Still, I often felt that I was invisible. I think I have been trying all my life to get my father to see me.
He described his alcoholism as “periodic.” Like the little girl in the nursery rhyme, he was good most of the time, but when he was bad he was horrid. Daddy was usually a solid citizen and managed to hold on to his jobs, but he could also come home roaring drunk and be abusive and violent. His moods could flash enthusiasm and joy and then plunge him, and everyone around him, into deep remorse and sorrow. I can remember his bubbling laughter about the feeling of the sun on his face or the taste of scrambled eggs in the morning. I remember his look of pride when my siblings and I brought home good report cards and his rage when our progress was not what he thought it should have been. And I remember the few times he took a hairbrush or razor strop to my behind.
My father’s despair was tangible at times and lurked just under the surface of his hearty, good-natured laughter and his apparent success. When drinking, he could be a nightmare of bitterness and unpredictability. Many mornings after a bad night, I witnessed his climb over a terrible hangover—he’d mix wheat germ, molasses, grapefruit juice, and B vitamins in the blender, with a raw egg to boot. With a roar of determination not to be beaten, Daddy committed himself to the day ahead of him to make a living for his family. He did well, and until the early 1960s, he was winning the fight. Everybody said so. He never whined, never complained, and never felt sorry for himself—as long as he was sober.
It was in Denver that my father finally did go to AA—not to stop drinking, but because he had become addicted to amphetamines and it was scaring him to death. AA for him didn’t last long; he told people he couldn’t take “the God stuff” and never went back.
All along, my mother, so strong in many ways, had to wrestle with Daddy’s rages and the knowledge that he was a skirt-chaser, especially when he drank. I knew about this because from the time I was old enough to listen, my father confided in me about his romances and sexual escapades. I was not shocked when he told me these things, and I understood that this information, usually imparted when he was drinking, was meant to create a wall between my mother and myself. I was already on thin ice with my mom much of the time, so my father’s boundary breaking probably worked, at least while I was in my late teens.
But later, when I was nineteen and pregnant, my mother and I got rip-roaring drunk one afternoon over lunch at a restaurant in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood and talked about everything, including Daddy’s affairs. Because of that soul-searching and brave meeting, engineered by my mother, we settled all our past differences. From that moment on, my mother and I were the best of friends, able to talk over everything in our lives. We had a loving relationship from then on, for which I will be eternally grateful.
And in spite of it all, her love for him never wavered. Marjorie Lorraine Byrd was as smitten with my father as she had been the day they met. She was never unfaithful over all those years.
And she forgave him everything.
Chapter Five
The Blizzard
Colorado, Colorado, when the world leaves you shivering
And the blizzard blows,
When the snow flies and the night falls
There’s a light in the window and a place called home
At the end of the storm.
—JUDY COLLINS, “The Blizzard”
I TURNED sixteen on May 1, 1955. That year, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was published, and someone gave me the trilogy, which I read under the covers when the lights went out. Marilyn Monroe had married Joe DiMaggio the previous year, and my father thought it would ruin the baseball star’s career. One of my most vivid memories is of my father listening to the games, slamming his fist on his armchair when things didn’t go well for whatever team he happened to be rooting for—usually the Yankees. I can hear the sound of the crowd pouring out of our Emerson radio, the cheers and the boos on a Sunday afternoon and the tinkle of the ice in my father’s whiskey glass. I began reading books other than the Count of Monte Cristo and Nancy Drew. My friend John Gilbert had turned me on to Albert Camus, the French writer and existentialist, who drank too much and broke my heart when he died a few years later in a car crash. Bill Haley and the Comets had one hit after another on the radio, followed by Elvis.
America was still reeling from the Korean War and the divisiveness of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare. But even as Washington looked to the Eisenhower administration to restore stability, new voices and new faces were rising. The new power of television had helped propel John F. Kennedy, the young senator from Massachusetts, to national prominence, and many of us began to agree with his father, Joe, that his son would one day be president.
THE country was falling in love with folk songs, as was I. I looked for material wherever I could, haunting the record stores with my precious babysitting money in hand, buying records of old sea chanties and English folk songs. I didn’t know then that the folk music for which I had conceived such passion had already taken root in eclectic clubs such as the Gate of Horn in Chicago, the Village Gate in New York, and the Purple Onion and the Hungry i in San Francisco, all of which regularly gave over their stages to the solitary singer with a guitar.
I found the Denver Folklore Center, where I spent every cent I had on records. I met other singers, whose lives were all about learning, trading, sharing, and finding songs. I suddenly understood that my father’s repertoire of music included much more than Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin. In the morning, rain or shine, hungover or stone cold sober, he would warm up his rich, clear baritone with Rodgers and Hart, and then burst into “Danny Boy” or “Kerry Dancers,” “Kathleen Mavourneen” or “Galway Bay.”
I continued going to Lingo’s mountain retreats to drink homebrew and learn folk songs. Dick Barker was often at Lingo’s; he was a redheaded cowboy with a sweet, haunting voice. He was the first person I heard sing “Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle.” He sang a beautiful song about a town in the mountains forty-four miles from Telluride, on the Delores River.
