After Clark spent some time at New York Presbyterian Hospital doing rehab and getting healthy again, his therapists said he would be better-off not living at home, and helped me find a school in Vermont where he would have much closer supervision and get the scholastic help he needed. By now he was eager to get back into classes. But, of course, he took his addictions with him.
In the spring of 1971 Stacy and I went to Stockton, California, where Stacy rented a house near one of the canals while he played the lead in Fat City, directed by John Huston. I rented a piano, went swimming every day, and tried to quit smoking. I had smoked since I was fifteen, but now I could feel it taking a toll on my voice and on my health. I had always exercised, but now when I swam or worked out, I could feel my lungs fighting for air.
That summer I became bulimic. Just like that. No run-up, no warning. One day, out of the blue, my eating disorder emerged in full bloom. In retrospect, I might blame lots of life crises, but of course my drinking was getting worse and worse. When I stopped smoking, the food addiction moved right in. Through my difficult future recovery from alcoholism and my subsequent sobriety, food is still the thing about which I have to be most vigilant. An eating disorder is a killer, mysterious and perplexing, but as a friend of mine says, as long as you are breathing, there is hope.
I had been addicted to sugar since childhood. My mother was a great cook, and desserts, especially fudge and divinity (the latter a wicked white thing made with cream of tartar, sugar, sugar, and more sugar, and some whipped egg whites), were her specialties. I spent my bus change on sugary treats when I was on my way to my piano lessons, and I loved to steal my father’s beloved chocolate-covered cherries out of his drawer.
From the age of about eighteen I had tried every diet I could find. I visited fasting farms and joined self-help groups to stop eating. Starting when I was twenty-three, I exercised every day. I ran and swam; I did crunches, took yoga, and practiced the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises. (All of this while I was, by now, putting away a half-quart of booze every day.) Now, more than a decade later in California, as I prepared to swim daily in our beautiful pool to stop smoking, I thought I had invented bulimia, or at least restored it from Roman history, dragging it from the past to my personal aid.
I was never very overweight, but the illness of the food disorder thrived, and it would be eleven years before I would be given a solution.
Fortunately, one addiction of mine would prove beneficial, and at times probably saved me: my need to be surrounded by my friends. Even from Stockton, I did my best to keep up with my friends in New York and around the country. I had made friends with a couple—from St. Louis, Judy and Peter Weston—when I worked at a club there. One day Judy and I had a great conversation on the phone, and the minute we hung up, I went to the piano and wrote a song called “Song for Judith.” I changed the name of the song to “Open the Door” and put it on my album Living, which was released in 1972 and consisted of songs I had recorded from my 1970 and 1971 concert tours:
Sometimes I remember the old days
When the world was filled with sorrow
It’s interesting how the lyric seems to be set sometime in the future, when I would be able to look back at my younger, troubled self. Perhaps I knew then, somewhere deep inside, that I would someday find some answers.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Mogul and the Movie Star
Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground, you in midair.
—STEPHEN SONDHEIM, “Send in the Clowns”
IN 1972, Elektra Records released a new album of Judy Collins hits from the previous decade. Jac and I had made the choices and planned the cover, conceived by Nancy Carlin and photographed on the beach in front of her friend Betty Beard’s house in Malibu. Colors of the Day came out that spring and included “Someday Soon” and “Both Sides Now,” plus “Amazing Grace” and my own “My Father,” “Since You Asked,” and “Albatross.” The songs that had gone onto the charts did so again, and the album went platinum; it still is in print. Later, Bill Clinton, in his 1992 run for president, referred to it as his favorite album and then proceeded to name every song, which impressed me no end!
That same year, I was part of an event organized by Shirley MacLaine, a gathering of women to support Senator George McGovern in his run for president. McGovern supported the issues that we were fighting for, including withdrawal of all forces from Vietnam. It was a high-profile, exciting event, culminating in a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City that included Gloria Steinem, Shirley, Carly Simon, and others. We sang, spoke, and raised money for the candidate, who had been a member of the Kennedy administration and a great advocate of women’s rights as well as having a strong liberal agenda.
In spite of my events and touring schedule, I was drinking more than ever. Sometimes, when Stacy was away on a shoot, I felt as if I was floating on another planet. He and I decided we needed to have our own apartments, and he took a place a couple of blocks away near the American Museum of Natural History. I continued to try to get Clark, now thirteen, through the ups and downs of his early adolescence. His school in Vermont seemed to be the right place for now. We had great visits and summers and school breaks together. Our relationship, always close, became closer and more supportive and loving. Clark made efforts to stay in touch with his father, but I didn’t see Peter for years. We had a very distant and cool relationship. But I knew things about him, from Clark, and from my former sister-in-law, Hadley. Peter now had a doctorate and taught William Blake at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Once, in the women’s bathroom at the school, graffiti was found on the wall that said: “Peter Taylor is God!” It was signed “The girls in the 9 a.m. Blake class.” Clark was very proud of his father, and did his best to keep the door open for him.
One night in the spring of 1972, I got a phone call from Jac Holzman. I had been with Elektra for eleven years by then, and we had done well by each other. Elektra had nurtured me, produced and promoted my albums, and I felt secure in my recording career. I was not ready for the news I was about to receive.
