Reckless Daughter

by David Yaffe

  “‘By the way,’ he added, ‘how many times did you see Black Beauty?’”

  Joni never forgot the lesson. In the ’90s, Joni gave the guitarist Robben Ford some songwriting advice: “When you see a cliché, circle it and replace it with something that isn’t a cliché.”

  Sharolyn Dickson was in that grade-seven class with Joni and Mr. Kratzmann, and she knew how much Joni looked up to him. “I don’t think she ever saw herself as an academic, but in truth, I felt like he brought that out in her, because he got us heavily into creative writing,” recalled Dickson. “So when she says he taught her to love words, I really think that’s where it came from. When he marked us, he was tougher on her than he was on the others. He marked according to our abilities, and his expectations of her were so high. If she didn’t meet that expectation, he didn’t mark her as well.”

  At the time, Joni understood this pedagogical method, but throughout the years, especially as she was fine-tuning her bitterness toward an increasingly large group of people from her past, she began to question whether that had been fair.

  “But he would often use her work as an example to teach us,” Dickson told me. “He’d put it on the board. We felt like she was a really outstanding writer even then. He was totally unconventional. We had caught wind of his class when we were in sixth grade, and we were all excited to get him. If our parents had known some of the things he was saying, they would have been on his doorstep. He was very outside the norm.”

  Kratzmann, alluding to Nietzsche, would tell Joni, “You have to learn to paint and to write in your own blood.” “She picked up on that,” said Kratzmann, “and started to write little things about her life and, of course, now you couldn’t believe that Joni Mitchell was ever somebody who wasn’t creative.”

  In Susan Lacy’s American Masters documentary on Joni from 2003, Joni recalled Kratzmann telling her, “If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words,” which was the guiding principle of her televised concert Painting with Words and Music.

  Kratzmann, who became the dean of education at the University of Regina and passed away in 2015, recalled Joni as someone at the very start of her creative exploration. “[Joni] wrote well . . . She used to copy a lot of stuff. She’d see a painting of a landscape and she’d duplicate it, and, when we’d be writing poetry, she’d have a tendency to sort of, like, pick Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ and write a poem about tulips but use the same rhyme scheme and style.”

  Copying was a big part of how Joni taught herself. She needed to write the words, draw the pictures, play the notes herself—or at least try. She saw her first Picassos and Matisses at the home of a classmate whose grandfather was a Canadian industrialist and art collector named Frederick S. Mendel. Mendel would go on to be the chief financial backer of Saskatoon’s first major art gallery. Joni loved Picasso. She loved that he was a troublemaker, and admired, she said, “his constant creativity, his restlessness.” Her relationship to music would also be personality-based. She loved Duke Ellington and had an intuitive relationship with the alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. “So flirty,” she would say. As a girl, Joan Anderson picked apart paintings, poems, literature, and songs the way some kids took apart toasters.

  With the exception of Kratzmann, her classroom experience would be a series of disappointments, but she found a way to be an engaged troublemaker. “The way I saw the educational system from an early age was that it taught you what to think, not how to think. There was no liberty, really, for freethinking. You were being trained to fit into a society where freethinking was a nuisance. I liked some of my teachers very much, but I had no interest in their subjects. So I would appease them—I think they perceived that I was not a dummy, although my report card didn’t look like it. I would line the math room with ink drawings and portraits of the mathematicians. I did a tree of life for my biology teacher. I was always staying late at the school, down on my knees painting something.”

  She did not write much poetry in those days, but one poem stands out: “The Fishbowl,” written at age sixteen.

  The fishbowl is a world diverse

  where fishermen with hooks that dangle

  from the bottom reel up their catch

  on gilded bait without a fight.

  Pike, pickerel, bass, the common fish

  ogle through distorting glass

  see only glitter, glamour, gaiety

  and weep for fortune lost.

  Envy the goldfish? Why?

