Love, Janis

by Laura Joplin

  The questions then fell on me. “Do you listen to her records much?” I panicked, groping among several answers in my mind. Nodding yes, I said, “We had three of them, but we lost two. Yes, we listen to Janis’s music.” “You do?” was her feigned shocked and laughing reply.

  The final question to Janis was, “What do you think you’ve got in common with your classmates of 1960 besides the fact that you were classmates?” Janis roamed among replies, settling on, “There’s always a point of communication for people. You just get down to human level and discard the accent or the dress or whatever. We’ve still got things to talk about. We’ve just got different kinds of experiences. They’ve got kids, I ain’t got kids, you know. I wear feathers, they don’t wear feathers. See, we have a lot of common ground. We can talk about birds.” On that note, Janis asked about the time. The reporters took the hint and drifted away.

  Janis turned to me. “You have to learn to smile, Laura,” she explained quietly after the press had completed their barrage of questions. “Like this,” she said, “with your lips parted and your teeth open. Try it, it’s not hard,” she coaxed. She kept pushing until I flashed the pearly grin but also said, “Janis, no one wants to talk to me. I’m not famous!”

  Later, we milled around the cocktail party. She greeted folks and recalled teachers and special times. She sat on a couch with Glenda South and Clarence Bray, the class president. They tried to remember the school song. We joined Kristen Bowen downstairs in the bar. Janis played pool and had a few drinks before the group assembled for dinner.

  Sam Monroe was the master of ceremonies for the evening, and he prudently put a formal tone on his remarks. Summarizing the class, he listed the number of children born to members, and the various numbers of doctors, lawyers, and other occupations. Wilting in her seat beside me, Janis heard him finish with an offhand “Is there anything I’ve missed?” Sigh—Sam’s somber sense of humor hardly created the jovial uproar I felt he was seeking. “Janis Joplin!” someone said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Oh, yes, and Janis Joplin!” They applauded, a few whistled, and Janis rose in place, politely nodding her head. “In honor of having come the greatest distance to this reunion, the committee wanted to give Janis a tire.” Ahhhh, Janis smiled. It was less than the ovation Ken Threadgill had received at his jubilee, and somehow she seemed crushed. Janis had really wanted more.

  “It’s just Sam, Janis. He’s trying to be funny, and he’s not very good at it. He didn’t know what to do,” I whispered at the table. She looked quizzically at me, and then her face registered agreement, the tensed muscles eased.

  No one with Janis wanted to stay for the dance. We piled into the rented car and headed to the Pelican Club, having heard that Jerry Lee Lewis was in town. It wasn’t the first time Janis had met him. In Louisville on June 12, she’d gone to his concert and tried to visit backstage. He had refused to talk with her, and so had his group of beefy, country bodyguards. Janis and her friends had left, but not before she almost crowned a security cop with a whiskey bottle. Why, I wonder, did she expect him to be different here? Was she attempting to offer him local hospitality, or did she want to commiserate about what a second-rate burg Port Arthur was? Perhaps after the less than laudatory reunion program, she just wanted to touch the other reality of her life, the glitter and special bond of one performer to another. After all, which of her classmates could even dream of approaching Jerry Lee?

  Sitting on the hard chairs in the open lounge, Janis commented with John and Bobby about Jerry Lee’s antics playing that outlaw piano. He put on a show, and the locals loved it.

  Janis pulled me along to say hello backstage and I stood at the door. Walking up to him, she chortled, “This is my hometown, and I’d like you to meet my sister.” He looked up at her gruffly. Then his scowling eyes moved across the room to me. “You wouldn’t be bad-looking,” he snarled, “if you weren’t trying to look like your sister!” A flash must have jumped in her mind, because she sent a reflexive fist to his face. Just as quickly, he hit her back!

  The boys rushed to her defense, leading her out of the room. Whimpering amid the circle of our bodies walking out of the club, she kept repeating, “How could he do that?” Surprised at the whole event, I said, “Who cares, Janis? We’re the ones who love you. We’re the opinions that matter. Who is he anyway?” Bobby picked it up. “Yeah, yeah, he’s nothing, Janis.” “Okay”—she straightened her shoulders—“okay.”

