Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  James’s infatuation with Joni would end two other romances he’d been having with women within his own circle. Also in that circle was another Canyon woman, his friend, who was now expressing from a different angle and in more populist terms the same changed world that Joni was singing about. As James would later write, in bemused amazement: “Who can explain it? This girl from Brooklyn, unannounced, on the scene…a tunesmith, a Brill Building pro, inventing popular music, hammering out songs for any occasion…[now writing] very accessible, very personal statements, built from the ground up with a simple, elegant architecture.” Who could explain it, indeed?

  It was finally Carole’s moment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  carole 1969–1970

  joni 1970

  carole and joni

  early 1971–1972

  As she entered the last year of the decade that had started with the soaring success of her semiautobiographical “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” Carole learned to live with the ambiguity of her on/off relationship with Charlie Larkey. While she might not always be in control of her relationships with men, work was something over which she always had mastery. “Here she shined, she excelled,” says Stephanie Magrino Fischbach. “She made it look easy to her peers. Whenever you’d come over to Carole’s house, she was sitting at the piano, writing, between the kids’ dentist appointments and picking them up from school.”

  Carole continued to write with Gerry, as long as his mental state was relatively stable, since it would financially benefit her daughters, Louise and Sherry. Gerry now had his own studio, Larrabee Sound, on Beverly Glen, but mostly, after discussing the tone and spirit of their envisioned song, Carole would take Gerry’s lyrics and write the melody at home. It was the same way she’d begun to work with Toni Stern. Toni, who didn’t know anybody else who had young children, was in awe of Carole’s efficiency. “One time she was playing the piano with one hand and helping one of her daughters get dressed with the other. I was slack-jawed.”

  The idea of casting herself as a “singer-songwriter” may have been sparked in earnest a year earlier, in the summer of 1968, when Carole first met with Lou Adler before she, Danny Kortchmar, and Charlie recorded Now That Everything’s Been Said. Lou had remembered how, in the early 1960s, people in the industry loved Carole’s demos so much, “I’d loan them out—and never get them back,” he says. “One of the first things Lou did was give us a copy of Laura Nyro’s first album, More Than a New Discovery, which was not well known outside the industry,” says Charlie, “and we took it home and listened to it a lot.” Like Carole, Nyro was a young outer-borough woman writing her own Broadway- and pop-soul-influenced songs and singing them, accompanying herself on the piano rather than on the now-fashionable guitar. As a teenager, Nyro’s a cappella group had sung the hits of the (local-hero) Chantels—and the Shirelles, including “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which she would eventually cover; and songs on Nyro’s first album, like “Wedding Bell Blues,” and on her virtuosic Eli and the Thirteenth Confession (“Sweet Blindness”) hint at Carole’s influence on her. Laura (her unfortunate bombing at Monterey Pop notwithstanding) was a solo act; why not Carole?

  Still, for Carole in the middle of 1969, the comfort of collaboration beckoned. Charlie, who was now playing bass at the Troubadour, proposed a jam session with Danny and Abigail Haness and Ralph Schuckett, “and I asked Carole to join in.” They all went to Abigail’s boyfriend, drummer Michael Ney’s house. After a couple of sessions Michael was replaced by Joel O’Brien, who was now living nearby with wife Connie. The friends came up with the name Baby Toshiba and the Delrays (someone had a Toshiba TV) and landed a gig at a Beverly Hills club called the Factory, a favorite of Sinatra’s Rat Pack. By now Carole had bowed out of the group.

  Baby Toshiba changed its name to Jo Mama, as in the street-corner “dozens” game (“Yo mama…!”). Abigail was lead singer, her long, lustrous auburn hair whipping around as she belted out bluesy numbers, many written by Danny. Danny, Charlie, Abigail, Joel: here was the New York-to-L.A. crowd (plus Ralph). The only ones missing were Carole, Stephanie, John Fischbach, and James Taylor. Within months, they would all coalesce.

  In the middle of that coalescence, Carole had herself an adventure.

