Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  And that was the beginning of what would be Carole’s time with the man her friends would call Rick Two (Rick Evers being Rick One)—and her half-dozen years of seriously Going Native in the wilds of Idaho.

  Welcome Home was the first Carole King album that was not a chart hit—a huge comedown for her and the beginning of what some music historians would call her “lost years.” After spending much of the summer at Burgdorf, she embarked on a small East Coast concert tour, concentrating on her classic, loved hits—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “I Feel the Earth Move”—a reliable formula she would now come to favor. She seemed to be looking for support (“Miss King’s gushing love for her fans—and their return of it—cloyed at times,” said The New York Times) and for buoyance (“and so did her consistently upbeat renditions of songs whose original recorded versions expressed…considerable sorrow,” the Times continued) to offset what a confidante during those years calls the “deep, deep depression” she was sinking into and would remain gripped by for several years.

  Despite or between these East Coast concert dates, she had had a winter’s supply of food and clothes moved up to Burgdorf; then, before the roads became impassible, she and the children settled into their cabin. Joy was surprised to see that Rick Sorensen had become, as she puts it, “part of the family.” If she’d known this combative man had been part of Carole’s package, she might have thought twice about making the arrangement with Carole. As it turned out, Sorensen had broken up with his girlfriend Chris, who “took it very hard,” Joy says, “just crying and crying, riding through the meadow.” Joy adds: “Rick Sorensen is very hard on his women.”

  With the (admittedly considerable) exception of her full-length mink coat, Carole wintered in at Burgdorf like all the more modest cabin dwellers. She used the outhouse. She bought two goats to eat her family’s garbage, tying them to the common outdoor stanchion. “And she’d be down there milking the goats in thirty-degrees-below-zero weather at five in the morning,” says Joy, adding that “it got so cold that winter, your hair would freeze between getting out of the hot pool and walking back into your cabin.” A fire was all that kept Carole and the children warm inside, and a kerosene lamp lit the small room where Carole homeschooled Molly and Levi. She washed her dishes outside, from the hot water spout under the hot pool. Rick killed buffalo, of course, and Carole broke her vegetarian regimen by making buffalo stew (she also made “delicious” goat milk yogurt, says Joy). Sometimes, when four feet of snow fell overnight, people skied off their cabin roofs. In one letter that Cynthia Weil received, Carole apologized for her delayed reply: “It took me a while to write back because we were snowed in and I had to walk three miles in snow shoes to mail this to you.” In the same way that Joni Anderson’s secret pregnant-and-penniless travails were more dramatic than Bobby Zimmerman’s weeks reading old newspapers in the New York Public Library, Carole King’s quiet embrace of the rugged West was more authentic than, say, the Hollywood Hills–dwelling Eagles’ photo shoots amid parched coyote skulls.

  Joy had problems with Teepee Rick. He sawed through the historic cabin wall so he could visually track the elk herd; he barked at the snowboarders. The worst confrontation was when he stormed over to the hot pool, brandishing a gun, angry that nonresidents (a group of elderly folks Joy had invited in) were enjoying the waters. (“But he had the good sense to apologize,” Joy says.) Carole, Joy could see, was growing “very in love with Rick,” but toward winter’s end Joy was annoyed at this man who, as she viewed him, was “a warrior and he always needs to have a war.” She angrily skied out of Burgdorf, leaving the cabins for Carole to manage.

  After the roads had thawed out enough, Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Brooks and Marilyn Arthur arrived for a visit. The reunion was like a sitcom, with the New York–to–L.A. former Brill Building–ites stifling gulps at Carole’s new life. (They had missed the Rick One chapter so they weren’t prepared.) “The outhouse!” exclaims Cynthia. “Rick didn’t like us. He was not happy that we were there; he was not very friendly; he really wanted to cut her off from some of her old friends.” Brooks had brought $200 worth of nuts and dried fruit, but in no time his stash was gone; the others kept dipping into it. There was something about the fresh-killed buffalo meat Carole made for dinner that was less than irresistible. Reboarding the plane for L.A., the group thought: Now, that was an adventure…

