Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  I didn’t really pay much attention to it, but I was having trouble breathing. When I breathed in deeply, there was the sound of gurgling in my lungs. I ignored it. I certainly was not going to go to a doctor. We seldom did in our family; we were as close to being Christian Scientists as Methodists could be, and I knew you would not want to take an aspirin unless you wanted to kill yourself!

  My weeks out on the road seemed endless, but Walter would sometimes travel to be with me, or I would go to New York for a few precious days with him.

  That September, Albert Grossman approached me. “You remember that idea I had for you?” he asked. “I want to put you together with Jo Mapes and Judy Henske. We can call you the Brown-Eyed Girls.”

  I started to laugh. “Albert, you and your trios!”

  “I think it would work,” he insisted. “You can get some brown contact lenses!”

  By the time our conversation finished, I had agreed, but I was still laughing.

  ON Golden Apples of the Sun, I kept mostly to the path I had begun with my first album. I was gaining a reputation as a singer of traditional folk ballads, although I did take some subtle detours and included an eclectic mix of contemporary and children’s songs.

  The song “Golden Apples of the Sun” is based on a William Butler Yeats poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”; I learned it from Will Holt at the Gate of Horn. “Apples” set the tone for this adventure into another musical world while continuing a relationship with my treasured old friends, the great songs of past centuries. Among the sea chanties, one of my favorite work songs of all, “Bonnie Ship the Diamond” played a powerful part in my concerts. I learned it from one of the many albums of sea chanties I loved so much. The story of a whale hunt, it conjures up the beauty and majesty of these magnificent creatures, as well as their terrible deaths.

  There was a kind of angry agitation in my singing of the songs that related to what I was doing in my life. I may not have been hauling a sail up a mast, but I was working hard and I identified with people in the world who did the same every day to make a living.

  Mystery also played a part in my selection for this early 1960s album. “The Great Selchie of Shule Skerry” had gotten me the job at the Gate of Horn, and there was a kind of sorcery in its strange lyric. A song that originated in the Hebrides, many of whose natives would not eat the meat of seals because they believed them to be bewitched seal-men, this story has a link to the history of magic in traditional ballads. Apples and gold, ships carrying whalers to faraway places, and dreams that haunt the lonely as well as the happy are all on board in my second album, a work full of contrast and, I hope, comfort.

  AT the end of the summer of 1962, as Golden Apples of the Sun was being released, I found I was pregnant. I knew the baby was Walter’s. And I knew I couldn’t go through with the pregnancy.

  I went to Denver for a gig and had two free days afterward. I borrowed my sister-in-law’s tiny VW to drive sixteen hours two states north to have an abortion.

  In the middle of the night, driving back to Denver, I found myself alone on a moonlit stretch of a Wyoming road. The little VW motor began missing beats and finally quit on me. I had some car skills, one of which was that I knew this little buggy and was able to put up the hood and file the points in the engine until I got her started again. And again. The moon shone brightly above me, but no one knew where I was. Only Walter knew, and he was in New York.

  This was not a safe place and not a place I was happy to be in. I was scared to death, in fact. In those days abortion was illegal. If men had ovaries, I’m sure there would be no question of who has a choice and who doesn’t.

  I got back to Connecticut, where my marriage, shaky at best, was continuing to crumble. One night Peter and I took magic mushrooms—given to him, I suspect, by a fellow student in his Blake course. Stoned to the eyeballs, we went to the movies outside Storrs. On the way back from seeing Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with Peter driving our big old Chevy van in the rain, we hit a rabbit running across the road. Truth suddenly spilled out of me—that I was in love with someone else, although I did not say whom. On top of the hallucinogen we had taken, we were both drinking that night, and the alcohol fueled what shortly became an argument. We both said things we would regret, but there was one thing that we both felt we knew: neither of us wanted to end our marriage. After that, our compact with each other seemed firm—I would stop seeing Walter, we would get through this.

  But of course I didn’t stop seeing Walter. I simply couldn’t. The sexual attraction was too strong to resist.

  On October 23, 1962, I played Carnegie Hall as the opening act for Theo Bikel. My parents came to New York for the great night, and there was an elegant party for us in the suite at the top floor of the Bergdorf Goodman store, the family business of Minky, Peter’s brother’s wife. There our marriage seemed to take its last breaths. I drank too much, as I had been doing for months. There were tête-à-têtes between Peter and his brother, and between my sister-in-law Hadley and me. My mother and father toasted their daughter’s triumph at Carnegie Hall, perhaps guessing my marriage was disintegrating but hopeful Peter and I would pull through, if only for the sake of our son. They had, after all, faced more challenges than we had ever known. I hadn’t the heart to tell them I knew my husband and I were facing problems that we could not solve.

  In the midst of my disintegrating marriage, the Cuban missile crisis was in full swing. Everywhere you turned, you saw fright and anxiety on people’s faces, and every television set and radio station in the country was carrying the news. President Kennedy himself, that beacon of hope for our times, was troubled, his frown deep, his voice dark, as though he was feeling what everyone else was feeling: terror at what might happen next.