“Dear,” Jac said, “I am leaving Elektra as of tomorrow.”
I was devastated and angry. I depended on Jac’s support and was shocked he hadn’t told me he was thinking of leaving the company. “Amazing Grace” was still charting all over the world, but I was nervous about the new album I was making and I needed Jac’s confidence and support.
He said he had made a deal with Steve Ross to buy him out but leave him in charge of a great deal of the technical aspects of the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic companies, such as the development of cable—Jac was always ahead of the curve in technology. He said that he was leaving the company in good hands and I would be meeting David Geffen, the new president of Elektra (who would be merging his own company, Asylum, with Elektra), at Lillian Roxon’s funeral the next day. He would introduce us. At a funeral!
Lillian Roxon’s death had been another shock. Lillian had died of asthma the week before Jac made his announcement to me. Her funeral was a gathering of rock and folk musicians and independent film people. She was mourned by everyone who knew her personally and by many who did not.
I did meet David Geffen that day; I knew of him because he had helped Stephen when Crosby, Stills and Nash was getting together. Jac did the honors, and it was all very cordial, but I was screaming inside. The entire event was so bizarre and unprecedented that I did not speak to Jac for two years, although we have made our peace and he is still one of my closest friends. And to give him credit, he was certainly right about David Geffen, who turned out to be a fine executive at Elektra, and who helped me enormously, both in making my forthcoming album, Judith, and with his friendship over these many years.
IN 1972, I would join Robert Jay Lifton and others to put on an event that involved a petition to Congress for “Redress of grievance,” to make the public statement that Congress needed to take responsibility
for funding what I and many other people felt was an illegal war in Vietnam.
I spent months reaching out to everyone from my friend Sister Corita, the Catholic activist, who was sick and could not come to the event, to the actor Carroll O’Connor, who said he was amazed that I had the chutzpah to call him, and declined flat-out.
We were insisting that Congress answer accusations that they had sanctioned the American invasion of a sovereign country, Vietnam, and had made the American people pay for a war that was disastrous and could not be justified.
Many artists, writers, and intellectuals agreed to participate, and those who showed up in the halls of Congress in 1972 included Tennessee Williams, Joe Papp, Francine du Plessix Gray, Ida Turkel, and Cynthia Macdonald, among others. Many of us were arrested and spent the night in jail.
Garry Wills was there, and in his book Outside Looking In, he writes of how a friend called him and said, “You have written about many antiwar demonstrations. Isn’t it time to put the rest of your body where your mouth is?” I shared a cell with Francine, Ida, and Cynthia. When we were arrested, Garry said he was told by Ida Turkel that “Judy Collins gave their cell great music.” I was singing “Amazing Grace.”
I wouldn’t have called it fun, but certainly it felt good to be with other like-minded women. My friend, the poet Cynthia Macdonald, who taught at Sarah Lawrence at that time, and I had always found it difficult to make dates with our schedules, so we loved being together, even in a cell!
I remembered having heard that Jane Fonda had had all her sleeping and vitamin pills taken from her at one of the political events she participated in, and so I dumped my loose pills down the toilet bowl in our cell. Sad to say, along with the pills, I dropped the amethyst ring my grandmother had left me.
As I sat in jail, ever the optimist, I was sure our actions would help bring the war to a quick end. But of course the war continued to rage.
LATER that spring, I had a brainstorm, an idea that would not go away, and would eventually help me get through the growing turbulence in my relationship with Stacy. It also gave me a focus that took my mind off my drinking.
Before discovering folk music, of course, I had studied classical piano with Dr. Antonia Brico, and I had learned bits and pieces of her moving and inspirational life story over the years. I decided to make a film about her life. I bought an 8 mm Rollei movie camera and then realized that I needed at least a 16 mm camera to do the job properly. And I could use someone who knew about film to help me! I dug deeply into my small savings, reached out to a couple of friends in the film industry, and before you knew it, I was on my way to making sure no one was ever going to forget Antonia Brico.
Writers should write about what they know, a common bit of wisdom has it, and I knew a lot about this woman. She was a pioneer, a heroine, and a mentor to me. By 1972, I was enmeshed in the women’s movement and had joined women’s consciousness-raising groups in New York, including one that my friends Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas had started with other women friends from Ms. magazine. These women, too, were enthusiastic about Brico, as I had shared her story with them. They helped give me the courage to try something entirely different for me: producing and directing a film.
I wrote the treatment and talked it over for months with Max, whose power as a teacher and a mentor had motivated me to tell this particular story. I then put together a team, starting with my co-director, Jill Godmilow, a talented New York documentary filmmaker who would share the directorial credits with me on Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, which would later be nominated for awards at Sundance and other festivals for many films, including Waiting for the Moon. Jill suggested a gifted cinematographer, Coulter Watt, with whom she had worked before on documentary films. Coulter is a painter as well as a cinematographer and had an eye for beauty that would fulfill my dreams of what this movie should look like.
