“And what might you do as a participant in the peace movement?” he had asked me.
“Well,” I’d said, “I might sing something, like ‘Where Have all the Flowers Gone.’ ”
“Then,” he’d said, smiling and smacking the table and grabbing my hand, “that is what you must do! You must show them by singing it, not just saying it!”
So in court the next day, that was what I did. I started to sing.
“Where have all the flowers—”
Outraged, the judge interrupted, “Just a minute, young lady.”
But I went on singing.
“—where have all the flowers gone?”
Then I felt a hand come over my mouth as the court clerk, on the judge’s orders, stopped me. It was as if my breath had been taken from me, and I was gagged, silenced. I stood, dazed and frightened. I had indeed fallen down that dark hole. No one had ever done such a thing to me in my life. I struggled to regain my balance.
In my mind, I kept seeing the gag going on Bobby Seale, the straps wound around his wrists and his body to keep him still and from talking in his own defense. For all I knew, they were coming with the tapes and the ropes for me.
DEPUTY MARSHAL JOHN J. GRACIOUS: I’m sorry. The judge would like to speak to you.
THE COURT: We don’t allow any singing in this court. I’m sorry.
THE WITNESS: May I recite the words?
MR. KUNSTLER: Well, your honor, we have had films. I think it is as legitimate as a movie. It is the actual thing she did, she sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which is a well-known peace song, and she sang it, and the jury is not getting the flavor.
THE COURT: You asked her what she did, and she proceeded to sing.
MR. KUNSTLER: That is what she did, your honor.
THE WITNESS: That’s what I do.
THE COURT: And that has no place in a United States District Court. We are not here to be entertained, sir. We are trying a very important case.
MR. KUNSTLER: This song is not an entertainment, your honor. This is a song of peace, and what happens to young men and women during wartime.
THE COURT: I forbid her from singing during the trial. I will not permit singing in this courtroom.
MR. KUNSTLER: Why not, your honor? What’s wrong with singing?
MR. FORAN (prosecuting lawyer for the City of Chicago): May I respond? This is about the fifth time this has occurred. Each time your honor has directed Mr. Kunstler that it was improper in the courtroom. It is an old and stale joke in this courtroom, your honor.
Now, there is no question that Miss Collins is a fine singer. In my family my six kids and I all agree that she is a fine singer, but that doesn’t have a thing to do with this lawsuit, nor what my profession is, which is the practice of law in the federal district court, your honor, and I protest Mr. Kunstler constantly failing to advise his witnesses of what proper decorum is, and I object to it on behalf of the government.
THE COURT: I sustain the objection.
I told the court that violent demonstration had been the furthest thing from the minds of these young men when they formed the Yippies and said that I was sure Rennie, Abbie, David, Tom, and the others had been provoked.
It seemed to me that the Illinois National Guard, practicing what the Ohio National Guard would perfect just a few months later at Kent State, had decided to assert its authority from the very start, to strike these peaceniks to the ground without waiting for provocation.
Why were these young men being penalized for wanting peace? Violence against people who think we should not kill one another is surely one of the most disturbed of human behaviors.
Walter Cronkite was so right. Chicago had felt like a police state, and in some ways I feel even today as if the peace movement never recovered from it.
William Kunstler invited Phil Ochs to testify in Chicago and, having learned from our experience with my singing, urged Phil to read the words to “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” which he did, without any interference from Judge Hoffman. However, as Phil exited the courthouse, he sang the song to the crowd of reporters, and later his impromptu performance was broadcast on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. That always amused Phil, as he knew Cronkite was responsible for making sure that CBS included his song in its news coverage that night.
The jury, at the end of February, found two of the defendants, John Froines and Lee Weiner, innocent of all charges. The other five, Abbie, Dave, Rennie, Tom, and Jerry, were convicted of crossing state lines with an intent to incite a riot. On February 20 they were sentenced to five years in prison each and a $5,000 fine. Abbie, in addressing the judge after sentencing, suggested he try LSD and said he could set him up with a dealer to provide the drugs.
Kunstler immediately appealed the verdict, and a long and painful two and a half years followed as they waded through the legal process to find out if they would, in fact, have to serve jail time. Their lives, their hopes, their dreams, were held hostage, even if the men were not literally incarcerated.
On November 21, 1972, the convictions were overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on the grounds that the court had violated their rights. Leaving the courtroom, Rennie Davis said he was going to move next door to the prosecutor (Tom Foran) and “bring his sons and daughters into the revolution.” Jerry Rubin gave Judge Julius Hoffman his book inscribed, “Julius, you radicalized more young people than we ever could. You’re the country’s top Yippie!”
Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam raged, and the collateral damage from the trial proved tragic. Phil Ochs seemed to be falling apart in the wake of the convention. That sweet and troubled man often drank too much, like the rest of us, and suffered remorse because of it. He had been entangled in some of the violence stirred up by the police, who swung batons at peaceful protesters and chased young people as though they were criminals. In the aftermath, the CIA hounded Phil, harassing him, tapping his phone. He began to call himself “John Butler Train” and to say “Phil Ochs has been killed by the CIA in a mugging in Tanzania while he was on tour.” He took to wearing a white suit—his Mafia suit, he called it—and referred to himself as “a cross between Elvis Presley and Che Guevara.”
