Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (43 page)

When, in the last week of July, James took a break from the tour to attend Mariposa, Joni was there, too, and his charisma and pain found its mate in hers.

• • •

Shortly after Mariposa, in August, Joni flew to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where James was filming
Two-Lane Blacktop.
He'd been calling Toni Stern “Mama” when he'd gotten the role; now Joni was his old lady. On the set Joni knitted him a sweater vest, which he took to wearing constantly. He clearly seemed in love with Joni, Susan Braudy says, but later Joni would tell three confidantes that, as one puts it, “he was always judging her harshly; it was almost intimidating.” And, as another says, “James could be cruel; he had a dark side—he could go from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll.” At a nearby Hopi reservation, Joni bought a skirt made by tribal women. James called it ugly. “It was James acting like her mother: ‘How could you wear that?!'” this second friend says. “Joni said he was very critical of her
all the time
—and she couldn't take it.” “Today,” the third friend says, “what she remembers is all the times James chastised her.” But “James
really
loved Joni,” Peter Asher recalls of this period.

Joni seems to have written “This Flight Tonight” about that time in New Mexico. Her “gentle and sweet” lover hurts her with “that look, so critical,” but she regrets leaving almost as soon as the plane takes off. She replays a tender moment of their watching a star in the sky between the movie set trailers and wants the pilot to “turn this crazy bird around” so she can return to him. Her confusion and vulnerability suggest depression, and now she understands its source: the relinquishment of the baby. As she later put it, “Soon after I'd given up my daughter for adoption, I had a house and a car and I had the means, and I'd become a public figure; the combination of those situations did not sit well. So…I began to go inside, and question who I was. And out of that [the songs of]
Blue
evolved.”

Joni joined James for a couple of months in England at the end of the summer. Peter Asher lived with them in a London flat. “I have a distinct memory,” Peter says, “of listening to Joni play ‘Blue,' which she'd just composed, on the piano.” Asher thought the song (which
Rolling Stone
's Timothy Crouse would call “beautiful[ly] mysterious and unresolved”) was extraordinary. (Its references to a drug addict's “needles” and Joni's proffering a seashell to her lover—John Fischbach remembers Joni giving a seashell to James one evening in L.A.—make it fairly clear that “Blue” is about James.) Joni also played her newly composed “A Case of You”
*
on the dulcimer—“I thought it was just a masterpiece,” Peter Asher says.

While in England, during which Joni performed at the raucous Isle of Wight festival (and skillfully calmed the obstreperous crowd), Joni wrote a letter to Cary Raditz, who was still in California, asking him to join her and James. “She said, ‘I hope you're not offended, but I'm with James and I wanted you to be here and meet him,'” Cary recalls. Cary already understood that their Matala romance had been downgraded by Joni to “some sort of friendship relationship”…so “I wasn't jealous.” The “red red rogue,” about whom Joni had already written two songs, good-naturedly adjusted from lover to, as he puts it, “sidekick and third wheel.” Cary flew to England; he, James, and Joni went “to music industry parties, eating, drinking well, riding in limousines.”

Joni and James's mutual infatuation was evanescent when they performed at London's Royal Albert Hall on October 28. James introduced Joni's songs like a prep school boy awed by his slightly older, more accomplished girlfriend. He dutifully listed the places (“partially in Paris and partially in Ibiza”) where she'd written “California.” Joni giggled and interrupted James's patter with private-joke puns on his song titles and past venues (“I'm a night owl, baby…”). She also proudly talked of her weeks among fellow “freaks” on Matala and referred affectionately to Cary, who was standing backstage, as “my friend from Matala, from London, and Los Angeles—and North Carolina.” As Joni and James tuned their guitars, their talk seemed coyly double-entendred (“Ready when you are, James,” she said; “I
know
…,” he answered, to laughter from the audience). And when he thanked the cheering audience by saying, “You're too kind,” he drove home the source of his appeal: those upper-crust manners juxtaposed with the brooding-junkie pathos. They performed a heavenly duet on “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which James was said to have written for Joni.

