Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (10 page)

Joan left the movie intent on tracking down the music. She went to Sallows and Boyd Furniture Store, which stocked 78s and let customers listen without buying. Joan asked for “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and listened to its fevered twenty-three minutes. “It was the most beautiful melody I'd ever heard,” she has said. She returned to the store's listening booth again and again, “and I would just go into raptures over it—it was the melody; it killed me,
killed
me.” She'd already had a memorable brush with the emotive possibilities of the female voice—when she was seven, she'd heard an Edith Piaf record at a French-Canadian girl's birthday party. At the point in the song when Piaf's voice plaintively soloed and then joined the male chorus, “I had goose bumps,” she has said. “I dropped my cake fork.” The hours at Sallows and Boyd furthered that impact. Voice, melody: two of songwriting's three elements were now lodged in her subconscious.

• • •

With Bill Anderson's next promotion, the family made its final move, to Saskatoon, a hundred miles south of North Battleford, a real city at last. They purchased a new green house, at 1905 Hanover Avenue, the nicest of the Anderson homes, right next to Lathey's Swimming Pool. It was 1954—James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry were just about to sharpen the idea of the teenager as rebel. Joan was eleven years old and loosened from the sweet grip of her family's church-centered life in the smaller town.

For a girl who was considering rebellion, midwestern Canada in the mid- to late 1950s was fertile territory. At a time that was already the peak of anxious traditionalism everywhere, that region (more Britishly proper and “more ‘nosegay' than America,” as Joni has put it) was filled with women like Myrtle: newly middle-class, distancing themselves from farm childhoods through an almost exaggerated respectability. Between 1955 and 1957, the women's pages of one of the Andersons' main local papers,
The Leader-Post,
brimmed with notices of social events both festive (“Mrs. S. C. Atkinson entertained at an evening party in honor of Mrs. C. Hay. Mrs. W. B. Ramsay poured from a table centred by pale mauve tulips and tall white tapers”) and functional (“A demonstration of various kinds of sewing machines will be a feature of a tea, sponsored by the Regina Home Economics Club”). These pages also called for a harder line on children. Opinion pieces lashed at the “permissive” parenting that had virtually redefined child rearing since the 1946 publication of Benjamin Spock's
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
One Fred Rawlinson called it a “joy to hear recently in Regina that every parent and every teacher said ‘no' to a child at least once a day.” “Mrs. Muriel Lawrence, the Mature Parent,” ridiculed lenient mothers. Psychologist A. E. Cox said parents who drove their kids everywhere were abetting “a pattern of evolution that might result in a physically useless, big-headed human race.”

Yet amid all the self-conscious refinement and the keeping of children in their places was an inspiring paean, by local poet Ella Davis, to a tougher heroine of a former era. The poem was simply called “Amelia,” as if that first, distinctive name alone were enough to describe the brave aviatrix who had gone alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Davis praised her “high dreams” in “all out altitudes.”

Did thirteen-year-old Joan Anderson (who was now defying Myrtle by sneaking out to the jazz-and-burlesque tent at the Mile Long Midway carnival) notice that poem in the newspaper on that summer 1957 day and feel a stab of romantic identification? “Amelia”: the intimacy of that first-name-alone as a title. “Dreams.” “Altitudes.” One wonders.

Starting junior high at Queen Elizabeth School in Saskatoon provided Joan with the third key to her future as a songwriter: a mentor—a task-master, really—for poetry writing. Within weeks of starting school, she'd established herself as the class artist, just as she had in North Battleford. She was hanging up paintings she'd made for an evening PTA meeting when a teacher she remembers as “a good-looking Australian came up to me and said, ‘You like to paint?' I said, ‘Yes.' He said to me, ‘If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words. I'll see you next year.'” The teacher was fifty-year-old Arthur Kratzmann, who had previously noticed, as he would later say, “how beautifully she could paint” when he walked into another class and watched her dabbing watercolors.

