Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (67 page)

Finally, in 1996, Kilauren received her registered letter, revealing the Non-Identifying Background Information. She and Ted called Tim and he was read these words (as Tim distinctly remembers them): “Your mother was from a small town in Saskatchewan and left for the U.S. to pursue her career as a folksinger.”

And this is where serendipity came in. As Tim was hearing Kilauren's excited recitation through the phone wire, he repeated the words aloud. His girlfriend, Annie Mandlsohn, was in the room. Annie, a photographer, was older than Tim. Eight years earlier she had been a graduate student at Canada's York University, getting an advanced degree in Canadian/Native relations. She had befriended another, older graduate student, a poet and member of the Ojibway tribe, Duke Redbird. The two had become confidants, and they talked about the 1960s, an era that Annie romanticized and Duke had lived through. In the course of their talking, Duke broke a secret he'd been keeping for twenty-four years. In 1964, he'd lived in a tumbledown rooming house in Yorkville, Toronto's bohemian quarter. His floormate there was a blond girl from Saskatchewan, the future Joni Mitchell. The secret part of the story was this: Joni had been
pregnant
at the time; she was going to give up her baby once it was born. This bit of gossip was something Annie had never shared with Tim. As soon as Tim repeated the words of Kilauren's letter, Annie grabbed the phone and informed Kilauren, “Your mother is Joni Mitchell!” Tim recalls, “Kilauren said, ‘No way!' She was speechless.”

Annie took control. Kilauren had to go to see Duke Redbird and ask him what season he was in the rooming house with the pregnant Joni. Kilauren was born on February 19, 1965. If Duke said summer, then Kilauren couldn't be Joni's daughter. But if he said that Joni had been pregnant in early winter…

Kilauren tracked Duke down at the Coloured Stone, the Toronto restaurant he owned. Redbird recalls, “Her attitude wasn't like she'd won the lottery. She wanted to connect with her birth mother, no matter
who
her mother was.” Duke answered her question: it was just before Christmas 1964 that he'd known the pregnant Joni.

Kilauren now had her answer. Duke suggested Kilauren try to contact Joni through Canada's Society for Composers and Performers.

• • •

By now, Joni's patch of being ignored had ended. Her 1994
Turbulent Indigo
—the startlingly husky voice refracting her tart, mature complexity—was touted as one of her finest albums in years. (Tim White, now the editor of
Billboard,
called it “one of the most commanding statements of a peerless, seventeen-album career” and praised its “rare blend of romantic faith and fervid realism.”) Joni used a self-portrait depicting herself as her hero Vincent Van Gogh as the cover. Her characters had ripened to a
noir
sheen. The female recluse in “Sunny Sunday” (who could be “Marcie,” all these life-dented years later) “dodges the light like Blanche DuBois” and fruitlessly shoots at lampposts like some menopausal Quixote. Situations of former earnestness now provoke a cranky realism: “Sex Kills” has Joni driving a car just as “Refuge of the Roads” did, but
this
Joni's not the reforming narcissist awed at her humble place in the universe; she's a pissed-off social critic deriding “all these jackoffs at the office.” Long-brewed hurts make their way into the album; “Not to Blame” excoriates Jackson Browne, but nobody knows why; and, in the album's most transcendent piece—and one of Joni's finest songs ever—the cruelty and humiliation she suffered as an unwed mother is transmuted into a searing imagining of life in an historically real Irish home for fallen women called the Magdalene Laundries.

By now, Joni's having given up a baby was a whisper of a rumor bobbing under the surface of public acknowledgment. She had confessed (in a 1990 gotcha! exchange with a London radio interviewer) that she'd had a baby; that fleeting broadcast moment on the faraway shore had not made it to North America, except to provide the basis for a mostly unnoticed, small April 1996
Globe
story in which a supposed art school friend talked about Joni having had a baby and having put it up for adoption. The brief article in the sleazy tabloid was rife with errors, saying, for example, that Joni was nineteen, not twenty-one, when she gave birth.