  Like many other young women of the time—like Joni, soon off to Crete—Carole wanted to get as far away from her known world as possible. In December she flew to Bangkok, met up with her neighbor Michael Schwartz, who was in the midst of a hippie trek, and the two of them flew to Calcutta and then vagabonded around India. Carole had a mission: Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, had given her a copy of John Wesley Harding to deliver to one of the two Calcutta men who were photographed with Dylan on the cover. But mainly Carole and Michael let themselves groove on the sheer wonder of the subcontinent. They stayed in cheap hotels, sleeping on rope beds and sharing primitive bathrooms with others; as with Joni in the toiletless cave, privation was part of the experience. They walked the teeming streets amid beggars, oxen, and the supine bodies of what they’d assumed were sleeping men until they saw those bodies being tossed into funeral carts. “It was an extremely intense experience—a girl from Brooklyn, a boy from San Diego—we’d never seen anything like it,” says Michael. They were in Bodh Gaya on New Year’s Eve and watched the 1960s turn to the 1970s at the site where Buddha had sat under the Bodhi tree. They took a train to the holy city of Benares. When they parted, Carole continued traveling on her own—it was a declaration of independence for the dawn of a new decade. Carole had gone from living with her parents to living with her husband to moving to L.A. with her daughters; now she was alone in the Third World, among strangers speaking an indecipherable language.

  Even before Carole flew back to California, the news in her crew was that Kootch’s friend James Taylor had arrived to record his second album, Sweet Baby James. Most of James’s year back in the States had been bumpy. After methadone treatment in England and rehab at Austen Riggs (during which his girlfriend Margaret Corey took to referring to him as “my boyfriend who’s in the loony bin”), over the summer he had injured both his arms and both his feet in a motorcycle accident—to make matters worse: on a motorcycle he’d “borrowed” from the local Vineyard police chief. Peter Asher was by now baptized into the angst and confusion of managing an addict: “There were bizarre moments, like scouring Chicago with some doctor friend to find methadone so James could finish his last show, with the attitude, Let’s just get him through these shows and then figure out what the hell to do.”

  Peter asked Carole if she would play piano on James’s new album, since James had loved the great Carole-and-Gerry hits. Carole hardly had to be persuaded; she’d heard James’s Apple album and she was a “huge James fan,” says Peter. Carole came to the Ashers’ rented house on Olympic and Longview, on the fringes of then-dowdy Hancock Park, for three rehearsals, and she and James formed, as Charlie puts it, a “musical mutual admiration society.” Also at the rehearsals was tall, lanky Russ Kunkel, a new drummer from Long Beach by way of Pittsburgh. His wife, Leah, Cass Elliot’s younger sister, had paid to get his missing front teeth replaced; he’d done some playing with David Crosby, but other than that was unknown. “Russ had never done a session before; he brought his own drums and arrived early,” says Peter. But his drumming turned out to be inspired, highlighting the plaintiveness of Taylor’s singing, and helped make the record a zeitgeist-turning hit. Kunkel would soon become the session drummer in the new soft rock, an important component of Joni’s Blue, and James’s best friend. (Later on, in the 1980s, by way of Carly, things would get more complicated between the two men.) Russ’s first impression of James: he was “tall—even taller than me—quiet, handsome, and soulful.”

  James didn’t just want Carole to play on his album, which she did; he wanted her to tour with him. “Carole had terrible stage fright; she was very insecure onstage,” says Danny. She would have said no to others, but she couldn’t refuse James. “James had a powerful allu
re,” says Peter. “If you made a list of women from that time who were secretly in love with James, it would be fairly long, and I don’t think Carole would deny being on it.” (Betsy Asher echoes, “You could tell Carole had a crush on James.”)

  Two others who were on the James “list” were Stephanie Magrino and Toni Stern. Toni met James at the Sweet Baby James sessions through Danny’s wife, Joyce, and “James and I became boyfriend and girlfriend,” Toni says. He spent a lot of time at Toni’s Kirkwood cottage, he called her “Mama,” and when he was cast in the movie Two-Lane Blacktop, he moaned, “Mama, they’re making me shave off my mustache!” “James was beautiful,” Toni says; they were “two souls who had some depth and were looking for love but didn’t have a clue about it, moving toward each other.” James was also romancing Stephanie, whenever she and John Fischbach were in an “off” mode. “She was my honey before she was your honey!” James once heatedly informed John over too many rounds of sake. Stephanie would eventually leave James in a Toronto hotel room after John called her and told her he loved her and to come back home to L.A. All this bed hopping was to be expected, of course. “It was a magical time,” says John. “We were in love with each other, and with life. I loved everybody! We were in our early twenties, with raging hormones, a little bit of dough, and, eventually, a little bit of fame—that’ll take you a long way.” Even though Margaret Corey was still James’s official girlfriend, they were not meant to last. “James broke up with Margaret” toward the end of 1970, “because his life was too frenetic,” says a woman in their inner circle.*

