Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (40 page)

On the one hand, being an old lady, or a “lady”—the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe—well, you couldn't beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype: talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn't have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity. For example, there was Annie Burden, the wife of architect-turned-album-designer Gary Burden (he'd designed
Crosby, Stills and Nash
), standing at the door of her house near San Vicente, proffering delicious organic treats with a baby on her hip. Then there was David's pal Trina Robbins, the comic-book artist and designer who made clothes for Cass Elliot, and Donovan, and Jim Morrison's girlfriend Pam Courson; Trina's lace-trimmed velvet miniskirts had been all the rage in the Canyon two years before, and, with her long blond hair streaming over her wide-shouldered thrift-store skunk coat, she was a hippie version of a 1940s movie star. And let's not forget Joni's kid-sister-like Estrella—she of the blues riffs and the savvy with elephants, who was often “sailing ships and climbing banyans”: there was adventure in that circus girl's bones!

Joni turned the three into her “Ladies of the Canyon,”
*
according a verse to each. The antiquated-sounding term that Joni coined gave a just-right handle to the now-flourishing style that she had helped establish.

On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man—and he was always coming out ahead, because he
was
a man. David was madly in love with Christine Hinton again; he elegized her as “Guinnevere” (though one chorus of the song had been written for Joni), and they'd stroll the beaches hand in hand, both of them as long-haired and nude as Lady Godiva. Still, he dominated her. And while there was no dominating Joni, there was this annoying fact: she had written all her songs and had produced her two (soon, three) albums, yet the
guys
were the headliners. Before long, she would muse aloud to a confidant: was she an artist—or a Crosby, Stills and Nash groupie?

As their live-in relationship went into its second year, Graham says, “Joni was very cognizant of the power of men on her life, and its trials and tribulations. Only in talking to communal friends, when we should have been talking to each other, did I find out that Joni thought I was going to demand of her what her grandmother's husband demanded of her grandmother.” Almost plaintively Graham insists: “There was no way I was going to ask Joni Mitchell to stop writing and just be a wife!”

However, looking back on that time, Joni has said, “Graham was a sweetheart” but he “needed a more traditional female. He loved me dearly…but he wanted a stay-at-home wife to raise his children.” (In support of Joni's concerns back then, Debbie Green, with whom Joni has been close for decades, makes the point that after Joni, “Graham was never with another creative woman.”) But, in all this after-the-fact categorization, a question is lost: Did Joni sense that Graham wanted her to give up her writing, recording, and performing? Or did she perceive the comfortable domesticity with Graham, in and of itself, as a threat to the edge and the hunger she needed to do her best work? That is more likely. “Women of Joan's generation raised the bar of how men should treat women and how women should treat themselves; they were the first to say, ‘I'm not wearin' this bra!' and ‘Go fetch your own tea!'” Graham concludes today, implying that their relationship may have been a casualty of that process.

In the early stages of Joni's grappling with this old lady vs. independent woman dilemma—in fact, at the peak of her boys' fame, September 30, 1969, the day that
Crosby, Stills and Nash
went gold—tragedy struck their circle. Christine Hinton got behind the wheel of David's VW bus to take her two cats to the veterinarian. As she manuevered onto the highway, one of the cats escaped the arms of her friend Barbara Langer, who was sitting in the passenger seat. The cat pounced on Christine, sending her into a collision with a school bus; Christine was killed. “David was completely crushed, and for days he could barely look at Barbara without seething. Christine's parents were there, but they had to wait on David to see how she would be buried,” says a friend.

“Want to go sailing?” David asked Graham. Christine had been cremated, and David wanted to toss her ashes into the ocean from the deck of the
Mayan.
“I had never been sailing in my life,” says Graham, “but I knew David was fragile and decided to stick close by him.” When David proposed flying to his boat in Fort Lauderdale and sailing to L.A., Graham stammered: “Hey, wait a second. Isn't that on the other side of this…
large
country?” Indeed, it was; a nine-week sail—through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, across the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific—was hatched. Joni boarded in Jamaica; she watched 1969 turn to 1970—everyone's first new decade as an adult—on the deck of the schooner. It was on this voyage that Joni first talked to Graham about breaking up, a decision put on hold while they were on the high seas but wrestled with for weeks thereafter.