  Carole released three albums in the next two years—Touch the Sky in 1979 and Pearls in 1980, both on Capitol, and One to One in 1981, on Atlantic. By this time, Capitol had dropped her. Only Pearls, which was comprised of her and Gerry’s classics, gained any traction; Carole’s rendition of “One Fine Day” was a hit single. But between the album-making forays to big or medium-sized cities, Carole’s life was mostly enmeshed with Rick in the deep forest. In 1981 she purchased a former dude ranch and mining camp, the Robinson Bar Ranch, on 118 acres of forest in Custer County, Idaho. Sixteen miles from the tiny town of Stanley, it afforded the kind of solitude Rick liked. Carole milked her cows and Rick went out shooting, and his pugnacious distrust of the government and outsiders eventually led them both—she as much as he—into a protracted, volatile legal battle with the county and the U.S. Forest Service, as well as the locals, over their locking the gate to a road, long taken for public, that ran through their property.

  This was a new Carole: one who accused a forest service officer of shoving her twice and purposely turning off the electricity when she and Rick were searching for land deeds in the government office files, and one who threatened to send the forest service (when they denied the use of her land for grazing) cow dung to prove that she and Rick were running a livestock operation. Joy had said that Teepee Rick was a warrior always looking for a war. Well, he had found one, and Carole joined him in it, applying the same determination she’d used to get the cellos onto the Shirelles track to fighting for her property and privacy rights. A forest service officer remarked, during the long battle: “With Carole it’s all or nothing…She can’t take no for an answer. She’s a strong-willed person and will push and shove for her beliefs, come hell or high water.” Danny Kortchmar (now his friend’s de facto son-in-law through his relationship with Louise) was confused. Why was Carole packing a .44 automatic? Why was she so up in arms about some road? Obliquely referring to this new attitude, Lou Adler has said, “Carole has gone through a lot of changes, a lot of it depending on who the man in her life was.” Carole wrote a song called “Golden Man” for Rick Sorensen, praising him for teaching her the “pain” of the earth. In its emotional, torch-singer-like long cadences, she calls him “son, lover, brother, father, and friend.” The lyrics are as exceedingly romantic as her songs for Rick Evers had been. Toward the end of the summer in 1982, in a sunrise ceremony in their mountains, Carole King made Rick Sorensen her fourth husband. He was identified in the local papers as the “foreman” on her ranch. (Later, in rare articles, he was referred to as “her husband, rancher Richard Sorensen,” the big-city media seemingly assuming that Carole had become the trophy wife of some wealthy landowner.)

  Carole called a local radio station to announce her marriage to Rick while they were at a government office, filing papers in their battle with the county. The statement she gave was not what you’d expect from a woman announcing a marriage. It was wounded and defensive, reflecting the rancor building up against her in the community—and perhaps locals’ whispers about whether Rick Evers’s death had been an accident, a suicide, or foul play: “My music and my life shine like a beacon in the forest of lies and the sea of rumors.” In this new strand of her life tapestry, Carole—angrily hiding from the overwhelming and unsought fame for which the critics seemed to have punished her, and feeling, Roy Reynolds says, “deep hurt”—stripped her life down until it was as dark and pure as the woods. She now answered to “Carole Sorensen,” and she would soon express, to the rare interviewer who found her, both the triumph and wound-licking comfort that this new land and identity was giving her: “When I fi
rst moved here I used to be afraid of getting away from my house and going up into the woods, where all the boogie creatures were going to get me. Now I realize the boogie creatures are in civilization, and you’re perfectly safe in the woods.”

  “We love you, Carole!” “Sing ‘Up on the Roof!’” “You’ve got a friend, Carole!” those 70,000 fans had screamed at Central Park in 1973. When she returned home in 1984, the bemused headline of Stephen Holden’s New York Times review relayed the irony: “Back for a Night at Town Hall: Carole King of Idaho.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  joni

  1972–1982

  Joni has said that her post-Blue months alone in her house in British Columbia, where she repaired to write the songs for For the Roses, were a retreat from “severe depression” and, as her second husband, Larry Klein, puts it, “her existential grief” about the baby. She armed herself with her bible Thus Spake Zarathustra, and more. “Before leaving L.A.,” she has said, “I bought out all the psychology and philosophy departments of two major bookstores. But, ultimately, those books didn’t help. I sat there in the bush, throwing those books at the wall, saying, ‘Bullshit! Bullshit!’” Then the cure came magically, naturally, and spontaneously:

