Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (34 page)

Joni moved onto David's boat. The Gaslight group rented bikes and rode around the Grove, and Estrella and the other girls noticed “that Joni—who looked like a Nordic princess, with her hair in two braids—had jeans that fit perfectly, like a high-fashion model. We wondered, ‘How could she get jeans to fit like that?” Estrella knew about the importance of “costuming” from the circus, “and Joni understood costuming.” As she observed Joni over the next weeks and months, she saw that Joni subtly understood other survival skills, too. “You never show fear to an animal—that's a rule in the circus. It's the same in the music industry and with rock 'n' roll men. To get far, a woman must never show fear. And Joni didn't.”

One day during the idyll, a love-struck David approached his new kid-confidante, Estrella, and thrust a piece of paper—a poem that Joni had written him—in her face. “He was practically in tears. He said: ‘Look at this—it's in perfect iambic pentameter! My career is winding down and hers is taking off! I'm so in love! I'm more in love with her than anyone I ever met before. What am I gonna do?'”

What David Crosby ended up doing was ditching his plan to sail around the world. Instead (as Joni would soon put it, in the moody, internal-rhyme-rich song she wrote about him, “The Dawntreader”), “Leave your streets behind, he said, and come to me.” In other words: He would take her to L.A. and produce her first album.

With an introduction to Warner Bros. Records arranged by Crosby, Elliot flew to Los Angeles with Joni's tapes. He secured a contract for her with Warner Bros. (she would be on their Reprise label), which included a rarely granted privilege, especially rare for new artists: creative control.

At the end of 1967 Joni moved out to Los Angeles, her fourth change of city in just over three years. She and Elliot, who was also relocating there, had a plan, which he articulated thusly: “The role model was Bob Dylan, and it wasn't a matter of radio play or hits, it was”—emphasis added—“a matter of
people being guided by your music and using it for the soundtrack of their lives.
” As Joni would later put it, “love and freedom: women in America freeing up their lives” was a main theme in her personal life, and of that soundtrack she was creating. “We had a lot more choice” than her mother's generation, she said, “which was very confusing. There were no guidelines.” But with a song—“Cactus Tree”—that she wrote around the time she was leaving New York for Los Angeles, she
did
offer a guideline for that new challenge: women would keep their hearts “full and hollow, like a cactus tree.” She invokes sailor David in the first verse of the third-person-narrated song; mountain-climbing Michael Durbin in the second; Chuck in the third; and others throughout (Roy is the “drummer”). Her narrator is not suffering Marcie-like obsession when these men are absent; rather (emphasis added), “She will love them
when she sees them.
” Over the years, frequent quotings of the song's catchy hook—“she's so busy being free”—have tinged its message with disapproval. “Busy being free” seems a self-contradiction and even a petty selfishness. But a woman
did
have to keep psychologically “busy” to match men at romantic free agency in the late 1960s. And the options, comfort, and confidence that young women enjoy today were born of all that busyness—that emotional effort to be revolutionary creatures—of the young women of that era.

As for Joni's “heart” being both “full and hollow”—that tricky duality had been necessary over these last three years. She'd struggled with impoverished pregnancy, a shamed childbirth in a charity ward, the decision to put her baby up for adoption even after she had found a male partner, and divorce and independence, despite the threat of people exposing her secret. Her musical creativity owed to each of those situations and choices, all made in a climate of risk. She'd
had
to have a “hollow”—self-protective—heart to make it this far. But now success seemed in view, so she could afford for her heart to
not
be hollow. And that held its own danger.

1965—1969

After Willie Donaldson broke up with her, Carly was on her own—not least of all, emotionally. Willie's rejection of her “was the first cut in my life,” she has said, “and the first cut is the deepest.” “She really lost her heart to Willie; it was very, very painful for her,” her then newly married best friend Ellen Wise Salvadori (now Questel) remembers.

