Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Joni had lots of friends—chief among them, a funny, freeloading young, wire-specs-wearing American guitar player named David Rea, who was one of the trickle-turning-into-a-flood of American males coming north to escape the draft during these early months of the Vietnam War; and the “den mother” of Yorkville, singer Vicky Taylor. Jet-black-haired, freckle-faced, Vicky Taylor was the classic hipster girl, taking her cues from a slightly earlier era. She was in psychoanalysis; she was madcap (given to dancing on tables in a leopard-print bikini); and, in Tom Lehrer fashion, as Jeanine Hollingshead recalls, “she would sing a naughty little song she’d written about the birth control pill.” Vicky had an apartment that was an all-purpose crash pad for destitute folksingers, where she ladled out a poor-man’s porridge that she called “gunk.” Looking back on that time, Joni has said, “Vicky was the only person on the folk scene that was nice to me. Every time she went out on an audition, Vicky would insist on dragging me along.”

  Among Vicky’s (and Jeanine’s) friends was a rangy boy from Winnipeg, a rock ’n’ roller who had only turned folkie when he’d aged out of the local rock club at nineteen and had written a song, “Sugar Mountain,” bewailing the injustice. He was a novelist-sportswriter’s son; he had a classically handsome, chiseled face, an intense expression, and a ragged, bleating, provocatively unmusical voice. He had suffered polio during the same epidemic that had felled Joni. His name was Neil Young.

  As Joni soldiered on through the last months of 1964, she and Vicky Taylor briefly formed a duo, named—for their opposite hair color—Black and White, and they performed at such clubs as the Mousehole, where Vicky was already a bit of a star. Then Joni got her own solo engagement at the Half Beat, charming the customers not just with her singing voice and her loveliness, but with the breathless, talkative sincerity of her presentation. When she sang “Crow on the Cradle”—the faux–Child Ballad song about the loss of a baby—her ambivalence and confusion about her own imminent maternity rang out, albeit in a code the listeners couldn’t divine, in her quavering voice: “Crow on the cradle, tell me: What shall I do?”

  Joni has said that her prenatal diet was “atrocious,” something that Duke Redbird recalls as true for all of the Yorkville rooming house dwellers. “It’s not even so much that we didn’t have money; we were, all of us, too excited being on our own and creating art to think about eating until we had to.” But he and his brother were worried enough about Joni’s health to give her the gift of apples. Not thinking about eating, not having money to eat well, never talking about her pregnancy or even admitting its existence: Redbird saw, and admired, all these things as the calm resolve of the girl who sadly sang and strummed her guitar through her closed door at night. “Joni had a very strong presence of being centered. I’m sure she had fears, but her demeanor was one of stoicism,” he says. But author Anne Petrie, who spent months in a secret Canadian unwed-mothers’ home in the 1960s, might look at what Redbird admired as stoicism and—empathetically—call it something different: “massive denial.” As Petrie wrote in her memoir, “I was pretending nothing was happening…I ignored the evidence of my body. Here it was changing by the day. I was doing what a woman is at least partly made for, growing and carrying a baby that was mine, made of me. I would feel it kick, I would even watch my stomach change shape as a baby fist or foot moved across it, but emotionally I was completely detached.”

  As December wore on, Joni’s pregnancy was too pronounced for her to play her guitar. The large, inflexible wooden instrument lay literally too high atop her belly for her to get a good grip on the strings. “That big old guitar!” Jeanine Hollingshead says. “Ask any pregnant woman how hard it is to play a guitar when you’re seven months pregnant—it starts to get away from you! That’s when Joni started to really use the tiple”—a small instrument, on the order of a ukulele or mandolin.

  Duke Redbird left the boardinghouse around Christmas; Joni was still there, and six weeks away from her due date. As the new year, 1965, loomed, Joni’s lugubrious eight-months girth rendered her unable to perform. Penniless, she went to live in Vicky Taylor’s aerie over the Lickin’ Chicken restaurant.

  There Vicky played Joni her friend Neil Young’s song “Sugar Mountain,” and the song’s premise—that the Winnipeg boy felt so unhappily “old” at nineteen—led Joni to begin to write a kind of “answer” song about the value of age. Months later, she would pick up the song again and complete it. This blue-note-filled song—with its emotional turn on the ninth and tenth syllable of the third bar—seems suffused with a sense of premature longing for something lost. It would be called “The Circle Game,” and she began writing it in the last weeks before she went into labor.