  Carole got a taste of performing on the road with James. She played piano for him, an anonymous band member. “Then James would bring her onstage and introduce her as the ‘legend’ who wrote ‘Loco-Motion’ and ‘Natural Woman,’” says Danny, “and you could see his fans going: ‘She wrote that? No way!’” The skepticism-turned-excitement spurred her on. “‘Yeah, they’re my songs!’ She had no problem after that.”

  Actually, it was a little more complicated. Carole said, at the time, that “if I think of it as ‘I’m getting up there to sing these songs’ and sing, with the emphasis on sing, I get really spooked. But when I think of it as ‘I’m getting up there to bring the songs to the people…’ with the emphasis heavy on the songs, then it’s easy, because the songs carry themselves.” When she’d play “Natural Woman,” “I’d say something about Aretha being a very hard lady to follow. And she is. Then I’d ask the audience to make believe that they’re hearing the demo before [Aretha] got it, and that kind of makes me relax.”

  But sometimes those performances became a humiliating trial by fire. As spring 1970 turned to summer and James became more of a phenomenon and a heartthrob (“Fire and Rain” would reach #3 in August), his fans were not in the mood to put up with any interloper. “They’d boo Carole; they wanted to hear James,” says writer Susan Braudy, who was along for many of the concerts. “But Carole would sing and play—‘Up on the Roof’ and ‘Natural Woman’—over the booing.” As Joni had found with Crosby, Stills and Nash, it was hard—so far, at least—to beat the power of a male superstar.

  And a superstar James Taylor was becoming. Touted a “new troubadour,” he was a hauntingly romantic figure with stringy, uncombed hair, penetrating eyes under thick, straight brows, and handsome, patrician features—the whole look calling more to mind an anguished Civil War deserter than a contemporary rocker. The effect was compounded by his brooding, tender, somehow classically American songs (his inclusion of “Oh, Susanna” on Sweet Baby James seemed natural, as if it extended a lineage), some of which—“Rainy Day Man,” “Sweet Baby James”; eventually “You Can Close Your Eyes”; later, “Walking Man,” “Shed a Little Light,” and “Shower the People”—contained a piercing, life-affirming sweetness. For all his shambling disaffection, there was a rock-ribbed dignity to him—a whiff of the modern-day Gary Cooper—that caused men to pleasingly identify. “He lopes into the spotlight, a tall, spare figure in jeans and a green T-shirt, lank, dark hair falling across his gaunt, sensitive face,” writer Ernest Dunbar would soon elegize in Look.

  Even more moved were the female scribes. “James Taylor…hunches his broad shoulders and wipes his sweating palms on his worn dungarees” as 4,000 fans wait for him in an Ohio auditorium, Susan Braudy wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile. “He pushes a hank of his long hair behind his ear and stares at the floor, oblivious to stage-hands,” one of whom opines, “‘You sure ain’t no Liberace when it comes to dressing,’” to which “James looks up for the second time in 10 minutes, grins…closes his eyes and monologues quietly in his gentle North Carolina cadence, ‘Well, doctor, it’s like this, man. I keep havin’ the same outasight dream…there are 4,000 people waitin’ for me to sing, but I can’t figure what they really want from me.’” Though James’s natural speaking voice was not Southern, he knew how to punch up the alienation, folksiness, and self-deprecation—and how to casually refer, as he did in the interview with Braudy, to his heroin addiction (which he put in the past tense, even though it was not) and his time spent in institutions. “Cynics may wonder if James’s myth-making mental anguishes have been packaged-for-sale by the businesspeople around him,” Braudy wrote, but “James seems to have made the decision to speak freely and honestly about himself.”