“There are so many ways that, very narcissistically, I thought of myself through Willie's eyes,” Carly says, of their time together; now she had to reconstitute her future. Carly's sister Lucy was married, as were her best friends, Ellen and Jessica, so rooming with any of them was out. Joey, whose mezzo-soprano voice was now in the employ of the New York City Opera Company, had an apartment in midtown, at 400 East Fifty-fifth Street. She deigned to let her recently dumped younger sister move in with her.

Carly took the smaller bedroom, paid Joey rent, and obeyed Joey's many exacting rules. For example, she had to stay inside her bedroom with her door closed whenever Joey entertained men in the living room. And what men Joey entertained! She'd had a long relationship with the urbane, much-older comedian and broadcaster Henry Morgan and had embarked on romances with dashing symphonic conductor Zubin Mehta and with the equally dashing ballet star Edward Villella. (Joanna Simon's penchant for illustrious men would continue over the decades; in 2006, she would become engaged to Walter Cronkite.) “Joey was the royalty and Carly was the court,” Ellen says. Leaving college to tour with Lucy, being jealous of Lucy's effect on Willie (and Sean Connery), taking a backseat to imperious Joey: the abiding role of her older siblings in her life—the maypole-twirl of their preening, jostling, scheming, confiding, now-maturing sisterhood—would lead Carly to write a string of songs (“Older Sister,” “Boys in the Trees,” “Two Little Sisters”) exploring the relationship so central to her identity.

Carly was falling into an accomplished young Manhattan crowd. Through Ellen and Jennifer Salt, Carly befriended Mary Ellen Mark, who would soon establish herself as a preeminent photojournalist of her generation, and Mary Ellen's boyfriend, young comic David Steinberg, as well as comedian Robert Klein and his wife, Brenda Boozler. She had a romance with an Oklahoma-raised Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and Oxford Rhodes scholar who was just becoming a director, Terrence Malick, and who would soon make a name for himself with
Badlands
and later
Days of Heaven.
She dated comic actor Severn Darden, who was a friend of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Later still, Carly would embark on a romance with the young Czech director Milos Forman, who would eventually give her a small role in his movie
Taking Off
(and whose antic avidity for “groovy” life and klutzy Eastern European accent supplied the inspiration for Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd's “wild and crazy” Slavic guys). In that way New York has of being several worlds in one small space, the city in the mid- to late 1960s had been a different home for each of the three young women: Carole had lived, always with family, in the bread-and-butter suburbs of the bustling Manhattan that was her workplace, not under the tenement rooftops she'd romanticized; Joni had slipped into the musical demimonde of downtown Manhattan, a solitary emigrée from the hinterlands, prolifically documenting the city's tough love. By contrast, Carly was not the Manhattan outsider; the borough of Gershwin songs had been hers in childhood, and now, as a young adult, she stretched her lovely, long legs into that milieu's next generation. She didn't have to go looking for the nascent establishment cultural elite (those creative young people who were on the cutting edge but who were too verbal and moored to be “underground”)—she had legacy status.

“I did not want a career at all” during this period, Carly has said. In this way, she was typical of young women at the time. “Career” was a fusty, jaunty-spinster kind of word—it called to mind Eve Arden and Joan Crawford at desks with hats and gloves on. “Ambition,” Jill Clayburgh once recalled of this time, “wasn't cool or feminine.” Not that upper-middle-class young women weren't supposed to make something of their lives, of course. “We
were
expected to achieve,” argues Jessica Hoffmann Davis, of their cohort. And, indeed, Jessica, like Ellen, was about to start graduate school. (Jessica would receive an Ed.D., and Ellen, a Ph.D.) But Jessica and Ellen had both resolved their personal lives (and Jessica had a baby), not atypical for a time when the average age of marriage for American women was just under twenty-one. The issue of achievement may never have been absent, but it was only enhanced once the other, pressing priority was settled. For many, even the fulfillment of one's talent came about through other people's notice and suggestion.

