Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (55 page)

Released in May,
Welcome Home
was a memorial to Rick Evers. Family-album-style photos of Carole and Rick, with Molly and Levi, filled a four-page inset, and Carole wrote a eulogy in the liner notes. Rick, she wrote, “often stretched beyond what some of us could understand. He didn't always do ‘sensible' things. He often got angry and frustrated about things that many of us couldn't see.” But, she made clear, there was another facet. “He had more love to give than anyone I've ever known.” This side of Carole's troubled man was one her friends did not see, but then, love is as much a locked box of esoteric intimacy that dissolves when it meets air as listening to a song is.

Carole's friends assumed that this would be the end of the Idaho mountain men in her life. They were dead wrong.

Carole returned to Robie Creek, but amid the painful memories (and Rick's ashes), she knew she couldn't stay there. So she took Joy James up on her offer to see the former gold mining ghost town at Burgdorf Hot Springs. She, Molly, and Levi stayed in one of the tiny nineteenth-century log cabins near the large hot springs pool, surrounded by a meadow full of calving elks ringed by the tall pines of a national forest. “Carole had an epiphany there,” says Joy James. She wanted to “winter in”: to be snowbound in acerbic simplicity. This rite would be boot camp, meditation lodge, escape from her now-loathed L.A.—and, perhaps, since she may have felt her fame had exacerbated Rick's volatile frustration, penance. A barter was arranged: Carole could have a cabin in return for agreeing to watch the place when Joy was out—to check on guests and order helicopter rescue from the forest service in life-threatening situations. “Molly and Levi were so excited when Carole told them,” Joy recalls. “They said, ‘You mean we get to spend the whole winter making snowmen?!'”

A man Joy knew was crashing on her cabin floor during Carole's summer stay. His name was Rick Sorensen, but everyone called him Teepee Rick because he was a kind of survivalist. Teepee Rick was a big, strapping, rough-hewn thirty-two-year-old whose face and stringy long hair made people think he looked like Jesus. He was originally from the Chicago area and had taught school in Hailey (near Sun Valley), but his civilized ways were long gone. For seven years, he'd been living in a teepee in the mountains, surviving by what he killed. A bear he'd shot between the eyes became his tent rug; the buffalo he killed provided the meals he cooked over fire kindled in wood he chopped; even the elk hide of his fringed buckskins was procured through his old-fashioned muzzle loader. Teepee Rick hated the federal government and he hated the forest service. “He was an alpha male, a warrior, quite a dominating man,” says Joy—so much so, that she didn't like having sustained time with him (it always led to confrontation), but she'd let him crash on her cabin floor for these few days and hunt in the adjacent woods.

When Carole saw Teepee Rick outside Joy's window, she excitedly asked to meet him. Joy made the introductions, and, as she recalls: “It was just like a lightning bolt. Everyone else [in the cabin] wanted to stand back because it was so profound—it was electric.” Though no last names were exchanged, Teepee Rick may have known who she was—“Gossip travels in the backcountry air faster than by telephone,” Joy says, “but, trust me, he didn't care [that a famous woman was in the area] because he had a beautiful lady, named Chris, who he was living with. But there was just
such chemistry
between [him and Carole].”

A few hours later, everyone was in the hot pool and one by one they left to go back to their cabins. According to what Carole told Joy, as Carole stood to leave, Teepee Rick grabbed her ankle and—me-Tarzan-you-Jane-style—demanded, “Where are
you
going?”

And that was the beginning of what would be Carole's time with the man her friends would call Rick Two (Rick Evers being Rick One)—and her half-dozen years of seriously Going Native in the wilds of Idaho.

• • •

Welcome Home
was the first Carole King album that was not a chart hit—a huge comedown for her and the beginning of what some music historians would call her “lost years.” After spending much of the summer at Burgdorf, she embarked on a small East Coast concert tour, concentrating on her classic, loved hits—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “I Feel the Earth Move”—a reliable formula she would now come to favor. She seemed to be looking for support (“Miss King's gushing love for her fans—and their return of it—cloyed at times,” said
The New York Times
) and for buoyance (“and so did her consistently upbeat renditions of songs whose original recorded versions expressed…considerable sorrow,” the
Times
continued) to offset what a confidante during those years calls the “deep, deep depression” she was sinking into and would remain gripped by for several years.

Despite or between these East Coast concert dates, she had had a winter's supply of food and clothes moved up to Burgdorf; then, before the roads became impassible, she and the children settled into their cabin. Joy was surprised to see that Rick Sorensen had become, as she puts it, “part of the family.” If she'd known this combative man had been part of Carole's package, she might have thought twice about making the arrangement with Carole. As it turned out, Sorensen had broken up with his girlfriend Chris, who “took it very hard,” Joy says, “just crying and crying, riding through the meadow.” Joy adds: “Rick Sorensen is very hard on his women.”

