Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (31 page)

Chuck had begun having what he calls “gut aches” about his young wife outpacing and possibly leaving him. (The idea of the wife's independence threatening a husband was still so counterintuitive that when Joni and Chuck gave a radio interview to announce their decision to perform separately, Philadelphia deejay Murray Burnett, assuming the separation anxiety was
Joni's,
suggested that Joni assuage her loneliness while Chuck was on the road by thinking of a housewife married to a traveling salesman.)

Joni's first solo performance after she announced that the duo was disbanded was a return to the Second Fret, and Chuck insisted that, for her own safety, she stay with a married couple—the club's manager, Joy Schreiber, and her husband, Larry. Joni returned to Philadelphia in late 1966, and the audience at the Fret loved her all over again. Among other songs, she played her secret lullaby to her baby, “Little Green” (without, of course, explaining its significance). “Everyone was saying that there was a magic to her songs,” says Gene Shay. “How she'd come up with these marvelous melodies and wonderful words, an artsy way with language.” When she wasn't singing, she was drawing. “Pentels were new,” Shay recalls, “and she always had them with her, and pads of special tracing paper that gave the feeling of stained glass to her sketches.”

Joy Schreiber, Joni's slightly older hostess-chaperone, was also an artist, as well as a worldly bohemian. She had spent 1962 in Tangier, among a crew of artists, writers, and scenemakers that included poets Ted Joans and Gregory Corso. Joni, who had never confided in anyone in Chuck's circle—not even in the seemingly compatible Marji Kunz—now made her first American female friend. Late at night, at the Schreibers' large one-room apartment near Rittenhouse Square—often while the two women took turns on the same rapidograph drawing, with Joy's Siamese cats underfoot—the talk flowed. They realized they'd both been hinterland art students, hungry for adventure. Joni confided to Joy about the baby. “Joni was greatly disturbed; she had many mixed feelings about having to give this child up,” Joy recalls. “She told me about the mental and spiritual turmoil she had felt during and after the pregnancy.” The two women talked about how illegitimacy was “a dreadful stigma for both the mother and the child”—even in 1966, it was simply a given that you couldn't keep an out-of-wedlock baby.

Despite these troubled evening ruminations, Joy recalls a full-of-life Joni whose talent was literally overflowing. “She never walked in the door without saying, ‘I've got to play you my new song!' She'd be playing it before she took off her coat. The lyrics would just pour out of her—she was not self-critical. She was so excited to write something, it never occurred to her how it would be received or what other musicians would say about it. She wrote many songs in my presence; I don't remember her ever changing a lyric.” True to the persona she was radiating, Joni was a ladylike, headlong adventuress. “She just wasn't afraid, like the average young woman,” Joy says. “She didn't say, ‘What happens if I get attacked on the street?' or ‘What if I go home with this man and something bad happens?' Or ‘Oh, this could be scary' or ‘Oh, this could come out badly.' It was all an adventure to her.” At the same time, “She knew how to be proper. She had a propriety that was so natural, you didn't notice it. She could completely change clothes in a dressing room full of men without ever going bare; she could put on a whole outfit by putting it on top of the one she was wearing—it was an amazing trick!”

During Joni's time with Joy and Larry, a young musician from Colorado named Michael Durbin was playing in a group at Manny Rubin's other club, the Trauma. “Michael was a very dear man—charismatic, charming, boyish, and very outdoorsy: a breath of fresh air,” Joy recalls. Joni and Michael started spending time with each other. They looked “dashing” together, Gene Shay says—Michael with his curly blond hair and his “gypsy-baby, new groovy guy” look; Joni, “gorgeous” in her fairy princess clothes, many of which—lacy, Victorian, seeded-pearled dresses—she now purchased from a Rittenhouse Square antique clothier named Zena. This was new; young women were suddenly strolling around Haight-Ashbury and the East Village, attired as if from Brontëera trunks and Elizabethan museum displays. For many young people in 1966, the day you first started seeing your peers dressed in clothes from other centuries (had people ever
done
this before?) was the day that Dylan's lyric “Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” took on a sharp, delicious significance.