After 1970, Phil began using pills to sleep, and booze to counter his extreme mood swings. I think the FBI and the CIA drove him out of his mind. But that didn’t stop him from writing, recording, performing. Friends feared he was becoming a danger to himself, and he increasingly spoke of suicide.
Phil Ochs hanged himself on April 9, 1976.
Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Youth International Party, died in 1989 after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had swallowed 150 phenobarbital pills, and his death would also be ruled a suicide.
David Dellinger spent the years after the Chicago Seven trial writing and teaching until his death in 2004. He dedicated his last book, Revolutionary Nonviolence, to “all the veterans of the Vietnam War—those who fought it and those who fought against it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Amazing Grace
Amazing grace
How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
—Traditional, “Amazing Grace”
“AMAZING Grace” was born in a period of political strife in England and the United States, and perhaps my latter-day version served as a kind of tonic during another time of social upheaval.
In late January 1970, I became involved in an encounter group with a number of friends in New York. It began when I met Candy Jackson at a dinner party. Candy was a tall, handsome, and articulate recovering addict who had fled from Synanon, the West Coast sober community for drug users. Candy had been hired to run the encounter groups at Phoenix House, an in-house treatment center for drug addicts and alcoholics on the Upper West Side in New York.
In the course of the evening’s conversation he learned that some friends and I were planning to meet and discuss buying property in Vermont. Like New Englanders fro
m an earlier century, we would find a way to live together, sharing property, money, and the fruits of the land.
Candy said, “Before you do that, you have to encounter each other, see what you are all made of.”
Candy came to our first meeting, and after we let him give his spiel, none of us ever talked again about buying land. We “encountered” one another, with Candy leading us, for the next two years. He had found a gold mine: neurotic Upper West Siders who needed to tear one another to pieces and would pay him to help us do it. Insane, now that I think of it. Perhaps we should have known better, but in fact, there were some surprising things that came out of those sessions.
For one thing, Candy nailed me on my alcoholism and dared me to stop drinking. I took the dare and stayed away from alcohol for two months. I started again, of course, but Candy had pierced through my wall of denial … for the moment. And while it was all right for me to call myself an alcoholic, and for me to tell my therapists that I was an alcoholic, God forbid anyone else should point it out!
Mark Abramson and Jac Holzman were part of the group, and Mark proved himself to be so effective in drawing out other people’s concerns that Jac asked him to lead a group of Elektra executives at a weekend retreat. That was Mark’s first involvement with any kind of group therapy; later, after he moved to upstate New York, he helped run therapy groups for inmates at a nearby prison. It was said of him that he was an excellent therapist. I was not surprised.
One night, members of the group were at one another’s throats. Mark said to me, “You should sing something. We are losing it here; everybody has to calm down.” I sang “Amazing Grace,” thinking that at least it was a song some of us knew. The next morning Mark called me.
“We have to record that song,” he said.
And so we did.
Mark and I decided that this next album—my ninth for Elektra—had to have a flavor that was spiritual in its nature. We would not have used that term, but we were searching. “Farewell to Tarwathie,” with the singing whales, was the first step in the right direction, and with “Amazing Grace,” I knew we had found the defining song, the spiritual center, of the album, which we called Whales and Nightingales.
We recorded several other traditional songs, among them “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker song that Aaron Copland adapted for Appalachian Spring, and “Gene’s Song.” I was taught this little gem by Evelyn Beers and her husband, Bob, who started the Fox Hollow Folk Festival in Petersburgh, New York, in 1966. The Beers were fascinated by folk crafts, such as the little walking man on a string that you gently bounce on a thin board of balsa wood, which makes him “dance.” Evelyn supplied the rhythm for this charming folksong with those little dancing feet.
Other songs on the album came from contemporary composers and songwriters, including Jacques Brel, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. “Nightingales I” and “Nightingales II” were my compositions, and Josh Rifkin orchestrated them both beautifully.
All of the songs on this collection emerged, I believe, out of my personal ideas about faith. They explore the power of nature in our lives, the idea that all life is sacred, and the idea that the planet, in its beauty and fragility, is being hunted, like the great whales, to depletion. That spring marked the first celebration of Earth Day, a signal event in raising environmental consciousness.
The album culminates with “Amazing Grace.” I learned the song from my maternal grandmother, Agnes Byrd. I had known it for most of my life, but I was not familiar with the story of John Newton, the English slave-trading captain who wrote the song. He had nearly died in a shipwreck. He became a minister and, years later, wrote “Amazing Grace.”
We recorded “Amazing Grace” in St. Paul’s Chapel on the campus of Columbia University. I brought in a group of friends to sing in the choir, some professional, but mostly amateurs: Eric Weissberg, Harris Yulin, Stacy Keach, and my brother Denver John. I loved the haunting echoes bouncing around the chapel, lending an otherworldly quality to the song.
