Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  At about this time, rising to a head was the issue of the baby.

  The more Chuck Mitchell is prodded to recall his conversations with Joni, the more it emerges that—for all his emphasis on her apparent career-mindedness—her early talk of the baby was indeed frequent, even persistent. “She had a concern,” he says. She would bring up the subject “in a number of places, wherever we talked. The conversation may have been when we drove around, because we were always driving someplace. Initially it was, ‘We have this issue, Chuck. What should we do? What should I do?’ [I said,] ‘Joni, make your choice and we’ll live with it.’” Joni has said, “There was a desperation about me” at the time on the subject. But Chuck says that “the baby wasn’t the central thing in our conversation—but then, it may have been that I wasn’t that sensitive.” Still, “there were no long silences followed by tears, although what was going on in her inner self, I don’t know. She may have agonized, but I saw no sign of it. It was, ‘I don’t know what to do; should I keep the baby or not?’” Thinking hard about those long-ago conversations, Chuck says, “It could have been that I said, ‘Oh, Christ, I don’t want to hear about that!’”—then he thinks better of it—“but, no, I don’t think so.” From this remove, it’s not hard to imagine a young woman more obsessed with the subject than she feels is welcome by her new husband. Significantly, Chuck adds, “We didn’t call the baby Kelly Dale or by any name. We called the baby ‘it’; not to be cruel, but for distance.”

  Chuck and Joni traveled to Canada frequently in those early months, playing small clubs in Regina and Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, as well as Toronto, sometimes joining the Smiths at the Black Swan coffeehouse in Stratford, Ontario, home of the Shakespeare Festival, where Chuck’s parents, Scott and Mary, were often in attendance. (Joni has said that Chuck used his parents’ likely disapproval as a reason to disfavor their taking the baby. Chuck denies this. He was, however, close with his parents.) En route to one such Canadian engagement Joni and Chuck made a momentous stop—at the foster home.* This was Joni’s chance to claim the baby.

  Today Chuck says, “I remember it being a discomfiting situation.” In later conversations Joni would say that the baby seemed well cared-for, as if measuring this stability against the peripatetic life that she and Chuck were living. She held her infant in her arms, and Chuck cradled the baby, too. All he remembers of that moment is “I didn’t feel the way I would later feel, holding my own two children.” Was Chuck’s diffidence toward the baby the sole zero-hour decider? Or were other factors—the months of mother-baby separation after a lack of bonding in the hospital; Joni’s unabated fear of her parents’ reaction and the shame they might bear in their community over the timing and circumstances of the birth; her blossoming talent—did all these things, in the aggregate, lead to an almost preordained outcome? It’s unknowable.*

  Joni signed the surrender papers. She was asked to disclose information that, though she did not know it at the time, was filed in a folder marked “Non-Identifying Background Information” that eventually became part of the Canadian Ministry of Social Service’s Parent-Finders Match Program, through which adoptees, at age eighteen, could obtain information about their birth parents without learning their names. Kelly Dale Anderson’s “non-identifying background information” consisted of this: her birth father was very tall; her birth mother was of Northern European descent, had had polio, and hailed from the province of Saskatchewan. Then came these words, based on what Joni spoke, or wrote, at the surrender: “Mother left Canada for U.S. to pursue career as folksinger.”

  At some point after this final farewell to the baby, Joni headed with Chuck for Toronto, to perform. Joni had remained in touch with her high school art teacher Henry Bonli, who’d become a fairly well known painter, and his wife, Elsa. Over the next year and a half, when Joni would come to Toronto, she would often stay, rent-free, at Henry’s painting studio on Yonge Street, over Rugantino’s restaurant, and sometimes she’d babysit the Bonlis’ daughter Jane. Henry and Elsa were very impressed with Joni’s new husband. “We thought Chuck was the better singer, and that he’d be the star,” Elsa Bonli Ziegler says today. During this particular visit “Chuck and Joni were staying in our studio,” Henry recalls. “We went to see Chuck in concert and everyone thought he was fantastic.” By contrast, “Joni was very vulnerable. She was supposed to sing at a separate venue, but she couldn’t do it; she was too nervous to sing.” This stage fright that Henry recalls is completely at odds with the audience-entrancing persona that Joni was confidently developing. The Bonlis didn’t know what caused her block and they didn’t know that she’d had a baby, much less recently surrendered it. “She just came and sat on my lap because she couldn’t do it,” Henry says. “She just fell apart.”