  The baby was two weeks late. (How Joni came by this information is unknown.) In the middle of the second week of February 1965 she entered the charity ward of Toronto General Hospital. Children’s Aid Society social workers visited her. According to what she, decades later, told her daughter (in the company of a friend), there was a “glut’ of babies of unwed mothers in Toronto at this time; the local paper had just published an article on the subject. But Sandra Jarvies of Canadian Birth-mothers says that the social work establishment, government, and media all “exaggerated the number of unwed mothers—there weren’t as many as they said—because they were busy promoting adoption.” Jarvies adds, “Social workers were in the hospitals, counseling girls that it ‘wasn’t really your baby,’ that it was in the ‘best interests of the baby’ to have it adopted, that ‘if you love your baby,’ you’ll give it up; the baby will be ‘illegitimate’ if you keep it.” Joni has said she was fiercely judged by the staff. “The time of her birth was traumatic for me. That’s why I could identify with the women who were sent to the Magdalene Laundries”—the punitive Irish home for “wayward” girls that she wrote about so stirringly in her song of that name, included on her Grammy-winning mid-1990s album Turbulent Indigo.

  On February 19 Joni gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She wrote on the birth certificate: Kelly Dale Anderson. “Kelly” (the first of the last-names-as-girls’-first-names) was popular with bohemians at the time (Hettie and LeRoi Jones named a daughter Kellie). More, as she explained in the wrenching song “Little Green” (sometimes, early on, she forthrightly sang the words as “Kelly Green”), written about the birth: “Call her green for the children who’ve made her.” She used the name Anderson because, again from the song, “You sign all the papers in the family name. You’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed.”

  Immediately after giving birth, Joni’s breasts were bound, to stop her breast milk supply. Having decided that the baby would, at least for now, go into foster care while she sorted out her options, she told the nurses not to bring the baby to her. But according to a confidante, “Probably by mistake, they brought the baby in to her anyway.” Two weeks post-due, Kelly Dale was a beautifully formed, pink-cheeked baby. “And that’s when she flipped out,” the confidante says. “She realized she had a baby and was going to give it up.

  “And ever since then, she’s never really been able to live with herself.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  carly

  1961–late 1965

  In the early ’60s, when Ivy League schools were all-male and Seven Sisters schools all-female, scattered clusters of eminences-in-the-bud were springing up at elite colleges. The men who would one day shape their generation were dog-earing copies of Blake and Kierkegaard or Marcuse and C. Wright Mills; shaving irregularly; cutting lectures to sleep off hangovers in clothes-strewn rooms. At Cornell were experimental novelists Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña—the latter soon to marry Joan Baez’s sister, Mimi, and become close friends with Bob Dylan—as well as Peter Yarrow, imminently of Peter, Paul and Mary. At Harvard Albert Gore Jr. was rooming with Tommy Lee Jones, while Erich Segal, studying for his Ph.D. (at the same time that Daniel Ellsberg was acquiring his), envyingly noted the handsome Tennessee senator’s son’s courtship of Southern ladies’ college
beauty Mary Elizabeth “Tipper” Aitcheson. At Yale, Bob Woodward—just out of military service; his Illinois accent porterhouse-thick—was sharpening his sleuth’s rapier while Yankee Texan George W. Bush was pulling ample strings to not flunk out; working-class Brooklynite Alan Dershowitz was editing the law review; and Gary Hart-né-Hartpence, a fundamentalist Christian from Kansas, was graduating from divinity school.

  In contrast to these later-famed male clusters, what mostly sprung up, in 1961 to 1964, at the elite women’s colleges were cliques of smart, talented, opinionated girls who were on their way to becoming the wives of those young men. Such was the cultural dictum, for even the smartest daughters of wealthy, educated families. The very recent year 1960 would prove to have marked the all-time youngest age of first marriage for American women for the entire prior one hundred years—more than half of women married by age twenty—affirming the gut sense that decades’ most “typical” characteristics emerge at their sunsets. “Girls’ identities were very much about the man you were with,” recalls Carly’s best friend, Ellen Wise Questel, now a psychotherapist, who went off to Sarah Lawrence, along with Carly. Despite privilege and culture and high expectations, Ellen says, “We were still not whole.” Carly—only slightly facetiously—remembers imagining her future thus: “I was going to live in the kitchen and serve little pouffy mousses with demitasses to my husband, the poetry professor at a small New England college, and his terribly intellectual friends, around an old farm table where no napkins matched.” In Carly’s Andrea-modeled version, it was the man who would do the interesting thing; the woman—wittily, flirtatiously, creatively—who would be his muse, the power behind his throne, and a thinking-woman’s version of a socialite. Still, the Riverdale girls were expected to finish college before getting married, and not to have children immediately. But be major creators in their own right? That wasn’t necessarily part of the agenda.

