Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Reviewing the album for that same publication, Ariel Swartley didn’t seem to know what to make of it and chose to focus on its well-touted riskiness rather than its satisfactions. Noting an “angry edge” to Joni’s guitar and the “taste for dissonance” that make “it see[m] as if the tensions [that] Mitchell’s courting [are] star[ting] to drive her crazy,” Swartley concluded, “Joni Mitchell keeps asking the hard questions, touching nerves. And the pressure she applies is increasingly brutal, increasingly deft. It’s been a long time since her songs had much to do with whatever’s current in popular music.” Reviewing it later, The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called the album a “brave experiment” that had failed.

  Joni launched a tour called Shadows and Light, for which Don—wisely taking control—played both drums and percussion. In the fashionably ripply perm that had for the last few years replaced her lank, straight hair, she performed with the neo-doo-wop group the Persuasions, and the live album included the beautiful tour-title composition, with its soul-stentorian refrain: “Blind-ness! Blind-ness, and sight!”

  Joni had never really let go of John Guerin. Don said, “I think Guerin always knew that, deep down, there was an unexplainable love between him and Joni, and that nobody could break that. It took a while for me to acknowledge” that. Throughout her years with Don, John was always there in the background—her “friend of spirit.” Don saw Joni’s insecurities. “Deep down, she may have had insecurity about being able to hold on to a man.” But more than that, “she was vulnerable about her art.” She had always been an obsessed worker. She had claimed work as a necessity and key to her identity back when it was unusual for a pretty girl to do so—to wit, her days of hours closeted in the tiny room in Chuck’s Detroit apartment. But in late 1980, at thirty-seven, her work ethic was different from when she was twenty-two; now, the perfectionism, intensity—and adulation—had shaped her. She was a self-absorbed artist: needy, entitled-feeling, idiosyncratic enough to believe she could impinge on the people she relied on for artistic counsel whenever she wanted (which, since she was nocturnal, was often in the middle of the night): an indulgence that a man in her position would, rightly or wrongly, be assured of.

  Joni was in Canada writing the title song for a movie, Love, by Swedish actress-director Mai Zetterling, in which nine stories written by women were being filmed, anthology style. There was tension on the set, and Joni was having trouble sitting in her hotel room with the Gideon Bible, struggling to transform I Corinthians 13 into a love anthem. Anxious, she called Don in New York “and she said, ‘Come up! Come up!’” he recalled. “So I went up to Toronto and immediately got swallowed up in the Mr. Joni Mitchell syndrome. At four, five in the morning, she’s asking me, ‘What do you think of this? What do you think?’ I’m like, ‘Jesus Christ, give me a break!’” Don decided to return to New York. “She says, ‘Why are you going back?’ and I said, ‘’Cause I want to rehearse my band,’ but I wanted to say: ‘Because you’re fucking killing me. Gimme some air!’” Don’s departure really upset her, he says. “The next day,” after he left—as he soon found out—“Guerin flew in.”

  Not long after that, as Don recalled it, Joni gave him twenty-four hours to get all his belongings out of their New York loft, which he considered his home. “It was like a guy breaking up,” he marveled, of her attitude. “It really hurt the hell out of me!” But, according to a friend of Joni’s, her reason for the abrupt breakup was simple and more than justified: “He struck her. He popped her. They had what she called a fist-fight. She told me that is why she ended it.”

  After the breakup, in 1981, Joni traveled to Jamaica. It was here, in this reggae-drenched land, that she fell in love not only with reggae but with what she’d call the “pop-rock polyrhythm” sound of some of the newer hit groups: Steely Dan, Talking Heads, and especially the Police. (Later, however, Joni would wryly take co-credit for the unique sound of the group’s uniquely named lead singer, Sting, a.k.a. Gordon Sumner, often quipping that she and James Taylor had taken to addressing him as “Son” because he’d picked up so much vocal phrasing from them.) But something else happened in Jamaica: Joni developed a severe ovarian infection and arrived back in L.A. in crisis and pain. Guerin visited her in the hospital and was alarmed. “She got really sick,” he said. “It was really rough.” Around the same time she was also starting to be physically challenged by postpolio syndrome, the dismaying return of muscular weakness from the long-vanquished disease. There were other challenges, too. “A lot of people we knew were suddenly dying—overdoses and strange deaths,” says record producer Dave Naylor, who ran with the Saturday Night Live writers (the deaths in this crowd included Doug Kenney and John Belushi) and who says that he and Joni started dating because “we were going to so many funerals together.” But Naylor—a rich, hip, handsome confirmed bachelor (about whom she may have written the song “Ladies’ Man,” for her next album)—had a life that he says “was a complete mess at the time,” while “I felt Joni really did want a real serious relationship,” something he could not provide.

