Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  One day in fall of 1987 Jim called Jake, saying, “I need to talk to you—you’re the only one who knows both of us. I want to ask Carly to marry me. What do you think?” First, Jake told Jim that he would have to consider it during lunch and for Jim to call him later. When Jim did so, Jake hesitated; then he said, in his slow, low voice: “She’s the most neurotic woman in the world.” He paused, then added, “But she’s the only one who’s worth it.”

  Jim proposed and Carly accepted. Jim quit his job at MONY; he would write Spike and Dive full-time now. They estimated it would take a year, maybe two, for him to complete the novel. She had faith in him.

  They had one “huge” fight, Jim says, just before the wedding. Carly wanted Jim to sign a prenuptial agreement. Such documents were now being recommended when, among other things, people of different economic levels were marrying. “I was furious,” Jim says, “because the prenup elevated one aspect of the relationship—and not the most important one—over all others.” Jim asked his father’s advice. “Do you love her?” Hart the elder asked. His son replied, “I adore her!” “Well, she’s dead wrong,” the wise crook said. “But apologize to her for fighting with her—and sign it. Because if you love someone, apologizing when you’re wrong doesn’t count. Only apologizing even though you’re right counts.” Jim signed the prenup.

  Two days before Christmas 1987, as a light snow drizzled the Vineyard, Carly’s and Jim’s families gathered in an Edgartown church for their wedding. “Carly looked like a Russian heroine” in her fur-cowlnecked, tight-bodiced white dress, Jim says.

  As the pair ferried off to their honeymoon in Nantucket, Carly’s loved ones were delighted that she was happy. They hoped that this mutual caretaking would work, permanently.

  PART SIX

  “in the river i know i will find the key”

  the middle ’80s to the present: three women, three endings, one journey

  reuniting

  Joni came into middle age with Larry Klein by her side. Their relationship spanned the ten years from her thirty-eighth to her forty-eighth birthday, never an easy juncture for a woman—and no less so for one who assumed that she was venerated as a questing artist (to be embraced by her fans wherever her musical journey took her), rather than one whose greatest bond with her public lay in how radiantly her internal life reflected their own.

  During the nine years of her marriage to Larry, Joni’s career, already derailed during her jazz experimentation, went deeper into a trough by way of her collaborations with her young husband. There are some who believe Klein’s synthesizer-heavy, drum-machine-based music hurt her career; that she had yielded to modishness at the expense of her true spirit. Others believe that, however off-mark their musical collaborations, Larry patiently absorbed and managed the anger that Joni increasingly felt. “Getting older was hard for Joni,” says Larry. She saw an injustice. “Men around that age”—Jagger, McCartney, Eric Clapton—“are still considered vital in pop music, but women aren’t. Joni is someone who’s stuck to her guns artistically, and I told her repeatedly that the way she pursued her career, with such single-minded devotion to artistry and holding on to her integrity so intensely, not chasing after commercial success, she had carved out a fantastic path for herself to grow older and still be vital.”

  If it sounded as if Larry was tending to Joni a bit, he doesn’t deny this. And although there are those who feel that he (so little known before their marriage) benefited tremendously, financially and otherwise, by being married to a legend, the relationship took its toll on him. “It was a real test for me to be that grounding influence to a person who was going through some really intense stuff, and who was flying around in a pretty wide swath. I hadn’t developed the ability to deal with conflict in a completely mature way—to not just sublimate my anger internally.”

  The first album of her songs that they produced together—her fourteenth album, 1985’s Dog Eat Dog—was political in spirit. Having her romantic life settled gave Joni the luxury of thinking about politics, she has said. In it she exhorted against televangelists (presciently, it would turn out; the hypocrisies of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1980s were nothing next to the grip on Republican politics that fundamentalist churches would exert twenty years later), and also Wall Streeters and advertising hucksters. Dog Eat Dog was poorly reviewed and her poorest-selling album in eighteen years. And though her next album, 1988’s smoother and more listenable Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, was enthusiastically received (Billboard’s Timothy White called it “lucid” and “sublimely sung”) and sold better (reaching a respectable #45), it didn’t touch the luster of her early albums, nor did the songs have that personal ache. Her 1991 Night Ride Home, whose title song honored Larry (“I love the man beside me, we love the open road”), was, as Stephen Holden said, “closer in spirit to her 1970s albums”; still it did about the same business as its predecessor. During these and subsequent years Joni bewailed what she called her banishment from the airwaves, spoke of her disdain for MTV, and tendered the opinion that she had been “blacklisted” from Rolling Stone because she had once thrown a drink in Jann Wenner’s face and told him to “kiss my ass.”