Next year, in seventh grade, Joan Anderson did indeed have Arthur Kratzmann for English. By now, she was fascinated by the man, whose background was somewhat romantic. Kratzmann, the son of an Australian sharecropper, had been a track star in Australia and had taught on Canadian Indian reservations. For his part, Arthur Kratzmann viewed Joanie Anderson as a “slim, blond-haired, blue-eyed, respectful, obedient, quiet, responsive student.” Kratzmann prided himself on being able to
really
teach English composition—to see his students as “artists who put down words and phrases and sentences that nobody else ever had in the world,” he has said. “The kids rise to the challenge. Joni Mitchell was one of them. She didn't strike me as the most outstanding person I've ever had in the field, but she wrote well.”

But first he had to shake her up. He'd observed that she was derivative. “She'd see a painting of a landscape and she'd duplicate it, and when we'd be writing poetry, she'd have a tendency to, say, pick Wordsworth's daffodils and write a poem about tulips but use the same rhyme scheme and style.” He was determined to push imitation out of her.

For her first assignment, Joan wrote a poem about a stallion. She went riding at a nearby stables, so she knew something about horses. Seeking to impress her teacher, she looked in
Reader's Digest
for verbal images. Kratzmann handed the poem back to her, with “Cliché,” “Cliché,” “Cliché,” “Cliché” scrawled in the margins and lines drawn to the many words he'd circled. “He marked me harder, I think, than American college professors mark,” she later opined. When she approached him after class to talk about it, Kratzmann grilled her: “How many times have you seen
Black Beauty
?” She answered, “Once.” “What do you know about horses?” She told him about her riding. He shot back: “The things that you've told me that you've done on the weekends are more interesting than this.” Then he said: “You must write in your own blood.” He's later explained, “At the time I was studying Nietzsche, who used to tell people that they must do things in their own blood, so I turned the quotation on her.” Arthur Kratzmann's exhortation had the same effect as Rachmaninoff and Piaf. The phrase “Write in your own blood” became a motto for the preteenager and triggered her lifelong love of Nietzsche. “She picked up on that and started to write about her life,” Kratzmann has recalled.

In fall of 1957, Joan entered Nutana Collegiate High School, while the school in which she would spend the balance of her high school years—Aden Bowman Collegiate—was being built. Gifted art students at Aden Bowman took art classes at Saskatoon Technical Collegiate, and it was here that Joan studied—and argued—with the Abstract Expressionist painter Henry Bonli. The Bonlis kept a studio in Toronto, but he and his wife, Elsa, had spent time in New York, where they'd befriended the most authoritative critic, Clement Greenberg. Bonli's sophistication leapt out at Joan, but she was as stubborn with painting as she had been with backyard circuses, and as forthright with her art teacher as she had been with her Sunday school teacher. “I know she objected to the way I was teaching, and she didn't like my colors,” says Bonli. “She didn't like putty; she liked bright colors.” But Bonli indirectly gave her something else: permission to spruce up her name. At a time when Susans were becoming Susi, Barbaras Barbi, and Pattys Patti, Joan Anderson, beguiled by the jaunty final
i
of her teacher's last name (and, possibly, by the hit parade singer Joni James), became Joni Anderson.

At Aden Bowman Joni's best friend was another tall, thin, blond Joan, Joan Smith, who lived on nearby Cumberland Avenue. A third friend, Marie Brewster Jensen, says, “The two Joans looked so much alike they could have been sisters.” (Joan Smith Chapman disagrees: “Joni's features were more severe than mine; she had high cheekbones.”) Joan Smith was even-keeled and conventional; she would marry her high school beau at nineteen. Joni Anderson was looking for something more. “Neither of us were very absorbed in school,” Joan Smith Chapman says. They lived for the weekends, when they'd go to the YMCA dances at the Spadina Crescent and dance: first, to Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard and then—with less enthusiasm on Joni's part—to the late-1950s
American Bandstand
regulars like Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Donny Kirshner's friends Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. “Nobody knew Joni Anderson had polio; she loved to dance,” says a boy in their crowd, Bob Sugarman, whom everyone called “Sugie,” and who was friends with Tony Simon, the “nice, smart fellow” Sugarman says Joni “bummed around with, but I don't remember Joni hooking up with anybody in particular. I wouldn't say Joni was in the popular group; she was too reserved and individual. She was going by the beat of her own drummer.”