In the country down below, where the little pinyons grow and it’s always nearly half a day to water,
There used to stand a town, where a brook come tumblin’ down,
From the mesa, where it surely hadn’t ought to.
It was a magical song, and as I watched Dick sing it, of course I fell a little bit in love with him. He wore cowboy boots and lived on his family’s ranch, west of Denver, cleaning out the horse stalls and spreading manure around the gardens and fields. He rode horses every day. I was enthralled.
We fooled around in the back of his truck a couple of times—hot and passionate petting with our boots on. Dick would end up buying a ranch in Moose, Wyoming, and running a float trip company on the Snake River. He lives there to this day and hangs with the local folksingers, including my friend Cookie, who goes to Dick’s Friday night “hoots.”
Nineteen fifty-five was also the year I fell in love with Peter Taylor. Peter had been born and raised in Colorado, and he arrived in my life like fireworks in the mountain air. It had been his stepfather, Hal Clark, who hired my dad for his radio show in 1949. Hal was about to marry Margaret Taylor, a widow with three children, Hadley, Peter, and Gary. My father told me later that the children’s father, James Gary Taylor, had taken his own life the year before. At nine, I had never heard of anyone who had died by his or her own hand. I found the knowledge strangely haunting.
In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I was teaching piano to Peter’s sister, Hadley, overseeing her technical training for Dr. Brico, who would take her on as a student in the fall. I had not seen any of the Taylor children in the ensuing years, and it was a fluke that Brico wanted me to work with Hadley, who during one of our lessons said she thought I should meet her brothers.
Hadley had a summer job at Sportsland Valley Guest Ranch, on the other side of Berthoud Pass from Denver, and helped me get hired. Her handsome and articulate older brothe
r Peter gave me a ride to the mountains. Our eyes met in the mirror as Peter drove over the pass, and by the time he took my hand to help me out of the car at the ranch, I was in love.
Sportsland Valley Guest Ranch stood among meadows surrounded by ponderosa and blue spruce. The air was fresh and the light glittered off the lingering snow on the peaks. The ranch had space for about fifty guests, for whom I washed dishes, served meals, and cleaned cabins. When the day’s work was done, I sang folk songs in the big main room, where the guests gathered for mulled wine after a day of horseback riding. Hadley and the other girls, her brothers, Peter and Gary, and the guests would sing along on “Black Is the Color” and “The Gypsy Rover” and “Loch Lomond.” Gary’s girlfriend, Hillary, was Scottish and knew all the songs. There were stolen glances and firelight, sweet walks through shadowed forests, rides together through the woods on horseback, and days overflowing with romance.
So you’ll take the high road
And I’ll take the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.
It was August 1955 and it seemed the whole world was in love. I might have known that love could break your heart, but I was more than willing to take that chance.
When I came down from the mountains, though, I was still in high school, still had to go to class and do homework, still had to help my mother with housework and look after my siblings—Mike, David, Denver John, and Holly Ann.
One day when I was visiting Peter’s house on a Saturday afternoon, his mom, Margaret, was sorting through some photographs, looking for baby pictures of Peter and his siblings to show me. Suddenly she pulled out a photograph of a very tall, good-looking man.
“That son of a bitch!” she said, allowing me only a glimpse of the man in the photo before she tore it into little pieces and threw them into the trash. I asked her who he was. She told me in an angry voice that he was her husband and Peter’s father, James Gary Taylor. I did not say I knew the family secret, that James Gary Taylor had taken his own life.
“He was a bastard,” she said. It was the first and last time I ever heard Margaret talk about Peter’s father.
The two of us went on looking at the family photos in silence. I could not concentrate on the pictures of my tall, good-looking boyfriend as a cute little boy throwing snowballs, laughing under a Christmas tree, standing with Gary and Hadley in his little sailor suit in the park. Margaret went on as if she hadn’t seen a ghost pass through the room.
My romances—with Peter and with folk music—swirled through my life as if I were a normal 1950s teen. I loved Your Hit Parade and my Saturday nights were often spent watching Dorothy Collins, with her little upturned nose and hairdo, those funny skirts and tight, wide belts. I danced to songs such as “The Great Pretender,” “Blueberry Hill,” and “Earth Angel.” Sometimes Carol, Marsha, John Gilbert, my one male friend, and I would play Elvis’ rockabilly songs at our favorite diner in Colfax, where I learned to smoke cigarettes, choking at first but keeping at it. We put away burgers and fries while we pumped dimes into the jukebox.
There is a time for everything, as Pete Seeger says in “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Rock and roll will always be a part of my life, but it never lured me from what I know now was my predestined path. I knew I had to sing those sweet, haunting folk songs, the ones that told stories about railroad men and murderous strangers and women with their hair pinned to the ground (from the traditional song called “Two Butchers,” about a traveler who is lured from his journey by a woman who placed herself along the road with her “hair pinned to the ground,” distracting him so that her accomplices could rob him). There were songs about human nature, political songs by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, songs by the long-lost troubadours, songs about war and peace, love and heartbreak.