  Larry coached Joni through several concerted attempts to stop smoking, but all of them failed. Once, he drove her to Palm Springs after she’d received an injection that was supposed to relieve the pain of withdrawal. He had left her alone in her hotel room and driven back to L.A., but then, unable to reach her by phone, he got in the car and drove back to Palm Springs. Joni hadn’t answered the hotel room phone because she had borrowed a bike from the desk clerk and pedaled to the nearest cigarette machine, thirty miles away. During another ill-fated cold turkey attempt, “Joni got so ill-tempered, I ended up saying: ‘Please smoke. Or else we’re both going to end up dead.’”

  At some point in her early forties Joni discovered she was pregnant—a surprise, since she had assumed that the infection she’d suffered in Jamaica had left her infertile. She would later tell a friend that “she wanted the baby, badly.” Larry was excited to be a father, although things were still so preliminary that they hadn’t gotten to thinking of names. Joni’s continued smoking bothered Larry. “She justified it historically: women in the past smoked while they were pregnant, before anyone knew it was bad for babies. She said, ‘This is what it is—I just have to deal with [the pregnancy] the way I am.’”

  In her first trimester, Joni miscarried. Larry had a recording date in England; musicians were waiting for him. He delayed his departure, then he asked Joni if it was okay for him to go and fulfill his commitment. She consented. In an act more naïve than callous, but with a devastating effect on Joni, he did leave. “In retrospect, it was really a bad thing,” he says today. “I didn’t know very much about what happens to women when they miscarry—the potential psychological problems, the depression. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone. It really damaged our relationship; she saw it as me putting this job higher in importance than her health.” A friend of Joni’s says, “She was really sick, in a lot of pain, after he left.” Not only did she suffer the physical and psychological symptoms alone, but a line had been crossed: “Larry’s leaving broke her trust in him.” In two very different ways, over twenty-plus years, she had lost two babies, and in both cases men had profoundly let her down by failing to hear what she wanted but did not say, instead of what they wanted and she agreed to.

  Joni took what she would come to feel as Larry’s betrayal stoically. “She had been through so much by the time I met her, it had produced a certain resilience in her,” Larry says. Consequently, the Joni who was his wife was “not an overly sentimental person. She’s got a bit of a hard edge in a certain way when it comes to existential events, whether it’s death or children or illness. The flip side of that was a kind of fatalistic attitude toward these things.”

  By 1991, the eighth year of his relationship with Joni, Larry had sunk into a deep, serious depression. “I was starting to come apart,” he says
. Larry thinks that Joni had been “looking at me to be the ideal person, to be the patient person who’s there when she was angry; the calm, reassuring person when that was needed, and the childlike person who could relate to her on the most innocent level.” The need to keep filling those shifting roles had worn him out. “She was as helpful as she could be” with his depression, “having wrestled with those kinds of demons herself,” he says, but Joni, who’s been called by some a “narcissist,” would tolerate only so much. Larry wanted them to go into couples therapy, but Joni expressed disdain for Western psychology. “So we had a pattern of her saying, ‘I’m just not able to be in a relationship; I’m not made for this,’ and me responding, ‘Oh, come on, let’s make this work.’” Twenty-one years earlier she had told Graham Nash, “If you hold sand too tightly, it will run through your fingers.” Larry was now in Graham’s place, his earnestness and neediness driving her away. Besides, when your best work has energized from intense relationships with edgy men, the normalness of marriage to a man who is a soother deprives you of prime material. As Dave Naylor, who remained close to both Larry and Joni, puts it, “It wasn’t just the miscarriage” that marked the end of the marriage for Joni. “She needed some inspiration, some play—she needed some interaction with men.”*

  Joni and Larry spent Thanksgiving 1991 at his aunt and uncle’s. “Then we came back to Joni’s house in Bel Air,” Larry recalls, “and—to her credit, for being honest—she said, ‘Listen, Klein. I am who I am. I’m not going to be changing a lot.’ So I said, ‘I’ve got to go. This is killing me.’”

