In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  In the same missive, she cagily breaks the news about her infamous black-and-white topless portrait, taken by photographer Bob Seidemann. In it, her chest is festooned with many beaded necklaces, styled so that one nipple pokes out coyly between the strands. “Also, they’re bringing out a poster of me!” she writes chattily. “Maybe you’ve read in Time magazine about the personality posters. They’re big, very big photographs, Jean Harlow, Einstein, Belmondo, Dylan, & Joplin. Yes, folks, it’s me wearing a sequined cape, thousands of strings of beads & topless. But it barely shows because of the beads. Very dramatic photograph & I look really beautiful!! If it wouldn’t embarrass you, I’ll send you one. I’m thrilled!! I can be Haight-Ashbury’s first pin-up.”

  Bob Seidemann, weighing in on the experience of being on the other side of the camera, saw it a bit differently. He found Janis to be aggressive and kind of a pain in the ass. During the shoot, she was naked from the waist up, mostly covered by the sequined cape. Throughout, she kept yowling, “Oh motherfucker! I want to take my fuckin’ clothes off.” She stripped, even though Seidemann told her to keep her clothes on. Later, she laid into him because she wasn’t seeing any money from the sale of the poster. “You motherfucker, you’re taking all the money I’m making for you.”

  Which one was the “real” Janis? Why can’t it be both? Or many things, for that matter. Why couldn’t she be a sweet daughter; kind sister; witty, compassionate friend; vulnerable lover; defiant genius; complicated, difficult woman? Why can’t we all be that?

  IN THE SUMMER AND FALL OF 1967, Big Brother played a number of gigs, including the Summer Solstice festival in Golden Gate Park (a benefit for the Free Clinic, and also for the Zen Mountain Center). Groovy peace and love vibes notw­ithst­anding, the band was not getting along. By “not getting along,” I mean the guys were put out because since Monterey, word on the street was that the band was holding Janis back.

  In February 1968, they made their East Coast debut at Anderson Theater on the Lower East Side. Janis was a basket case, intimidated by the thought of playing New York. She fretted that they would just be written off as a gang of “street freaks” from the Haight.*7

  In her satin, beads, feathers, and bracelets, Janis brought it. Her scorching, vocal cord–shredding rendition of “Piece of My Heart” had people on their feet. They rushed the stage, which she encouraged and flat-out adored. She gave four encores that night. The New York Times gave the show a rave, writing, “The lines can start forming now, for Miss Joplin is as remarkable a new pop music talent as has surfaced in years.” Two weeks later, after successful gigs in Boston, Providence, and Detroit, they returned to New York to play the Fillmore East. Lines had formed, snaking down the street for many blocks—a crush of people there to see Janis. Not long after that, the group was booked and billed as Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. (You can imagine how well that went over.)

  Also in 1968, Janis spent some of her newly acquired rock star moola on a 1965 Porsche. She paid $3,500 for it, and commissioned Big Brother roadie Dave Richards, who obviously possessed some serious art chops in addition to his music equipment–hauling skills, to do a custom psychedelic paint job. Richards covered the Porsche with turquoise, orange, and pink flowers, butterflies, astrological signs, mushrooms, skulls, and even a portrait of the band. The car instantly became as famous as its driver; in 2014, it sold at auction for $1.76 million.

  IN THE FALL OF 1968—despite the fact that Cheap Thrills was a massive hit—Janis’s manager, Albert Grossman, announced her plan to leave the band. Hastily, a new band was tossed together. It was called the Kozmic Blues Band, but there was nothing “kozmic” about it. Not their fault, really. Janis was 25, and didn’t have a managerial bone in her body—something no one really thought about before handing her four musicians for whom backing her was merely a gig. Also, the whole of her musical education consisted of getting up in front of a crowd half-crocked and singing her guts out. What was she supposed to do with a bunch of musicians she hardly knew? And what were they supposed to do with her?