I would focus on interviews with Brico, and on her conducting her own orchestra in Denver. I also wanted to feature one of her students who might replicate my own experience with Brico. We found Helen Palacus, a student much like myself, who was playing a concerto with the orchestra. We were able to film the rehearsals, we could show Brico at work with one or two of her most promising pupils and reveal her pioneer spirit and her deep love of and talent for the music she conducted. Brico would talk about her life during the interviews in her studio.
As a student of Brico’s between the ages of ten and sixteen, one of the things I did was to spend occasional Saturdays with her in her downtown studio. We would lunch on sliced chicken, grapefruit, and almond-vanilla cake, listening to the weekly live opera broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Sitting in that room, surrounded by the statues of Beethoven, Mozart, and Jean Sibelius, I felt as if I was absorbing the inspirational elements of this extraordinary woman’s life.
I later read about everything she had done, drawing on clippings from around the world and newspaper interviews. I listened to Brico speak of how her mother—who had become pregnant by an Italian sailor and been cut off by her family for her sins—could not afford to raise her; how her mother went from Amsterdam to Rotterdam to have her baby; and how that baby was whisked off to America, to San Francisco, by foster parents, who had no rights to take her. Brico was beaten by her foster mother, and finally she ran away from home to live with a friend. It was at Berkeley that she decided to become a conductor. When she found Yogananda, the Indian guru, in New York City, he helped her to go to Germany, where she attended Berlin’s State Academy of Music, and there she was finally able to pursue her dream.
When she graduated, she conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, startling the critics with her power and musical charisma. After her conducting debut in 1929, a critic from one of the Berlin papers wrote that she “possesses more ability, cleverness and musicianship than certain of her male colleagues who bore us in Berlin!” Back in the United States, San Francisco and the Hollywood Bowl fought to have her conduct her debut concert, and both claimed her as their “Cinderella.”
Brico was the only woman orchestral conductor in the United States for decades. She worked with major symphonies around the world, including Sibelius’ orchestra in Finland, and the London Philharmonic. During World War II, she formed her own all-women’s orchestra in New York, which performed weekly at Carnegie Hall.
In 1945, she went to the Aspen Summer Music Festival. She knew Albert Schweitzer was going to be there to speak about Bach and perform in a Bach concert. She introduced herself, and he invited her to come to Africa and study Bach with him. Like many before him, Schweitzer must have been amazed that Brico actually showed up, pith helmet and mosquito netting in her suitcase along with clothes for a month in the jungle. She never would have turned down an offer to study Bach with a master, even if it meant traveling halfway around the world!
This was a journey I had to make, not just to find Antonia but also to find, again, that girl who had been snatched from the arms of Rachmaninoff by the Gypsy Rover.
When we finished the film, Jill and I put our time and energy into marketing and promotion. Antonia opened the Women’s Film Festival at the Whitney Museum in New York, winning much acclaim, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1974. CBS featured a piece of the film as well as an in-depth interview of Brico by Mike Wallace.
The release of Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman, as well as its nomination for an Academy Award, sparked a second wave of interest in Brico’s career. She conducted concerts all over the world, reclaiming her stature and earning accolades, able to make a comfortable living, perhaps for the first time in decades.
I was, most of all, gratified that I had helped tell the story that had fascinated me all my young life. I find her story inspiring for women all over the world who wish to follow their dreams.
AS we were finishing Antonia, I became part of a coalition organized by my friend Cora Weiss, called Women Strike for Peace. In February we traveled to France to attend the Paris peace talks between the North an
d South Vietnamese and the United States. There were a hundred of us, people from all over the United States, all ages, all genders, all colors. Cora arranged through the State Department to get us into the conference, which was no small feat. We flew over in a crowded, very uncomfortable chartered plane. My friend John Gilbert’s father, a Unitarian minister, was on the trip; the only other person I knew on the plane was Cora. I remember two young African American men in the group who spent the flight taunting us for being white and privileged and useless. I needed that like a hole in my heart.
We went to the U.S. embassy first, where, in the cold February weather of Paris, we were given not even a cup of tea. The ambassador did not want anything to do with busybody American peaceniks. Next we went to the South Vietnamese embassy. They gave us tea but were only slightly friendlier than the Americans. Finally, discouraged and depressed, we headed for our final visit, to the North Vietnamese embassy, where they rolled out the red carpet and gave us a bust-out party. And once again, when we got home from these travels, the war that we wanted so much to see ended was still going on, and did for another three years.
But you keep working, keep taking actions, and keep hope burning.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Last Gasp
It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.
—LEONARD COHEN, “Famous Blue Raincoat”
THE school in Vermont that Clark attended was effective for a while. But Clark’s addiction did not subside. We struggled in the dark, fumbling for help. And in 1974, when he was fourteen, I started to look for a new school, some solution for his growing problems. I sent him off to Windsor Mountain, in Lenox, Massachusetts, where we had gone for an interview and were told by the headmaster that Windsor Mountain—a prep school housed in an elegant stone mansion—worked well for young people who might have issues with substance abuse. In other words, they were aware, and they would take care. Of course, it is impossible to police an addict, no matter how glamorous your facility is, if he is not at the same time getting help to stay away from drugs. It worked for a few months.
Judy Collins Page 27