Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  * Although the Pill was still not legal for unmarried women in many states, many doctors prescribed it to them anyway.

  * Nyro and her backup singers had arrived at the festival in long, black nightclub gowns, and she, a rare bird from another planet, was overtaken, confounded, and outnumbered by the psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane, Hendrix, and Joplin, and by the SoCal hipness of the Mamas and the Papas, who had recently made electric folk rock sybaritic and glamorous. Laura bombed at the festival and as she sang, she heard, or thought she heard, the audience booing her. “Laura walked off the stage crying,” Michelle Phillips recalls, and as both Michelle and festival coproducer (with John Phillips) Lou Adler attest: “Laura carried that baggage all her life.” But, almost three decades later, Adler and Pennebaker carefully watched and (with the aid of sound amplification that had been unavailable in 1967) listened to the original footage of Laura’s performance, and they made an astonishing discovery: the booing was something Laura had imagined. “Those weren’t boos!” Adler says today. “It was a person saying, ‘We…love…you’!” Lou Adler and Michelle Phillips were eager to get the tape to Laura to reverse her pain. Laura died, of ovarian cancer, in April 1997, before she was able to hear it.

  * A year earlier Morrison had been spending his days sunbathing spread-eagled on State Beach (but rarely getting wet) with a crew of Beverly High surfers who’d grown up in glamorously dysfunctional families, and who cheerfully committed petty thefts with their hero, dashing outlaw surfer Miki Dora. Morrison wrote poetry by day (“terrible” poetry, according to his best friend, Robbie Freeman), while, at night, high on acid, he dazzled people with his “deep” metaphysical apocalyptic rants—and horrified them by gleefully stamping out lit cigarettes on his pliant girlfriend Mary’s bare stomach. Now Morrison, basically untamed, was the FM airwaves’ charismatic bad boy, soon to be called the Lizard King.

  * Soon after he and Toni broke up, Schneider would divorce his wife and become involved with Candice Bergen. By now he was ragingly political, a close friend of Abbie Hoffman’s at the height of Hoffman’s Yippie mischief, and a friend and avid patron—one might say acolyte (“What can I say? He’s my hero,” Schneider had said)—of Black Panther Huey Newton, who had been convicted of manslaughter in the 1967 shooting of a police officer. During this time—as Bergen recalls in her autobiography, Knock Wood—Abbie Hoffman excitedly suggested that Bergen use Henry Kissinger’s presumed crush on her (he had asked her for a date) to “put acid in his Tab.” Bergen declined to send Nixon’s Secretary of State on an acid trip, but, urged by Schneider not to pass up the opportunity to “confront” Kissinger about the war, she did go on the date with him.

  * “The women James goes for are strong, and he turns his power over to them,” says one who’s known Taylor since virtually the beginning of his career, adding, “James marries women so he doesn’t have to make another decision.”

  * According to Richard Corey, James had originally written “Maggie” (Margaret’s nickname), not “Jesus,” but Paul McCartney had told him he couldn’t have two girls’ names in one song.

  * Chuck, admitting his memory is fuzzy, says he believes they visited the foster home “before we got married,” but Joni has consistently said that (in her view) Chuck told her he would take the baby and that is why she married him—and then he didn’t take the baby; so her memory puts the trip to the foster home after the marriage.

  * The events directly leading to relinquishment of the baby are something Joni has talked about over the decades with friends, in different versions. Her conversation with a close friend about that day in the foster home yields a credible summation. According to the friend, “From what she told me, I don’t think she had enough gumption to stand up to Chuck and say, ‘No! I want this baby. I have to have this baby! I can make this work.’ That’s what was going through her head, but she wasn’t able to say it. She’s held that against him forever.” Chuck says, “I will not take the blame for the decision. The Joni I knew always made her own decisions, and it stands to reason she would have made this one, too.”