  Back home, our family was already asleep. No matter, the whole group came in and sat around the dining table. “Janis,” I asked, “do you remember that song you wrote a long time ago, ‘Come away with me and we’ll build a dream?’” Her head shot up, and she left the room, mumbling, “No, no, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bobby’s eyes had lit up, eager to make some caustically cynical remark about believing in dreams. Her exit was all that cut him off.

  The next day Mom and Pop were furious to find that Bobby was asleep in the car with the motor running and John Fisher was on the couch. Neither had bothered to drive back to the motel. The guys left sheepishly, and Janis tried to explain that it wasn’t important, but it created tension in the house.

  Jimmy Pryor came over to ask Janis if he could quote her in the newspaper he and Michael published, Agape. They had an international circulation since someone from Panama had subscribed. It was youth writing to youth, about Christianity as universal love. “I believe in that,” Janis stated in that deep, emphatic voice that had a tinge of humor in it. In flowing script, one half-page of the next issue said, “Don’t Compromise Yourself, It’s All You Got,” with Janis Joplin the signatory.

  Janis told me about a girlfriend who had fallen in love with a fellow who had lots of money and lived out in Montana. “He asked her to marry him, and he flew to California in a helicopter and took her away,” Janis said wistfully. “I wish someone would take me away,” she continued, sighing.

  Janis asked me, “Why don’t you come visit?” I was pleased by the invitation and replied, “Okay, I’d like that, but I won’t have any time until Christmas break.” So we made plans for me to spend the holidays with her in Larkspur.

  In 1990, I talked with Bobby Neuwirth about the reunion. He said, “After the reunion, she had mixed feelings. It was sort of a letdown, but also gave her a sense of completion at the same time. Like, she didn’t really have to play with it anymore . . . didn’t have to regret the original experiences anymore.”

  I think the whole experience was a good one for her, for her growth as a human being. Mom had written in a round-robin letter to the family earlier, “It’s a strange scene to read of one’s eldest as ‘the Queen,’ ‘the Goddess,’ ‘the Superstar.’ She calls now and then, but never writes anymore. Perhaps the home folks bring this halo down to polishing distance.”

  Back in California, she told people about her experiences at home. She was putting perspective on the mortally wounded outcast role she had presented to the press. She had told the Port Arthur News during the reunion interview, “Well, to tell you the truth, it [high school] made me very unhappy. It may have been a problem of my own, but problems aren’t all one-sided. It just made me very unhappy. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. . . . Now I can talk to anybody in Port Arthur because I’m older and I can go on their trip. I can relate to them on their trip whether they can relate to me or not. But then I was very young and I didn’t have any experience in relating to people and every time one of my overtures would be refused, it would hurt.”

  Bob Gordon realized that her attitude toward her family had changed, and suggested that she rewrite her will. Janis agreed, and he drafted a new document. The former will had left everything to Michael, because in the mind of the star Janis, he was the only one who loved her. Coming back home, she had realized that was not true. Everyone in the family loved her, as much as she would let them. She was giving up the feeling of being wronged by the world.

  She was trying to make things right, to have the kind of life
that she’d always wanted. Part of that meant a good love relationship. Back in California, she began a romance with Seth Morgan, a fellow she had met in May at the Lyle Tuttle Tattoo Party. Janis had been on tour in the East, based in New York, for most of the intervening months. After August 12 she was on vacation and living back at her home in Larkspur. Their romance bloomed with the unique blending of their personal brands of outrageousness.

  Seth had large, sexy lips and thick, dark, wavy hair that curled seductively around his face. He was a student at Berkeley who’d grown up in a house frequented by many of the literary greats of the day because his father edited a literary journal. He was a member of the Morgan family, the descendants of J. P. Morgan. He was slender, muscular, and a few years younger than Janis. He was also intelligent, interesting, fun, and spontaneous. He could carry his own, and was not afraid or put off by the rock-and-roll scene.

