Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (82 page)

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One child of the five was hers from a previous marriage, whom Dylan adopted.

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Even though the facility was a jail and not a prison, convicted men sentenced to several-year sentences were incarcerated there.

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On some legal documents “Edward” is given as Evers's middle name; on others, “Morrison” (his mother's maiden name) is.

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That life would soon take a somewhat startling turn. Danny Kortchmar, now divorced from Abigail, would, as he puts it, “fall madly in love with Louise” the next year, 1978. They would live together and he would produce her first, self-named album. Abigail was appalled by her ex-husband's romance with a barely of-age girl they'd known since she was nine. Abigail asked Carole: “How could you let this happen?” According to Abigail, Carole replied, “I like Danny.” The two women didn't talk for a while.

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At the time she was known as Joyce, her given name. She later shortened it to Joy, the name she goes by today.

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“Song for Sharon” is a mélange of many references. Named for a childhood friend, Sharon Bell, who shared young Joni's enamorment with weddings, it is, like three other songs on
Hejira,
about recovering from, mourning, and coming to terms with her breakup from subsequent boyfriend John Guerin (with whom she
did
have a noisy blowup “at”—or at least near—“the North Dakota junction”). It describes her search for a mandolin in Staten Island with her friend Joel Bernstein; it presents a chorus of real-life close females—her housekeeper, Dora, her best friend, Betsy Asher, and her mother—advising her on how to use her ample free time as an unattached single woman, while, she admits, all she really wants to do is “find another lover.”
And
it tells, namelessly, of Phyllis Major Browne's suicide.

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Daryl Hannah's uncle, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, claimed to have seen Daryl in the hospital after the incident with “ugly black bruises on her eye and chin and on her ribs” and asserted, in a letter to
Us
magazine, that “Jackson beat Daryl.” Browne responded to Wexler, in part: “I did not beat [Daryl]” and offered to “describe Daryl's actions to you and then judge for yourself as to how these injuries may have occurred.” A November 1992 statement by the Santa Monica Police Department said: “We went to the house where Jackson Browne lives regarding a possible disturbance. We resolved the situation in about five minutes. There was never any assault. There are no charges pending and no prosecution sought by or intended by the District Attorney.”

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Shortly after the song's release in 1994, Jackson Browne gave a radio interview in response to the song. He said that Joni was a troubled person; he added that she had “never gotten over” him. Though the first statement is understandably defensive, the
second
statement (coming from a mature musical icon and social activist) sounded tackily boastful—unless, of course, one understood what was there but
unsaid,
that she had never gotten over how she'd put herself at risk because of her feelings for him.

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In 2003 PBS aired a documentary/musical tribute to Joni, “Woman of Heart and Mind.” Several of Joni's past significant others were featured or mentioned as such. Don Alias was extremely hurt that he was not asked to participate and was not mentioned, and he strongly suspected that the producers left him out because of his race. (A white female friend from Joni's past also thought the omission seemed pointed.) Alias said: “Her relationships with Larry, and John, and Graham were mentioned, and I want to know
why
I wasn't there.
Why
did they take so lightly—as if it didn't exist!—a relationship with someone I loved so much? That bothered the hell out of me.” He paused. “Well, when I talk to Joni again, I want to find out.” He died before he could.

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This question was put to Sue Mingus, in an e-mail she invited. She declined to reply.

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“The comparisons to Joni were a terrible thorn in Carly's side at the beginning,” Jake Brackman says. Between Joni having been James's girlfriend and Joni's high esteem as a songwriter, “both of those things formed two blades of a single sword into her heart. She wanted the respect that Joni got. When Carly sold the rights to ‘Anticipation'”—to Heinz Ketchup, for a popular commercial—“and appeared on the cover of
Playing Possum
in that little teddy, people would say to her, ‘Joni
wouldn't
do that.' And that hurt her.”

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Jake reels off: “I've done it, Jim [Hart, her second husband] has done it, [friend] Tamara [Weiss] has done it, Sally's done it…” Leah Kunkel remembers Carly throwing up backstage before the 1979 No Nukes concert and thinking, “She's a little…
crazy
!” Carly took to wearing too-tight shoes, so the discomfort would preoccupy her out of her stage fright, and before performing at President Bill Clinton's birthday, she had her whole band take turns spanking her so the pain would knock out her fear of going on after Smokey Robinson.

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James enjoyed hiding references to heroin use in his lyrics, he once told one of his dope dealers (who was interviewed for this book) during a dressing-room hand-over of some balloon-bagged product in the early 1970s.