  His bubbles are breaking ’round the rim

  while silly fishes faint for him.

  Joni remembers that she wrote the poem about the celebrities in the teen magazines she devoured at the time. “I felt sorry for celebrities with talent when I wrote that poem,” she said. “Sandra Dee was breaking up with Bobby Darin and all the magazines had pictures of her with mascara running down her face, all paparazzied out.” (Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin actually broke up in 1967, when Joni was twenty-four, but point taken.)

  But it is also easy to see the poem as an allegory of how she is comparing and contrasting herself with the kids around her, wondering how far she might go or how stuck she might be in the rural world that surrounded her. Joni remembers that when she wrote the poem, “I never felt like I had any talent. I was a painter, but the musical and writing gift hadn’t come in—even though that poem is pretty precocious.”

  The biggest gift of her Canadian childhood for Joni was the gift of nature: it was, in a way, its own religion and it would give her the truest compass she would ever know. “I lived in the tail end of a horse-drawn culture,” Joni remembered. “We still had our water and the milk delivered by horses, and at Christmas a mound of packages would come on an open sleigh.” Sharon Bell remembered that, as kids, she and Joni would go out and wander the prairie, with open sky as far as the eye could see. Simple pleasures like squishing mud between your toes—and then the simple scolding of having them washed by Joni’s mother, the ever proper Myrtle—were priceless memories later on. “It was a simpler life and simpler times,” said Bell. “We all go back to simpler times from time to time, but Joni more than others, because she had become separated from that.”

  In 1969, when she was just becoming famous, Joni told The New York Times, “My poetry is urbanized and Americanized, but my music is influenced by the prairies. When I was a kid, my mother used to take me out to the fields to teach me bird calls. There was a lot of space behind individual sounds. People in the city are so accustomed to hearing a jumble of different sounds that when they come to making music, they fill it up with all sorts of different things.”

  “I always thought I’d marry a farmer,” Joni recalled. “I loved the country. But I don’t think I would have been happy as a farmer’s wife. It’s a hard job and a lot of work. I’m naturally nocturnal, so farmers’ hours would have been pretty tricky for me.” She was a country girl who loved wide-open spaces, who loved to draw and to dance, but it was the 1950s and Canada was, as Margaret Atwood described it, still “a blank spot on the map of global culture.” Joni found it hard to dream beyond a marriage that would let her live the way she wanted to. Was there another way to make a living that allowed you a big country house and a view of fields and prairies as far as your eyes could see? She didn’t know, but she aimed to find out.

  2 LET THE WIND CARRY ME: LESSONS IN WOMANHOOD

  In an interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), Joni recalled the day she fell ill with polio. “It was the day before I was paralyzed. And I remember what I wore that day. I dressed myself for school that day. I woke up and I went to get dressed, I looked in the mirror and said, ‘You look like a woman today.’ My face had filled out. Something had happened, or the impending disease . . . You ever see kids with cancer on TV? You see how mature they are? There’s something about that, a maturity that happens that prepares you for the battle. I don’t know what I saw. My face had changed shape. And there must have been something in my eyes.”

  It wa
s November 1953. She had just turned ten.

  “I walked to school with a chum. The third block before the school, I had to sit down and take a little rest because I was aching. And I said, ‘Oh dear, I’m getting old. I must have rheumatism ’cause my grandmother had rheumatism.’ The following day I couldn’t get out of bed. I was paralyzed. When they diagnosed it they shipped me up to a polio colony, outside St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon.”

  The place was like a leper colony, designed to limit the spread of the harrowing disease.

  “[We were in] annexed trailers, and they were kind of terrifying, in that the sound, not so much in the daytime because the halls were full of activity, but at night, the sound of the iron lungs—that wheezing breathing—it was a terrible sound and we all dreaded the possibility that we could end up in one of those cans. If the disease spread into your lungs you’d go into the iron lung because you’d have to have mechanical aid. And if you got into the iron lung, chances are you’d never get out. And there was a possibility that I would never walk. I was frozen and many of the muscles in my back were lost. As a result my spine was crooked, and arched up like a broken doll.”

