Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Now, in the summer of 1968, James and Margaret welcomed house-guests—Joel and Connie O’Brien and Richard Corey—bearing unhappy news. There was a girl, Susan Oona Schnerr, from Long Island, whom they all knew. James had had a brief romance with her when both were psychiatric patients at McLean; James and Joel had hung out with her in the Village during their Flying Machine and scag-shooting days; and she’d reentered their life as a State University of New York at Stony Brook friend of Joel’s brother Geoffrey. Susie Schnerr was a beautiful brunette with what Richard Corey calls “Brigitte Bardot lips.” The severe depression that had landed her in McLean had over the years gone unabated. Richard had met and had a shipboard romance with her on a youth tour ship to Europe, during which she’d unnerved him by walking the deck near the railings, talking about how much she wanted to kill herself. Richard had been greatly relieved when they’d made it to port without her having jumped overboard. But now Susie Schnerr had killed herself, by overdose. Joel, Connie, and Richard had known this for a while, but had not told James—Richard and Connie had felt the news would dampen their friend’s mood at a critical moment: the acquisition of his record contract. But Joel, the group’s hipster-sage, felt James deserved to know. He informed James.

  James absorbed the shock of the news. Then, in a brooding, reflective mood, he used the unsettling fact that they’d delayed telling him to craft the opening bars (changing “Susan” to “Suzanne” for rhythm)—“Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone…”—of a ballad he would complete over the course of months in various locations, the last being Austen Riggs Psychiatric Hospital in Stockbridge, while getting addiction treatment. He called the song “Fire and Rain.” The loss of the doomed “Suzanne,” James’s struggle to stay straight, and his cry for help (“Look down upon me, Jesus, you gotta help me make a stand”*) all gave the song earned white-boy soul. In two years, the song—and James—would usher in a musical sea change.

  Now That Everything’s Been Said was released at the beginning of 1969, but with no tour (Carole was afraid to go onstage, for one thing) or promotion, it sold abysmally. Carole, whose expectations for the album had been sensibly low—“I’m a songwriter, not a singer,” she would tell people—easily steeled herself against the album’s lack of airplay and notice. But Charlie had been banking on the album, of which he was inordinately proud. “It didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be a success; it was a big surprise when it wasn’t,” he says. He was twenty-one, barely more than an amateur, and he was living with a successful songwriter five years his senior. He didn’t want to be swallowed up; he needed to find and prove himself as a musician in his own right. He broke up with Carole, rented an apartment over a garage on nearby Stanley Hills Drive, and, to support himself, got a job as a busboy at the new vegetarian restaurant Help! on Fairfax.

  “Carole was upset when Charlie left; she’d be crying,” recalls a friend—then she would feel guilty about that irresponsible show of emotion. Her life “was complicated. She had kids! [She bewailed that] ‘I can’t be a good mother to them because my boyfriend just left me,’” yet she couldn’t turn off her emotions. Around the country, other young women for whom the new times had brought divorce and freedom were negotiating the same conflict. They were responsible parents (now, functionally, single parents) who put their children first, but they were also in the position of being, once again, teenagers in love. The need for complete control in one’s maternal life and the complete loss of control in affairs of the heart: it was a tough push-pull. “All the people I’m friends with now are four and five years younger than I,” was the seeming non sequitur that Carole would volunteer to a reporter in two years’ time. Perhaps her proffering of that self-conscious detail was a way of expressing not just the new lightness she felt but also the heaviness, unique in her new circle, that she carried, as well.

  Finally, there may have been a sense of familiar failure. Carole consistently succeeded at her work. But love was a different story. “Since she had ‘failed’ with Gerry,” says a friend, “she was going to make this [relationship with Charlie] ideal. But it wasn’t ideal.”

  Meanwhile, a new young woman had moved to the Canyon, “and she was all anybody could talk about,” says Danny. “She was so dramatically talented, so beautiful, so utterly charismatic.” David Crosby brought her to Danny and Barry Friedman’s house one day. “She was shy,” recalls Danny. “Oh, I was round-shouldered shy!” is how she—Joni Mitchell was her name—would describe herself during those weeks. The shyness was an element of that “gosh-golly” propriety that had served her well, obscuring her innate toughness. But the shyness may have also been something else—a self-girding, against a looming irony: receiving the reward that her work deserved would actually be more painful than not receiving it, given what she had gone through, and then decided to do, two fraught years earlier.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  joni