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Local women were especially harsh, since late 1970s Manhattan was exceedingly down at its heels, and downtowners had a cockeyed pride in living closer to its filthy curbs than, say, a Central Park West penthouse. Two female
Village Voice
reviewers took gentle to not-so-gentle aim at Carly's May 1977 appearance at the Other End (the renamed Bitter End), which was attended by Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, and Art Garfunkel. Susin Shapiro derided the “culturally privileged turnout” filled with “record honchos” who “cooed and purred,” along with “Carly's family, friends, some select press, plus a few paying customers in the spirit of token democracy.” M. Mark started her review by declaring, “Carly Simon has been getting on my nerves for years”; harrumphed suspiciously through Carly's performance; opined, of her romantic-pain songs, “She's too sleek and well-adjusted to be a credible victim”; and assailed her for being more cotillion than feminist. “Although she's begun to consider the injustices of the prom world, she apparently hasn't thought about walking away from that old demeaning dance of courtly love. It's way past time for Carly Simon to define herself. She'll always get asked to the prom, and she doesn't have to say yes.” Steve Harris remembers that evening—including the fact that Mick Jagger slipped into the club (somehow, over these years, he was always subtly circling Carly) and sat down in the back booth with him, Arlyne, and Diane Keaton. The presence of the sexy lead Rolling Stone made Keaton so unbalanced, she called him “Mike” instead of Mick all night.

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Breast-feeding was still considered downscale, weird, or “hippie” in the late 1970s, especially to high-born women from a different generation and men from the provinces. When Joe Armstrong, the new
Rolling Stone
bureau chief, came over to Carly and James's apartment for dinner one night, he was stunned when Carly whipped out her breast to nourish Ben while passing the salt and pepper. “I was this kid from West Texas! You sort of want to watch, but you don't want anyone seeing you watching,” he recalls.

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Carly once described this form thusly: “I wra[p] the story line in four simple verses (ABAB) with a bridge just before the last chorus…It's like the ballads I used to sing that reach a climax somewhere around the fourth stanza, and then the final chorus has a kind of irony, meaning something different when all the facts are on the table.”

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For the book, which was published in 2002, White (who died of a heart attack just after its completion) was forbidden by Trudy Taylor from interviewing Carly and obtaining her point of view. White's portrait of Carly is neutral to negative; his portrait of Kathryn Walker, whom he interviewed, and who was by then divorced from James (James had married his third wife, Kim Smedvig, the public relations director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), is almost obsequiously positive.

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“I think Trudy eventually ruined
all
her kids' marriages,” says a person who worked with James. “She couldn't help it. She loved her kids too much. She was married to a madman herself, who left her.” Ike Taylor had an affair and then divorced Trudy to marry and have two children with a much younger woman; eventually both Ike and his wife died and the children were orphaned. “Trudy was going to do everything she could to ‘save' those kids of hers,” says James's colleague.

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Russ and Leah had a teenage son, Nathaniel; Leah was also raising her deceased sister Cass's daughter, Owen.

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Shortly after he was elected president, and while he was vacationing on the Vineyard, Bill Clinton, with Hillary in tow, came to visit Carly, ostensibly to seek her celebrity's-eye-view counsel on how to assure that Chelsea would have a normal life—but also because he was a huge fan of Carly's. According to Jim, the first words out of the president's mouth to him were a mock-scolding, incredulous “What tree were
you
under, not to know who Carly Simon was?”

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At least one friend of Joni's believes
that Larry exacerbated Joni's insecurity by “flashing younger singers in front of her all the time”
and that she (continuing to work with him as she did, after their divorce) never entirely got over
him.

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The Canadian press was more skeptical, with some columnists noting how long it took Kilauren to prove she was Joni's daughter, and harshly saying that Joni had given her daughter to another family to raise and then, as a celebrity, with fanfare, claimed her when she wanted to.

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In November 1981, Carole and Rick filed action in federal court, claiming their right to due process had been violated, and they asked that the road be declared private. In early 1982, a judge dismissed criminal charges against Carole. In January 1983, a federal judge ruled that her rights had not been violated and that the road issue was for the state to decide. In June 1985, Carole's neighbors and Custer County sued her and Rick in state district court, seeking an order declaring the road open. In August 1986, the district court ruled for Carole; the neighbors appealed the ruling. In June 1987, the district again ruled for Carole; the neighbors appealed.

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President Bush has tried to rescind Clinton's roadless rule, but has been kept from doing so by the courts. NREPA continues to be reintroduced in Congress, year after year.

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The term “baby boomer” by now had come to refer to anyone who had lived through the 1960s, even as a child. It literally refers to the broad population of people born between 1946 (after the end of World War II) to 1964.

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Whitman had appropriated the idea of New York as a modern-day biblical capital from William Blake's urbanity-venerating words (“And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills?”) in Blake's poem “The New Jerusalem.”

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Needless to say, this is a different Larry Norton from the hippie preacher who performed Carole King's third wedding.