  In Joni’s lullaby about her daughter, she sends Kelly Dale off to an unseen future after telling her, “There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrow.” When she finally recorded the song (and she didn’t until her fourth album, Blue), she held its two last syllables—“sor / row”—for a highly extended two measures. Her two grandmothers had endured backbreaking farm work, endless childbirths, and stormy husbands. But their privileged granddaughter, who was as unfettered and as free to create as they had been overwhelmed and downtrodden, shouldered her own steep emotional debt. And over the years she paid it.

  Soon after her marriage to Chuck, Joni moved from Chess Mate listener to performer. “Joni came in with her husband and asked Morrie Widenbaum if she could do a set,” remembers Tom Rush, who was the featured performer that week, and who remembers her as winsomely shy, the way Eric Andersen does (as opposed to the way Chuck does). “Morrie told her she could. So she stood up and sang her own songs. She was a slip of a girl: blond, intense. She was probably nervous. The songs blew me away—their poetry, their visual imagery.” One of the songs was “Urge for Going,” in which Joni is still hewing to Child Ballad–like expression (“And not another girl in town, my darling’s heart could win”). But the lyric is a sophisticated commentary on impulse versus self-control, and she makes those cliché-magnets—climate images—strikingly original:frost “gobbled summer down”; the sun turns “traitor cold”; “bully winds” abound. The Harvard-educated Rush, a leading light in the once-Baezled Cambridge folk scene, was an almost prettily handsome young man—longish hair grazing good turtlenecks under tweed jackets—somehow possessed of the ruggedly ragged voice of an old rail rider. He wanted to put “Urge for Going” in his repertoire. He struck up a friendship with Joni and Chuck, who invited him to stay at their apartment when he played the Chess Mate. Almost simultaneously Joni learned open tunings from Eric Andersen, who’d also become a friend of hers and Chuck’s.* Apart from liking the resonant sound of the open tunings, Joni found that the technique relieved her polio-affected “clumsy” left hand; with open tunings, fretting the chords is considerably easier on that hand. By the fall of 1965, she had a unique playing style and two handsome young male mentors.

  Chuck and Joni’s Ferry Street apartment had become a way station for folksingers who swung through the Motor City: Eric Andersen and Tom Rush, of course, but also guitarist and MacDougal Street regular Bruce Langhorne, the only black man in Bob Dylan’s inner circle (“a wonderful houseguest, who hummed as he made omelettes in the morning,” Chuck recalls), and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who was really Elliot Charles Adnopoz from Brooklyn (and who once took an underage girl home from the club, in those days before such things provoked outrage, or protection, and had a noisy good time with her all night, keeping Joni and Chuck awake). Burly “Mayor of MacDougal” Street Dave Van Ronk visited but didn’t stay over; and so did Gordon Lightfoot, Jesse Colin Young, local legend Loring Janes, and Joni’s revered Buffy Sainte-Marie. Through the interplay with these seasoned players, at their apartment and at the club—where Joni and Chuck would crowd into the tiny green room on nights when Rush, Buffy, Lightfoot, or David Blue, or Ian and Sylvia were performing—Joni was listenin
g, learning, and trying out her new songs for the best kind of audience: these colleagues/betters. “Whoever was there, she was on him: ‘Listen to this!’ She was constantly pitching her songs,” Chuck recalls. But what Chuck may have recalled as “what we now call chutzpah,” the performers saw as promise. Sainte-Marie and Van Ronk would come away fans. “Buffy [eventually] said, ‘You wrote that?!’” about “The Circle Game,” Chuck says.