  Joni was two years away from forty. After a string of conflict-filled romances, a hospitalization for a serious infection, and a loss of her fans, maybe it was time to choose the easy and nurturing way for a change. A whole new generation of women of varying degrees of merit on the shock-value-to-talent continuum—Rickie Lee Jones, Deborah Harry, Madonna, Pat Benatar, Chryssie Hynde, and Joan Jett (all of whom had essentially supplanted an interim generation that included Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and the highly regarded Patti Smith)—were now the queens of the airwaves (and of that initially cheesy-seeming brand-new phenomenon that robbed records of their imaginative value: music videos), riding on the “ploughed dirt” (to use Joni’s term for what O’Keeffe had provided her) that Joni, Carole, Carly, Laura Nyro, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin had provided through a more concerted battle against the limits of being a young American female. The idea of living the hard and soulful life—the life that Joni and D’Arcy Case had sought, that she and Joy Schreiber had found they had in common, that she and Ronee Blakley followed, through Nietzsche and Van Gogh: maybe you could live it for just so long.

  Joni’s next album, Wild Things Run Fast (on her former housemate’s new label, Geffen Records) was such a departure not only from her jazz albums but also from the confessional ones, that the critics noted that fact almost before anything else. Stephen Holden called it “the most exhilaratingly high-spirited album Miss Mitchell has ever made,” featuring “several vibrant rock-and-roll performances that communicate a rare joy in being alive. The feeling of playfulness that runs through the album also makes Wild Things Run Fast different in spirit from [emphasis added] all of Miss Mitchell’s previous records. It is as though, at 39”—the album was released in late 1982—“the preeminent confessional songwriter of her generation had finally faced down the romantic demons that haunted her earlier albums.”

  In fact, the exorcising of demons was literal. Though no one knew this at the time (including Joni’s parents, from whom the secret was still firmly kept), it was in the first song on this album, the wistful “Chinese Café/Unchained Melody”—which, not accidentally, featured Joni “listening” to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” on a jukebox—that Joni explicitly confessed: “My child’s a stranger / I bore her, but I could not raise her.” No one picked up on this revelation—or on the fact that, despite the upbeatness in the rest of the album, this song was purely a woman bluntly (and half-unbelievingly) announcing a new phase in her life: “We’re middle class, we’re middle aged.”

  Similarly, the bebop-rhythmed, deceptively cool “Moon at the Window”—in which she commiserates with Betsy Asher, then in the throes of her breakdown, and remarks on how hard women can be on themselves, and that “sometimes the light can be so hard to find”—has as its refrain “At least the moon at the window / the thieves left that behind.” Self-evidently, and with deft sarcasm, the line means: any part of our soul and sanity that isn�
��t pinned down can be “stolen.” But according to Joni’s confidantes, the song has a deeper, more literal meaning. When Brad MacMath split from Toronto in early autumn 1964, he left his pregnant girlfriend a painting of a moon out a window.

  She could write about the baby now because she could finally see she’d had no choice back then. It was “the times” that made a single girl have to place a baby for adoption. That was what she always said to Don Alias whenever they talked about it. She had done what she’d had to do. Indeed, Georgia O’Keeffe’s own musing about women’s creative limits had made her feel extra-justified. If she’d kept the baby, there would have been none of her work.