  march 1965–december 1967

  When twenty-one-year-old Joni Anderson walked out of the Toronto General Hospital maternity ward in February 1965, she was in a “sort of numb and half-awake period,” as she would later recall to intimates. Her newborn daughter was in foster care, and she was recovering from the nurses’ fierce disdain, which she has labeled as “traumatic.” “She was one of the walking wounded. She’d been chastised both tangibly and passively by the nuns in the place—it was just tremendous,” says her second husband, Larry Klein, of what she told him fifteen years later. “She felt she was going to stigmatize her parents, that she would be relegated to the dungeon of existence” if it were revealed that she’d had a child out of wedlock. “She felt ostracized, with no hope for a job, and then [a couple of months later], here was this guy who wanted to be with her. She thought: That’s the strongest way the wind’s blowing.”

  That last line reflects Joni’s bitterly flippant memory of meeting, in March 1965, Detroit-based Chuck Mitchell, a blond, clean-cut folksinger eight years her senior. For many years, Joni has demonized her first husband, who, as she put it (in the song she wrote about him, “I Had a King”), “carried me off to his country for marriage too soon.” Especially since her reunification with her grown daughter, Joni has said that, racked with time-pressured “desperation” about the baby (“I couldn’t leave her too long in a foster home—either I had to find a job so that I could support her or give her up for adoption before she was too old”), she told Chuck Mitchell about the birth, and that they made plans to save money to (as she referred to it vernacularly) “get the baby out of hock.” When he asked her to marry him, she has said, he agreed to “take us both.” Then (as Joni’s account, which she’s shared with friends and given to the media, continues), after they were married Chuck turned around and said, “I’m not raising another man’s child.”

  Chuck Mitchell strongly denies he uttered that sentence, and he says, “I have no recollection—none—of agreeing to keep Little Green, and I think I would if I did. For absolute certain, I did not Indian-give. I did not say, ‘Sure [let’s get the baby]’ and then ‘No, we can’t.’” Rather, “I said a very effective thing. I was no dummy. I didn’t know a lot of things at thirty, but I knew when I looked at this woman—this feral girl: whoa! there was so much life in her!—that all she talked about were her songs, her writing, her drawings—I knew what she wanted, and how do you take care of a child and have a career? There was no way! My recollection was that, even though she talked about the baby—‘What should we do?’ ‘We have to make a decision’—she never seriously considered [reclaiming her]. So I said, ‘It’s your choice. I’ll go along with whatever you want.’” Chuck didn’t want the baby; by leaving the decision to Joni, he avers, he predicted things would work out the way both of them wanted. Chuck felt “reasonably sure” Joni’s priority was her songwriting and singing; that, absent anyone urging her otherwise, she’d stay the course she’d tentatively set in the hospital: surrender and adoption.

  If Chuck Mitchell is remembering things
correctly, then Joni may well be angry at him not because he fought her inclination but, rather, because he didn’t.

  That Joni came to understand that the decision was providentially made is suggested in a 1978 interview, in which she said—apropos of recalling a recent conversation she’d had with Georgia O’Keeffe—“after 1965 was really the first opportunity that women had in history” to be accepted as creative artists; therefore (she continued, in the interview), given that fresh opening, she had to make use of the musical genes passed on by her grandmothers. In 1978 no one but her close friends knew about the baby, yet in that interview she specifically cited the year 1965 (not 1966, when well-known folksingers began singing her songs, or 1967, when she acquired a manager and a champion, or 1968, when her first album was released) as the springboard, as if 1965 was a personal marker for her. She seemed to have made peace with the thirteen-year-old bargain, a peace that the two men closest to her during the late 1970s, John Guerin and Don Alias, both say she exhibited to them.

  The piercing quality of Joni’s songs, from the faintly panicked earnestness in her first two albums to the defenselessness of Blue, was the aftertaste of her decision, one that is so unnecessary to today’s young female performers that its very historical existence has almost been forgotten. Today, it’s a career boon for an edgy young performer to be with child; today, magazines burst with expensively acquired photos of unmarried stars: pregnant, pushing toddlers in strollers, or both. This was not the case in 1965.

