By now, Joni’s having given up a baby was a whisper of a rumor bobbing under the surface of public acknowledgment. She had confessed (in a 1990 gotcha! exchange with a London radio interviewer) that she’d had a baby; that fleeting broadcast moment on the faraway shore had not made it to North America, except to provide the basis for a mostly unnoticed, small April 1996 Globe story in which a supposed art school friend talked about Joni having had a baby and having put it up for adoption. The brief article in the sleazy tabloid was rife with errors, saying, for example, that Joni was nineteen, not twenty-one, when she gave birth.
For years Joni had kept the possibility of the search for her baby in a kind of locked box. She still had not told her parents, and with every year the secret seemed more trouble to uncover. Larry Klein, Don Alias, and John Guerin all remembered her having fleeting pangs to try to “find my kid,” but they were just that—fleeting. However, 1996 was an affirming year for Joni. Late-in-coming awards started flooding in all at once: Turbulent Indigo was the surprise winner of Best Pop Album Grammy (Joni’s unexpected selection may have been partly compensation for the Grammys she should have won years earlier), and she won Billboard’s newly instituted and very prestigious Century Award. In addition, Stephen Holden publicly criticized the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “antifeminine” bias for their failure to honor Joni (she was inducted the next year, as well as into the Songwriters Hall of Fame); the National Academy of Songwriters and the National Songwriters Association each awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award; BMI gave her their one-million-performance certificate for “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock,” their two-million-performance certificate for “Help Me,” and their four-million-performance certificate for “Both Sides, Now”; and she won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award. There were perks to being fifty-three years old.
In addition, her personal life had come satisfyingly full circle. She was now in a relationship with Canadian poet Donald Freed, a Métis (half Indian) who traveled around Canada’s remote areas, teaching children to turn their lives into poetry. Her friends approved; one called Freed “a one-hundred-percent great person, with boundaries; a really together man.” The fact that he and Joni had been introduced by Myrtle, and that the two had grown up on the opposite shores of the Saskatchewan River, made the union seem like a destined homecoming. Joni wrote a song with an explicitly midlife-female title (“Face Lift”) about Freed; ringing through it is her abiding tussle with Myrtle’s unflinching propriety. (Joni’s Myrtle character angrily demands, “Did you come home to disgrace us?” when Joni and Freed stay at a local hotel together; Joni cries, “I’m middle-aged, Mama!…Why is this joy not allowed?”)
Like many women her age, who’d by now hacked at the quandary of love vs. freedom from a dozen different angles, Joni found the long-distance relationship a good solution. When the now happily married John Guerin asked, “But, Joan, isn’t that guy in Canada all the time?” she answered, “Yes, but it’s better that way. I see him when it’s cool.” After all that emotion spilled for so long, by the mid-1990s “I don’t think Joni could be head-over-heels anymore,” John surmised. Then Joni saw Don Alias for the first time since their abrupt breakup a decade and a half earlier. Alias dropped by her house one day, hoping to rekindle the romance. “We danced around a little bit, happy to see each other, and then Joni said, with a smile, ‘I thought you were mad at me’”—for giving him twenty-four hours to get his possessions out of Varick Street—“and I wanted to say, ‘You’re goddamn right I’m mad at you!’ but I said, ‘No, I’m not mad.’” Alias asked Joni if she was seeing anyone; she mentioned, as Alias came away thinking of him, “the cowboy,” Freed. They parted, friends. As for other exes: Graham Nash sent Joni flowers every year on her birthday, and James Taylor sang her praises (“He seemed to look back on their relationship more positively than she did,” says a friend). With Jackson Browne she remained angry.
Joni’s decision to search for her daughter had started in 1996, as a result of that early tabloid article. The foster mother who had cared for Joni’s baby for seven months contacted Joni’s managers, sending photos. When Joni received the pictures, she reportedly said, “My daughter…my baby…my child,” as if the sheer ability to mouth those words was intensely relieving. She marveled at how the baby resembled Sadie, her musically frustrated maternal grandmother. “She must be a really strong woman,” Joni said, of her adult daughter.