  Larry moved to a house in Venice and “spent five years—probably the most difficult period of my life—completely reconstructing myself. The relationship with her was the most valuable thing for me, but it had ended in failure. I felt, Wow, who am I again, now?” He was left with the stereotypically female task of extricating an autonomous self from the emotional mesh of a marriage dominated by her identity. And Joni? Joni was alone again. But fate works with its own symmetry. Although Joni Mitchell had no idea of it now, across the country, in Florida, a conversation was occurring that would set in motion the most profound imaginable end to her existential void, to her haunting aloneness.

  The Gibb family of Don Mills, Toronto—parents Ida and David and now-grown children David and Kilauren—always went somewhere warm for Christmas vacation, and this year, 1991, they chose Miami. Kilauren, twenty-six, had something to tell her parents: she was pregnant. She was having a baby with her boyfriend, local rock-group drummer Paul Kohler.

  Kilauren had always been so different from her parents. They were timid and uncharismatic; she was headstrong and self-possessed. They were bookish; she was artistic—she liked to paint (and did so in a colorful, realistic style). While they were prim and dour, she was, as a friend calls her, “a renegade spirit, a girl who hung out with the band.” They were not very attractive, but she was, as one beau put it, “unapproachably beautiful.” (She had been discovered by Ford Models when she was in high school in Toronto and had done runway modeling in France and Australia before coming back to Canada. She used the money earned from her modeling to buy fashionable clothes.)

  When she was fourteen, a boy she had befriended at their local Donalda Country Club had asked her, point-blank, “I’ve heard rumors to the effect that you are adopted and David wasn’t.” Kilauren had replied, “Not a chance!” That was the answer she had been adamantly given by her parents.

  Yet so many of the things Kilauren was made her a kind of errant jigsaw piece that didn’t fit in her family’s cardboard puzzle board. Adventurous and bohemian, headstrong and stubborn; a music lover, a dreamer, a low-level model dressed better than her peers; a painter, a traveler; a tall, blond, high-cheekboned girl who melted men’s hearts. Whose puzzle board did she fit in?

  During breakfast at the Miami Beach hotel over Christmas 1991, Kilauren received world-rocking news. Shortly after she told her parents she was having a baby, they (prodded to truthfulness by their son, David, who’d felt bad about having kept the truth from his sister for so long) told her that she wasn’t their natural child; she had been adopted, at seven months old. “She felt anger and betrayal and a loss of center,” says someone in whom she later confided. She abruptly left the table. Things would never again be quite right between Kilauren and her parents.

  Seeking answers, Kilauren called Canada’s Children’s Aid Society. She was told that there was something called a Non-Identifying Background Information form that every relinquishing birth mother in the 1960s had to fill out. Even nearly three decades later, it was hard to obtain this information, and the bureaucratic delays varied from province to province.

  Kilauren had her baby, a son. She named him Marlin. She broke up with the baby’s father and was kept intensely occupied as a single mother. Four years passed.

  In early 1995, the phone rang in the Toronto apartment of a young man named Tim Campbell. Tim had grown up with Kilauren and was a friend of Ted Barrington, who was now Kilauren’s boyfriend. Tim had been adopted himself; but, unlike Kilauren, he had always known. When he was nineteen, something called the Match Program came into being across Canada. If you were an adoptee who wanted to find your birth mother, you put your name in a registry, which was checked against a registry of birth mothers who wanted to meet the children they’d relinquished. If a match was found, both parties would go into separate counseling and then be given each other’s contact information. Tim signed up for the Match Program right away. Four years later he got a registered letter: “There’s a match!” When he and his birth mother sat down at the coffee shop, face to face, “we were both so excited, it took us five hours to order anything more than a Coke.” The importance of that reunion led Tim to become a volunteer counselor for Children’s Aid, spending his spare time imploring skittish birth mothers to add their names to the registry.