  The bass player on Wild Things Run Fast was a very tall, lean, darkly handsome twenty-four-year-old with tousled black curls and a rakish pirate’s mustache. But Larry Klein’s swashbuckling looks obscured the decency and psychological conservatism of a natural caretaker. (Klein’s friend Dave Naylor thought of Larry as “someone with the perfect combination of patience and balls.”) Larry Klein’s father was a Jewish aerospace engineer and his stay-at-home mother was, he says, caught “in the pincers of the late 1950s–early 1960s housewife disease”—Betty Friedan’s “problem without a name”—“which made for booming Valium sales.” A female psychotherapist was a kind of “second mother” to him. Thus, Larry grew up (“in deep suburbia—in Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley”) with a marriage model in which the man was the soother of the more complicated woman and therapy was a part of life. Emotional helpmate was the role he expected to fill.

  Joni met young Larry Klein just as the nonfiction book The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence, by Colette Dowling, was becoming a nerve-hitting best seller. For and about women in their thirties who had pioneered feminism, it addressed the unextinguished longing to be protected. Maybe, for women like Joni—so fiercely independent, they seemed intimacy-averse; so talented, confident, and accomplished, they routinely directed men in their workaday projects—that neediness took the form of the middle-of-the-night imprecations she’d made to Don Alias and the constant availability she’d relied on from John Guerin: both relationships, so frictional. Maybe it was time to find a more straightforward protector.

  Over the year of the recording of the album, Larry and Joni developed a friendship, “getting into philosophical discussions” while playing pinball. He was besotted. “I had never met a woman remotely like Joan,” he remembers thinking. “She was just a whole other species for me,” able to hold “rambling discourses on everything from Beethoven to Nietzsche to politics to the environment. It was a level of interaction that was so far above anything I’d ever had with a woman, I was pretty stunned. Every conversation was so catalytic and cathartic for me because, aside from being the brilliant, prescient thinker that she was, she was thirteen years older than me. My most serious relationship was a high school romance. Here I was, twenty-four and thinking, What planet is this woman from? This is amazing!” It was “daunting” to feel a mutual attraction developing between himself—this provincial young man—and this much-older musical icon. “Moving forward to act on that impulse, I thought, This is either gonna be fantastic or the absolutely most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

  It turned out not to be the most embarrassing thing he’d ever done in his life.

  The reggae-beat “Solid Love” is a euphoric testament to Joni’s feeling for Larry—“Klein,” as she called him. Larry moved into a house in Malibu with her (she kept the Bel Air house as well) and, as summer of 1982 turned to autumn, he recalls, “we would joke, ‘Will you still marry me…?’ after knowing this and that about each other or enduring some difficult situation.” Joni told Larry that, because of the infection she’d gotten in Jamaica, she probably couldn’t get pregnant; he said he was okay with that.

  John Guerin had recently married. “Now that you’re married, I can get married,” Joni told him. “I’d like to think we had a certain thing that she didn’t have with most people,” John mused, shortly before his death.

  On November 21, 1982, a couple of weeks after Joni turned thirty-nine, about fifteen close friends and family members of Joni Mitchell and Larry Klein attended their wedding at Elliot Roberts’s Malibu house. Joni wore a traditional wedding dress and a tiara of flowers. A New Age healer performed the ceremony; Joni’s housekeeper Dora’s daughter was the flower girl. Betsy Asher tried hard to make it, but at that point she had gotten too afraid to leave her Summit Ridge house. Joni and Larry limited the guest list because, as he says, “we didn’t want any skeptics there, and, of course, a lot of people were skeptical” about “the discrepancy in our ages,” among other things. How would this “solid love,” this normal happiness, affect her writing?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  carly

  late 1973–late 1987

  Early in Carly’s pregnancy, she and James and Ellen and Vieri Salvadori had traveled to Europe. After they returned to New York, James entered treatment, and Jessica remembers Carly “going to visit James in rehab when she was pregnant, realizing the depth of his problems and having to come to that understanding” that she had married a drug addict. “I think things were really difficult, and she worried—and felt insecure.” Still, she was strong and nurturing; as someone who worked closely with James says, “Carly got James on methadone, and that was an achievement.” Others, however, say that methadone would prove for him at least as difficult a habit as heroin.