With the (admittedly considerable) exception of her full-length mink coat, Carole wintered in at Burgdorf like all the more modest cabin dwellers. She used the outhouse. She bought two goats to eat her family's garbage, tying them to the common outdoor stanchion. “And she'd be down there milking the goats in thirty-degrees-below-zero weather at five in the morning,” says Joy, adding that “it got so cold that winter, your hair would freeze between getting out of the hot pool and walking back into your cabin.” A fire was all that kept Carole and the children warm inside, and a kerosene lamp lit the small room where Carole homeschooled Molly and Levi. She washed her dishes outside, from the hot water spout under the hot pool. Rick killed buffalo, of course, and Carole broke her vegetarian regimen by making buffalo stew (she also made “delicious” goat milk yogurt, says Joy). Sometimes, when four feet of snow fell overnight, people skied off their cabin roofs. In one letter that Cynthia Weil received, Carole apologized for her delayed reply: “It took me a while to write back because we were snowed in and I had to walk three miles in snow shoes to mail this to you.” In the same way that Joni Anderson's secret pregnant-and-penniless travails were more dramatic than Bobby Zimmerman's weeks reading old newspapers in the New York Public Library, Carole King's quiet embrace of the rugged West was more authentic than, say, the Hollywood Hills–dwelling Eagles' photo shoots amid parched coyote skulls.

Joy had problems with Teepee Rick. He sawed through the historic cabin wall so he could visually track the elk herd; he barked at the snowboarders. The worst confrontation was when he stormed over to the hot pool, brandishing a gun, angry that nonresidents (a group of
elderly
folks Joy had invited in) were enjoying the waters. (“But he had the good sense to apologize,” Joy says.) Carole, Joy could see, was growing “very in love with Rick,” but toward winter's end Joy was annoyed at this man who, as she viewed him, was “a warrior and he always needs to have a war.” She angrily skied out of Burgdorf, leaving the cabins for Carole to manage.

After the roads had thawed out enough, Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, and Brooks and Marilyn Arthur arrived for a visit. The reunion was like a sitcom, with the New York–to–L.A. former Brill Building–ites stifling gulps at Carole's new life. (They had missed the Rick One chapter so they weren't prepared.) “The outhouse!” exclaims Cynthia. “Rick didn't like us. He was not happy that we were there; he was not very friendly; he really wanted to cut her off from some of her old friends.” Brooks had brought $200 worth of nuts and dried fruit, but in no time his stash was gone; the others kept dipping into it. There was something about the fresh-killed buffalo meat Carole made for dinner that was less than irresistible. Reboarding the plane for L.A., the group thought: Now,
that
was an adventure…

Carole released three albums in the next two years—
Touch the Sky
in 1979 and
Pearls
in 1980, both on Capitol, and
One to One
in 1981, on Atlantic. By this time, Capitol had dropped her. Only
Pearls,
which was comprised of her and Gerry's classics, gained any traction; Carole's rendition of “One Fine Day” was a hit single. But between the album-making forays to big or medium-sized cities, Carole's life was mostly enmeshed with Rick in the deep forest. In 1981 she purchased a former dude ranch and mining camp, the Robinson Bar Ranch, on 118 acres of forest in Custer County, Idaho. Sixteen miles from the tiny town of Stanley, it afforded the kind of solitude Rick liked. Carole milked her cows and Rick went out shooting, and his pugnacious distrust of the government and outsiders eventually led them both—she as much as he—into a protracted, volatile legal battle with the county and the U.S. Forest Service, as well as the locals, over their locking the gate to a road, long taken for public, that ran through their property.