  The couple settled on the name Chuck and Joni Mitchell. They would take turns performing alone on the stage and then do some duets. They took their act on the road: driving all over the country in Chuck’s 1956 Porsche, performing and then hitting all-night diners, where Joni would order grilled bacon and cheese sandwiches and salad, “slathered,” Chuck recalls, “with orange Kraft French dressing.” At these far-flung gigs (from Canada to Florida), Joni’s feistiness surfaced. “She was not a wilting flower; she had a kind of jackboot feminism and a wonderful sense of righteous indignation,” says Chuck. “At a fourth-rate pizza place in Regina she got madder than hell—‘You bastards! You fuckers! Listen to me!’ when a foursome at one table talked while she was singing.” When the two were herded into the police station in Athens, Georgia, after Chuck was ticketed for speeding, Joni was so enraged at the cops, “she’s stalking around saying, ‘You sons of bitches!’ The judge said, ‘Young lady, curb your language or I will put this man in jail!’ Her attitude was, ‘I didn’t come all the way from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to run into this bullshit!’”

  Still, Chuck says, his young wife was largely circumspect. “From her years in those prairie towns where nosy was normal and expected,” she had become “careful and compartmentalized. It was a survival mechanism, ingrained. She could be open but careful-open. She’d read a situation, and if it was safe, she’d open up more.”

  Meanwhile, Joni kept writing. And writing. Chuck may have perceived them as a duo, with her the junior partner, but she was bearing down on a rich vein of talent that had suddenly materialized, full-blown. It turns out that she was as natural a songwriter as any who ever walked the earth and only now was this gift manifesting itself. She completed the swing-rhythmed, highly syncopated ode to Yorkville, “Night in the City,” to defend the neighborhood that (as she indignantly put it in a radio interview) “local Torontoans were always slandering—‘Dread beatniks walk the streets of Yorkville!’ ‘Fourteen Yorkville hippies get busted!’ ‘A young girl’s true confessions of life in Yorkville!’—every week there’s something like that [in the news].” The song’s upbeatness puts it in the minority of her early pieces, many of which, for all her rootedness in the folk idiom and despite her jazz instincts, are almost Sondheim-like. “Song to a Seagull,” “Marcie,” “Michael from Mountains,” “I Had a King,” and “Sisotowbell Lane” are all literate, melodic soliloquies that it’s easy to imagine hearing from a spot-lit singer-actor.

  Through contacts at the Chess Mate, Joni and Chuck hired Motown sidemen to write lead sheets for her songs. “They were good solid jazz players”—not easily impressed, Chuck recalls. The men unenthusiastically trudged up the four flights to the Mitchells’ apartment, but once they got inside “they listened to Joni and said, ‘She’s somethin’ else!’ and they looked at her hands and said, ‘Play that again?’” By now Armand Kunz was working hard to set Joni and Chuck up as publishers of Joni’s own songs. Chuck had begun seeking (and would within the year obtain) written permission from Oxford English professor J. R. R. Tolkien to use the name Gandalf for the publishing company. (After Joni and Chuck divorced, her catalogue of songs moved from Gandalf to her own self-named publishing company, Siquomb. Chuck’s and Armand’s efforts proved very advantageous to Joni; having published her own songs so early, within her own publishing company, she could not be exploited the way many songwriters are.)