By the end of 1996 (concurrent with another article in the Globe), Joni announced that she was searching for her daughter. In an interview with the Calgary Sun, Myrtle (after offering lip service to the appropriate reaction with “We would have been supportive if we had only known” about the baby back then) proved that Joni had in fact judged her mother’s reaction accurately all along. “It’s Joni’s fault this is coming out now; she’s too open and frank about it. This is really embarrassing,” Myrtle fretted.
Joni’s Vancouver-based managers, Steve Macklam and Sam Feldman, handled the responses; hundreds of thirty-one-year-old adopted women wanted to be Joni Mitchell’s baby.
Knowing she was the one, Kilauren contacted and recontacted Macklam and Feldman, but “the first e-mails went unanswered for six weeks,” a friend recalls; Kilauren felt frustrated. By the early weeks of 1997 she was calling or e-mailing almost every day. Finally, the Gibbs located a long-buried photograph of Kilauren, in their arms, taken the day she left her foster mother. In early March Kilauren sent this photo to Macklam and Feldman; they matched it against the ones Joni had been sent one year earlier by the foster mother. To Joni’s protectively skeptical managers, there could be no doubt now.
Joni was on vacation with Don Freed, in Santa Fe. There she was: on that “burning desert” in cactus tree land, her self-anointed locus of female solitude and independence, where she’d imagined a heart-to-heart with Amelia Earhart and had a real one with Georgia O’Keeffe. Returning to her hotel after an outing with Don, she received Macklam and Feldman’s message with the phone number for one Kilauren Gibb. Joni called, and into the voice mail exclaimed, “It’s Joni. I’m overwhelmed.”
Days later, on March 11, Duke Redbird got to his Toronto restaurant and found this note: “Hi, Duke…I went to see you today because I’m on my way to L.A. on Thursday, March 13, to visit Joni. She remembers you and your brother and your kindness [bringing her apples] during her time of need. She couldn’t believe that I had met you. She is my mother and she has sent my son and me to visit her…Thanks for being so kind. Love, Kilauren Gibb.”
Kilauren and Marlin flew, with first-class tickets from Joni, from Toronto to L.A. They were met by a limousine and driven to Joni’s house. Kilauren didn’t know to go to the side entrance; she rang at the (mostly unused) front entrance. Joni came out onto the balcony to redirect Kilauren—mother looked down and daughter looked up, awkwardly, comically Romeo-and-Juliet-like. Joni raced downstairs and opened the door. And, as she would later write it, in her abashed, eloquently measured song about the occasion: “In the middle of this continent, in the middle of our time on Earth, we receive one another.” Here was her Kelly Dale—here was her Little Green—thirty-two years later.
Turning themselves into a family was, while euphoric, mined with dangers, as Joni’s own words in “Stay in Touch” predicted: “But our roles aren’t clear / So we mustn’t rush.” For Kilauren, the contrast between glamorous Bel Air with Joni as her mother and, as a friend says, “dreary suburban Toronto and dealing with the Gibbs” was dizzying and depressing. There was the matter of their strong similarities—Kilauren and Joni “are both brutal to argue with; they’ve got excellent selective memories,” says one who knows both, “and they’re both feisty, like Myrtle. They’re three birds of a feather.” There was also the matter of their equally strong differences. As Dave Naylor puts it, “It drives Joni crazy, ’cause she’s Kilauren’s mom and she can’t understand why this daughter of hers doesn’t have this work ethic that she has.” “Joni has Kilauren on a shor
t leash,” says a friend, using, figuratively, the same word, “leash,” that Joni had once described Myrtle literally using on her as a child. How strong, these generational echoes! Joni and her daughter and mother were, indeed, as she had so early written, “captive on the carousel of time.”
