Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (68 page)

Joni and Donald Freed broke up. Like Don Alias, he objected to her calling him in the middle of the night.

Kilauren had a second baby—a daughter, Daisy, with Ted Barrington—in 1999. After her drab, odd-fit childhood with the Gibbs, she
loved
the idea of being Joni's daughter and didn't want to lose that privilege and magic. “She was frightened of Joni; she was on best behavior with Joni; she didn't want to be cut off from the perks,” a confidante says. So certain feelings were kept inside.

And then—on a good day for emotional clean sweeps, the first day of the new millennium, January 1, 2000—came an almost inevitable blow-out.

Kilauren and Marlin were visiting Joni in Bel Air. Kilauren was excitedly preparing to go with Joni to a party given by Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. While she was dressing, she let Marlin sit in front of the TV. The movie
The Green Mile,
which featured a torture scene, was on. Joni heatedly objected: it wasn't appropriate for Marlin to be watching a violent movie. Kilauren heatedly rebutted: the movie was fine for Marlin.

Joni shot back: “Don't talk back to
me
—I'm your
mother
!”

Kilauren shot back, “What do
you
know about being a mother? You gave me away!”

And then Joni slapped Kilauren's face.

Kilauren called the police, but when the officers arrived, she declined to press charges. Kilauren and Marlin spent the night at the house of a friend of Joni's.

Since that time, Joni Mitchell and Kilauren Gibb have made their way through a thicket of complicated emotions to arrive at a relationship that feels like real life. Joni visits her daughter and grandchildren in Toronto; they visit her at her houses in L.A. and near Vancouver. When Kilauren said she wanted to have an evening with her birth mother and birth father together (Kilauren had also reunited with Brad MacMath), Betsy Asher had Joni, Kilauren, and MacMath (the bestower of Kilauren's deep-set, up-slanted eyes) over for dinner. In a photograph taken that evening, Joni, her long-ago art school boyfriend, and Kilauren are smiling as easily as any long-married middle-aged couple and their adult daughter.

Joni's nineteenth album, 2000's
Both Sides, Now,
and her twentieth—2002's double-disc
Travelogue
—both feature her singing her songs in her new, life-deepened voice.

In 2003 Joni was the subject of a PBS
American Masters
tribute-biography, “Woman of Heart and Mind.” James Taylor was among the participants honoring Joni in word and song. She unappeasedly continued to call the recording industry a “cesspool,” railing, of the pop landscape: “What [should] I do now? Show my tits? Grab my crotch? Get hair extensions and a choreographer?” Danny Kortchmar puts the complaint thusly, referring to rap music, “Today, people write love songs to their jewelry.”

Joni has essentially asked, thought-provokingly:
Do we
destroy the female artists among us? She concedes that since so many people have said her early work was her best, maybe it was time to believe it herself. In 2004 she ran into Jackson Browne in a grocery store. He told her he couldn't bear the animosity between them and the two reportedly buried the hatchet. A more momentous milestone: Myrtle Anderson, whose high standards had shaped Joni, died at the age of ninety-five on March 19, 2007.

As for Joni and Kilauren, they are close and they have their ups and downs. “You know what?” a friend of Joni's says. “With all Joni's exasperation over Kilauren, and her worries about Kilauren, and their back-and-forth hurts; and her time, happily, spent with Kilauren and Marlin and Daisy: like it or not, Joni's become a mother, after all.”

And an artist, first and foremost. Joni spent the summer of 2007 recording her twenty-first album,
Shine,
a bravura effort of electric music, every track of course produced by Joni, who also supplied virtually all of the instrumentation. James Taylor added his guitar to the title song. The album tackles grand themes—not just environmentalism, the smart set's cause du jour, but the problems of organized religion. She dedicated it to her grandchildren, Marlin and Daisy. It was released, on Starbucks's Hear label, in late September 2007, heralded by a full-page ad in
The New York Times:
“A Timeless Voice Challenges Today's World.” Joni was reportedly annoyed that her proposed cover—the arched backs and bulbously muscled thighs of leaping male dancers—was not thought to be the best signifier for a Joni Mitchell album, artists' faces, not strangers' buttocks, being considered more congenial. But there those muscled buttocks were, on the counters of those thousands of serene, glossy, ubiquitous heirs to her feisty, funky, hidden-away Louis Riel. Starbucks surely learned what everyone knows: She is Joni Mitchell and she isn't backing down.

coming home

Throughout the 1980s, there were two Carole Kings. To the wider American public there was Carole the beloved singer-songwriter, about whom people in their thirties and older affectionately but briefly wondered, “What happened after
Tapestry
?”—and whose Brill Building hits were increasingly being marketed as what would be called “classic rock.” This Carole King was a genial legend and a good-works activist. She gave ten performances, around the country, to fund-raise for her friend (and, though few knew this of her, fellow Western statesman) Gary Hart during his presidential bid in 1984. Briefly thought to be the “new Kennedy” that Americans were still wistfully determined to uncover, the handsome, square-jawed—and, of course, married—Colorado senator self-destructed by daring the press to follow his every move, only to wind up with a blonde on his lap on a boat called
Monkey Business.
This Carole King also performed at Willie Nelson's first Farm Aid concert. In image and, increasingly, in real life, she was an environmentalist, taking her earth-motherliness to the next—political—stage.