  Two days after the Carnegie Hall show, I headed for Tucson, where I had a club date. Clark was in Peter’s arms on that windy morning at Bradley International Airport, waving to me as I boarded the plane that would take me far, far away from our life in Connecticut, from the Scottrons’ farm where the fireflies floated in the summer fields outside the windows of our red-painted farmhouse, where I cooked and baked and ironed and fed Clark and Peter dinners and listened to tapes of the songs for my next albums. I would look back on that time in our lives and wonder, from distant cities and continents around the world, whether I would ever again find the peace and happiness we once had.

  I was very ill when I landed in Tucson, and after I did my first show that night, the two young people who ran the club, Fran and Alice, who had day jobs as medical technicians, insisted I go see a doctor at Tucson General. They picked me up at the hotel the next morning, and on the way to the hospital the radio was playing the Beatles’ new release, “Love Me Do,” their first single. Fran, Alice, and I bounced to the Beatles on the radio, and I asked them to pull over at a liquor store for a quart of Kahlúa and a six-pack of Canadian beer. I knew I was sick; I had been having trouble breathing for months, hiding the pain with whatever was handy, and I knew I was lucky with my new friends—like so many strangers who were there when I needed them—who were skilled and saw at once that I needed help. I also knew that I was going to need reinforcements.

  Less than thirty minutes later Dr. Schneider had diagnosed tubercular pleurisy. The hospital admitted me and my luggage and my paper shopping bags full of booze with no questions, and I was sent to a remote hospital wing, as far away from the other patients as they could get me. The doctors drained my lungs and put me on drugs for TB. I was to stay there a month.

  That first afternoon I found the pay phone in the hall outside my room and phoned Albert Grossman. I knew he was already working on his idea for a trio, networking with Judy Henske and Jo Mapes and God only knew who else. They might not have even agreed to be part of the Brown-Eyed Girls, but his idea had been haunting me.

  “I am not going to join the Brown-Eyed Girls,” I told him, and explained what had happened.

  “Well, I wish you good luck,” he said. “And get well soon
,” he added.

  I spent the afternoon being poked and prodded, so that evening, after sleeping pills and liquids, I settled into bed and turned on the little radio, with my stash of booze at the ready. The news broadcasts were still full of the story of James Meredith registering at the University of Mississippi earlier that month, escorted by the federal marshals who had been ordered to protect him by Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general. Governor Ross Barnett in Mississippi had called in his thugs, but in spite of them, Meredith became the first black student in American history to be admitted to an all-white school. It was a great moment for the world, and I kicked up my heels again (quietly, painfully, as I was practically unable to stand up from exhaustion and the drugs that had been prescribed) and took a slow turn around my room, celebrating for Meredith and for the country, and toasting him with Kahlúa.

  I spent the first few days in Tucson General licking my wounds and getting the attention of Dr. Schneider, who would pull double duty as my unofficial therapist. My isolated room had its advantages. I could gaze out my window at the heartbreaking view of mountains against spectacular sunsets of red and gold as the dry western air soothed my lungs.

  As my lungs continued to be drained each day and my doctors ran tests and nodded in agreement over my improvement, a sigh of relief spread through even the isolation wing at the hospital. Doctors and patients alike had been listening to the news of the Cuban missile crisis and reading the papers to find out how close we really were to nuclear war. Outside my windows, in the mountains of Arizona, there were nuclear warheads buried and at the ready, waiting for the signal from JFK to go to red alert. Kennedy and UN secretary-general U Thant reached an agreement with Soviet premier Khrushchev on the missile crisis. A deal was cut with the Russians to end the conflict, and everyone around the country sighed with relief.

  I, too, was breathing easier. I was still sick, but my illness, or perhaps fate, had given me the time to think about what was happening in my life. Off the road, stopped in my tracks by something I could not negotiate, I would not be in a plane or spending night after night in a lonely hotel room where the walls or an occasional one-night stand would fill the void. My husband, the child I loved, an often overwhelming career that had swept me into its accompanying chaos—all were on pause. It was a time to reflect, and to face another kind of music. Walter was the catalyst, but I knew my marriage was probably over and that my life was going to change, had to change. The illness would force me to be still, at least for a time.

  After five weeks in isolation, I received permission from the hospital to fly to Colorado, where I was admitted to the National Jewish Hospital in Denver. I needed a few more months of hospitalization, and as Theo Bikel served on the board of National Jewish, he was able to get me in as a charity patient. I had no money, and only Theo’s goodwill helped me get the treatment I needed to get well. I will never forget Theo’s kindness to me then and in years to come.

  I was paying keen attention to the news of the war, as usual, and learned from the papers in Denver that Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, had gone to Vietnam to observe its progress. He saw what was happening more clearly than others, and made a historic speech on December 2 in which he spoke out bluntly against the war. He was the first American official to publicly do so.

  Jac came to visit me in Denver and brought me the recordings of Jacques Brel, and I listened to “Marieke” and “Chanson des Vieux Amants.” I played the guitar and rested, as though I were of the dead, not the living.