American articles somewhat reverentially praised Joni’s dutifulness to her new family. Joni told The New York Times that, for the sake of her grandson, Marlin, she was now watching network TV. The Times quoted Marlin’s sweet comment about Joni’s steadfastness in his life, that he “couldn’t imagine…Joni going away.”*
Meanwhile, Joni’s eighteenth album, Taming the Tiger, was released in 1998. It included “Stay in Touch” as well as “Face Lift”; a paean to lust (Joni told friends she was on the now-popular-with-her-cohort elixir, hormone-replacement therapy) that she wrote with Freed, “The Crazy Cries of Love”; and “Lead Balloon,” which parlayed her spat with Jann Wenner into an apt jab at society’s approval of angry men and scorn for angry women. In the title song, “Taming the Tiger,” Joni took another broad swipe at the music industry: the radio serves up “formula music, girly guile, genuine junk food for juveniles.” So reuniting with her daughter hadn’t scratched every itch, and receiving the flood of awards two years earlier hadn’t bought her silence. Once the pert, fragile, bell-voiced pleaser (and jelled in aspic as such in much of the public’s mind), she’d evolved into a prickly, husky-voiced straight shooter; her songs still (but from that other “side now”) as astringently unphony as they had always been.
Joni and Donald Freed broke up. Like Don Alias, he objected to her calling him in the middle of the night.
Kilauren had a second baby—a daughter, Daisy, with Ted Barrington—in 1999. After her drab, odd-fit childhood with the Gibbs, she loved the idea of being Joni’s daughter and didn’t want to lose that privilege and magic. “She was frightened of Joni; she was on best behavior with Joni; she didn’t want to be cut off from the perks,” a confidante says. So certain feelings were kept inside.
And then—on a good day for emotional clean sweeps, the first day of the new millennium, January 1, 2000—came an almost inevitable blow-out.
Kilauren and Marlin were visiting Joni in Bel Air. Kilauren was excitedly preparing to go with Joni to a party given by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. While she was dressing, she let Marlin sit in front of the TV. The movie The Green Mile, which featured a torture scene, was on. Joni heatedly objected: it wasn’t appropriate for Marlin to be watching a violent movie. Kilauren heatedly rebutted: the movie was fine for Marlin.
Joni shot back: “Don’t talk back to me—I’m your mother!”
Kilauren shot back, “What do you know about being a mother? You gave me away!”
And then Joni slapped Kilauren’s face.
Kilauren called the police, but when the officers arrived, she declined to press charges. Kilauren and Marlin spent the night at the house of a friend of Joni’s.
Since that time, Joni Mitchell and Kilauren Gibb have made their way through a thicket of complicated emotions to arrive at a relationship that feels like real life. Joni visits her daughter and grandchildren in Toronto; they visit her at her houses in L.A. and near Vancouver. When Kilauren said she wanted to have an evening with her birth mother and birth father together (Kilauren had also reunited with Brad MacMath), Betsy Asher had Joni, Kilauren, and MacMath (the bestower of Kilauren’s deep-set, up-slanted eyes) over for dinner. In a photograph taken that evening, Joni, her long-ago art school boyfriend, and Kilauren are smiling as easily as any long-married middle-aged couple and their adult daughter.
Joni’s nineteenth album, 2000’s Both Sides, Now, and her twentieth—2002’s double-disc Travelogue—both feature her singing her songs in her new, life-deepened voice.
In 2003 Joni was the subject of a PBS American Masters tribute-biography, “Woman of Heart and Mind.” James Taylor was among the participants honoring Joni in word and song. She unappeasedly continued to call the recording industry a “cesspool,” railing, of the pop landscape: “What [should] I do now? Show my tits? Grab my crotch? Get hair extensions and a choreographer?” Danny Kortchmar puts the complaint thusly, referring to rap music, “Today, people write love songs to their jewelry.”
Joni has essentially asked, thought-provokingly: Do we destroy the female artists among us? She concedes that since so many people have said her early work was her best, maybe it was time to believe it herself. In 2004 she ran into Jackson Browne in a grocery store. He told her he couldn’t bear the animosity between them and the two reportedly buried the hatchet. A more momentous milestone: Myrtle Anderson, whose high standards had shaped Joni, died at the age of ninety-five on March 19, 2007.
As for Joni and Kilauren, they are close and they have their ups and downs. “You know what?” a friend of Joni’s says. “With all Joni’s exasperation over Kilauren, and her worries about Kilauren, and their back-and-forth hurts; and her time, happily, spent with Kilauren and Marlin and Daisy: like it or not, Joni’s become a mother, after all.”