  I jumped off a rock into this dark emerald green water with yellow kelp in it and purple starfish at the bottom. It was very beautiful, and as I broke up to the surface of the water, which was black and reflective, I started laughing. Joy had just suddenly come over me, you know? And I remember that as a turning point. First feeling like a loony because I was out there laughing all by myself in this beautiful environment. And then, right on top of that was the realization that whatever my social burdens were, my inner happiness was still intact.

  That sure makes a great story. If only it were so simple.

  At the very beginning of 1972 Joni left Canada to embark on a concert tour, making a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall, playing the Midwest, England, and returning to L.A. to record For the Roses, as well as to perform at McGovern rallies. For the Roses would be her first album on her friend (and her manager Elliot Roberts’s business partner) David Geffen’s new label, Asylum. Geffen, who’d started out as a mailroom boy like Elliot had, was now a wealthy young man. He bought Julie Andrews’s house on Copley Drive, a manicured wedge of Beverly Hills near Bel Air, and asked Joni (who’d been subletting her Lookout Mountain house for a pittance to friend Ron Stone) to be his roommate.

  Joni consented. Yes, she and David had had their art-vs.-commerce differences. She’d written what she called her only “blatantly commercial” song, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” to placate David’s desire for her to have a hit on For the Roses. (Her instincts, and his implicit goading, proved correct: with it, she reached #25 on Billboard.) But moving in with him didn’t mean she’d have to stop playing the superior, aggrieved creator to his commercial kingpin. Beneath their differences, she liked David. She wrote a song, “Free Man in Paris,” in his honor. In it, a pressured executive who’d been “stoking the star-maker machinery” goes to Paris to feel—that unlikely first adjective had an elegant flightiness—“unfettered and alive.”

  On her early-1972 tour, Joni’s opening act was someone whose debut album David was about to release: Jackson Browne.

  The son of a journalist father and teacher mother, Jackson (who’d dispensed with his first name, Clyde, just as Joni had ditched Roberta) had run in the same circles as Joni in California. But originally there’d been a glamour and status disparity. When she was the girl among the boys—leaving David Crosby for Graham Nash—teenage Jackson and his friend Ned Doheny were essentially “Crosby, Stills and Nash groupies,” says a woman on the scene. Jackson was disconcertingly fair-faced, teen-actor handsome, with chiseled features and a credulous, androgynous prettiness. But despite his time in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, he’d been less a performer than a writer—and a good one. David Crosby loved his songs. Jac Holzman had given him a publishing contract, and, of course, Tom Rush had recorded a song of his on his Circle Game. Most recently, from a rented house in rundown Silver Lake, Jackson had worked hard to craft a body of signature pieces with which to launch himself as an artist. Sending a glossy headshot (along with an almost obsequious letter) to Geffen, who was not yet “out” but was gay, hadn’t hurt. Jackson Browne was almost too pretty to be a rock star, but now, even at a mere twenty-three, he was, by the day’s standards, a seasoned songwriter, and that prettiness helped rather than hurt.

  Jackson was a romantic; “I got my heart crushed about eight times in a row. It would happen every two years or so,” he said in the early 1970s. As a barely-eighteen-year-old, he’d fallen for Nico, the stunning, decadent queen of the Max’s Kansas City night, who, he would complain, seven years later, “used me, man; she fucked me around!” He’d had a romance with a very opposite kind of woman, Laura Nyro—musically brilliant, but zaftig, reclusive, socially insecure, and easily wounded. Most recently, he’d been in love with Salli Sachse, the San Diego–raised beach movie actress who’d been part of Peter Tork’s “artistic collective” and a close friend of David Crosby’s lady, Christine Hinton. Beautiful, long-haired Salli exuded an air of sorrow; she’d weathered not just Christine’s sudden death, but earlier that of her husband, Peter Sachse, who had perished in a stunt-plane crash. As Browne wrote of her, in his song “Something Fine,” Salli “took good care” of him during their love affair in London before she hit the road, as girls, of course, were wont to do, for Morocco.