  In February 1969, all four performances at the Fillmore East were sold out. The mainstream press was there, as well as Mike Wallace and a 60 Minutes camera crew. The band wasn’t terrible, but Janis was. Rolling Stone, in a cover story, called her the “Judy Garland of Rock” and declared her performance “stiff and preordained.” In March, she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and played Fillmore West to a hometown crowd. San Francisco Chronicle writer Ralph Gleason said she should “go back to Big Brother, if they’ll have her.” The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner played Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving 1969. Janis was pressed into doing a duet with Tina, which she managed to botch, being too drunk to stand up.

  Only a year earlier, Janis had been fresh and original: the glorious, anarchistic embodiment of the age. Sexual and rebellious, her energy untamed, she was like nothing anyone had ever seen. In retrospect, it was probably time for her style to evolve. But she was afraid to change for fear of losing the love of her audience. Instead, she lost her way for a bit. Whenever she felt insecure or overwhelmed, she acted out, swaggering and cussing and stomping around. Really, she could be obnoxious. Once, while interviewing a roadie, she made a big production of squeezing his bicep, then cackling that he didn’t seem strong enough to carry the equipment, much less have sex with her.

  In the meantime, now she was famous. Like most people who imagine the arrival of fame will bring joy, Janis was confused, and sometimes flat-out pissed off, that celebrity brought more problems than it solved.*8 Whenever her entourage went out to eat and drink, Janis felt obligated to pick up the bill, then would complain bitterly that people were taking advantage of her. She bought a house in Larkspur, in Marin County, and installed a wet bar made of redwood burl, a sunken tub, and a dog door for her beloved George. Junkies and hangers-on came and stayed. She would fly into a rage and kick them all out, then weep with loneliness. She expected everyone to know who she was, and when they didn’t, she panicked that her career was on the skids. Once, she called Bob Dylan just because she could. “Hey Bob, it’s Janis!” she roared. “Janis, who?” he said. She wept. Whether alone or in the middle of one of her raucous parties, she knocked back a quart of tequila; because it wasn’t her signature Southern Comfort, now largely a publicity prop, she believed she was doing better.

  During lucid moments Janis admitted to friends that she was in deep trouble. She knew she needed help, that her drinking—there was never any mention of drug use; everyone who knew her believed she’d kicked the needle long ago—was affecting her voice and ability to perform. This sort of clarity never lasted. There would always be someone crashing through the door, sliding into the booth beside her, or skipping backstage with a bottle of something, and she would never say no. On tour she developed a routine: Arise at a respectable hour, drink until passing out in the afternoon, “rest” until showtime, sober up enough to perform, rest afterward by getting drunk.

  In January 1970, Janis’s circumstances improved. It’s something you learn as you get older: If you can just hang on, things will eventually get better. The Kozmic Blues Band disbanded, replaced by the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was better with this setup; her voice was maturing. It was richer, more nuanced. Unfortunately, her shows were less electrifying than they’d been in the past, and also less well attended.

  This had more to do with changing times than with Janis, but she took it as implicit criticism anyway. For being an emblem of the 1960s, Janis wasn’t especially political—by which I mean not at all. The moment she stood up in her 11th-grade social studies class and spoke out on behalf of civil rights was her first and last overtly political act. She paid almost no attention to what was going on in the world: quite a feat in an era when presidential candidates and famous civil rights leaders were being assassinated right and left, and pregnant actresses were being slaughtered in their fancy homes by hippie lunatics.

  Clo
ser to home, if you were a rock star, was Altamont. On December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, four people died. One drowned in an irrigation ditch, two were killed in a hit-and-run, and audience member Meredith Hunter was stabbed by a Hells Angel as he tried to climb onstage. The fallout was a souring of the concert scene. Concert promoters became strict about crowd behavior, forbidding singers to urge the frenzied audience to stomp and dance in the aisles or rush the stage. At outdoor venues, barriers appeared between the front row and the stage, in an effort to maintain order. But Janis loved nothing more than getting people stirred up to the brink of rioting. Managers, publicists, and minders would beg her to tone it down. “I’m not gonna tell ’em to get out there and dance, but if they do it, man, I won’t say a word! If they break those barriers, I ain’t tellin’ ’em to sit down. I won’t! I won’t!”