This was a new Carole: one who accused a forest service officer of shoving her twice and purposely turning off the electricity when she and Rick were searching for land deeds in the government office files, and one who threatened to send the forest service (when they denied the use of her land for grazing) cow dung to prove that she and Rick were running a livestock operation. Joy had said that Teepee Rick was a warrior always looking for a war. Well, he had found one, and Carole joined him in it, applying the same determination she'd used to get the cellos onto the Shirelles track to fighting for her property and privacy rights. A forest service officer remarked, during the long battle: “With Carole it's all or nothing…She can't take no for an answer. She's a strong-willed person and will push and shove for her beliefs, come hell or high water.” Danny Kortchmar (now his friend's de facto son-in-law through his relationship with Louise) was confused.
Why
was Carole packing a .44 automatic?
Why
was she so up in arms about some road? Obliquely referring to this new attitude, Lou Adler has said, “Carole has gone through a lot of changes, a lot of it depending on who the man in her life was.” Carole wrote a song called “Golden Man” for Rick Sorensen, praising him for teaching her the “pain” of the earth. In its emotional, torch-singer-like long cadences, she calls him “
son,
lover, brother, father, and friend.” The lyrics are as exceedingly romantic as her songs for Rick Evers had been. Toward the end of the summer in 1982, in a sunrise ceremony in their mountains, Carole King made Rick Sorensen her fourth husband. He was identified in the local papers as the “foreman” on her ranch. (Later, in rare articles, he was referred to as “her husband, rancher Richard Sorensen,” the big-city media seemingly assuming that Carole had become the trophy wife of some wealthy landowner.)

Carole called a local radio station to announce her marriage to Rick while they were at a government office, filing papers in their battle with the county. The statement she gave was not what you'd expect from a woman announcing a marriage. It was wounded and defensive, reflecting the rancor building up against her in the community—and perhaps locals' whispers about whether Rick Evers's death had been an accident, a suicide, or foul play: “My music and my life shine like a beacon in the forest of lies and the sea of rumors.” In this new strand of her life tapestry, Carole—angrily hiding from the overwhelming and unsought fame for which the critics seemed to have punished her, and feeling, Roy Reynolds says, “deep hurt”—stripped her life down until it was as dark and pure as the woods. She now answered to “Carole Sorensen,” and she would soon express, to the rare interviewer who found her, both the triumph and wound-licking comfort that this new land and identity was giving her: “When I first moved here I used to be afraid of getting away from my house and going up into the woods, where all the boogie creatures were going to get me. Now I realize the boogie creatures are in civilization, and you're perfectly safe in the woods.”

“We love you, Carole!” “Sing ‘Up on the Roof!'” “You've got a friend, Carole!” those 70,000 fans had screamed at Central Park in 1973. When she returned home in 1984, the bemused headline of Stephen Holden's
New York Times
review relayed the irony: “Back for a Night at Town Hall: Carole King of Idaho.”

1972–1982

Joni has said that her post-
Blue
months alone in her house in British Columbia, where she repaired to write the songs for
For the Roses,
were a retreat from “severe depression” and, as her second husband, Larry Klein, puts it, “her existential grief” about the baby. She armed herself with her bible
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
and more. “Before leaving L.A.,” she has said, “I bought out all the psychology and philosophy departments of two major bookstores. But, ultimately, those books didn't help. I sat there in the bush, throwing those books at the wall, saying, ‘Bullshit! Bullshit!'” Then the cure came magically, naturally, and spontaneously:

That sure makes a great story. If only it were so simple.

At the very beginning of 1972 Joni left Canada to embark on a concert tour, making a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall, playing the Midwest, England, and returning to L.A. to record
For the Roses,
as well as to perform at McGovern rallies.
For the Roses
would be her first album on her friend (and her manager Elliot Roberts's business partner) David Geffen's new label, Asylum. Geffen, who'd started out as a mailroom boy like Elliot had, was now a wealthy young man. He bought Julie Andrews's house on Copley Drive, a manicured wedge of Beverly Hills near Bel Air, and asked Joni (who'd been subletting her Lookout Mountain house for a pittance to friend Ron Stone) to be his roommate.

Joni consented. Yes, she and David had had their art-vs.-commerce differences. She'd written what she called her only “blatantly commercial” song, “You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio,” to placate David's desire for her to have a hit on
For the Roses.
(Her instincts, and his implicit goading, proved correct: with it, she reached #25 on
Billboard
.) But moving in with him didn't mean she'd have to stop playing the superior, aggrieved creator to his commercial kingpin. Beneath their differences, she
liked
David. She wrote a song, “Free Man in Paris,” in his honor. In it, a pressured executive who'd been “stoking the star-maker machinery” goes to Paris to feel—that unlikely first adjective had an elegant flightiness—“unfettered and alive.”

On her early-1972 tour, Joni's opening act was someone whose debut album David was about to release: Jackson Browne.