  * Coincidentally, Eric’s soon-to-be wife, Debbie Green—who was Joan Baez’s and Betsy Minot Siggins’s friend on the Cambridge/Boston folk scene six years earlier (and from whom Joan Baez had actually derived her breakthrough folk style during those evenings at Club 47)—had long ago been a sixth-grade summer crush of Chuck’s; their mothers knew each other.

  *Rolling Stone credited Rush’s The Circle Game with ushering in the “singer-songwriter” era. The album also included his versions of Joni’s “Urge for Going” and “Tin Angel” and then-barely-known James Taylor’s “Something in the Way She Moves” and “Sunshine Sunshine” and then-unknown Jackson Browne’s “Shadow Dream Song.”

  * A double standard that is worth pondering. Four years earlier, Bob Dylan—who’d come to New York, letting it be thought he was an exotic vagabond—had been humiliatingly exposed by Newsweek as a middle-class Jewish fraternity boy; still, after a brief retreat from the public eye, his glamour was undiminished. Yet Joni now worried that her reputation and her prospects would be hurt by revelation of the baby. Even in rebel-loving 1960s rock, a young man could be forgiven for having a less tortured and romantic past than he’d invented for himself, but a young woman had to fear retribution for having a more tortured and romantic past than the public knew about.

  ** The song’s ebullient spirit transcended its immediate meaning—inspiring, among other things, a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham to fall in love with the song as she was falling in love with fellow student Bill Clinton, and to decide, on the spot, to name their future child after the song.

  * Twenty-one years later she would write of Killer Kyle in “The Beat of Black Wings.”

  * She might have been influenced by the foil wallpapering of Andy Warhol’s Factory, by Billy Linich (a.k.a. Billy Name) three years earlier.

  * In her 1987 autobiography Trust Your Heart, Judy Collins mistakenly credited Tom Rush, not Al Kooper, with calling her in the middle of the night, with Joni present. Rush says, “It’s sweet of Judy to credit me with bringing her the song [but I didn’t]…I remember first hearing ‘Both Sides, Now’ on the radio, done by Judy, and feeling a bit hurt that Joni hadn’t offered the song to me. I also recall Joni telling me some years later that when she wrote the song, she thought of me—salt in the wound! None of which is to say that I harbored any illusions that my version of ‘Both Sides, Now’ would have inevitably achieved the prominence that Judy’s did, but I would have liked a shot at it.”

  * Tork—whose membership in the artificially constructed group the Monkees didn’t lose him street cred with his “purer” musician friends—owned a house in Studio City, which he termed an “artists’ collective.” There, beautiful, distinctly non-bimbo women strolled around nude; vegetarian cuisine was whipped up by a chef; and Augustus Owsley Stanley III made personal visits from the Bay Area with his finest fresh batches of acid. Crosby and his girlfriend, Christine Hinton, were frequent guests.

  * Grossman had his own, secret logic when it came to image. He had made Noel Stookey change his name to Paul, and he insisted that Mary Travers avoid the sun at all costs, to keep her skin milk white.

  * According to Patricia Barry, the attorney who, along with feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, effectively made sexual harrassment a federal cause of action through the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1986 decision on their appeal of Meritor Savings Banks v. Vinson: “Anyone sexually harassed on the job in 1966 would have no remedy because the idea that sexual harassment amounted to sexual discrimination was not raised as a claim of employment discrimination until the late ’60s or early ’70s. However, even if sexual harassment was actionable in 1966, unless the music engineer was her supervisor, Carly Simon would still not have a claim.”

  * Sociology professor Todd Gitlin, former SDS president and memoirist-historian of the political side of the era, describes, in his authoritative The Sixties: Ye
ars of Hope, Days of Rage, the passion and melodrama that radical politics had attained: “[The movement] did not merely want you to support a position, it wanted you to dive in, and the more total the immersion the better. The link between feeling and action was a short fuse. Actions were taken…to ‘dramatize convictions.’…[T]he movement’s rites became epiphanies. Confrontations were moments of truth, branded into memory, bisecting life into Time Before and Time After. We collected these ritual punctuations as moments when the shroud that normally covers everyday life was torn away and we stood face to face with the true significance of things. Each round was an approximation of the apocalyps[e.]”