  Chuck and Joni met in March 1965 at the Penny Farthing, one of the higher-profile Toronto folk clubs. Joni Anderson was booked in the upstairs room, as the minor act; Chuck Mitchell had star billing downstairs. This was his first Canadian appearance; his repertoire consisted of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill songs as well as historical folk music of the “Greensleeves” variety. The pair met cute—someone at the club knew Joni had been fiddling with “Mr. Tambourine Man” and said, “That song you’ve been trying to learn? There’s an American downstairs and he’s singing it.” Chuck and his accompanist, Loring Janes, caught Joni’s act—Chuck said, “Great legs”; Loring—more high-mindedly—said, “Great left hand.” Joni took Chuck to task for mangling Dylan’s work. “He’d rewritten some of it, and badly, too,” she said, “and so we immediately got kind of into a conflict.” Still, she consented to take a walk with him in a nearby park. It was a “raw, late-winter day,” Chuck recalls. Although Joni has preferred to call what developed “an odd friendship,” Chuck says, “We got together after the stroll, in Joni’s narrow, cramped room, with its single bed by the window.” Joni was—she would soon use this term on a Beatles-song character with whom she identified—“poverty-stricken.” By contrast, Chuck, who’d recently quit a good job writing promotional material for the Detroit Board of Education, was comfortable; he exuded a certain polish. “Joni was certainly proud of Chuck, and she was happy for him to meet her friends,” says Yorkville folksinger Jeanine Hollingshead, who’d admired Joni’s grace during her pregnancy. “Chuck was American and really self-confident. We Canadians were very—I won’t say ‘insecure,’ but Americans’ national pride was much stronger and made for more outgoing citizens. We didn’t [gain that confidence] until Trudeau became prime minister” in 1968.

  Very soon after their meeting Joni took the train across the Canada-U.S. border; Chuck met her at the station and drove her to his home. He proposed within thirty-six hours. They fixed a June wedding date, setting out for club engagements and to meet each other’s parents in the interim. Chuck wanted them to sing as a duo; Joni assented. He had a calm, literate, flauntingly knowledgeable air that she would soon find condescending. He also had what he admits is a “snide, confrontational” sense of humor, causing Joni to bristle when he made fun of her “big teeth” by remarking, “When you don’t wear makeup and you smile, you look like a rhesus monkey.” Their edgy sparring; Chuck’s paternalism; Joni’s anxiety about the baby, counterpoised with the flowering of her talent: all this would animate their fractious yet functional two-year-long relationship.

  She called him Charlie. She was Joni—“and with a circle over the i when she wrote it; that was very important,” he says. The practice of intimates calling her Joan came later; “If I called her ‘Joan’—or especially ‘Roberta Joan,’ which I did when I wanted to piss her off—she’d say, ‘Cut that shit out!’” Joni never talked about her polio to Chuck. “She did what she had to do. There’s a line from a David Blue song: ‘So Lucy, so easy she goes by, she moves on earth and sky…’: that was Joni. She not only looked great, she moved well.”

  Chuck was something of a snob, and he took pride in being from a “pedigreed” Midwestern family. His paternal grandfather had been an editor at the Duluth Herald; an aunt had an apartment in the exclusive River House in New York; his mother and father had attended Mills and Antioch, respectively. A graduate of Principia, a Christian Science–affiliated college in Illinois, he viewed his art college dropout fiancée as a “prairie girl” from a “rube place, and this was the days before big-time television; there wasn’t a sense of everybody being homogeneous. I mean, she liked to go bowling—talk about your kitsch!—and with those little balls, like they do in Canada!” (The bluntness with which Chuck Mitchell—who has remained on the folk and small-theater circuit and also restores historic houses along the Mississippi River—makes these provocative remarks seems to acknowledge that his ex-wife’s enormous renown makes his years-ago snobbery meaningless and ironic.) Joni once said: “My husband had a degree in literature. He considered me an illiterate, and he didn’t give me a great deal of encouragement regarding my writing”—a view expressed in words she wrote after the end of her marriage, in “I Had a King”: “He’s swept with the broom of contempt.” (At other times, feeling less the victim, she’s said: “He liked Cape Cod and English furniture and was more cultured; I was just a rampant adolescent.”) Escaping small-town Canada seemed urgent to Joni. “Her attitude was, ‘I don’t want to have to answer to those people [back home]; I don’t want to live in that tight little society; I want to be free!’ It was a powerful motivation for her,” Chuck recalls.