Such was the case with Carly. “Somehow I kept getting sucked into [music],” she's recalled. At parties, when she'd take out her guitar and play and sing, “people would pay me a compliment: ‘Wow, you have a great voice; you should make a record.'”

Through the Simon Sisters' record producer, John Court, who was the junior partner to Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, Carly was brought to Grossman's attention. Grossman was a portly man and, despite his stunning wife, Sally (who had just been photographed lounging in a chair in a red dress, cigarette aloft, by an ornate fireplace, with Bob Dylan, for the cover of Dylan's
Bringing It All Back Home
), he wasn't averse to proffering a version of the casting couch to women singers (at a time when the negative notion of sexual harassment didn't exist). As Carly has put it: “Without my dear sister [Lucy]'s protection, I was a sitting duck. [Grossman] offered me his body in exchange for worldly success. Sadly, his body was not the kind you would easily sell yourself for.” Carly declined; Grossman apparently didn't hold the rejection against her.

Grossman thought Carly had strong potential, but her background gave him pause. “He didn't like the fact that my parents had been wealthy and that I lived in a big house in Riverdale,” she has said. “Albert said to me, ‘On a one-to-ten scale as a woman, you're a nine.' I said, ‘That's flattering, but where do I miss out?' He said, ‘You've had it too easy. You haven't suffered enough. You don't know what working for a living is like.'” Grossman's assessment was in some ways off-point: Dylan himself, for all his talent, had never been the scuffling itinerant he'd pretended to be when he came to New York; he'd been a cosseted middle-class kid. And across the country in Laurel Canyon, no one was rapping the knuckles of handsome young male folk rocker Ned Doheny, whose wealthy family's name was as recognizable in L.A. as the name Simon of Simon & Schuster was in New York, for not “know[ing] what working for a living is like”—he was just part of the stew of handsome Canyon bards, like his best friend Jackson Browne. Maybe it was just easier to exert reverse snobbery on a female. But Grossman's reservations about Carly made a certain measure of sense in this season of in-your-face Janis Joplin and debutante-turned-psychedelic-queen Grace Slick. A witty, polished girl who remained within the verbal junior intelligentsia did not emblemize the cultural moment.

Nonetheless, Grossman wanted to develop Carly as a star. He had the idea of an act called Carly and the Deacon, pairing her with a black male singer.
*
When the desired “deacon,” Richie Havens, declined, that idea was dropped, but Grossman still set out to produce an album for Carly. For one song, he arranged for Carly to collaborate loosely with Dylan himself. Carly has recalled, “Albert said, ‘You should get Bob to write a song for you. I'll get Bob and you'll go into the studio with his guys.'”

In July 1966 Bob Dylan and Carly Simon met in a cubicle in Grossman's office. There Dylan rewrote, for Carly, some of the words of Eric von Schmidt's “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” the anthem of the Cambridge folk scene popularized by Dave Van Ronk in the Village coffeehouses. Carly was struck by how “out of it” Dylan was during the session—he was “very, very wasted.” (Later that month, in Woodstock, Dylan got on his motorcycle and started to ride it to a repair shop. He crashed, sustaining the serious injuries that would prompt his eighteen-month absence from public view and leave his fan base afire with dire rumors.)

Carly worked daily for weeks on the album—recording the von Schmidt song and others—with a group of tremendous musical talents just coming into their own: Paul Butterfield and, from the group the Hawks—soon to be renamed The Band—Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Robbie Robertson. With his heavy-lidded eyes, high cheekbones, and air of sophistication, the half-Jewish, half-Mohawk Robertson was profoundly attractive to women (a fact that would emerge—unexpectedly, given the group's backwoods image—in Martin Scorsese's 1978 film
The Last Waltz
). Carly developed a crush on him, and they had a flirtation that culminated with a hot evening at the Chelsea Hotel's Spanish restaurant's bar, “mooning and spooning and June-ing all over each other,” she recalls, “but going no further—Robbie and I were shy, a little in awe of each other.” When they made a date for the Fourth of July, she looked forward to a romance that would sweep away the pain of her broken engagement. On the appointed night Carly waited and waited. And waited. Robbie stood her up. “I felt this sheer wall of rejection,” she says. “Robbie had been my hope of getting over Willie.”