The son of a journalist father and teacher mother, Jackson (who'd dispensed with his first name, Clyde, just as Joni had ditched Roberta) had run in the same circles as Joni in California. But originally there'd been a glamour and status disparity. When she was the girl among the boys—leaving David Crosby for Graham Nash—teenage Jackson and his friend Ned Doheny were essentially “Crosby, Stills and Nash
groupies,
” says a woman on the scene. Jackson was disconcertingly fair-faced, teen-actor handsome, with chiseled features and a credulous, androgynous prettiness. But despite his time in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, he'd been less a performer than a writer—and a good one. David Crosby loved his songs. Jac Holzman had given him a publishing contract, and, of course, Tom Rush had recorded a song of his on his
Circle Game.
Most recently, from a rented house in rundown Silver Lake, Jackson had worked hard to craft a body of signature pieces with which to launch himself as an artist. Sending a glossy headshot (along with an almost obsequious letter) to Geffen, who was not yet “out” but
was
gay, hadn't hurt. Jackson Browne was almost too pretty to be a rock star, but now, even at a mere twenty-three, he was, by the day's standards, a seasoned songwriter, and that prettiness helped rather than hurt.

Jackson was a romantic; “I got my heart crushed about eight times in a row. It would happen every two years or so,” he said in the early 1970s. As a barely-eighteen-year-old, he'd fallen for Nico, the stunning, decadent queen of the Max's Kansas City night, who, he would complain, seven years later, “
used
me, man; she fucked me around!” He'd had a romance with a very opposite kind of woman, Laura Nyro—musically brilliant, but zaftig, reclusive, socially insecure, and easily wounded. Most recently, he'd been in love with Salli Sachse, the San Diego–raised beach movie actress who'd been part of Peter Tork's “artistic collective” and a close friend of David Crosby's lady, Christine Hinton. Beautiful, long-haired Salli exuded an air of sorrow; she'd weathered not just Christine's sudden death, but earlier that of her husband, Peter Sachse, who had perished in a stunt-plane crash. As Browne wrote of her, in his song “Something Fine,” Salli “took good care” of him during their love affair in London before she hit the road, as girls, of course, were wont to do, for Morocco.

Jackson Browne
was released in early 1972. The album's cover showed the artist in a faux-antique tinted picture, his name semicircling the photo in Old West typeface. Like James Taylor on his debut album, Browne evoked an earlier era with his piercing-eyed, Civil War poster–worthy countenance. “Jackson was a West Coast version of James; James is an East Coast version of Jackson” is how Russ Kunkel characterizes them. Indeed, if James's songs exuded Carolina and the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, it was the car culture anomie of his native Orange County that surged through Browne's songs, which nonetheless attained a stirring eloquence that was hinted at in their beseeching, quasi-biblical titles (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Rock Me on the Water”). His huge, Springsteen-like hit “Running on Empty” and his coauthorship, with Glenn Frey, of the Eagles' megahit “Take It Easy,” which emblemized the male mid-1970s, were more literal evocations of Browne's provenance. In early 1972 Bud Scoppa in
Rolling Stone
called
Jackson Browne
that “rare album sufficient to place a new performer among the first rank of…artists.”

Still, during the very first dates of Joni's tour, the local reviewers, who didn't know of Jackson's album, dismissed him. (The
Detroit News,
while generally praising Joni, called Jackson's performance “inexcusable.”) By the time they got to England, Joni was still the “high priestess,” as one British critic put it, but Jackson was now viewed as the intriguing comer, since his infectiously rocking “Doctor My Eyes” had become a major U.S. hit. When Jackson and Joni duetted on “The Circle Game,” fans saw a chemistry between them. By the end of the tour, Jackson was a full-fledged headliner and “Joni and Jackson were together,” Danny Kortchmar recalls. (That fact probably made it easier for her to be in James's company, now that James was virtually engaged to Carly.) “Jackson and I are in love” is how Joni put it to her old flame Roy Blumenfeld when he visited L.A.

Jackson had the same twinness with Joni that James Taylor had exuded two years earlier. Both were beautiful, high-cheekboned WASPs who wrote angst-laden songs. They had bits of background in common: both their mothers had been teachers, and Jackson's maternal grandparents, like Joni's paternal ones, were Norwegian immigrants to midwestern North America. Ultimately, though, none of this mattered. “She just fell for him,” says a confidante.

• • •

For the Roses
was released in the fall of 1972, and the reviews were ecstatic. Of the album whose chord progressions would be called “mind-boggling,”
The New York Times
raved, “Each of Mitchell's songs…is a gem glistening with her elegant way with language, her pointed splashes of irony and her perfect shaping of images.” The
Times
articulated what her fans had come to realize [emphasis added]: “
Never does Mitchell voice a thought or feeling commonly.
She's a songwriter of genius who can't help but make us feel we are not alone.” Stephen Davis of
Rolling Stone
operatically wrote, “Love's tension is Joni Mitchell's medium—she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity”; he went on to praise her “gorgeous piano lin[es]” and, respectfully using the new feminist-speak, her “large dose of Woman Truth.” Less obsequiously (Ellen Willis was his girlfriend; he must have felt politically secure),
The Village Voice
's Robert Christgau noted, “Sometimes her complaints about the men who have failed her sound petulant, but the appearance of petulance is one of the prices of liberation.”