Now Joni wrote the bittersweet “Michael from Mountains,” about new lovers ambling through a shut-down city on a rainy Sunday, noticing “oil on the puddles in taffeta patterns that run down the drain” and seeing children in a park as “yellow slickers up on swings, like puppets on strings”: uncommonly precise images for a pop song. It is a feminine song, braiding the wet children being scolded by (Myrtle-like) mothers in “wallpapered kitchens” into the story of intimacy on a depressing day; featuring a boy-man who is solicitous, impish, and gallant. The song is traditional—Michael will leave, while she will wait; but its conservatism is the baseline for an ascending series of songs that will break tradition: Next will be a woman musing about wisdom and freedom (“Both Sides, Now”), then living on her own, risks and all (“Chelsea Morning”), and, finally, achieving the same romantic power as a man (“Cactus Tree”). Before she hit her stride as a writer, songs used to be “what men thought women should sing,” Joni has said, “and they carried all the old feminine values, according to the ‘master.'” In her own arc of songs, she broke with that ingrained imperative.

At some point after Joni returned to Detroit from Philadelphia, in the early winter of 1966–67, Chuck confronted her. His “gut aches” weren't going away. This wasn't the first time he'd shown his young wife his anger and insecurity. During a summertime trip to New York he'd smoked hash at Eric Andersen's loft in SoHo, and “I got paranoid, and all this garbage was coming out [in my mind] about my trying to control Joni and my resentment” of her success “and my fear” of losing her. During that summer freakout, “Joni had said, ‘Charlie, are you okay?'” he recalls, “but when I said, ‘I'm scared,' she said, ‘You're bringing me down.' I thought: ‘Bitch!'” This time, the fight was more heated. “I was pushy,” Chuck admits. He repeatedly asked her if she'd had an affair. She challenged his right to ask the question. “She said something like, ‘Well, what if I
did
?'” The evening was a stormy one. Joni was so angry at Chuck's possessiveness (“She'd always say, ‘Don't be possessive!'”) that, Chuck recalls, she picked the brass candlestick off her bedstand “and had it back and clocked for a swing. I had her wrist in one hand and the candlestick in the other.”

And then, Chuck recalls: “I turned her over my knee and spanked her.”

Soon after that fight, one night when Chuck was out of town, Joni arrived at the apartment with a guy she'd met at a poker game; she had talked him into helping her move exactly half of her and Chuck's antiques down the four flights of stairs. Chuck only later realized that she had moved out within thirty days after she received her green card for residence in the United States. He believes that Joni—partly—used him (“but I didn't mind being used, because we had too much fun”), and to some extent, she probably did. Now she was going off to the inevitable next phase of her life: living alone in New York City. The city would be her base of operations while, acting as her own manager and agent, she booked herself in clubs around the country.

• • •

Manhattan was both a magical and a daunting place for a Pentels-and-guitar-case-toting young woman to enter, alone, in the spring of 1967. Downtown had its own ecosystem. The folk scene on MacDougal, to which Joni immediately introduced herself, was centered on the Night Owl (where James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar's Flying Machine had been the house band until James went to London and Danny to Laurel Canyon) and the Cafe Au Go Go (where the Blues Project—“the Jewish Beatles,” from Queens and Long Island—held forth), with all the musicians piling into the Dugout around the corner after sets. English rock stars stayed at the Albert Hotel on Fourth Avenue, while beatnik expatriates thrust back on the city holed up at the Chelsea on Twenty-third Street. Uptown couples thronged to the new psychedelic discos, Cheetah, the Electric Circus, the Dom. The center of the hip universe was Max's Kansas City; Wonderland Alices fleeing provincial hometowns could walk into the large Park Avenue South restaurant on a Sunday afternoon and go light-headed from all the dark-garbed, grave-faced Dylan types slouching at the bar. It was a mini-nation of weathered cool, unduplicable in any other city. Owner Mickey Ruskin had his choice of artists, models, and would-be writers as waitstaff—girls eagerly quit straight jobs in publishing to sling plates at Max's. (For 1960s-generation women who'd lived in New York, there was nothing, in ensuing years, more status-conferring or instantly signifying than to have “Max's waitress” on their life résumé.)