  Now, in January 1995, Tim was listening to Ted’s girlfriend Kilauren Gibb, who seemed “frantic and desperate,” Tim recalls. “She said, ‘I still haven’t heard anything and I’m at the breaking point. I have to know who my birth mother is by my thirtieth birthday or…’” Tim knew that not knowing “is a big black hole that can consume” an adoptee. He took Kilauren’s desperation very seriously because he’d had a friend who was adopted and in response to that unfilled “black hole” had hanged himself. Tim used his Children’s Aid affiliation to get Kilauren’s name to the top of the Match Program list. Even with that boost, months went by; more months; then more months.

  Finally, in 1996, Kilauren received her registered letter, revealing the Non-Identifying Background Information. She and Ted called Tim and he was read these words (as Tim distinctly remembers them): “Your mother was from a small town in Saskatchewan and left for the U.S. to pursue her career as a folksinger.”

  And this is where serendipity came in. As Tim was hearing Kilauren’s excited recitation through the phone wire, he repeated the words aloud. His girlfriend, Annie Mandlsohn, was in the room. Annie, a photographer, was older than Tim. Eight years earlier she had been a graduate student at Canada’s York University, getting an advanced degree in Canadian/Native relations. She had befriended another, older graduate student, a poet and member of the Ojibway tribe, Duke Redbird. The two had become confidants, and they talked about the 1960s, an era that Annie romanticized and Duke had lived through. In the course of their talking, Duke broke a secret he’d been keeping for twenty-four years. In 1964, he’d lived in a tumbledown rooming house in Yorkville, Toronto’s bohemian quarter. His floormate there was a blond girl from Saskatchewan, the future Joni Mitchell. The secret part of the story was this: Joni had been pregnant at the time; she was going to give up her baby once it was born. This bit of gossip was something Annie had never shared with Tim. As soon as Tim repeated the words of Kilauren’s letter, Annie grabbed the phone and informed Kilauren, “Your mother is Joni Mitchell!” Tim recalls, “Kilauren said, ‘No way!’ She was speechless.”

  Annie took
control. Kilauren had to go to see Duke Redbird and ask him what season he was in the rooming house with the pregnant Joni. Kilauren was born on February 19, 1965. If Duke said summer, then Kilauren couldn’t be Joni’s daughter. But if he said that Joni had been pregnant in early winter…

  Kilauren tracked Duke down at the Coloured Stone, the Toronto restaurant he owned. Redbird recalls, “Her attitude wasn’t like she’d won the lottery. She wanted to connect with her birth mother, no matter who her mother was.” Duke answered her question: it was just before Christmas 1964 that he’d known the pregnant Joni.

  Kilauren now had her answer. Duke suggested Kilauren try to contact Joni through Canada’s Society for Composers and Performers.

  By now, Joni’s patch of being ignored had ended. Her 1994 Turbulent Indigo—the startlingly husky voice refracting her tart, mature complexity—was touted as one of her finest albums in years. (Tim White, now the editor of Billboard, called it “one of the most commanding statements of a peerless, seventeen-album career” and praised its “rare blend of romantic faith and fervid realism.”) Joni used a self-portrait depicting herself as her hero Vincent Van Gogh as the cover. Her characters had ripened to a noir sheen. The female recluse in “Sunny Sunday” (who could be “Marcie,” all these life-dented years later) “dodges the light like Blanche DuBois” and fruitlessly shoots at lampposts like some menopausal Quixote. Situations of former earnestness now provoke a cranky realism: “Sex Kills” has Joni driving a car just as “Refuge of the Roads” did, but this Joni’s not the reforming narcissist awed at her humble place in the universe; she’s a pissed-off social critic deriding “all these jackoffs at the office.” Long-brewed hurts make their way into the album; “Not to Blame” excoriates Jackson Browne, but nobody knows why; and, in the album’s most transcendent piece—and one of Joni’s finest songs ever—the cruelty and humiliation she suffered as an unwed mother is transmuted into a searing imagining of life in an historically real Irish home for fallen women called the Magdalene Laundries.