  * Unguessable from his Saturday Evening Post covers of orderly, apple pie–innocent small-town American life, Rockwell had moved to Stockbridge because his mentally ill wife was undergoing shock treatments at Riggs. In a year’s time James Taylor would enter Riggs to (temporarily) detox from his heroin addiction.

  * Brackman never wrote another essay with that cachet, but he did become Esquire’s film critic and soon after a screenwriter for the Bob Rafelson–directed The King of Marvin Gardens and executive producer of director Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

  * Woody Guthrie’s performer son lived in the area and, through his satirical antiwar song, “Alice’s Restaurant,” about his Stockbridge friend, funky restaurateur Alice Brock, he had made Stockbridge counterculturally iconic in colleges all over the country.

  * Carly’s short, mostly unpleasant period with Elephant’s Memory had an even more unpleasant afterlife. Although she’d signed a contract with them to be only a singer, not a writer, once she became famous, they sued her—unsuccessfully—for rights to the hits she had written.

  * The tragedies and notoriety of the staff of and contributors of the briefly flourishing Eye are a thin-slicing of the era’s melodrama. Eye’s rock scene den mother, the charismatic Lillian Roxon (who inspired Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman”), died too young of an asthma attack. Its art director—beautiful, Pocahontas-braided Judy Parker—and chief photographer, her pint-sized British boyfriend, Michael Soldan, took acid after their boss, Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, scolded them for their hallucinogenic colors; then got in their boat on the Long Island Sound in a storm and drowned. Judy Collins’s boyfriend Michael Thomas wrote for Eye; so did Jac Holzman’s girlfriend Ellen Sander (who’d stroll around their home nude amid company). Susan and Michael Lydon (the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne of the counterculture) filed dispatches from swinging London, the Haight, and Berkeley; then Susan split from Michael and became, in this order: Janis Joplin’s guitarist’s girlfriend, a member of one of the first consciousness-raising groups, an essayist on the politics of orgasm, a leader of the self-fufillment cult Arica, in near-middle-age a street-dwelling crack addict, and, finally, before her death from breast cancer in 2005, an authority on knitting (and, one might add, on survival). The photographer in the crowd was a long-legged young woman who’d grown up on a leafy estate just north of Manhattan, had been married to a professor, wore tailored skirts and blouses, and was the receptionist at Town and Country. Her blasé preppy-debutante airs made her fascinating to rock stars. Her name was Linda Eastman. She promptly went to England and married Paul McCartney.

  * Joni’s attendance at the festival was significant for another reason. Though she didn’t perform that year (organizer Nancy Carlin, a close friend of Joan Baez’s and Mimi Fariña’s, says, “We didn’t even know who she was at the time; we didn’t have accommodations for her because we weren’t expecting her; she offered to sleep in the station wagon”), Joni met Joellen Lapidus, a hand-carver and crafter of the Appalachian dulcimer. The dulcimer, which lies flat across the lap, may be the only musical instrument indigenous to America. Joni once described its myth-shrouded origin as the result of either the “Scots coming to Appalachia and longing for their bagpipes [or]…the Swedes coming and longing for their zither, [though] other people say that one day they just took a fiddle and stretched it out and put it on their lap.” It makes a vibrant, plucked sound. Lapidus made Joni a beautiful dulcimer, which would become a staple of her composing and singing, and her accompaniment on much of Blue.