And an artist, first and foremost. Joni spent the summer of 2007 recording her twenty-first album, Shine, a bravura effort of electric music, every track of course produced by Joni, who also supplied virtually all of the instrumentation. James Taylor added his guitar to the title song. The album tackles grand themes—not just environmentalism, the smart set’s cause du jour, but the problems of organized religion. She dedicated it to her grandchildren, Marlin and Daisy. It was released, on Starbucks’s Hear label, in late September 2007, heralded by a full-page ad in The New York Times: “A Timeless Voice Challenges Today’s World.” Joni was reportedly annoyed that her proposed cover—the arched backs and bulbously muscled thighs of leaping male dancers—was not thought to be the best signifier for a Joni Mitchell album, artists’ faces, not strangers’ buttocks, being considered more congenial. But there those muscled buttocks were, on the counters of those thousands of serene, glossy, ubiquitous heirs to her feisty, funky, hidden-away Louis Riel. Starbucks surely learned what everyone knows: She is Joni Mitchell and she isn’t backing down.
coming home
Throughout the 1980s, there were two Carole Kings. To the wider American public there was Carole the beloved singer-songwriter, about whom people in their thirties and older affectionately but briefly wondered, “What happened after Tapestry?”—and whose Brill Building hits were increasingly being marketed as what would be called “classic rock.” This Carole King was a genial legend and a good-works activist. She gave ten performances, around the country, to fund-raise for her friend (and, though few knew this of her, fellow Western statesman) Gary Hart during his presidential bid in 1984. Briefly thought to be the “new Kennedy” that Americans were still wistfully determined to uncover, the handsome, square-jawed—and, of course, married—Colorado senator self-destructed by daring the press to follow his every move, only to wind up with a blonde on his lap on a boat called Monkey Business. This Carole King also performed at Willie Nelson’s first Farm Aid concert. In image and, increasingly, in real life, she was an environmentalist, taking her earth-motherliness to the next—political—stage.
The other Carole King—Carole King Sorensen—was known only in Custer County, Idaho, and there she was very much disliked. She was considered a combative, wealthy interloper with a New York accent (a “city slicker from the Bronx [sic] and Los Angeles,” as one local paper put it), who, even while genuinely embracing ranch life (Carole did milk her cows and chop wood for her stove; she and Rick did run a livestock operation; and their ranch house was, by musical star standards, almost threadbare), didn’t quite get Custer County’s values. Says a woman who is married to a seventh-generation mountain Idahoan (and who, as a newcomer herself in the early 1970s, learned the code when she pulled a cake-mix box from the grocery store shelf—only to have another customer disapprovingly pluck it out of her hand, put it back on the shelf, and say, “I’ll teach you how to bake that cake from scratch”), “You don’t
wear dirty jeans to a community meeting, like Carole did—that’s what rich hippies do. You leave your ranch work clothes at home and you wear pressed, proper clothes.” Besides bucking convention, Carole and Rick were pursuing their closed-road case against her neighbors, the French and Schoonen families; against Custer County; and against the U.S. Forest Service. Says someone who was a party in her legal battle: “There are two things in this state that people fight over: water and access.” She’d picked one of them.
Both sides had merit: Carole had purchased the Robinson Bar Ranch only after doing research to determine that a road that ran very close to their living quarters was their private property. In neighborly fashion, they gave the people whose ranch abutted theirs—Thorlo and Dorothy French and David and Helen Schoonen—the combination to the lock on the gate, so they too could make use of the road. However, the Sorensens’ research did not take into account local custom: as long as anyone in Custer County could remember, that road had been used by everyone in the county; it had been treated as if it were a public road, and during the winter months, it was often the only alternative to a circuitous—and dangerous—mountain pass. So, at the urging of the neighbors and the U.S. Forest Service, in September 1981 Custer County had declared the road public, and its sheriff issued Carole a criminal citation for placing a locked gate on her road. (One independent-minded deputy sheriff, having heard from his colleagues no “justifiable rationale” for criminalizing the civil complaint, later said that he believed the act was “carefully planned to harass and intimidate” Carole.) Carole fought back; the forest service, county, and her neighbors counter-fought,* and, while no one outside the state knew of this feud, the Idaho papers were full of stories (at least twenty-six, by one count), for the next six years.
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