The tracks of her album had to be mixed, and that was the job of sound engineer Bob Johnston. But Johnston held off—instead, dangling a quid pro quo: sex for sound-mixing. “If you're nice to me, I'll make you a nice record,” he told Carly with casual impunity, since workplace threats were not illegal.
*
“It was amazing to actually hear it coming out of somebody's mouth,” Carly recalls. She took the very circumstance that Grossman and others had held against her—her lack of desperation—and used it as a touché. “I stood, very calm, and said, ‘I'm not that hungry.'” Johnston paid her back by refusing to mix the tracks and by bad-mouthing her to Grossman. “Whatever Bob Johnston said to Albert, I was shelved,” she has said. “This was the end for me for a very long time. I was frozen.”

“This was a very depressing time for me,” Carly says. Still living at Joey's, she drew close to her younger brother, Peter; he had felt as wounded by their father's rejection as she did, and he was funneling his feelings into a love of photography. They palled around together during what he's called “that gloomy era” in which Carly “became very down on herself, awfully negative and depressed…. It was just a rotten time for her.”

Richard Simon had left each of his four children a modest inheritance, and Carly was quickly depleting hers on psychotherapy. So in the fall of 1966, needing cash, Carly took a job at a production company—the kind of entry-level job available to young women: secretary. “I pretended to type and take shorthand, while extending my lunch breaks to drown my sense of failure in more and more puff pastry and puddings,” she has written on her Web site.

As the single one among married friends, Carly traced the contrast between her life and Jessica's in sardonically formal letters, which Jessica reciprocated. “Dearest…,” they would write, using the same campy, theatrical breathiness with which they'd concocted the
Moll Flanders
essay for Sarah Lawrence. The dozens of letters they exchanged during the mid- to late 1960s reflect, Jessica says, “the last vestiges of a time in which girlfriends knew everything about each other and wrote it down so we would never forget.” In one letter, Jessica woefully called herself a “Worcester housewife,” referring to the Massachusetts town where she and her husband were living. Carly wrote back, “Dearest Jessica, It is with imminent euphoria that I look forward to my brief visit with you in culture-laden Worcester. All the culture is in
your house,
dearest friend.”

Carly made some of these trips to see Jessica with her soul mate brother, Peter, who'd gone full-bore hippie-politico: With his hair long and wild, he was student photographer for the Boston University newspaper, of which his friend Raymond Mungo, soon to be a pioneer of the underground press, was editor. Peter was always rushing out to antiwar rallies, and in a couple of years he and Mungo would be knee-deep in Vermont compost, cofounders of the commune Tree Frog Farm. (Mungo called it “Total Loss Farm” in his book of that name.) Tree Frog's rolling meadows were the site of badminton games during which female communards who looked like Kennedy wedding bridesmaids, down to the demure smiles and ribboned boaters, wielded their racquets over their bare tits. (Later Peter Simon would become a devotee of spiritual leader Ram Dass, formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary's fellow LSD professor.)

The kinds of protests in which Peter Simon was enmeshed would grow in number and attendance with the Tet offensive in January 1968, heralding a year in which over half a million American soldiers were in Vietnam, fighting a war the public was now beginning to view as, in Walter Cronkite's words, “a stalemate.” Students looked for reasons to foment huge, flashy protests. The occupation of Columbia's buildings in April 1968 was based on a relatively petty complaint: the university's appropriation of Harlem land for a gym. The movement was a brushfire stoked by complementary components—the political people were earnest and tactical; the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll people were playful and instinctual—but the two elements burned with the same passion for larger-than-life living. If you tumbled into your adulthood in that magic moment, the players' operatic example of how to live life—in both its serious
*
and its recreational dimension—became your “normal.”