Also aboard was Florida-based folksinger Bobby Ingram (who'd introduced David to Joni) and his wife—and a young unknown singer named Ronee Blakley. Ronee was a girl from Idaho who, on the strength of hearing Joan Baez's “Barbara Allen,” had bolted for a creative life in northern California. Ronee attended Mills College, then Stanford, became a political activist, had a romance with the university's radical student body president David Harris (who later married Ronee's hero Baez and was currently in jail for draft resistance), moved to New York, and was now relocating to L.A. As the
Mayan
cut through the volatile ocean and David searched for the right place to toss Christine's ashes, “Joan and I would ride on this little seat off the aft—it was like being on a roller coaster through a canyon of waves,” Ronee recalls. “The waves could be extraordinarily high; sometimes they would break on top of us, and we were all greased up with Bain de Soleil, so we'd slip and slide and have to hang on to the cables not to go overboard.”

The trip was like the group's song “Wooden Ships” come to life—hippie superstars huddled together, alone on the vast sea with their dreams and their body heat. A hired cook made what Ronee recalls as “grand feasts” as joints were passed, guitars were strummed, and the music that, many hundreds of miles away, was wallpapering U.S. FM radio tinkled, a cappella, over the inky swells beneath the starry heavens. “David was a great sailor, and Graham did the celestial navigation,” Ronee recalls. “The men took four-hour turns keeping watch all night, and they manned the sails; the women took care of the galley.” At one Caribbean dock the ship was impounded and searched stem to stern. But once it passed muster, peace was made, and David sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the island's suspicious-constables-turned-excited-autograph seekers.

Ronee got on David's nerves. The sound of her typing her memoirs so irritated him, he tossed her typewriter overboard; then she lost her copy of
Crime and Punishment
and it was found in the bilge, blocking the pipes. But it was that very urgently expressed literary streak in Ronee that would form the basis of her friendship with Joni, which was consolidated after they docked in L.A. “Joni's core was that of an artist, and I was trying to be an artist,” Ronee says. “I carried my weight in the friendship, but she was certainly way ahead of me. Whether we were meeting for dinner at Dan Tana's or running down to Palm Springs, or calling each other on the phone to play our songs, she was an artist, a pure artist: searching and open-minded and sensitive and vulnerable and tough and disciplined. Anything she did or felt went into her work.”

Ronee and Joni listened to Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday records together. They both found Nietzsche inspiring and would comb through
Thus Spake Zarathustra
for signifying phrases: Joni was struck by “Anything worth writing is worth writing in blood,” which had been her writing teacher Arthur Kratzmann's motto, and she was jolted by the passage where Nietzsche was “scathing,” as she'd put it, toward poets—calling them vain—but then talked about “a new breed of poet, the penitent of the spirit,” which was what Joni wanted to be. Joni taught Ronee how to draw, and Ronee, knowing Joni admired Van Gogh, bought her
Dear Theo,
Van Gogh's letters to his brother. Many of the lines the Dutch master had scribbled to his sibling had resonance for Joni. “Where there is convention there is mistrust”: that was the small-minded Canada she'd fled. “I want to go through the joys and sorrow of domestic life, in order to paint it from my own experience”: this validated her confessionalism. And “It sometimes happens that one becomes involuntarily depressed”: this was happening to her, and Graham was noticing it. Finally, “Parents and children must remain one”: she had violated this maxim.