But an a cappella hymn? People at the label were getting a kick out of this, knocking it around, playing it for one another, delighted, but with no thought of its becoming anything but a good filler on the album. They were as shocked as I was when it turned out the universe had other plans. This recording of “Amazing Grace” dominated the radio waves, the album flew out of the stores, and within weeks it became a worldwide sensation.
It seemed that people had not tired of prayer or of hymns or of church. They just needed the music.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Easy Times
Easy times come hard for me
And oh, my darling
Time again to dream
That you are comin’ home.
—JUDY COLLINS and STACY KEACH JR., “Easy Times”
DURING the years we were together, Stacy kept busy all the time, creating unique and memorable characters in many films and Broadway shows. Meanwhile, I was out touring and making records or at home, trying to take care of Clark. Stacy gave one of the most thrilling performances I have ever seen as Buffalo Bill in Arthur Kopit’s play Indians. He transformed the theater into the Wild West. You could smell the dust and the manure, feel the puff of the gunpowder as it streamed off Annie Oakley’s six-shooter. We were still living in my old apartment on West 79th Street, although we’d soon find a new place farther uptown. Stacy would come home from his performances drenched in sweat, mopping his face, his hair plastered to his forehead, and his handsome eyes dark with fatigue.
Stacy won rave reviews in Hamlet, first at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven and then at Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. Then he landed the lead role in the spring of 1970 in a movie directed by Frank Perry about Doc Holiday, called Doc. Frank was planning to shoot the film in Almería, Spain, and asked Stacy about his thoughts on the cast. Of course Stacy wanted Harris Yulin, his good friend and an amazing actor, to play Wyatt Earp. Faye Dunaway was cast as Doc’s common-law wife. And one day Stacy and I were driving out to the Hamptons, talking about who should play the kid. I knew my brother Denver John, who had been in a theater company in Vermont and was very gifted, would be perfect for the part. Stacy agreed, and Frank gave Denver a screen test, his first and last. (Denver makes his living on the other side of the camera now, shooting music videos and movies and filming television specials. He also directs and/or shoots all my television productions.)
In June we took Clark and his friend Josh Klein, son of my therapist, with us for a few weeks to Almería, which has often stood in for the parched and jagged territory of Texas in American westerns. The crew and the stars and their guests ate langoustine and drank cerveza and went to the bullfights in a little town on the coast. I loved watching Stacy play Doc Holliday under Frank Perry’s direction. The “barbed, grisly dialogue” of Doc, as the New York Times described it, was written by Pete Hamill.
Faye Dunaway had starred in Bonnie and Clyde and The Thomas Crown Affair and had co-starred with Marcello Mastroianni in A Place for Lovers, during the production of which they became lovers. Marcello came to Spain and found Faye involved with Harris Yulin, and I remember that everyone on the set was abuzz when the handsome, charismatic Mastroianni arrived. But she was not having any of it. He later was said to have confided that he never spent an unhappy moment in Faye’s arms. Faye flew to Madrid, he said, and met another man.
Stacy was Faye’s leading man in Doc, and I was there, very much in her way, although Stacy and I had a deal that I would make myself scarce when he and Faye had their love scenes. She later told me that it was awkward for her that I was there.
“I always have an affair with my leading man,” she said. “Except that in Doc, you cramped my style, because I couldn’t have Stacy!” We both laughed, but it hadn’t seemed very funny in Spain.
Jimmy Webb wrote the music for the movie and told me that when Frank Perry flew out to Los Angeles to talk about the score, they spent four days drinking a quart of tequila each day and wound up with a sound track t
hat resembled a scruffy Mexican band imitating Tito Puente.
It was really a vacation for me, watching the filming, being with Clark and my beloved brother Denver John, laughing in the light of the bonfire that always burned as seafood was grilled over the coals at night, for the cast and everyone who was swabbing down with aloe after baking beneath the Spanish sun. It was like the West, not just on film—hot and dusty and full of sharp colors—but we were blessed with a lovely hacienda where the shutters made lovemaking cool and comfortable in the afternoons.
Also, I knew I was falling more and more in love with Stacy. That was such a good feeling—to be totally involved with a man I admired and got along with. Almería was an escape for me in a way, a restorative time-out from the relentless daily pace of my life. But after a few weeks, Stacy’s work on the film wrapped up, and we flew back home.
I got Clark into school and returned to the road.
CLARK began having troubles, acting out, and at the end of the year Stacy and I hunted for a new school for him. His therapist felt he would be better-off at a boarding school, and I had to say I agreed. I could not guess that he had the illness he inherited from my family genes. The alcoholism was alive and rampant in him, and he had started using drugs. No doctors in my life, most of whom he saw at some time or another, identified his problem as drug-related.
In January 1971, Clark was packed off to a boys’ school in Maryland. Three weeks into his first semester, he had a sledding accident and went into the hospital for life-saving surgery. I spent two weeks with him in Baltimore at the hospital thanking God for his surgeon, who had done a delicate operation to repair his skull. At first we did not know if he would live or die, and he hovered, it seemed, for ten days. Then I saw his eyes open and a gleam come into them. He told me later that he had made a decision to come back, to live his life. I will be grateful for that miracle all my days.
Judy Collins Page 26