  It was a powerful image for a young girl who felt alone in a home with a military father and a mother who longed to escape: she was a life-size, broken doll.

  “Christmas was nearing and I said to the doctors, ‘I want to go home for Christmas’ . . . They hung their heads as if it wasn’t really a possibility.”

  Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine would not reach Canada until 1955. Joni and Neil Young are among the survivors of the 1953 epidemic.

  “I remember visiting Joni in the ward when Joni had to lie flat on her back and couldn’t move for quite a long period of time,” recalled Sharon Bell. “She was told that if she moved, the polio would spread. That’s a really scary thing for a young kid. We knew what polio was and wondered if she’d walk again.”

  The several months she spent in the hospital left a deep emotional scar and widened the fissure between Joni and her parents. Bill never visited her, and Myrtle visited only once—with a protective mask over her face. This was not unusual. Parents did not visit often—partly because of distance, partly because of hospital rules—but that was small consolation to a ten-year-old girl who was already deep in the throes of a struggle with loneliness.

  “The loneliness that many polio patients experienced . . . was made worse by the very restrictive visiting policies of most rehabilitation hospitals in the 1940s and 1950s,” writes Daniel J. Wilson, the author of Polio. “The Shrine hospital in San Francisco, for example, permitted the parents of patients to visit only on Sundays for a half an hour, and parents were not allowed to come together. Other hospitals took away patients’ visiting privileges if they had misbehaved or if parents fell behind on paying the bills . . . By the time polio patients were in rehabilitation, they were no longer contagious. There was no medical reason for such limited visiting hours, except for the convenience of the hospital.”

  Joni did end up spending Christmas in the colony. Her mother brought her a small Christmas tree to cheer her up, which offered little consolation. Preternaturally willful, the child fought back: praying, or more accurately, demanding that she be healed.

  “I said, ‘Give me back my legs and I’ll make it up to you.’ I didn’t know who I was praying to. It wasn’t God or Jesus. I knew that there was a spirit of destiny or something. I just wouldn’t believe that I’d be crippled in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I just wouldn’t buy into it. ‘Give me that back and I’ll make it up to you.’ So I fought it like crazy and amazed them by standing up and walking.”

  This was the first of many willful, indeed creative, acts of defiance. Physically incapacitated, socially isolated, she marshaled her internal powers in order to maximize the effectiveness of the rudimentary therapies she was offered. It was not so much an overcoming as it was a rewriting of the odds.

  “Somewhere all the cells said, ‘Oh, she means no way!’ So that in the weeks that followed, I took my treatments, which were hot, scalding rags, like a champ, and I allowed the therapist to bend me. I was very brave and very determined and I walked.”

  It is not hard to imagine why Joni, in her professional career, would time and time again defer to her own instincts. Her fortitude and endurance proved more reliable than her best advisers. Others would underestimate her, but she would not underestimate herself. “I came back a dancer,” Joni said of the incident.

  Literally, this is true. By fifteen, Joni would go dancing almost every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the YMCA with her pal Tony Simon. Figuratively, in battling polio, Joni became an artist of her own expressive body. Shunted away in a polio colony in the provinces, she not only learned to fight like hell, but to sculpt her body and spirit in concert with each other. The origins of her voice—that inimitable voice of almost limitless range—can be located, figuratively and literally, in the polio year. The unique link between her inner life, her emotions, and her instrument—her whole body—was formed when she willed herself to stand up and walk.

  Melancholy was not her stock-in-trade, resilience was. She would later say, “I celebrated my legs. I would have been an athlete. I lost my speed, you know, so that I was never gonna win a swimming contest. I was never gonna be the fastest again. But at least I was mobile. And so I turned to grace. I turned to things that didn’t require such speed: water ballet, dance. And I think that it was a blessing in a way because it developed the artistic side.” This artistic side, however, not unsurprisingly, produced an unintended side effect: rebelliousness. Schooled in her own strength, distrustful of the parents who seemed to abandon her to the medical authorities, Joni began to act out against the mores of her home and her small-town life.