THROUGHOUT the next year Peter and I saw each other when we could, and we became more strongly attached, even though he was in college at Boulder and I was still in high school. We talked of books and hopes and ideals, and wrestled, each of us, with the conflicts in our lives. I fretted about turning my back on the piano and about my perceived betrayal of Brico. At my last lesson with her, when I told her that I was not going to pursue the career she and my parents had planned for me, she was furious, and we both were in tears. Brico knew I was ambivalent about my decision, but she also knew I was determined. In spite of my love for the great music I had studied with her, I broke her heart—but I also knew I had made the right decision.
Peter was torn over his own future. We were against the war in Vietnam, and the draft was on. Peter knew he would, at some time in the future, have to do his time in the service, even as he dreamed of going on with his studies at the university.
I had another year in school and another great summer at Sportsland Valley. I performed “The Gypsy Rover” at concerts all over Denver with my friends Marsha and Carol. Peter enlisted in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in 1956 and came to Denver only occasionally, when he had leave. When he did, we hung out with my father and Lingo, spending time going to movies, having meals with our families, and getting to know each other better.
I graduated from East High in June 1957 and had to find another job for the summer. After two summers at Sportsland Valley, I knew I wanted to return to the mountains, and had written letters to a few lodges in the Rockies. The job I got was at Lemon Lodge in Grand Lake, a pretty mountain haven in Rocky Mountain National Park. The lodge was run by a widow, Jenny Lemon, who had a great property and two rowdy but cute kids, six and eight, who ran rings around me all summer.
Peter and I didn’t see each other very much. When he was home on leave, we danced around the edges of sex but didn’t go “all the way.” Lonely in the mountains, I would go to the local dance hall in town, a smoky club where they served big drinks and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
There was a cowboy from one of the stables in Grand Lake whom I got to know when I went riding at his father’s stables. Jim, as I will call him, would sometimes come fetch me at dawn, a saddled bay pony behind him as he rode his own cutting horse and whistled under my window. I would be dressed and waiting at five-thirty and we would spend a couple of hours together riding our horses in the long grass of the high meadows, rounding up the saddle ponies for their workday at the stable in Grand Lake. I felt a little like the girl in “The Gypsy Rover.” It certainly wasn’t love, but it was romantic and exhilarating. “Love the one you’re with,” as Crosby, Stills and Nash would later sing. One night after one or ten too many drinks—which was becoming a habit in my life—we went down by the lake and necked like mad. I went to sleep yearning to see Peter.
I loved being on Grand Lake on those long summer days, working hard for Jenny, cleaning cabins and making beds, and then water-skiing behind her boat in the afternoon with her two kids laughing at my efforts (when it was smooth, I would tumble into the mirrorlike water; when it was rough, waves lapping against my bare legs, I was fine). Still later, I played my guitar and sang my songs in front of the great stone fireplace. I was barely eighteen, happy, in love with the mountains, the music, and dreams, and Peter Taylor.
PETER came to see me that summer, when he had leave. He had quit the flight training program because his entire body would break out in hives when he had to fly in close formation. In that type of flying, his safety depended on total trust, a certain intimacy with the other pilots. Peter Taylor was normally a stand-up, go-for-it kind of guy, and perhaps the secret in his family had something to do with this out-of-character reaction to wingtip-to-wingtip flights as a Naval Aviation Cadet. In any case, he wound up going from flying jets to cruising on a tin can in the Atlantic.
After those few short days of summer leave, Peter was off to sea and I was off to my first year at a little college in Illinois called MacMurray. I struggled through the cold midwestern winter, singing folk songs, cadging socks and cigarettes from my roommates, as poor as a church mouse. I worked in the library to supplement the tiny scholarship given to me by my mother’s women�
��s group, P.E.O.
That March on spring break, I took the California Zephyr home, drinking scotch-and-water in the bar car all the way to Denver. Two days later, Peter was back for good from the Navy. We drove to Arapahoe Basin, an hour west of Denver, where we froze our asses off skiing in a snowstorm all day. The snow was so thick that all I could see was Peter’s red parka in front of me. I followed it down, inhaling snow with every breath, cold and scared but also excited, knowing we would not go back to Denver at the end of the day.
When we got to the hotel, I hid my ring finger as we strode past the desk clerk to a single room. I was woefully unprepared. The only thing I knew about birth control was the rhythm method, which had worked so well for my parents—five times at least. There, in a romantic night of a new and totally undreamed-of physical freedom, Peter and I conceived our son, Clark.
I remember in the morning the waiter in the restaurant warmed our cups with boiling water and dried them off before pouring the steaming coffee.
Back at school in the late winter in Illinois, I was pregnant and terrified. When the term ended in May, I took the California Zephyr back to Denver, where Peter was waiting for me. We talked and worried about what to do, but before we could make any clear decisions or come up with any real plan, Peter had to return to Estes Park, where he had found a job. Driving back through the mountains at night—and probably drunk—Peter crashed his car, but walked away from the wreck unscathed. His narrow escape brought us to the sudden realization about what we both wanted: this child, a marriage, and a life together.
Judy Collins Page 4