Joni, James, and Cary flew back to the States in November and lived together at New York's funky Albert Hotel and the glitzy Plaza Hotel. On Joni's twenty-seventh birthday—November 7—James was playing a concert in Princeton, New Jersey, when he suddenly laid his guitar on his lap and started to sing, “Happy birthday, dear Joni…” “Is it her
birthday
?” several girls screamed. After James smiled, the audience called out: “Bring out Joni!” Joni came onstage, to the crowd's wild applause. According to Susan Braudy's
New York Times Magazine
article, “The crowd's shouts and applause have reached a manic pitch. As [Joni] sits down…James breaks out into…‘You Can Close Your Eyes'” and “a few voices from the audience interrupt him…and the whole audience is singing ‘Happy Birthday' to Joni Mitchell. After it's over, both James and Joni are nodding their heads in the same polite, distant way, and someone in the crowd loses her control completely, screaming, ‘Oh, God, I just love you two together! You're beautiful!'”

• • •

By now Carole had cut a solo album. John Fischbach and his friend Andrew Berliner had built their studio, Crystal Sound, and, says John, “I said to Carole: Why don't you be a singer-songwriter like James?” John's suggestion, of course, was something Carole had already been discussing with Lou Adler; it was inevitable that there would be a Carole King album. Carole wanted to record it at John's studio and give John his first record producer credit (he went on to produce Stevie Wonder) because she felt so close to him and Stephanie. They were there for her when she got emotional over Charlie—John, like others, saw how confident Carole was about her talent yet how vulnerable she was about men. More, John had recently taken to rushing to Carole's house to protect her against Gerry.

Gerry had started appearing at Carole's doorstep, literally “frothing at the mouth,” says John. “He wanted his family back. It scared the hell out of everybody, especially his kids. Everyone was afraid of Gerry. Not that he was doing it on purpose—he could be the sweetest guy in the world when he was on his medication, but when he was off it, it was another story.” One of Gerry's doorstep visits occurred when Carole was on the phone with Jerry Wexler. Wexler heard, through the wire, Carole trying to placate the emotional Gerry.

Gerry's acting out seemed a desperate attempt to reverse what, even over two years in, he'd had trouble grasping: that the woman he'd always taken for granted had moved on. Jack Keller had predicted as much. “Gerry didn't treasure Carole and over the years he lost her” is how Keller put it. “When you lose somebody who was madly in love with you, you're screwed. Gerry was totally destroyed when Carole left him.”

The sessions at Crystal Sound in March and April 1970 were a family affair. Carole did the arrangements, vocals, and piano; James was on acoustic guitar and singing backup; Danny on electric and acoustic guitar; Charlie on Fender bass; Joel on drums, percussion, and vibes; Ralph on organ; Abigail singing backup vocals; and John on Moog synthesizer. Gerry did the sound mixing. Carole forthrightly named the album
Writer.
On the cover she is standing against bare winter trees, with her long hair straightened. She's wearing a form-fitting, bold-patterned granny dress (which Stephanie had made). Unsmiling, she looks uncomfortable; she hasn't yet brought out that piece of herself the public will take to its heart.

Most of the songs were Carole-Gerry compositions, and their eclecticism shows the now-divorced couple continuing trying to retool their Brill Building magic for an FM-playlist age. There are outright rockers like “I Can't Hear You No More” and the album-opening “Spaceship Races.” Critics would later note that Carole sounds like Grace Slick in this song, and the aria-rocker melody does recall the Airplane's “Volunteers,” but Gerry's opening lyrics are—rare for him—tired and strained. By contrast, the beautiful “No Easy Way Down” is an example of the best of classic-Carole-and-Gerry meeting the new era: the song is gospel-driven—
Rolling Stone
's Jon Landau would call it a “masterpiece of a pop ballad with almost symphonic crescendos”—and its message about the inability to ease emotional collapse seems to reflect Gerry's own breakdown. “Goin' Back,” with its Byrds-friendly bridge, essentially describes, through her ex-husband's words, Carole's last three years, morphing from a mah-jongg-playing, tract-house-dwelling Cadillac driver to a jam-session-ing, India-trekking Canyon chick. “Eventually” is Carole and Gerry's hymn for Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The album closes with Carole singing “Up on the Roof.” While the other tracks have a garage band feel, in this one alone Carole and her resounding, confident piano stand at the center of the universe, pointing to the approach she will next take.