  Seth was wonderful to be seen with in public because he was good-looking, punky, and brash. He rode a motorcycle and had a cocky, haughty air. Janis could be as outrageous as she wanted to be with Seth. In fact, he liked to be seen with Janis in the Porsche, out about town. It was Janis who had put the kibosh on that, preferring to stay at home, having a glass of wine and watching television together. Whereas David Niehaus had disliked his visibility with Janis, Seth thrived on it. Nevertheless, they lived a quiet life. John Cooke remembered those evenings with amazement, emphatic in his description of the relationship as a positive one for her. She was slowing down her partying.

  Seth had a modest income from family trust funds and it gave him an independence that was needed for a relationship with Janis. He wasn’t overwhelmed by her personality or her career, though he took pains to continue pursuing his college studies and his own career goals as a way of preserving his sense of self.

  Seth offered Janis the perfect balance. She didn’t need to choose between a career and a mate. He could handle both. They talked about their future together. Janis wanted to retire soon, even though the recording sessions and Full Tilt tour had convinced her the new band was great. She wanted to have a child and change her life. Seth was all for it, though he was quick to add that theirs would be an “open” marriage. Janis must have felt that what he offered was enough, because she focused on their future together.

  But Seth was also something of a con—a “silver-tongued devil.” Several years after Janis died, he served time at Vacaville on a five-to-life sentence for armed robbery. While incarcerated, he wrote an article about his relationship with Janis. He said he had met her when he was dealing cocaine (not a drug commonly associated with Janis). Even later, after he wrote a successful novel, he talked to the press about her on his book-promotion trips. “If she was any old body, I wouldn’t have looked at her. . . . No, that’s not true. Janis and I had a real genuine flame. If she hadn’t been Janis Joplin, we just would have been rip-roaring friends.”

  None of the tortured insanity that marked much of Seth’s later days was evident yet. He was still a neophyte. That’s why later he could truly say, “Who knows what would have happened if she hadn’t died?” It wasn’t until after her death that he first did heroin. I would think that seeing Janis die would have stopped him from doing the same drug that killed her. But for Seth, it was a reason to start.

  Janis was tired of waiting for a good man who could handle the life she was leading. In 1969 she told a Playboy interviewer, “Oh hell, all any girl really wants is just love and a man. But what man can put up with a rock and roll star?” Seth looked like he might, but later evidence says that he was no strength to lean on.

  They made big plans—a wedding at sea on a Caribbean cruise ship. Janis’s attorney, Bob Gordon, drew up a prenuptial agreement at her request. They hadn’t announced it to friends yet. They were waiting for the proper moment.

  Who knows if they would have gotten married. The twenty years of his life after her death were a roller coaster of drugs and alcohol, fast motorcycles, and a constant stream of women. He said he had a fatal attraction to self-destructive women, whom he liked to help along their self-chosen paths. He died in 1990, high on alcohol, cocaine, and Percodan, in a motorcycle crash that also took the life of a lover. Minutes before the bike went out of control, she was seen beating desperately on his back, yelling, “Slow down!”

  In September 1970, Janis stayed in L.A., recording her next album. Seth stayed at Larkspur and flew in for visits. He didn’t much like the scene in L.A., since there was nothing for him to do except hang around the recording studio.

  Janis was making history of sorts, the first CBS act allowed to record in an independent studio. Sunset Sound was in a converted garage, the perfect atmosphere for a rock band, Paul Rothchild explained. She had the studio, the producer, a band she loved, and good material. Work was great.

  Recording could be especially hard for a performer like Janis, who was tuned to the audience. Hers was not an independent sound; it relied on audience feedback. She liked the fans to get up, clap, stomp, sing, and show that the music moved them. That was missing from the studio. Yet Paul could make it work without the audience.