  However, adds Ellen, “If there was one women’s college that got the few women who did not think in that conventional way—who believed in their own talent and expected to be artists in their own right—then that was our college, Sarah Lawrence.” “It was a magic time to be at Sarah Lawrence,” says award-winning filmmaker Helen Whitney, who was a student there during those years.

  Strolling the campus flanked by graystone Tudor halls; grabbing lunch at the Caf in Reisinger after coming from dance or theater upstairs; underlining Proust or Talcott Parsons, Malinowski, or Quine and Strawson in the library beneath McCracken; sprawling on the steps of Westlands or Titsworth—everywhere strode ballerina-postured students (not a square inch of bleeding madras on their collective torsos) whose then-unknown names would soon define the American female cutting edge.

  There was disciplined, taut-bodied Meredith Monk, already making avant-garde dances, and soignée Hope Cooke, eyes kohlsmudged, trench coat thrown over her mud-hemmed sari—engaged to some older guy she’d met in a Darjeeling bar, who just happened to be the king of Sikkim (soon making her the only American queen of a Himalayan kingdom, not to mention the only bohemian one). Spelman transfer student Alice Walker, eighth child of sharecroppers, scoped out the tricky terrain (passionately liberal, yet land-mined with status hierarchies) of the white northeastern intellectual elite during her 1963-to-1965 tenure there. After graduating, she’d return South as a civil rights activist, in 1968 becoming the black member of the first interracial marriage in Mississippi—all this before emerging as one of the defining female writers of her generation.

  Then there was Jill Clayburgh, wild child from a proper Upper East Side family (in a decade and a half, she’d put a face on feminism by way of An Unmarried Woman), who palled around with one of the very few male students, Brian De Palma (“who was screwing everyone,” a female alum recalls) and also with fellow drama major Jennifer Salt, the daughter of blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt. Jennifer’s lifelong best friend was Janet Margolin, who had just debuted as the deep-and-alienated Lisa in David and Lisa, an American film that miraculously provided starved non-philistines with an unimported antidote to Gidget. Sally Kempton, daughter of newspaper columnist Murray, had serious late-night, dorm-room talks with future La Mama dancer-actress Lanny Harrison (whose Jewish father had owned a Harlem radio station, whose mother had been a suffragette, and who herself had been almost kicked out of Asbury Park High for having a black boyfriend) about “who we were to men, and what men were to us, and how we loved to flirt but we wanted to be completely strong and yet still have relationships,” Lanny recalls. Sally would go on to marry Harrison Starr, the producer of the late-1960s zeitgeist film Zabriskie Point (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni); then she’d publish a bombshell personal essay in Esquire to help take feminism mainstream, and after that, disappear into an ashram, as Swami Muktananda’s top aide, for thirty years. There was wickedly funny Sybil Littauer, already getting her own show at the Betty Parsons Gallery; acting student Pepa Ferrer, whose stepmother was Audrey Hepburn; and sardonic Jane Barnes, who danced on tables to John Lee Hooker records. “We were all boy-crazy,” says Lanny Harrison. “We would go down to parties in New York—parties near Columbia, parties in the Village, wherever we heard there were parties—and dance until we dropped, to Motown and to bluesy folk artists like Jesse Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis. Then we’d climb over the wall and sneak back, long after curfew.”

  It was into this rich stew of swaggering, culturally snobbish femininity that the not-un-like-minded Carly Elizabeth Simon was plunked in late 1961. She loved her Russian literature class, taught by a female Russian professor, and she was praised for an oral report on Gogol, a triumph to her, since, as she says, “I was still living in fear of having to speak aloud in class.” She felt vulnerable around her old fourth-grade Fieldston teacher, who was now a college English instructor, Joseph “Pappy” Papaleo, because at Fieldston she’d been the phobia-beset nine-year-old, fearful of attending school in the morning, and he used to cajole her into class with yo-yo tricks. She feared that her craziness, though tamped down, still showed, even now in college, where she was a “woman,” not a “pupil.”