  The genuine, generous side of Janis could still be glimpsed now and then. In July she canceled a $15,000 gig to travel to Austin for Ken Threadgill’s 61st birthday party. Threadgill, you remember, supported her and believed in her when she was a weirdo and would-be ugliest man on campus. She had come straight from Honolulu, where she and the Boogie Band had delivered a solid, seasoned performance. She serenaded Ken Threadgill with an acoustic version of “Me and Bobby McGee” and presented him with a gift from Hawaii. “…I brought him one thing I knew he’d like,” she said. “A good lei.” She dropped the flowers around his neck and laughed girlishly.

  IN THE FIRST DAYS OF OCTOBER 1970, Janis was relatively happy. Things were going well, in fact. She and the band had been in the Sunset Sound recording studio in Los Angeles, finishing up the new album, Pearl. On October 1, she laid down a sly, a cappella version of a new song, “Mercedes Benz.” She was in good spirits. She had a new boyfriend, Seth Morgan, with whom she was talking marriage.

  On the last night of her life, she listened to an instrumental track for a song called “Buried Alive in the Blues.” She was invigorated at the thought of laying down the vocal track the next day. At the end of the session she tooled her famous psychedelic Porsche down Sunset to have a drink with a few pals at Barney’s Beanery. She drank two screwdrivers and expressed her joy that the band was coming together and that the new album would most surely be a hit. A little after midnight she returned to her room at the Landmark Hotel, alone.

  There are various thoughts about why this particular hit of heroin was fatal. Some say she had not been using at the time, and thus had failed to build up the proper tolerance. Some say this particular smack was especially pure, and thus potent.

  During the early morning hours of October 4, she died.

  Janis was a pioneer of difficult womanhood for a generation who’d been taught that above all a woman must be nice, polite, and well behaved. She put the music world on notice that a female singer didn’t have to be angelic, but could be nasty, powerful, and ballsy. Her life was not easy, and she was often her own worst enemy. But she demonstrated that women don’t need to constantly be policing their feelings, that being alive means being on speaking terms with every dark corner of our hearts. That we should not be afraid to let it all out. Some might call that difficult. I call it being human.

  *1The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were also practicing in old Victorians that were on the verge of being condemned, making the neighbors’ ears bleed as they figured out their sound.

  *2What about Grace Slick, you may wonder. I don’t know what to tell you. She wasn’t Janis.

  *3In time-honored fashion, Janis lied to her mother, telling her she was spending the night at a girlfriend’s house.

  *4This may not have been his real name, not surprising given all that would transpire.

  *5I cannot begin to imagine what this sounds like; please use your imagination.

  *6I seem to have a lot of friends who miss certain things about the 1960s and ’70s: the music, the flowing attire, the fact that no one had answering machines, much less more advanced technology. No one misses the word “ball.”

  *7She wasn’t being oversensitive. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention refused to play at Monterey Pop because Zappa thought the Bay Area bands were subpar.

  *8A question for another time is why everyone wants to be famous when it so rarely ends well.

  CHAPTER 28

  LENA DUNHAM

  Imperfect

  I WAS IN A HOTEL ROOM, on a layover on my way to Paris, when I watched the premiere of Girls in the spring of 2012. This is the only remotely cool personal detail about me in relation to the hyper-cool Lena Dunham and her Emmy Award–winning HBO comedy series about four millennials who live in Brooklyn and stagger through the early years of independence. Lena’s cool quotient may fluctuate in relation to how people are feeling about her latest tweet; Instagram post; ill-considered political statement; tattoo acquisition; questionable red carpet outfit; degree of nudity; weight loss or gain, or recent magazine cover photograph. But there is one unhip horror of which she will never be accused: She is not a middle-aged woman.

