A few days after meeting with Joe Papp, Bill Kunstler called to ask if I would go to Chicago to testify on behalf of my Yippie friends, the boys who were now known as the “Chicago Seven” and who were being tried on charges of conspiracy and inciting to riot. I agreed immediately. The trial was scheduled for September, but Bill wanted to know that he had the witnesses he needed. I told him I would be there. (I would actually not be called to testify until January 1970.)
Somehow, amid all the hubbub, I managed to be in Santa Monica for a concert and saw Stephen. Stephen showed up with gifts at the Holiday Inn where I was staying: a Martin guitar that he had had restored for me and a beautiful song that he had written for me. I heard “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for the first time: the story of my life, of our relationship, of the ins and outs of my therapy, and our pain together, his and mine. The sweeping seven-minute song told everything one would have needed to feel the heartbreak, to feel both our hearts break. It was magnificent, and we both wound up in tears.
I think it was meant to win my heart. It certainly won my soul.
But I came away from those hours with Stephen with the unshakable feeling that our breakup was inevitable despite our best intentions. I also left California certain in the knowledge that Crosby, Stills and Nash was poised on the brink of stardom, like a loaded cannon waiting only for someone to spark the fuse. The sweet and the bitter, all at once—as usual, I suppose.
I returned to crowded New York, where horns honked and sirens shrieked, where people lived in apartments and there were no backyards filled with swimming pools and no fires in the hills. I was back at my apartment on the Upper West Side. No more glamorous Hollywood types driving their Bentleys and Jags to shop on Rodeo Drive, but back to muggings that kept you out of Central Park anytime after six in the evening.
I was thrilled to be home.
ON May 1, returning from a tour of the Midwest, as I walked through LaGuardia Airport I spotted on a newsstand my face blazing out from the cover of Life. Under the photograph was the headline, lovely and perhaps true in one sense but bitterly ironic in another: “Gentle Voice Amid the Storm.” I had just turned thirty.
The real storm was the one in my head and heart. I would have to wait on fate and time to heal me and to help me find the compass that seemed, at the moment, far off.
George Shearing and me, Denver, 1956.
At the Gilded Garter in Central City, Colorado, 1959—my second paying gig after Michael’s Pub.
In concert, 1960s.
Newport, 1967.
Cover of my sixth album, In My Life, photographed and designed by Bill Harvey at the Glory Hole, Central City, Colorado, 1966.
(left to right): Harold Leventhal, Mimi Baez Fariña, Richard Fariña (seated), and me at a recording session for In My Life, New York, 1966.
With “Big Joan” Baez in New York, 1964.
Nude shot at John Haeny’s home, Laurel Canyon.
With Leonard Cohen, Forest Hills, New York, 1968.
Bruce Langhorne and me at an antiwar rally in the late ’60s.
Sketch of me testifying at the trial of the Chicago Seven in January 1970.
At the airport with Stephen Stills, 1968.
Joni Mitchell and me at Joni’s cabin in Laurel Canyon, 1969.
Bill Lee and me on tour in 1965.
With my singing teacher, Max Margulis.
With Mimi Fariña, Japan, 1966.
Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, me, and Arlo Guthrie at a fund-raiser for Woody Guthrie’s Huntington chorea fund, 1969.
In New York with Stacy Keach, winter 1969.
Stephen Stills and me, winter 1968.
Singing in Amsterdam, 1972.
Chapter Thirty
Stacy, Woodstock, and the Humpback Whales
Farewell to Tarwathie
Adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimmond, I bid thee farewell.
—Traditional, “Farewell to Tarwathie”
AT last, at the end of May, I came to a decision about Stephen. I could not take the roller-coaster ride of emotions that characterized our affair. We got rock and roll, we got rhythm, and then we got the blues. Stephen was driven by something I could not see and did not understand. I was driven by something that, apparently, was opposite. Clearly, that ride was almost over.
At the first rehearsal of Peer Gynt, I met Stacy Keach. He was handsome, a man in the prime of his life, buoyant, full of energy, sparking with ideas. He met me head-on with that smile of his and lifted me up from the place I had been with Stephen—despairing and sorry, sad and full of regret. I seemed to wake up.
In the Ibsen story I play the woman who waits, true and faithful, for Peer Gynt, the gadabout and free spirit who is off roaming the world to find himself. These days, we’d put Solveig into a twelve-step program for co-dependency, and sooner rather than later! Of course, Ibsen and Grieg didn’t see things that way. The romantic songs and the setup for romance—first in the rehearsal hall, where we danced in loving awe around each another, and then in the park, with its birds and water and light—were the perfect conditions for love.
I had invited Stacy to dinner at my apartment, and very quickly we began our affair. When he took me in his arms I felt the friction in my life ease. He was brilliant and creative, but solid, too, with his feet on the ground. We both were involved with other people, but felt at once that something important had happened between us.
Stacy Keach is a courtly man, two years older than me. He had been born in Savannah, Georgia, and always called himself “junior,” to distinguish himself from his father, Stacy senior, a director and drama teacher who earned a name for himself in Hollywood radio and movies. Stacy graduated from UC Berkeley in 1963, attended the Yale School of Drama, and earned a Fulbright scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in England.