  “I think I fell in love with James while writing that piece,” says Braudy, who at the time—serious, long-legged, and quite beautiful—was a prized girlfriend to New York’s male media elite. Soon to be one of the original Ms. editors, she was just separating from her Yale-educated Columbia University professor husband—today, esteemed social critic Leo Braudy—and would eventually date Brian De Palma and Warren Beatty, with Woody Allen basing the Diane Keaton character in Manhattan on her. In between her travels to James’s concerts, Braudy was always set upon by people at Columbia professors’ parties who wanted to know what James was really like. Whereas Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison implied slumming for culturally snobbish women, James Taylor was a gorgeous junkie rock star who seemed to be one of their own. “James was one of the most complicated men I’d ever met,” Braudy says. “He was a bird with two broken wings…like a genie, with those beautiful tunes, and yet his nose ran, he was doing drugs, and when he took off his shoes, his socks smelled terrible,” all of which added to his “passive-aggressive charisma. He would walk into a room dejected, and he catalyzed the room.” Much of the angst was real; his new fame “was tremendously stressful; he was very shy, and it happened so quickly,” says Danny. “James,” says John Fischbach, “was a really, really funny guy, but also a somber guy; he had his demons,” which he knew how to parlay. “No one gets on the cover of Time magazine”—as James would in March 1971—“by accident,” remarks Peter Asher wryly.

  When, in the last week of July, James took a break from the tour to attend Mariposa, Joni was there, too, and his charisma and pain found its mate in hers.

  Shortly after Mariposa, in August, Joni flew to Tucumcari, New Mexico, where James was filming Two-Lane Blacktop. He’d been calling Toni Stern “Mama” when he’d gotten the role; now Joni was his old lady. On the set Joni knitted him a sweater vest, which he took to wearing constantly. He clearly seemed in love with Joni, Susan Braudy says, but later Joni would tell three confidantes that, as one puts it, “he was always judging her harshly; it was almost intimidating.” And, as another says, “James could be cruel; he had a dark side—he could go from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll.” At a nearby Hopi reservation, Joni bought a skirt made by tribal women. James called it ugly. “It was James acting like her mother: ‘How could you wear that?!’” this second friend says. “Joni said he was very critical of her all the time—and she couldn’t take it.” “Today,” the third friend says, “what she remembers is all the times James chastised her.” But “James really loved Joni,” Peter Asher recalls of this period.

  Joni seems to have written “This Flight Tonight” about that time in New Mexico. Her “gentle and sweet” lover hur
ts her with “that look, so critical,” but she regrets leaving almost as soon as the plane takes off. She replays a tender moment of their watching a star in the sky between the movie set trailers and wants the pilot to “turn this crazy bird around” so she can return to him. Her confusion and vulnerability suggest depression, and now she understands its source: the relinquishment of the baby. As she later put it, “Soon after I’d given up my daughter for adoption, I had a house and a car and I had the means, and I’d become a public figure; the combination of those situations did not sit well. So…I began to go inside, and question who I was. And out of that [the songs of] Blue evolved.”

  Joni joined James for a couple of months in England at the end of the summer. Peter Asher lived with them in a London flat. “I have a distinct memory,” Peter says, “of listening to Joni play ‘Blue,’ which she’d just composed, on the piano.” Asher thought the song (which Rolling Stone’s Timothy Crouse would call “beautiful[ly] mysterious and unresolved”) was extraordinary. (Its references to a drug addict’s “needles” and Joni’s proffering a seashell to her lover—John Fischbach remembers Joni giving a seashell to James one evening in L.A.—make it fairly clear that “Blue” is about James.) Joni also played her newly composed “A Case of You”* on the dulcimer—“I thought it was just a masterpiece,” Peter Asher says.

  While in England, during which Joni performed at the raucous Isle of Wight festival (and skillfully calmed the obstreperous crowd), Joni wrote a letter to Cary Raditz, who was still in California, asking him to join her and James. “She said, ‘I hope you’re not offended, but I’m with James and I wanted you to be here and meet him,’” Cary recalls. Cary already understood that their Matala romance had been downgraded by Joni to “some sort of friendship relationship”…so “I wasn’t jealous.” The “red red rogue,” about whom Joni had already written two songs, good-naturedly adjusted from lover to, as he puts it, “sidekick and third wheel.” Cary flew to England; he, James, and Joni went “to music industry parties, eating, drinking well, riding in limousines.”