  Joni and Chuck were married on a June afternoon in 1965 in a small ceremony in the tree-dotted front yard of Chuck’s parents’ home in the countryside north of Detroit, by an Episcopalian preacher standing on an elm stump they’d rolled into place for the occasion. Joni made her own dress. On a radio show on which they appeared a year and a half later (when their marriage was fraying but they were pretending it wasn’t), Joni—in her sweet, eager-to-please voice with its distinct Canadian oo’s—described the wedding, with a happy giggle: “There were trees and birds and streams and folksingers and baroque trios hiding in the bushes.” “It was sort of a Versailles wedding, only it was rural and rustic,” Chuck picked up, “with the birds singing and violins and flutes—” “From the Detroit Symphony Orchestra,” Joni cut in, proudly. From 1965 to 1967 many young couples had such weddings—on mountaintops, in meadows, with homemade gowns and self-written vows. (Joni and Chuck recited the standard wedding vows.) These sensitive, arty nuptials expressed the shift in zeitgeist from helmet-teased-haired Twist dancers to the gentler, just-precounterculture world of Peter, Paul and Mary songs, of Charlie Brown’s Christmases, and of plays (Barefoot in the Park) and films (A Thousand Clowns) celebrating the sweet spontaneity that upscale young adults were now starting to romanticize. This was the world of the long-haired playground moms in Robert Hemenway’s story “The Girl Who Sang with the Beatles,” in which lovers—quite like Carly’s friend Jessica Hoffmann Davis and her groom—quoted e. e. cummings lines in their wedding vows and etched them on their wedding bands, and of the sometimes steelier version of these women in Grace Paley’s short stories, Anne Roiphe’s early novels, and Mary Cantwell’s memoirs (which helped usher in the current return of the memoir genre). These latter young heroines were opinionated and nonconformist, yet they were a priori coupled. Despite the proud contrariness of this wedge of
time, the idea of young marriage lay unchallenged. And marriage to a man more advanced in the glamour fields of the arts or media, politics, or academia enabled a dewy bride to leap several game-board squares ahead in worldliness. In 1965 people still advanced from youth to adulthood. Two years later, that natural progression would be confounded, that value nullified.

  After a honeymoon night spent in a Port Huron hotel and then a performing engagement in London, Ontario, Joni and Chuck settled into the “tenement castle” of “I Had a King”: Chuck’s three-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up, with its bay windows and octagonal dining room, at 93 West Ferry Street, adjacent to Wayne State University. By day, newlywed Joni, wearing jeans and chain-smoking dual-filter Tareytons, refinished the dark, ornate woodwork that Chuck had stripped, and filled the apartment with Indian quilts from J. L. Hudson’s and thrift store antiques, eventually turning the heavy, depressing lair into a green-hued fantasyland straight out of the imagery of J. R. R. Tolkien. Joni had picked up Chuck’s ardor for The Lord of the Rings; both were swept up in the world of Middle Earth. At night Joni hosted Chuck’s best friends—folksinger-comic Cedric Smith and his wife, Joan, one night; lawyer Armand Kunz and his fashion writer wife, Marji, the next. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was Joni’s specialty. After dinner the Mitchells and Smiths would have raucous, all-night poker games; on the nights the Kunzes were over, Joni and Marji might talk fashion (both were stylish beauties of opposite coloring—Marji had black hair—who knew their way around a sewing machine) and, as the months went on, Armand and Chuck would talk about Armand’s setting up the Mitchells’ music publishing company.

  In these early weeks after her marriage, Joni would often go with Chuck to the Chess Mate, the main folk club in Detroit—on McNichols (also known as Six Mile) and Livernois, next to the University of Detroit campus. The club was owned by Morrie Widenbaum, an unkempt inveterate gambler who was the Michigan state chess champion, and, along with another Detroit club called the Living End, it was a hinterland bright light in the still-vibrant acoustic folk circuit. Quiet, watchful Joni did not perform—at least that’s how Eric Andersen perceived her. “She was just a fan in the audience: hanging out and listening, and impressed by all these people from New York, wanting to meet them,” says Andersen, who was a highly regarded young singer-songwriter from Greenwich Village by way of San Francisco by way of Pittsburgh, and who had been Tom Paxton’s protégé. (Chuck’s memory is different. “The idea that she might spend more than five minutes without going on the stage is a little bit silly; she didn’t have much of a shy bone,” he says.) Eric was a tall, classically handsome man—his chiseled features not unlike Neil Young’s and James Taylor’s—and Joni listened avidly to his “Miss Lonely, Are You Blue,” her own songs-in-progress brewing in her mind. She admired Eric’s open tunings, a form of playing that was often used on pedal steel guitars and blues slide guitars and which gave Eric’s song a swollen, resonant sound.