He had already established himself in the world of New York theater by the time we met. He had worked with Morgan Freeman in George Tabori’s The Niggerlovers in 1967. It was Morgan Freeman’s first acting job, and Morgan always said he learned more about acting from Stacy than from anyone. Stacy had played Lyndon Johnson in the Barbara Garson play MacBird, a satire about the president we all loved to hate, alongside William Devane and Rue McClanahan. The play was an early stepping-stone in the careers of all of these actors, who were all friends of Stacy’s. Stacy loved theater and theater people. He would introduce me to many of the actors in the New York community: Jane Alexander, James Earl Jones, Rene Auberjonois, and Sam Waterston, as well as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and the great Jason Robards.
Stacy was a man in the full bloom of his early career, handsome, lively and generous, levelheaded and ambitious, a man of great charm, both on and off the stage.
I felt that I could talk to Stacy, be his friend, and find solace with him. Our love felt complete, imbued with respect and genuine caring.
And I thought: “Here is the man who is going to solve all my problems.” On the white horse, of course!
I really did the best I could to be the partner he might have wanted. I would wait, follow, adhere, and love him from afar, from close up, from wherever I was. It was the real thing. Again.
We rehearsed Peer Gynt throughout May and into June, then opened in Central Park in July in that greenery-filled fantasy conjured in the Delacorte Theater. And I sang John Morris’ songs, which had sold me on doing the show in the first place.
AND where was Stephen? I hadn’t heard from him for a month after our last unsettling talk about our broken love affair, but I knew he was rehearsing for his tour with David and Graham, putting in the hard work that would ensure fame and fortune after the phenomenally successful release of the new Crosby, Stills and Nash album.
When I met Stacy, I was beginning the last mad charge into hell, the final descent into alcoholic oblivion. Yet everyone still said, even those who knew me best, “You don’t look like an alcoholic! You’re too successful, too put together!”
We had not rea
lly had any closure, Stephen and I, and perhaps that was best. Every time we tried to find some adult way to end things, we ended up hurting each other. I was drinking, and I would do what I wanted. Someday we would speak again, and perhaps find a way to be friends. I hoped so. Meanwhile, at least that June, Stephen was still hoping and writing crazy, love-filled, disjointed letters. One night in New York I came back from rehearsal and dinner with Stacy to find Stephen hovering near the entrance to my apartment building. He apologized but said we had to talk. I was determined not to. I was unkind. I was in my own world. I had moved on. I did not understand that one couldn’t just speed past the wreckage of the heart free of pain and regret. There was a price to all this bungling of relationships, and eventually I would have to pay, as everyone must.
Peer Gynt closed on August 15, 1969, the weekend that history was being made in Bethel, New York, at Max Yasgur’s farm at Woodstock. I had not been invited to sing, and so I missed the debut of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” sung by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Instead, I headed to Williamstown to see a production of The Cherry Orchard with Olympia Dukakis, who had played Anitra in Peer Gynt. Stacy, my sister Holly, another friend, and I rented a car and drove first to Yasgur’s farm, which was on the way to Williamstown. There we paused to say hello to Bill Graham at the production office on the highway outside the festival grounds. He invited me to go to the stage in the helicopter to watch the festival up close. I thought about all those artists who had been invited to Woodstock—from Richie Havens to Joan Baez to Crosby, Stills and Nash—and said thanks but no thanks.
We proceeded to Williamstown, where Olympia was brilliant, and certainly didn’t think we had missed anything by not joining the mud and the crowds at Yasgur’s farm!
ON the way home, I finally thought of a way to get the sound of humpback whales into the world.
I had been given a tape made in Bermuda by the biologist and environmentalist Roger Payne. He had come backstage during one of my performances of Peer Gynt and presented me with the first recording ever of the singing humpback whales. He asked me to think of something to do with these great half-ton leviathans, to find a way to make their songs known to the world.
In a way, it was not far from the kinds of requests many songwriters had made of me over the years. Driving back from Williamstown to New York, I knew what I would do. I would sing a traditional whaling song, “Farewell to Tarwathie,” a cappella, in duet with these magnificent creatures. It would be the first time humpback whales were heard by most of the world.
I said, over and over, the mantra I had said in California as the black and white killer whales leapt through the Pacific: “Nam myoho renge kyo.”
I HAVE always thought that some angel of fate intervened to make sure I was not there when Stephen, David, and Graham played “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for the first time at Woodstock. It would not have been right for me to be there, singing or not.
And then in September 1969, I heard “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for the second time, on the radio, riding in a cab in New York City. It sounded nothing like the solo version Stephen had played me months before. This was different. I leaned forward and asked the driver to turn up the sound and then, sitting back as the city poured by the cab’s windows, I was moved to tears all over again.
The driver looked at me strangely as I managed to get the door open and literally staggered from that cab after paying my fare. I was sober, stone cold sober, and very much in shock.