  Carly had seemed absolutely clear-eyed in her interview with James in Rolling Stone, pronouncing “junk” one of the addictions that was socially “unacceptable” as well as “self-destructive.” She had spoken of how loving a man with an addictive personality had only made her see more keenly drugs’ insidiousness. (“I snorted cocaine a couple of times, but it was never as bad to me as when I saw James getting into it.”) But, as she would realize eight years later, “I didn’t go into [the marriage] with a great deal of projection about the future. I was caught up in the moment. I just knew I was very much in love with James and I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life.” In that way she was typical of her times. Upper-middle-class young women, used to being airlifted out of dangers they were visiting as tourists, were apt to be hopeful that love could carry the day and that effort invested in a decent, striving man would be rewarded. And, thirty years before trailer-park methamphetamines sullied drugs’ patina of elitism, addiction was a sign of sensitivity and vulnerability. James Taylor had always traded on that romance.

  But now there was a child in the picture. Sarah Maria (Sally) Taylor was born on January 7, 1974; James audio recorded the birth of the baby girl who would inspire him to write a song named for her. “I was there at the hospital when Sally was born and I think I’d never seen James so happy,” Ellen says. “I remember the two of them diapering her, the nurse teaching them how.” Bringing the baby home, “Carly was just so happy,” Jeanie Seligmann remembers. “It seemed as if her world had gotten smaller, but not in a bad way. She was really focused; she had found herself. She was still going to be very creative, but the part of her life that had been scattered for a while was coming into its own.”

  Hotcakes, Carly’s ode to this season of contentment, had been recorded late in Carly’s pregnancy. It was another Richard Perry production. (Because he’d pushed her so hard during No Secrets, he had to woo Carly—then, as he recalls, “full-on pregnant”—over lunch at Tavern on the Green, to get her to work with him again.) Released days after she gave birth to Sally, it sold nearly a million copies, peaking at #3. The album featured Carly and James having great fun with Charlie and Inez Foxx’s rocking version of the old folk song “Mockingbird.” Punctuated by their call-and-response on each syllable of the title word, and by punchy near-campiness (James doing a Yiddish “hoid” for “heard”), the Top 10 single was a smart way to have their cute couplehood both ways (wisely, they turned down starring roles in a remake of A Star Is Born), and the song became a staple of their joint ap
pearances, with Carly jumping all over the stage with gawky abandon.

  The jaunty, ragtimelike “Older Sister” was another one of Carly’s songs about the sisterly awe and competition that had marked her childhood, as was the more darkly autobiographical “Grownup,” about her inability to grow out of the insecure little girl in a “white nightgown…playing with her hair” while looking at her parents’ friends assembled for cocktails. Her casual insistence on following the adage “Write what you know” had met with sneers (and sometimes still did), but little by little, as women woke up from the ultimately perishable conceits of the countercultural dream, the line she drew from a certain kind of childhood to a certain kind of womanhood made identifiable sense. Praising the album for being “not deep but…honest,” Jon Landau in Rolling Stone wrote: “Carly Simon never apologizes for writing about herself or her well-to-do background that has been so gratuitously criticized.”

  “Mind on My Man” was as smooth a standard as any her friend Jonathan Schwartz would spin. “He’s a gentleman lost at the fair / He’s a lotus that opens and closes, notice he won’t always let me in”: she locates James. More, those last phrases describe what women find attractive in men—vulnerability, abandon, mystery, but with decency—in the voice of a woman who is not at all self-protective but is very self-aware.

  The album’s hit single, “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” (#2 in the adult contemporary market) with its operatic, string-infused interlude—which she wrote with Jake, and which Landau called “her best single to date”—underscored her current life: Enough self-obsession already! (“You showed me how, how to leave myself behind / how to turn down the noise in my mind.”) Enough existential angst! (“Suffering was the only thing made me feel I was alive.”) But Carly’s bleating voice undercuts her vow of emotional peace—she’s too passionate to stay unpained—and gives the song its edge. “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby,” her snapshot of the era of platform shoes and strident autonomy-professing, made up in mischief for what it lacked in grace, and it introduced in this most urban but visceral of writers what would be her affecting motif: the idea that a woman—fluid, absorbing, eternal—is a “river.”