For years Joni had kept the possibility of the search for her baby in a kind of locked box. She still had not told her parents, and with every year the secret seemed more trouble to uncover. Larry Klein, Don Alias, and John Guerin all remembered her having fleeting pangs to try to “find my kid,” but they were just that—fleeting. However, 1996 was an affirming year for Joni. Late-in-coming awards started flooding in all at once:
Turbulent Indigo
was the surprise winner of Best Pop Album Grammy (Joni's unexpected selection may have been partly compensation for the Grammys she
should
have won years earlier), and she won
Billboard
's newly instituted and very prestigious Century Award. In addition, Stephen Holden publicly criticized the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's “antifeminine” bias for their failure to honor Joni (she was inducted the next year, as well as into the Songwriters Hall of Fame); the National Academy of Songwriters and the National Songwriters Association each awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award; BMI gave her their one-million-performance certificate for “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock,” their two-million-performance certificate for “Help Me,” and their four-million-performance certificate for “Both Sides, Now”; and she won Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award. There were perks to being fifty-three years old.

In addition, her personal life had come satisfyingly full circle. She was now in a relationship with Canadian poet Donald Freed, a Métis (half Indian) who traveled around Canada's remote areas, teaching children to turn their lives into poetry. Her friends approved; one called Freed “a one-hundred-percent great person, with boundaries; a really together man.” The fact that he and Joni had been introduced by Myrtle, and that the two had grown up on the opposite shores of the Saskatchewan River, made the union seem like a destined homecoming. Joni wrote a song with an explicitly midlife-female title (“Face Lift”) about Freed; ringing through it is her abiding tussle with Myrtle's unflinching propriety. (Joni's Myrtle character angrily demands, “Did you come home to disgrace us?” when Joni and Freed stay at a local hotel together; Joni cries, “I'm middle-aged, Mama!…Why is this joy not allowed?”)

Like many women her age, who'd by now hacked at the quandary of love vs. freedom from a dozen different angles, Joni found the long-distance relationship a good solution. When the now happily married John Guerin asked, “But, Joan, isn't that guy
in Canada
all the time?” she answered, “Yes, but it's
better
that way. I see him when it's cool.” After all that emotion spilled for so long, by the mid-1990s “I don't think Joni could
be
head-over-heels anymore,” John surmised. Then Joni saw Don Alias for the first time since their abrupt breakup a decade and a half earlier. Alias dropped by her house one day, hoping to rekindle the romance. “We danced around a little bit, happy to see each other, and then Joni said, with a smile, ‘I thought you were mad at me'”—for giving him twenty-four hours to get his possessions out of Varick Street—“and I wanted to say, ‘You're goddamn
right
I'm mad at you!' but I said, ‘No, I'm not mad.'” Alias asked Joni if she was seeing anyone; she mentioned, as Alias came away thinking of him, “the cowboy,” Freed. They parted, friends. As for other exes: Graham Nash sent Joni flowers every year on her birthday, and James Taylor sang her praises (“He seemed to look back on their relationship more positively than she did,” says a friend). With Jackson Browne she remained angry.

• • •

Joni's decision to search for her daughter had started in 1996, as a result of that early tabloid article. The foster mother who had cared for Joni's baby for seven months contacted Joni's managers, sending photos. When Joni received the pictures, she reportedly said, “My daughter…my baby…my child,” as if the sheer ability to mouth those words was intensely relieving. She marveled at how the baby resembled Sadie, her musically frustrated maternal grandmother. “She must be a really strong woman,” Joni said, of her adult daughter.

By the end of 1996 (concurrent with another article in the
Globe
), Joni announced that she was searching for her daughter. In an interview with the
Calgary Sun,
Myrtle (after offering lip service to the appropriate reaction with “We would have been supportive if we had only known” about the baby back then) proved that Joni had in fact judged her mother's reaction accurately all along. “It's Joni's fault this is coming out now; she's too open and frank about it. This is really embarrassing,” Myrtle fretted.

Joni's Vancouver-based managers, Steve Macklam and Sam Feldman, handled the responses; hundreds of thirty-one-year-old adopted women wanted to be Joni Mitchell's baby.