Ladies of the Canyon
was released in March 1970 ( just as
Clouds
was winning the Grammy for Best Folk Performance), and it was shot through with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and “straight” moneyed men (whose offices bear their “name on the door on the thirty-third floor”), the inequity between a rock star's wealth and a street musician's poverty, the misguided destruction of “paradise” for the sake of money. Henry Lewy again engineered the spare album (with Joni actually in charge), which contained the title cut, and her two odes to Graham—“Willy” (but with the roles reversed: in the song, the woman is the needier partner) and the haunting “Blue Boy.” “Conversation” and “The Arrangement”—as literate as Sondheim, as so many of her songs seemed to be—both describe a sensitive girl's affair with a prosperous man who has a superficial wife. “For Free” puts a halo on the shabby “one-man band by the quick lunch stand” while Joni guiltily notes her musical fame. Joni's big hit from this album (only one of four Top 40 hits in her career), “Big Yellow Taxi,” was written during her and Graham's trip to Hawaii. “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot” was Joni at her Tin Pan Alley best. “Woodstock,” her lovely “Rainy Night House” for Leonard, and her tuneful “Morning Morgantown”—quaint Canada Joni—round out the album. The last cut is “The Circle Game,” finally recorded in her own voice.

But still she withheld “Little Green,” the song about her baby.

With this album, Warner Bros. finally understood young women's identification with Joni. They created a full-page
Rolling Stone
ad, in the form of a story—“Joni Mitchell's New Album Will Mean More to Some Than to Others”—about a hypothetical young woman, one “Amy Foster, twenty-three years old and quietly beautiful,” whose old man just took off with another chick. Amy is blue, and she's thinking of getting in her van and splitting. Listening to
Ladies of the Canyon,
Amy is consoled knowing “there was someone else, even another Canyon lady, who really knew” how she was feeling.

That
Rolling Stone
ad—with “Amy Foster” planning to drive to Oregon, alone—captured another new reality about young women: they were going on the road,
splitting,
taking off on (as the paperback jacket copy of Kerouac's
On the Road
put it six years earlier) “mind-expanding trips into emotion and sensation…[while] passionately searching…for themselves.” As Joni would soon sing, in “All I Want”: “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling,
traveling, TRAVELING
/ Looking for some-
thing,
what can it be?” The Marrakesh Express, which Graham had made famous, and the circuit of glamorously primitive rich-hippie enclaves—Ibiza, the middle-sized of the three Balearic Islands off the coast of Barcelona; Matala, Crete, the ancient port on Greece's Messara Bay; and tropical Goa, on India's western Konkan coastal belt—brimmed with long-skirted young Americans, traveling with girlfriends, with boyfriends, or alone. In this new form of travel, everyone went native because they already—naïvely—
felt
native.

For females, this meant getting lost in packed, mazelike souks, with angry rug merchants running after you because you'd accidentally bargained
too
successfully; watching (on acid) someone you'd just made love to break his neck jumping off the Formentera cliff during full moon; being the only English speaker, and in the minority of two-legged creatures, on a steamer on some body of water in the middle of nowhere; barricading the inside of your door in a hotel in Mauritania because the desk clerk, who was banging on it, assumed any solitary Western woman guest was a prostitute. None of this suddenly-typical fare was covered in Arthur Frommer's guidebook.

The ultimate adventure—nothing could make a girl feel more like Bonnie of
Bonnie and Clyde
—was to smuggle hash out of Afghanistan or Morocco, often by packing it in girdles and feigning pregnancy.
Rolling Stone
regularly devoted a two-page section, “The Dope Pages,” to such applauded hijinx, including the story of a young female graduate of UC Berkeley (initials: L.C.) who spent a full year muling hash all over the world as a “pregnant” traveler: flying from Pakistan to New York via wildly zigzagging routes that took her to Alaska, Denmark, Brazil, Portugal, and Luxembourg. Today she heads a division of one of the largest insurance companies in the country. She reflects on her youth: “The first thing I'd say is, I should have stayed away from that married junkie musician who used my innocence to make money. But after that, I'd have to admit that the adventure taught me skills—about functioning under stress, making split-second decisions, reading behavior, assessing risk, suppressing fear, and thinking outside the box—that have helped me in business and even helped me overcome two serious health crises. Plus, I got to star in my own movie (and, believe me, it
was
one).”