  Joni was “writing songs everywhere,” Chuck says. “She had little pieces of paper and notebooks, filled with her round, girlish hand, with her proper cursive.” She wrote “The Circle Game” during the first year of the marriage. Joni had started it as a kind of “answer” song to Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” which Vicky Taylor had played her months earlier. Now she returned to complete it. Chuck remembers their talking about the song-in-progress. “It was a conscious thing she did; she saw the universal nature of the image—‘We’re captive on the carousel of time’—and played with it; the original toying with it came when we were driving somewhere. I always drove; she’d be sitting there, looking out the window and she’d often write. Even though she was a confessional songwriter, she had a real gift for Tin Pan Alley—the idea of the ponies going round and round: she knew it was commercial.” Though Joni was not even twenty-three when she wrote it, the song has an earned-feeling grasp of the finiteness of life; it’s darkly sad in the guise of sweet innocence. An answer song to “Sugar Mountain”? A commercial effort? It’s hard to believe this is all this song is. A Look magazine writer in 1970 noticed, on walking through Joni’s Laurel Canyon home, that she’d scrawled on a notepad, “Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.” Was Joni’s secret dilemma, from pregnancy to relinquishment, a “sorrow” that was “so hard to tell” it could only be expressed in a song ostensibly inspired by other, less personal, events?

  Or two songs? For “Both Sides, Now,” which she wrote on the cusp of her estrangement from Chuck, also seems undeniably tied to her turmoil about the baby, despite what she has claimed were the song’s roots. She once said that “Both Sides, Now” was inspired by The Lord of the Rings (she’d begun to write a children’s fantasy based upon it), while Chuck remembers her reading enough of his copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King to have come upon Henderson musing from his airplane seat: “And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides, as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.” (Joni has also independently given this version of the song’s origin.) But on top of these stated influences, “Both Sides, Now”’s theme of thoughtful indecisiveness and of the shifting, illusory nature of truth suggests it was unconsciously autobiographical. (Fluidity of meaning is “the great thing about songs,” Neil Young recently said to interviewer Terry Gross, in describing how a lyric he wrote that was directly inspired by a male friend’s phone message was nonetheless correctly interpreted as a love poem to his wife.)

  Tom Rush had been singing “Urge for Going” all over Cambridge, and his fans loved it. He was eager for more of Joni’s songs. “I remember asking her, ‘What else do you have? What else do you have?’ So she sent me a reel-to-reel tape. It was a tape of nice songs, and then at the end she says into the mic: ‘This is a new song. I’ve just finished it. It’s awful. I don’t even know why I’m bothering you with it.’ And it’s ‘The Circle Game.’” Rush phoned her right away. He would not only record the song; he would use the song as the title of his 1968 album.*

  Joni’s creative fertility and her work discipline were noticed not just by Chuck, who saw in his young wife a penchant to plunge herself into work until it was finished (“whether that work was songwriting or making a pant suit from an old navy blanket”), but by Chuck’s friend Armand Kunz. “Joni had incredible focus,” Kunz recalls. “If she decided to write, she wrote—it didn’t matter what time of day. I remember her being closeted in a little room off their hall, working intensely, working seriously. Joni had a powerful work ethic; I don’t recall her ever complaining or saying she was blocked.” Kunz had just been made general counsel of the Michigan Bar Association, and his wife Marji had become fashion editor of the Detroit Free Press. “Marji’s columns were chatty and approachable,” Armand recalls, of his late wife. “She wrote about fashion like you were having coffee with her. And, like Joni, she never blocked. ‘We need three column inches? I’ll get to work on sandals.’ Though Joni wasn’t writing to space or deadline like Marji, they had that work ethic in common.” Foursome dinners were frequent.
Both fine cooks, the Kunzes lived in a carriage house in a marginal neighborhood; the Mitchells, in their antique-filled “tenement castle” in a student ghetto—totally urban-romantic.

  That romanticism became a matter of public record when Marji hired Joni and Chuck to model for the Free Press’s fashion page, and then in March 1966, the other Detroit paper got on the bandwagon by running an article about the Mitchells, touting them as connubial tastemakers-about-town. Tucking that news clipping into an envelope, an amused Chuck typed a note to a friend: “The Detroit News, treating in rather idyllic fashion the life and digs of a young couple footloose in the big city…us’n. We be the new urbanity, it says. How about that?” How about that, indeed? This was the life that a great many twenty-two-year-old American females dreamed of having.