  Paul helped her to develop as a singer. She learned to use the subtle nuances of her voice instead of sheer power alone. “She demanded greatness from herself and delivered it,” he said. “The band had come up and grown so spectacularly in such a short time. And they were committed, just welded to Janis. They would do anything for her and so would I. . . . She trusted me and I trusted her. We relied on each other being faithful and honest.”

  There was plenty of boredom in recording. The singer had to wait for the instrumental tracks to be laid down before the vocals could begin. Janis spent the time hunting for the right tunes and the best arrangements. They were crafting a piece of art.

  Entertaining the gang during a break, Janis sang a novelty song, “Mercedes Benz,” which she had penned in a bar along with Bobby Neuwirth. They took Michael McClure’s poetic zinger of a line—“Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”—and turned it into a song. Janis had never intended for it to be part of the record. The song was, however, placed on tape during the process.

  “It wasn’t a sad and tragic time,” Paul said, smiling. “Fun was the underlying thing. We were joyous explorers. We were exploring land that was forbidden by our forebears and it was all about dress-up and it had the same kind of innocence. It was all about smiles and fun and laughter and then talking about it the next day because secrets didn’t exist.

  “How can I say this without it sounding sexist? Janis was one of the guys. When I was with her, there was no sense of she’s female, I’m male,” Paul Rothchild explained. Walking to the band car after recording in Los Angeles, Janis turned and surveyed the group of guys, wondering who should drive. She asked, “Who’s got the biggest balls?” Then she answered, “I do.” “Her humor frequently came from almost a male orientation,” Paul explained. “Like her male balance was as strong as my female balance. We both acknowledged that place, the other side of our sexual whole.”

  Janis told Seth that she was using heroin again. She explained it away to Seth, saying, “I started since I couldn’t get to work for being so goddamned drunk all the time. When the album’s over I’ll kick like before.” She kept the drug use to herself, hitting up only late at night, after she finished recording. There was no one around like Linda Gravenites, who would have yelled, “No, you can’t go back to that stuff, not after what you went through in quitting!” Seth wasn’t the one to take a stand, in spite of her calling him and asking, “Please make me stop.” He wouldn’t even try, telling her, “It’s something you have to do for yourself.” Instead Lyndall Erb was Janis’s roommate, a woman Seth felt was taken with the Joplin fame. He said she was never one to say no to Janis. He felt she was fawning and her relationship to Janis was “pernicious.” In Los Angeles, Peggy Caserta was around, a woman who was heavily into heroin at the time.

  Several people knew or guessed that Janis was using heroin, beca
use her behavior would change. The strange truth was that when she did heroin, she turned into a hazy little girl. She lost the vibrant energy that was the persona of Janis Joplin. She became passive and oh-so-quiet. When she was straight, her intellect bloomed; she knew what she wanted and she knew ahead of time what the people around her wanted. One of the times she did heroin during the L.A. stay, she wandered in to band member John Till’s room. She seldom came to visit, but she was feeling lonely. John and Dorcas wanted to reach out to her, but didn’t know how to say, “Heroin is the problem, not the answer.” People weren’t that clear about such things then.

  Overall, Los Angeles was a fun time for Janis. She worked with people who thrived on enacting the ideas that jumped into their minds. “We both had Porsches,” Paul Rothchild said. “We’d race along Sunset Boulevard to Laurel Canyon. She was a lot crazier than I was—and I was nuts. She’d go against traffic on blind curves, with the top down, laughing, ‘Nothing can knock me down.’”

  She flew out to Santa Fe to meet Albert for a photo session for what would be her first job as a commercial representative. Albert had her booked to represent a cigar company. The photos were taken on the Rio Grande gorge bridge in New Mexico. It wasn’t a time of visiting and reflecting with Albert. Instead photographer Lisa Law introduced her to a fellow Janis called “her mountain man,” and she went off with him for the evening. One day in, the next day out. Janis returned to Los Angeles.

  She called Pat Nichols, who lived in L.A. They hadn’t seen each other since 1969, when they agreed to get together again only when they were both off heroin. Talking on the telephone, they made a date for October 5 to see a Toshiro Mifune Japanese samurai movie.