The other Carole King—Carole King Sorensen—was known only in Custer County, Idaho, and there she was very much disliked. She was considered a combative, wealthy interloper with a New York accent (a “city slicker from the Bronx [sic] and Los Angeles,” as one local paper put it), who, even while genuinely embracing ranch life (Carole
did
milk her cows and chop wood for her stove; she and Rick
did
run a livestock operation; and their ranch house was, by musical star standards, almost threadbare), didn't quite get Custer County's values. Says a woman who is married to a seventh-generation mountain Idahoan (and who, as a newcomer herself in the early 1970s, learned the code when she pulled a cake-mix box from the grocery store shelf—only to have another customer disapprovingly pluck it out of her hand, put it back on the shelf, and say, “
I'll
teach you how to bake that cake from
scratch
”), “You don't wear dirty jeans to a community meeting, like Carole did—that's what
rich hippies
do. You leave your ranch work clothes at home and you wear pressed, proper clothes.” Besides bucking convention, Carole and Rick were pursuing their closed-road case against her neighbors, the French and Schoonen families; against Custer County; and against the U.S. Forest Service. Says someone who was a party in her legal battle: “There are
two
things in this state that people fight over: water and access.” She'd picked one of them.

Both sides had merit: Carole had purchased the Robinson Bar Ranch only after doing research to determine that a road that ran very close to their living quarters was their private property. In neighborly fashion, they gave the people whose ranch abutted theirs—Thorlo and Dorothy French and David and Helen Schoonen—the combination to the lock on the gate, so they too could make use of the road. However, the Sorensens' research did not take into account local custom: as long as anyone in Custer County could remember, that road had been used by
everyone
in the county; it had been treated as if it were a public road, and during the winter months, it was often the only alternative to a circuitous—and dangerous—mountain pass. So, at the urging of the neighbors and the U.S. Forest Service, in September 1981 Custer County had declared the road public, and its sheriff issued Carole a
criminal
citation for placing a locked gate on her road. (One independent-minded deputy sheriff, having heard from his colleagues no “justifiable rationale” for criminalizing the civil complaint, later said that he believed the act was “carefully planned to harass and intimidate” Carole.) Carole fought back; the forest service, county, and her neighbors counter-fought,
*
and, while no one outside the state knew of this feud, the Idaho papers were full of stories (at least twenty-six, by one count), for the next six years.

Carole and Rick approached their shared battle from opposite political perspectives: she, the left; he, the right. He was the survivalist, angry at and deeply distrustful of the federal government, seeking privacy and freedom at all costs. She soon melded the anger about privacy and property rights that she'd originally picked up from him with the environmentalist and communitarian perspective that was more her style. The battle with the U.S. Forest Service led her to research, discover, and become appalled at that agency's plans to build roads
throughout
Idaho's 20 million acres of wilderness so that logging companies could cut down and profit from the unprotected trees. (Idaho and Montana were the only states at the time that didn't have wilderness protection laws, and, in pro-business Reagan America, they weren't likely to get them.) A participant in the legal fight remembers their different miens: “Teepee Rick showed up in federal court for depositions with a buck knife on his belt, trying to be threatening.” Carole, who the participant remembers as being “pretty hard-nosed,” nonetheless retained humility, and humor. When a court worker (who knew Carole was
some
kind of female music star but didn't know which one) asked her to sing a few bars of “You're So Vain,” Carole obligingly delivered a rendition of Carly's song.

During the seven years that the case bumped along, in and out of courts, “Carole was very unhappy; she was in a deep, deep depression,” a confidante says. “Did she have good times with Sorensen? Yes, sure, she did—she has all the frailties of any woman and maybe more so. I think she was desperate to find somebody who would love her for herself,” and the reclusive Sorensen, who (unlike Rick Evers) had no interest in her connections to the music industry, must have appeased her fear of being used.

Living with this wary warrior at their Robinson Bar Ranch, Carole lost touch with her
Tapestry
friends like Stephanie Fischbach, and she was doubly isolated from her Brill Building friends. Cynthia Weil understood that “obviously Carole wanted to be in Idaho and [Sorensen] wanted her to be there, and he didn't like us very much.” After their closeness in New York and their benign distance from each other from 1967 on, this Rick One/Rick Two period (as Cynthia would come to view the years from the late 1970s to the late 1980s) seemed a chasm, despite their occasional bouts of writing together. “I just felt that Carole and I were so different, I had no insight into what her direction was. I didn't understand” her life and “I thought, Who am
I
to tell her anything? I'm probably living a life that she wouldn't want.” Besides, “I think when Carole falls in love with somebody, she can't see quite clearly, and I can understand that—it happens to the best of us. So I just backed off. But Carole knew if she wanted me, I'd be there.”

Actually, Carole had, on her own, come to the same conclusion—that she hadn't been seeing clearly: at least in terms of her approach to city-vs.-wilderness. “I jumped; I cast off everything; I ran away from this town,” she admitted to the
Los Angeles Times
's Charles Champlin at the dawn of 1984, with the failure of her fourteenth original album,
Speeding Time,
fresh behind her. “I have a way of not doing anything in the middle when there is an extreme available. And I realized I'd thrown away good things with bad—the energy and the people who were doing good things. I have to admit it; I write better in the city, but the rest of your life suffers.” Over the next three years, though she made forays into New York and L.A., performing in an off-Broadway play in 1987 and acting in and writing the score for a minor movie,
Murphy's Romance
(starring Sally Field and James Garner), in 1986, most of her time was spent in Idaho with Rick. It was hard not to think she
was
out to pasture, amid the horses and cows in her pine-ringed mountain fortress. In 1987 she and Gerry were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and a year later they received the National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime Achievement Award. That was what happened when you started writing as a teenager, became a seasoned pro before you could vote, and a superstar in your twenties, then slowly dissolved over ten years: a
lifetime
achievement award at age forty-six. Carole was determined to not be “honored” into irrelevance.