAIT and at the coffeehouses in Calgary, Edmonton, and Regina—had given her a sense of herself as a show-woman. Along the way, she had acquired a real guitar. “When she introduced her song, you would lean in and listen,” Hollingshead says. “That gorgeous, bell-like voice would take you away. She would say, ‘This is a song for my friends…’”