Those endless weekends of Y dances “were pretty innocent, mellow evenings. You got a ride down with your parents and got a ride home from them; there was no alcohol and certainly no drugs,” says Joan Chapman. But Marie Jensen remembers a bit more teenage angst, which was released during Joni-Joan-and-Marie slumber parties at Joan's house, where the girls' heads rarely touched the pillows unmediated by “those big round plastic rollers with the big clips in them,” Marie recalls. Marie lived in another community, Prince Albert, two hundred miles north, and knew the two blond Joans from their vacations there, on Lake Waskesiu (pronounced Wask-ah-soo), with their parents. She was less like the contented Joan than the restless Joni. “We were ‘finding' ourselves, trying to understand that we didn't have to do things like our mothers had, to exist,” Marie says. “Joni was beautiful, and she always looked so well put-together, in those little Jackie Kennedy kinds of coats and a hair band. But she was reserved and withdrawn and she had her insecurities, like I did, like we all did: Were we pretty? Who
were
we? Where were we ‘going'? We had strong separation and approval issues with our mothers—more than the next generation of girls, I think.” Marie believes this is because prairie-Canadian mothers of that era had themselves experienced distant mothering from hardworking farm women who hadn't doted on them. So, to compensate, “
our
mothers,” Marie says, “said to themselves, ‘We're going to fix our relationships with our daughters.' Maybe they fixed them too much.” Joni, the lone only child in the crowd—Myrtle's masterpiece-in-progress—may have suffered this overcompensation most intensively. Toward the end of high school, she started rebelling—drinking too much; frequenting the “rowdy” west side of town, where the Indian and Ukrainian kids lived; slacking off in her classes (they bored her, she's said; she drew pictures on math assignments). She had entered a turbulent period. A current close friend of Joni's says, on the basis of how Joni has described these years, “Joni was always at odds with Myrtle, who was opinionated and critical of her. Myrtle was a straight cat. ‘You're going to school! You're going to be educated! You're going to be a
good
girl!'”

“I saw that tension in Joni when she was a teenager,” says the woman who, as a girl, probably did more than anyone else to model rebellion for Joni. Her name was D'Arcy Case. She was Marie Brewster's friend from Prince Albert, and her parents ran an inn on Lake Waskesiu where the Saskatoon kids hung out on vacations. Petite, brunette, and strikingly pretty, D'Arcy was a flamboyant, passionate baby beatnik, and her exaggerated persona threw down the gauntlet at, as she puts it today, that “fucking dainty little culture” of late-1950s Canada. One day, for example, D'Arcy dyed her hair red, green, and blue, to match a plaid skirt. She was so obsessed with Edith Piaf (whose voice Joni had been so moved by) that one night, on impulse at a party, she took a blunt scissors and chopped her past-shoulder-length hair off to a boy's length—“just like Edith had done during the French Resistance, identifying with the German women who'd been shamed,” D'Arcy says. But for all her wildness, D'Arcy maintained sobriety and a don't-you-put-your-hand-undermy-blouse sense of propriety. Her parents were alcoholics; having seen how liquor could ruin a life and having to be a kind of parent to her parents, she herself never drank. She became a kind of sober companion to the rowdy but innocent, pent-up Saskatoon kids who invaded the lake on holidays.

D'Arcy would look after the inebriated Saskatoon kids at wiener roasts, and Joni Anderson quickly became her favorite. “She got really drunk, a lot,” D'Arcy says. But D'Arcy felt there was something deeper behind Joni's drinking than the simple rebellion and delight in excess that powered the other teenagers. “There was something tragic there. You have to drink when you have something like I felt Joni had—so much inner fire, in contradiction to her perfect little only-child life [created] by a mother who is essentially saying, ‘Here's your life, dear; all arranged for you.' Joni got lots of attention from her parents. She was privileged—she had nice clothes and sweater sets, where some of the others of us had to earn our own money—but that came at a price. She was very tightly looked after. I think she really wanted to break out. She was really screwing up in school; still, it was so hard for her to do so. She had her parents' expectations to deal with.”