  Carly was one of the two folksingers on campus; the other was Helen Rheinhold. “Carly was the more showbizzy folksinger,” says Lanny Harrison, “while Helen, who was from Brooklyn, was more the Fred Braun sandals, frizzy hair parted down the middle, very folky one. Everyone loved them both; they were just different.”

  Along with her prized Odetta records, Carly had brought some of her large collection of classical Nonesuch albums to her Gilbert Hall dorm room. She was also beginning to admire Judy Collins, the former teenage pianist who’d switched from piano to guitar and had just released A Maid of Constant Sorrow in the mold of Joan Baez singing Child Ballads, and especially Judy Henske, the self-described “tall, foot-stomping beatnik” from Wisconsin who’d sung with the Whiskey-hill Singers and opened for Lenny Bruce before becoming a solo act. Carly heard in Henske’s belting voice a hint of her own potential. “[Henske] was just kind of solidly earthy—amazing,” Carly felt, especially on “Wade in the Water”; over the next few years, Carly “emulated” her and “copied her songs,” which alternated a folk repertoire with the art songs of Jacques Brel.

  Carly’s cachet within the highly discriminating campus status hierarchy was inched upward by her boyfriend, Nick Delbanco, who was the young novelist at Harvard, courted by serious publishers, destined for literary fame and glamour. “He was very smart, witty, and sexy. I thought they were a great couple,” says Lanny Harrison. Typical of the time, “I always had the feeling Nicky had more power in the relationship,” remembers Ellen, who notes that among even the most confidently creative girls at Sarah Lawrence “there was still that little piece missing, that had to do with men.” And Carly—reaching for attention but riddled with insecurities—was not one of the most confidently creative girls at Sarah Lawrence. Nick had come into her life at her most vulnerable moment, as her father was dying, and he filled the role of knight in shining armor. Carly saw Nick as her
“protector,” her “warrior,” she says today, adding (with a dash of Andrea-like drama) that he was “my caretaker and my lover and my handsome darling.”

  One of the things that impressed the Sarah Lawrence girls was how European Nick seemed. Nick had taken his parents’ old-world gravitas and fashioned a contemplative suavity. Students at Sarah Lawrence and Harvard—and many elite colleges—avidly read Bosley Crowther’s film reviews in The New York Times and devoured the European cinema. Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and The 400 Blows and Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Godard’s Breathless, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita: college students in the early 1960s longed for that weary Continental decadence in their own lives. Carly was as intrigued by foreign films as any self-respecting Sarah Lawrence girl; she especially loved Ingmar Bergman. (Years later—in the mid-1970s—when her friend Mia Farrow was dating Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Carly asked Nykvist, “What do you think happened to the people in Scenes from a Marriage after the movie ended?” Nykvist said he had no idea. “The next weekend,” Mia says, “Carly came back to my house with pages and pages of description she’d written about what she thought would happen to the characters; it was breathtaking.”)

  From the movies came the infatuation with European life. The motor scooters; the baguettes and bunches of flowers in those randy flats near crumbling edifices; the droop of Simone Signoret’s eyelids, the tilt of the Gauloises from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s lip, the transformation of Jean Seberg from Iowa girl to French New Wave movie star married to Parisian leftist intellectual: all of this seemed salvation from the banality of suburban, even wealthy suburban, America. It had begun with the coffeehouses where Joni waitressed and performed and with the romanticization of tight-quartered city life in Carole’s songs—European ideas, both. Soon would come other ideas from the history-rumpled mother continent (and the British Isles)—long hair and dandy clothes for men; a jaded attitude toward romantic exclusivity; boutiques, whose fashion put a piquant innocence (and, hence, a permission) into sexuality—that would help push the culture in a new direction. Women in their twenties and early thirties, following Jackie Kennedy’s lead, were already living Frenchified lives (even in their roles of luncheon-going, baby-producing wives to rising-star alpha men). Coq au vin, runny cheeses, croissants: in 1961 through 1963, these were the domestic appurtenances of an elect who might in some ways still live like but would never be like their mothers.