Like any great nighttime host, Ruskin turned a congenial mishmash of creators and outcasts into a dazzling elite. His dried-chickpea-munching aristocracy consisted of two-fisted painters and sculptors from places like Nebraska and their symbiotic urban complements (fey poets, cerebral critics); fashion designers and photographers; filmmakers and dancers that no one except
The Village Voice
knew to write about; briny denizens of a secret hard drinkers' bar scene whose unmarked north star was the 55 on Christopher Street; the occasional discreet prostitute, of either gender; everyone from Andy Warhol's Factory; heiresses gone underground; ruined or soon-to-be-ruined bards (Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley); and Park Avenue art collectors in artists'-tab-paying thrall to it all. Party addresses were passed around Max's bar on weekend nights under the twisted-metal John Chamberlain sculpture; the semi-invited took taxis to the empty industrial streets south of Houston and followed Otis Redding's recorded, Stax-backed moans up steep, rickety wooden stairs to lofts (their walls covered with nearly wall-sized paintings) crowded with sexy, brooding hipsters, expensively miniskirted socialites like Warhol Girl of the Year Baby Jane Holzer, Paraphernalia publicist Pam Sakowitz, and fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg's rapier-cheek-boned hipster actress girlfriend, in months to be shot-out-of-a-cannon famous in
Bonnie and Clyde:
Faye Dunaway. Girls would dance up a fine coat of sweat—to Carole's hit for Aretha, “Natural Woman,” among other LP tracks—and collapse behind fabric room dividers on coat-piled beds with cocky would-be Larry Riverses or silky, urbane “spade cats” (a slyly self-embraced term of awe, not insult) who seemed to have tumbled out of a Norman Mailer or James Baldwin novel.

If you got an apartment for, say, $78.50 a month—rent was sometimes calculated to the half-dollar—it often featured “tub in kitchen.” Gun-toting landlords could walk in on their single female tenants at will; there was no one to complain to. Joni found a second-floor, street-fronting one-bedroom with high windows (tub, thankfully, not in kitchen and no sadistic landlord) across from a church, off Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Village. The apartment, at 41 West Sixteenth Street, had a fireplace and the newly prized exposed brick wall. Today the neighborhood is called Flatiron; it's chic and bustling. Then it was a genteel residential wedge abutting small factories and office buildings. It didn't have a name—the closest neighborhood, Chelsea, lay northwest—but realtors called it Chelsea anyway.

Joni decamped, filling the apartment with her thrift shop antiques, making it homey (“milk and toast and honey, and a bowl of oranges, too”), and she continued what would be her most prolific period. She would write more songs in 1967 than in any other year—upping her output from twenty-five compositions to sixty, and bringing her total of published songs to thirty-eight by the time she turned twenty-four. She walked the city at night—a Whitman, an Arbus with a guitar case: a voyeur to what she would call the “incredible” “street adventures…There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in people's faces. You hear the songs immediately.”

As she put it in “Song to a Seagull,” she lived self-shipwrecked “like old Crusoe” on that “island of noise in a cobblestoned sea,” and she described that vulnerable state with precision: Her character “Marcie” tries to shake off her preoccupation with an absent lover by going uptown to see a Broadway play (a thoroughly New York thing to do), but when she travels back to her apartment via the West Side Highway, “down along the Hudson River, by the shipyards in the cold,” we know that the city's touted culture hasn't lifted her out of her pain. Churlish taxi driver “Nathan LaFraneer” ferries an anxious Joni “from confusion to the plane,” on which she'll fly to one of those out-of-town club appearances—a jolt of travel that doesn't dispel her life's nagging questions. She's trapped in the back of the angry man's cab, but naïve civility (“we shared a common space”) leads her to overtip him (he snarls). These are the songs that would lead
Time
magazine to say of Joni that, among other things, “She is the rural neophyte, waiting in a subway.”

She was divorcing Chuck; she was living alone; she was in the big American city with her thrift shop clothes and her hungry heart. She knew she was moving away from Myrtle's approved borders: “My gentle relations have names they must call me…” The worry was not gratuitous. During those first weeks in New York Joni was fearful that the existence of her illegitimate baby would be revealed to her parents—and to the public. According to what she told a friend, she worried she'd be blackballed for disbanding the duo and leaving her husband. “I had the impression [that the threat] was insinuated in conversation,” says that friend, adding that Joni “was quite concerned about it, as any woman would have been during those years.
*
I don't remember how the issue was resolved…probably [those who threatened the blackballing] simply dropped the idea when she left Chuck, since any other musicians they were handling would have hated them for it.” (Chuck Mitchell dismisses such rumors as baseless. He says they “pick up on the ‘meddlesome, difficult Chuck' motif” that Joni and her supporters have “put forth for years.”)