Writer
was almost as much of a failure as
Now That Everything's Been Said
had been.

Around the middle of the summer of 1970, during an “off” time with Charlie, Carole embarked upon a new romance with a young man named Tom Neuwirth. Neuwirth was a film buff and eventually became a cinematographer on TV shows and feature films. “He was sexy, handsome, serious but fun,” says a friend. “If they had stayed together, Tom would have married her.” The romance may have been the shot of competition Charlie Larkey needed to realize that if he didn't act quickly he could lose the woman who was in love with him.

Charlie asked Carole to be his wife. She happily accepted.

Carole married Charlie on a hot September day in a simple, homey ceremony in her Wonderland backyard. Charlie's parents, sister, and brother flew out, as did Sidney and the remarried Genie. A rabbi officiated; Louise and Sherry were the flower girls; Connie O'Brien brought food she had cooked. Carole wore the simple, white empire-line dress that Stephanie sewed for her; Carole put in the zipper. “The wedding was hippie-dippy, just like we were,” says Abigail, who came with Danny—broken up from Michael and Joyce respectively, they were now a couple. To friends of Carole, the day was a triumph. As one puts it, “Carole loved Charlie deeply, and in time he came to love her deeply, too.”

A few months after getting married, Carole and Charlie moved up the road, to a larger house with story-book turrets on Appian Way. She placed her grand piano in its large white living room. Charlie made a decision that wisely gave his career independence from Carole's, at least for a while. He decided “if bass playing was going to be my career, I better know more about it.” On the Fender bass, he was, as his band mates noted, an insecure player; “he'd play his parts but he never really
owned
them,” one says. ( James once introduced him onstage as “the Electric Elephant.”) He wanted to learn the upright bass, so he arranged for private lessons in classical bass with Milton Kestenbaum, who played with the L.A. Chamber Orchestra.

The James Taylor, Carole King, and Jo Mama tour resumed. “Carole and Charlie cuddled a lot, which was sweet,” remembers Ralph. “I think every time Carole nuzzled up to Charlie and every time she deferred to Charlie,” Abigail says, “she felt a little less in charge and a little more womanly, as if she hadn't lost her youth, running her little Carole King empire.” On the bus and on the road the group was a bouquet of personalities. Charlie was low-key, guarded, and serious. Joel, nicknamed Bishop, was everyone's bebop older brother: charismatic, cool, a brilliant fount of music and film trivia—and self-destructive. Joel would remain on heroin even when James swore off. Connie was warm and compassionate; the women felt sorry for her, being married to an addict. As for Kootch: “Danny was probably the most outspoken person in that crew—a born leader and almost as much a driving force as Carole and James,” says Ralph. “Danny was always a little sharper than the rest of us; I looked up to him,” says Charlie. Abigail was a good match for Danny.
*
“She had a big personality, too,” says Ralph. “The two of them were tough, savvy, volatile, highly opinionated New Yorkers. Danny, Joel, James, and Abigail were very witty. Sometimes the repartee was hysterical.” Ralph hung back, playing cool to hide his insecurities. Stephanie, with her art-school chops and cooking and sewing skill, was the resident hippie Martha Stewart.

As for James—“James was
magical,
” says Abigail. “Stephanie and Abigail formed a picket fence around James; I think Joni was very intimidated by all these women circling around him,” says Betsy Asher, who had stopped regarding her husband's find as a freeloading younger brother and now understood James's “romantic and mysterious and unavailable, deep, brooding” charisma.

At Carole's house—where Willa Mae ran the show and was deferred to and loved by one and all—Carole, Stephanie, and Abigail had a chicks' sewing circle and made Nehru shirts for Charlie, John, and Danny. On the road, Carole and Abigail whiled away their time with needlepoint. When any of the guys was giving any of the girls a hard time, they'd have feminist bitch sessions. “We'd make sure Sherry and Louise were asleep and couldn't hear us and then we'd be: ‘Fuck
this
shit…!'” says Stephanie. There were no secrets. “You couldn't beat the closeness that comes from being on the road together—we were a reinvented family,” says Abigail.