  * When Joni and Jefferson Airplane appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, David and Stephen bounded in, mid-segment, fresh from Bethel. In her long, low-cut, loden green crushed velvet dress, Joni exuded a blushing but steely, farm-girl dignity, next to tanned, lean, tartly sophisticated Grace Slick in tie-dye. Slick, still the reigning Acid Queen, got the lion’s share of attention, sparring with Cavett (when she dismissively referred to him as “Sam,” he shot back, “Stop calling me the wrong name, Miss Joplin”) as if they were some odd-couple comedy team, but Joni’s “Chelsea Morning” drew an almost awed ovation. Word of the transition from tough psychedelic hard rock to thoughtful, sincere music—soon to be advanced by James Taylor, and then, most fulsomely, by Carole on Tapestry—would be flowing from music critics’ pens in a year and a half’s time. The contrast, during this show, between Grace and Joni was the early, female version of that baton-passing.

  * Apparently struck right away by the unique geography and female sociology of the place and scene she’d just moved into, Joni actually wrote the first version of the song in early 1968, when she was recording Joni Mitchell. Announcing, “I have a surprise for you,” Joni sang the Trina verse for Trina at the recording session; in gratitude, Trina promptly made Joni a black minidress with an antique lace pocket.

  * Although the official lyrics are “Never been…,” Nash, musing about that moment in time, spoke them to this author as “I have never been…”

  * After a bit more international roving—in Nepal, among other sites—and time in Marin County and New York City, the “red red rogue” became a yoga teacher and investment adviser who today shuttles between the D.C. area and Nairobi, where his wife is an executive of an AIDS-related humanitarian organization.

  * Margaret went on to marry and have a son with a ballet dancer who then came out as gay. After they divorced, she married a man who was Hasidic; she became Hasidic, cutting off her long hair and covering her head with a wig. She spent her days washing the bodies of the dead, according to Jewish burial rites. In 1997 Margaret Corey died of an asthma attack.

  * “A Case of You” may be one of the rare Joni songs that was written about two men. Although she told a confidante in the mid-1990s that it was about Leonard Cohen, she told Estrella Berosini that the song’s signature line referred—literally—to intimate moments with James (who, in a 2004 magazine interview, Joni said was the best lover she’d ever had).

  * Danny and Abigail eventually married, as did Stephanie and John. Both couples are now divorced.

  * In the same way that the otherwise great minds at the 1964 World’s Fair missed the mark by thinking that “revolution” for U.S. women would be exotically supercharged house-cleaning equipment, Roszak thought U.S. youth’s loathed enemy was technology.

  * A portion of the song’s lyrics would, years later, be criticized as antifeminist—“Where you lead / I will follow” did sound servile. When the song became the theme song for Gilmore Girls in 2001, Carole and Toni took out the male-female references and rewrote the song to reflect the idea of loyalty, not slavish devotion.

  * Joni and James did their background parts a week later; they are credited as “the Mitchell/Taylor Boy-and-Girl Choir.”

  * The child actor from television’s My Three Sons had become a photographer.

  * Although James’s women friends had, as Betsy Asher noted, formed a “fence” around him, Joni’s confidantes recall that it was his family, not his friends, who intimidated her.

  * In 1974, Gerry went to Boston on a self-appointed errand to intervene against the anti-integration school busing rioters; he returned home, Barbara says, “all bloody” from the confrontation. The next year he flew to Israel and tried to enlist in the Israeli army.

  * Late in her pregnancy, Carole had occasion to run into Warren Beatty, who (
recalls Abigail, who witnessed the scene) begged Carole to have sex with him, saying he’d never had sex with a very pregnant woman and wanted to know how it felt. Carole declined.

  * When Stephanie and John’s son Noah was born two years later, it would be practiced mom Carole who held the jaundiced newborn while the doctor gave his heel a needle prick. And when Carole and Stephanie were at a Connecticut Howard Johnson’s in 1974 and the manager told Stephanie to cover herself with a blanket because the other diners were disturbed by her breast-feeding, Carole pointed to the one-year-old and coolly retorted, “Well, he seems to be happy.” “We were crusading hippie moms,” says Stephanie.