  Jackson Browne was released in early 1972. The album’s cover showed the artist in a faux-antique tinted picture, his name semicircling the photo in Old West typeface. Like James Taylor on his debut album, Browne evoked an earlier era with his piercing-eyed, Civil War poster–worthy countenance. “Jackson was a West Coast version of James; James is an East Coast version of Jackson” is how Russ Kunkel characterizes them. Indeed, if James’s songs exuded Carolina and the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, it was the car culture anomie of his native Orange County that surged through Browne’s songs, which nonetheless attained a stirring eloquence that was hinted at in their beseeching, quasi-biblical titles (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Rock Me on the Water”). His huge, Springsteen-like hit “Running on Empty” and his coauthorship, with Glenn Frey, of the Eagles’ megahit “Take It Easy,” which emblemized the male mid-1970s, were more literal evocations of Browne’s provenance. In early 1972 Bud Scoppa in Rolling Stone called Jackson Browne that “rare album sufficient to place a new performer among the first rank of…artists.”

  Still, during the very first dates of Joni’s tour, the local reviewers, who didn’t know of Jackson’s album, dismissed him. (The Detroit News, while generally praising Joni, called Jackson’s performance “inexcusable.”) By the time they got to England, Joni was still the “high priestess,” as one British critic put it, but Jackson was now viewed as the intriguing comer, since his infectiously rocking “Doctor My Eyes” had become a major U.S. hit. When Jackson and Joni duetted on “The Circle Game,” fans saw a chemistry between them. By the end of the tour, Jackson was a full-fledged headliner and “Joni and Jackson were together,” Danny Kortchmar recalls. (That fact probably made it easier for her to be in James’s company, now that James was virtually engaged to Carly.) “Jackson and I are in love” is how Joni put it to her old flame Roy Blumenfeld when he visited L.A.

  Jackson had the same twinness with Joni that James Taylor had exuded two years earlier. Both were beautiful, high-cheekboned WASPs who wrote angst-laden songs. They had bits of background in common: both their mothers had been teachers, and Jackson’s maternal grandparents, like Joni’s paternal ones, were Norwegian immigrants to midwestern North America. Ultimately, though, none of this mattered. “She just fell for him,” says a confidante.

  For the Roses was released in the fall of 1972, and the reviews were ecstatic. Of the album whose chord progressions would be called “mind-boggling,” The New York Times raved, “Each of Mitchell’s songs…is a gem gli
stening with her elegant way with language, her pointed splashes of irony and her perfect shaping of images.” The Times articulated what her fans had come to realize [emphasis added]: “Never does Mitchell voice a thought or feeling commonly. She’s a songwriter of genius who can’t help but make us feel we are not alone.” Stephen Davis of Rolling Stone operatically wrote, “Love’s tension is Joni Mitchell’s medium—she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity”; he went on to praise her “gorgeous piano lin[es]” and, respectfully using the new feminist-speak, her “large dose of Woman Truth.” Less obsequiously (Ellen Willis was his girlfriend; he must have felt politically secure), The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau noted, “Sometimes her complaints about the men who have failed her sound petulant, but the appearance of petulance is one of the prices of liberation.”

  Though she was mainly living at Geffen’s, by the end of 1972 Joni also rented an apartment in West Hollywood, on one of those sharply hilly streets between Santa Monica and Sunset that shoot into the Hollywood Hills. Things were not going well between her and Jackson. “It was a high-strung relationship,” says a confidante. Everyone in their crowd was “doing so much cocaine at the time,” and “Joni thrives on conflict, and not many guys can take that.” (“I’m a confronter by nature,” she’s admitted.) One night they had a fight at the Sunset Strip club, the Roxy. Her friend recalls: “Joni said Jackson had dissed her onstage and she was walking upstairs and he was walking down.” A verbal argument, she claimed, led to Jackson hitting her, and she ran out into the street without her shoes. “This was the first time a man ever hit Joni.” (People who know Jackson Browne say he is not a violent man.)