  In eleventh grade, Joni got caught shoplifting a pair of pants, having tried to slip them on under her own. The police drove her home. While no charges were pressed (Myrtle paid for the pants), the incident marked the next stage in the evolution not only of Joni’s identity but of her relationship to her life at home. If the polio year produced an awareness of her own mental and physical strength, her brush with the law illuminated the divergent paths she had before her. The girl who could catch polio and then stand up and eventually walk out of the hospital was profoundly superior to a life of petty crime.

  “There . . . came a stage when my friends who were juvenile delinquents suddenly became criminals,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979. “They could go into very dull jobs or they could go into crime. Crime is very romantic in your youth. I suddenly thought, ‘Here’s where the romance ends. I don’t see myself in jail.’”

  Myrtle did not trust that her daughter would reach that conclusion. The standoff between mother and daughter would continue for all their days.

  “I lied to her once in my teens. I told her I was going someplace and I went to a public dance, where I wasn’t supposed to go. So I was always a liar after that. A liar, a quitter, and a lesbian. She’s wrong on all three counts and would not stand corrected. She just got these things fixed and they wouldn’t erase.”

  Myrtle was a cautious, conservative woman, who avoided major displays of emotion, and expressed her concerns about her daughter primarily through judgment and distrust.

  Sharon Bell remembered her as an “exceedingly proper” woman who kept “everything” in the house “absolutely immaculate.” The walls were painted in “neutral colors.” The only exception to Myrtle’s immutable law of cleanliness and order was a tree that Joni was allowed to paint on her bedroom wall.

  One of the ways Joni thwarted Myrt’s conservative country sensibilities was by exploring parts of Saskatoon that her parents would never visit. “My identity, since it wasn’t through the grade system,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979, “was that I was a good dancer and an artist. And also, I was very well dressed. I made a lot of my own clothes. I worked in ladies’ wear and I modeled. I had access to sample clothes that were too fashionable for our community, and I c
ould buy them cheaply. I would go hang out on the streets dressed to the T, even in hat and gloves. I hung out downtown with the Ukrainians and the Indians; they were more emotionally honest and they were better dancers . . . When I went back to my own neighborhood, I found that I had a provocative image. They thought I was loose because I always liked rowdies. I thought the way the kids danced at my school was kind of, you know, funny. I remember a recurring statement on my report card—‘Joan does not relate well.’ I know that I was aloof. Perhaps some people thought that I was a snob.”

  She indulged her more tomboy tendencies when she hung out with Tony Simon and his bowling club buddies. “There was a group of us—basically about a dozen guys,” Simon recalled. “Somehow, she became one of the boys. She used to pal around with us and we would say anything in front of her that we would never say to any other girl. We used to go down to the riverbank in Saskatoon and have wiener roasts. Usually, it was just drinking beer. Everybody would sing all these dirty songs. And nobody out of all of those people played a musical instrument—including her. She’d had a few piano lessons way back, but nobody could play. So she got a ukulele so that we could have some accompaniment for usually very dirty songs. We’d do classics like the limerick ‘There once was a man from Nantucket / Whose cock was so long he could suck it / He said with a grin as he wiped off his chin / If my ear was a cunt I would fuck it.’ We’d put it to music and have a highly intellectual time.”

  Joni remembered that it was around this time that “rock and roll went through a really dumb vanilla period. And during that period, folk music came in to fill the hole. At that point I had friends who’d have parties and sit around and sing Kingston Trio songs. That’s when I started to sing. That’s why I bought an instrument. To sing at those parties. It was no more ambitious than that. I was planning all the time to go to art school.”