Knowing she was the one, Kilauren contacted and recontacted Macklam and Feldman, but “the first e-mails went unanswered for six weeks,” a friend recalls; Kilauren felt frustrated. By the early weeks of 1997 she was calling or e-mailing almost every day. Finally, the Gibbs located a long-buried photograph of Kilauren, in their arms, taken the day she left her foster mother. In early March Kilauren sent this photo to Macklam and Feldman; they matched it against the ones Joni had been sent one year earlier by the foster mother. To Joni's protectively skeptical managers, there could be no doubt now.

Joni was on vacation with Don Freed, in Santa Fe. There she was: on that “burning desert” in cactus tree land, her self-anointed locus of female solitude and independence, where she'd imagined a heart-to-heart with Amelia Earhart and had a real one with Georgia O'Keeffe. Returning to her hotel after an outing with Don, she received Macklam and Feldman's message with the phone number for one Kilauren Gibb. Joni called, and into the voice mail exclaimed, “It's Joni. I'm overwhelmed.”

Days later, on March 11, Duke Redbird got to his Toronto restaurant and found this note: “Hi, Duke…I went to see you today because I'm on my way to L.A. on Thursday, March 13, to visit Joni. She remembers you and your brother and your kindness [bringing her apples] during her time of need. She couldn't believe that I had met you. She is my mother and she has sent my son and me to visit her…Thanks for being so kind. Love, Kilauren Gibb.”

Kilauren and Marlin flew, with first-class tickets from Joni, from Toronto to L.A. They were met by a limousine and driven to Joni's house. Kilauren didn't know to go to the side entrance; she rang at the (mostly unused) front entrance. Joni came out onto the balcony to redirect Kilauren—mother looked down and daughter looked up, awkwardly, comically Romeo-and-Juliet-like. Joni raced downstairs and opened the door. And, as she would later write it, in her abashed, eloquently measured song about the occasion: “In the middle of this continent, in the middle of our time on Earth, we receive one another.” Here was her Kelly Dale—here was her Little Green—thirty-two years later.

• • •

Turning themselves into a family was, while euphoric, mined with dangers, as Joni's own words in “Stay in Touch” predicted: “But our roles aren't clear / So we mustn't rush.” For Kilauren, the contrast between glamorous Bel Air with Joni as her mother and, as a friend says, “dreary suburban Toronto and dealing with the Gibbs” was dizzying and depressing. There was the matter of their strong similarities—Kilauren and Joni “are both brutal to argue with; they've got excellent selective memories,” says one who knows both, “and they're both feisty, like Myrtle. They're three birds of a feather.” There was also the matter of their equally strong differences. As Dave Naylor puts it, “It drives Joni crazy, 'cause she's Kilauren's mom and she can't understand why this daughter of hers doesn't have this work ethic that she has.” “Joni has Kilauren on a short leash,” says a friend, using, figuratively, the same word, “leash,” that Joni had once described Myrtle
literally
using on her as a child. How strong, these generational echoes! Joni and her daughter and mother
were,
indeed, as she had so early written, “captive on the carousel of time.”

American articles somewhat reverentially praised Joni's dutifulness to her new family. Joni told
The New York Times
that, for the sake of her grandson, Marlin, she was now watching network TV. The
Times
quoted Marlin's sweet comment about Joni's steadfastness in his life, that he “couldn't imagine…Joni going away.”
*

Meanwhile, Joni's eighteenth album,
Taming the Tiger,
was released in 1998. It included “Stay in Touch” as well as “Face Lift”; a paean to lust (Joni told friends she was on the now-popular-with-her-cohort elixir, hormone-replacement therapy) that she wrote with Freed, “The Crazy Cries of Love”; and “Lead Balloon,” which parlayed her spat with Jann Wenner into an apt jab at society's approval of angry men and scorn for angry women. In the title song, “Taming the Tiger,” Joni took another broad swipe at the music industry: the radio serves up “formula music, girly guile, genuine junk food for juveniles.” So reuniting with her daughter
hadn't
scratched every itch, and receiving the flood of awards two years earlier
hadn't
bought her silence. Once the pert, fragile, bell-voiced pleaser (and jelled in aspic as such in much of the public's mind), she'd evolved into a prickly, husky-voiced straight shooter; her songs still (but from that
other
“side now”) as astringently unphony as they had always been.