Though she was mainly living at Geffen's, by the end of 1972 Joni also rented an apartment in West Hollywood, on one of those sharply hilly streets between Santa Monica and Sunset that shoot into the Hollywood Hills. Things were not going well between her and Jackson. “It was a high-strung relationship,” says a confidante. Everyone in their crowd was “doing so much cocaine at the time,” and “Joni thrives on conflict, and not many guys can take that.” (“I'm a confronter by nature,” she's admitted.) One night they had a fight at the Sunset Strip club, the Roxy. Her friend recalls: “Joni said Jackson had dissed her onstage and she was walking upstairs and he was walking down.” A verbal argument, she claimed, led to Jackson hitting her, and she ran out into the street without her shoes. “This was the first time a man ever hit Joni.” (People who know Jackson Browne say he is not a violent man.)

Nevertheless, Joni remained in love with Jackson. Newly lionized, handsomer now that time had slightly lined his baby face, well placed in the Troubadour-Canyon elite (“
Everybody
loved him,” Joni's friend remembers her feeling), six years younger than she: the power was shifting, and all her worshipful reviews wouldn't change that. When she first came to the Canyon, she'd been the awe-inspiring queen. Now, the gravity of sexism (or reality) had pulled her down a notch.
He
had the advantage.

One night at the Troubadour bar Jackson Browne saw a beautiful young blonde being screamed at by her boyfriend. Browne interceded in her defense (“I was doing my very best Bogart” is how he put it, in his “Ready or Not”), and the boyfriend threw a punch at Browne. Browne's gallantry was rewarded; he went home with the damsel in distress, a Southern California girl who, with her mother's booking and chaperoning assistance, had recently been a successful model in Europe. Her name was Phyllis Major.

Jackson's attention to Phyllis Major felt, to Joni, like “a great loss and a great mind-fuck,” says her confidante. One night Joni was at her apartment on that hilly street, expecting Jackson to come over. He didn't show up.

What happened next Joni has described to several people as her “suicide attempt.” One confidante says she said she “took pills. She cut herself up and threw herself against a wall and got completely bloodied—glass broke. She vomited up the pills.” According to one confidante, David Geffen came to her rescue and got her medical help. Joni wrote a song, “Car on a Hill,” about that evening. The narrator worries because her lover is an hour late, but rejection, not catastrophe, is what she really fears is the reason the car is not—as she tensely puts it—“
CLIMB
-ing /
CLIMB
-ing / climbing the
hill.
”

After the incident, Joni got a recommendation from David Geffen. “She went to a ‘think tank' for therapists” in a residential setting, the confidante says, “and the head guy said to pick the [therapist] you want to work with.” Joni wrote “Trouble Child” about this experience. In the song, whose airy, hazy melody and long pull on every fourteenth beat mimic the effect of sedation, she writes of being “up in a sterilized room,” rendered “weak” and “spacey.” She refers to her dogged depression, which has kept her in torpor and which rules out her ability to “give love,” even though she knows she “need[s] it.” The indignity of psychiatric intervention, for a strong, proud person like Joni, snaps through the lyrics; no wonder she's called these songs of
Blue, For the Roses,
and
Court and Spark,
her next album, “scrapings of my soul.” (Still, many critics didn't know how autobiographically she was speaking.
Rolling Stone
's Jon Landau, for example, would catch the “tragic” story being told in “Trouble Child,” but he assumed its “infinite compassion” was trained on someone else.)

During this same postbreakdown moment, she wrote “People's Parties”—complex, its lyrics “through-composed,” like many of
Blue
's songs—to describe the acute self-consciousness she had still not overcome. Now the parties weren't hang-loose Canyon gatherings but Hollywood bashes that she attended with the likes of Beatty, whom she'd unwittingly shared with Carly. Some of her gaffes at these parties were funny, at least in retrospect. Joni went with Beatty to Hugh Hefner's one night and slipped off her clothes to skinny-dip in a pool on what
seemed
to be a totally deserted part of the estate, only to find herself stuck, in the water,
nude,
while the entire party moved poolside. In her telling, she bolted from the water, dressed, got in her car to drive off, only to run out of gas. The experience left her mortified. But more often she was the deft observer at such fetes. As she'd limned the Ibiza party on the red-dirt road, she dissected the stylish people with “passport smiles…giving to get something.”