  I am old enough to be Lena Dunham’s mother. I even have a daughter who is currently the same age Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna were in that first season when the nation was losing its mind over the hilariously self-involved, clueless eponymous girls—especially the perfectly terrible sex Hannah and Adam had on a broken-down couch that could have used its own condom. Weirdly, this makes me a much better appreciator of Girls than the girls for whom the show was created.*1

  Because I came of age in the 1970s, and went to film school in the ’80s, I feasted on a cinematic diet of poorly lit European art films that revealed the occasional dense bush or flaccid penis (not to mention Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, with the butter scene). I also sat through any number of student films starring the filmmakers’ normal-looking friends doing drugs and having bad sex—and thus my jaw didn’t drop when I watched Hannah, in that first episode, struggle to take off her tights on Adam’s couch. I thought she got it just right, and I laughed my head off, remembering. During that first short half-hour premiere, viewers were put on notice: Lena is a normal-looking person who’s going to show 20-something life in all its cringe-worthy glory.

  MUCH HAS BEEN MADE ABOUT Lena Dunham’s privilege, as if the fact she was born to two celebrated, well-connected New York artists accounted for her drive and talent, or the ability to get a pilot green-lighted at HBO. For the daughter of photographer Laurie Simmons and painter Carroll Dunham, the main signifier of how Life Has Been Unfairly Good to Lena is the Tribeca loft in which she and her younger sister Grace grew up.*2 That loft, with its chic white walls and white floor, was one of the stars of Tiny Furniture, the $25,000 film Lena shot over the course of three weeks in 2009, which led eventually to her HBO deal for Girls. Success begetting success, she soon landed a three-plus-million-dollar book deal to write a collection of personal essays, published in 2014 as Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned. Lena claimed to be inspired by Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 best-selling self-help guide Having It All, but I didn’t see it. Really, it’s just an uneven collection of personal essays that might have been written by Hannah, had her Season 3 e-book deal panned out. Still, Lena took the money and wrote—and good for her.

  Lena’s real advantages lay in having a close relationship with her mom and dad, and witnessing from a young age what it means to live a life in the arts. She was spared the learning curve that most of us go through, first being seduced by the romance of the creative life, which features much drinking, pot smoking, talking, and suffering before figuring out that it’s just like anything else: a beastly amount of hard work, long hours, late nights, boredom, and revision, revision, revision. “My parents taught me that you can have a creative approach to thinking that is almost scientific,” Lena observed. “You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you c
an perform again and again.”

  On screen, as Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham is not so savvy. Actually, she’s whatever’s the opposite of savvy, with her endless chattering, self-absorption, lack of self-awareness, and—cardinal sin—being unlikable. Because viewers apparently have trouble distinguishing between Hannah the character and Lena the creator, Lena has been branded as unlikable as well. The main thing viewers struggled with was that Hannah had a normal, slightly chubby body, and still insisted on being naked. She dared to be, week after week, season after season, a young woman okay in her less-than-perfect body.

  It’s ridiculous that this was the primary act that made Lena Dunham difficult—that what was seen as either appalling or “brave” was being naked while not being a supermodel. On Instagram she wrote: “Let’s get something straight: I didn’t hate what I looked like—I hated the culture that was telling me to hate it. When my career started, some people celebrated my look but always through the lens of ‘isn’t she brave? Isn’t it such a bold move to show THAT body on TV?’ ”

  Maybe people simply confused courage with confidence. As a creator, Lena was confident that her imperfect body would hold your attention—so confident that even if she, as a director, shot herself at unflattering angles doing unflattering things, you’d be unable to look away. Once, when asked when she felt the most sexy, she answered without hesitation: “When I’m directing.” That’s a difficult woman talking right there. She claims her power in her actions, not in the perceptions of others.

  For my middle-aged white woman money, Lena Dunham’s genuine act of bravery rested in the compassionate portrayal of Hannah’s parents. Loreen (Becky Ann Baker) and Tad (Peter Scolari) are academics in their late 50s who teach, presumably, at Michigan State in East Lansing. They are also actual humans with their own struggles, desires, and secrets. Even though the show is not about them, they serve as more than props, punch lines, or cautionary tales of what will happen to the main character if she doesn’t follow her dream/embrace her passion/take the teaching job in France/say no to the boring, yet safe, boyfriend/dare to age.