The song would rock the country and the world into a new place where rock and folk came together. The gorgeous harmonies of David, Stephen, and Graham, along with Stephen’s shimmering guitar work merging with insistent rhythms, created a truly new sound. Hearing it the first time was a totally dazzling experience. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was the single that would spearhead a fresh new sound in popular music, and I knew after I heard it that first time I would have a hard time getting over it—the affair, the breakup, what the song meant about my addiction to the therapists who told me it was not in my best interests to commit to anyone. I am not blaming them; I was the one who threw the dice and then backed away from the table. Stephen knew exactly what he was doing; he was that smart and that gifted. In a way it was his revenge, served hot, and it was magnificent.
MY love affair with Stacy was just beginning to blossom. We continued through that autumn to spend all our time together when I was not on the road. Clark and Stacy bonded and became close friends. We got iguanas and made trips to the park and the zoo. For Christmas that year, Stacy gave me a husky puppy, Smokey, a little black and white fluff ball with a red ribbon around his neck. We had the perfect holiday.
Stacy moved in with me, and we soon realized we were going to need a new apartment.
Our hearts were entwined, our lives as well. And our good fortune in finding each other was clear as a bell to both of us.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Art of Antiwar
The Democratic convention is about to begin in a police state, there doesn’t appear to be any other way to describe it.
—WALTER CRONKITE, CBS Evening News
SEPTEMBER 24, 1969, marked the beginning of the trial of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. Within two weeks, the trial had become a circus. Bobby Seale called the judge, Judge Julius Hoffman, a “fascist dog,” a “pig,” and a “racist,” among other epithets. Seale was verbally harassed by the judge, tied to his chair, gagged, and denied permission to defend himself. Seale’s lawyers made a deal for a separate trial, and the Yippies became known as the Chicago Seven.
The convention itself had been a disaster. Now, outside the courthouse in the Windy City, the National Guard was called in as demonstrations grew for and against the defendants. I flew to Chicago on January 23, my mother’s birthday. She told me on the phone that she was proud of me and wished she could be with me.
I checked into a hotel near the courthouse. I felt nervous but believed in what I had come to do.
I met with William Kunstler that night and he and I spoke about what Judge Hoffman might ask me and what direction the testimony might take. I was inspired by this devoted, brilliant man who had championed so many good causes.
I woke up the next morning feeling like a patriot, full of anger about the war, indignant about the trial, and eager to take part. After all, this was a democracy, and I was simply going to have my say. At the courthouse, I sat in the echoing halls waiting to be called. I was determined to speak eloquently.
But I didn’t say half of what I wanted to say. By the time the clerk came to escort me into the courtroom, I had forgotten everything and just wanted to get through the ordeal one way or another and let them know that they had the wrong guys and the wrong war, and the country was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore.
I felt like Alice having just fallen down the rabbit hole and drunk from a little bottle and become so small. I saw the boys—men, really—all in a row: Abbie, David, Rennie, Tom, and the others. The judge sat in his black robe looking sinister, as though he might reach out, grab me, and stuff me where no one would ever find me. I could go to jail if I told him something he didn’t like and wound up in contempt. A vision of the prison in Joliet flashed through my mind—I had once slept with an ex-con from Joliet, and he had told me about the conditions there—and the thought made me shiver. The boys really could go to jail, I thought.
I stood up when my name was called and approached the bench, where I laid my hand on the Bible. I had not seen a Bible since the Methodist church my family attended in Denver. The book seemed almost alive in the hand of the clerk, accusing, hiding its meaning behind its black cover. Was Christ really against the war? Was He for peace? All the songs I had sung for peace were in my throat. I wondered that none could prove my point.
The look on the judge’s face told everyone that he wanted to get this witness off the stand as quickly as possible. The defendants were wearing what
looked to me like clothes of shining silver, purple, and bright green. They seemed dressed for a party. The look on the judge’s face said it all, the unspoken implication being: “You’re a misfit, Collins, a singer.” Kunstler looked tired but strangely elegant. He opened with a few questions about who I was and what I did for a living.
MR. KUNSTLER: Would you state your name, please?
THE WITNESS: Judy Collins.
MR. KUNSTLER: What is your occupation?
THE WITNESS: I’m a singer. I sing folk songs.
MR. KUNSTLER: Now, Miss Collins, I call your attention to March 17, 1968, at approximately noontime on that date. Do you know where you were?
THE WITNESS: I was at the Americana Hotel in New York City attending a press conference to announce the formation of what we have now come to know of as the Yippie Movement.
MR. KUNSTLER: Who was present at that press conference?
THE WITNESS: There were a number of people who were singers, entertainers. Jerry Rubin was there. Abbie Hoffman was there. Allen Ginsberg was there, and sang a mantra.
MR. KUNSTLER: Now, what did you do at that press conference?
William and I had discussed the night before how my testimony might go. Over dinner with his staff at the hotel restaurant he had said he wanted me to talk about the Yippie press conference. He needed to instantly get the attention of the jury and judge as to why I had attended it. I told him I was sure I had been invited because I was a singer, as well as an active participant in the peace movement.
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