  In late November Peter flew to Colorado with Clark. Now I would have my son with me. He stayed with my parents and went to a little children’s play group. Every afternoon I was allowed out of the hospital and drove to Mom and Dad’s house on Marion Street. I played the piano, returning to the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 on my Baldwin grand like a bird to its sanctuary. I played with Clark and fed him his dinner and then made my way back to the hospital.

  Peter and I talked and argued and wept on the phone and then in person, when he came to be with me over Christmas while I was still in the hospital, until it was clear that divorce was the next step. On New Year’s weekend of 1963, my husband arranged to spirit Clark back to Connecticut, where he could make his legal request for sole custody of our son. His mother, Margaret, and stepfather, Hal, arranged to take Clark for a day and did not bring him back to my parents’, but instead took him on a plane to Chicago, where Peter picked him up. I was devastated but helpless. I called the Colorado attorney general and said my husband had kidnapped my son, but I was told there was nothing I could do. I had no separation agreement, and therefore no rights.

  I was the one who had broken the rules, who had shattered the peace. I knew I wanted out, and now this was the price I would have to pay. The marriage was finished, but I could not accept losing my son.

  I felt paralyzed, but there was nothing I could do except call lawyers and begin to work on a divorce and a plan for regaining custody of Clark. Of course I wanted full custody, but Clark was Peter’s son as well. It was not going to be easy. And the custody battle, which began that very day, would seem to take forever.

  In the first week of January 1963, I filed for divorce. The proceedings would take two years, and at the same time I would be fighting for custody of my son, a battle that would continue after the divorce.

  But finally I was beginning to regain my health. The doctors released me from the hospital, so I could go back to—what? I would not be returning to Connecticut. I would not be going home. Instead, I would go to New York, where Walter lived. Where the music was being created, where the folk revival was at its most exciting.

  To a new life.

  My father, Chuck, at his typewriter and Braille writer, preparing for his radio show.

  Me, age four, Seattle.

  My mother, Marjorie, Seattle, Washington, 1939.

  Me, age six; my father, Chuck; and my brother, Mike, age two, Los Angeles.

  Junior high school, Denver, Colorado, 1954.

  Me and Peter Taylor, Denver, 1956.

  With my son, Clark, age seven.

  Clark, age twenty, New York.

  My mother, David, Denver John, me, Holly Ann, and Mike on the way to a reunion at Fern Lake Lodge—Fern Lake Trail, Colorado, 1978.

  In Colorado with Holly Ann, 1978 (top) and Denver John Collins, 1979 (bottom).

  Clark and his daughter, Hollis, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1989.

  Louis Nelson, my beloved husband, and me after our wedding, New York, 1996. “Uncle Louis in the rain forest with a girl,” said Rowen Kahn, Holly Ann’s three-year-old.

  Harold Leventhal, my manager from 1961 to 1972 and friend for life.

  Jac Holzman, president of Elektra Records, and me, upon release of Colors of the Day, 1969.

  Onstage with Kris Kristofferson.

  With Rosa Parks.

  Joan Baez and me singing “Diamonds and Rust” in the rain, Newport Festival, 2009.

  Fritz Richmond, Joni Mitchell, me, John Cooke (Cookie), Nancy Carlen, and Joan Baez at Big Sur Folk Festival, 1968.

  Dorchester Hotel, London, 2009.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wild Rippling Water

  As I was a-walking and a-rambling one day

  I spied a fair couple a-making their way

  One was a cowboy, and a brave one was he

  And the other was a lady, and a fair one was she.

  —Traditional, “Wild Rippling Water”

  ONCE the doctors at National Jewish Hospital released me in February 1963, I collected my guitar and packed a tiny bag with a dress, some makeup, an extra pair of shoes, and the TB drugs I would have to take for another year and a half, and I headed for Washington, D.C. I was bound for New York, but first I had been invited to join a group of singers in a special performance for President Kennedy, to be televised to the nation. My mother and father took me to the airport, where we said an emotional goodbye. My mom was still angry about Peter having taken Clark back to th
e East Coast.

  I was not worried about my voice or my guitar playing. I had been singing every day in the hospital and playing the guitar;

  I knew I could carry on. I had learned some new songs, particularly ones I hoped to record—a couple from Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger, including his wonderful “Turn! Turn! Turn!” I had been brought low by illness, but in a way it was a peaceful valley amid the mountains of chaos that had become my life. For nearly five months I had been sheltered, taken care of, healed. And separated from Peter.

  I walked out of the doors of that hospital with no place to go but forward and nothing to do but sing. It was, in many ways, a path to the unknown. But I was ready, and I was filled with a kind of wild faith that everything was as it should be.

  THE preparations for Dinner with the President were already in gear when I arrived at Washington’s Sheraton Hotel. Television cameras were filming; I was late, having been delayed by an early spring snow that had slowed everything in D.C. to a crawl. Harold greeted me, and then someone rushed me to the stage, past the tables covered in white linen and ornate floral centerpieces. I joined the rehearsal and we ran through our songs as waiters hurried about with trays of glasses, cups, and dinner plates.

  Robert Ryan, the actor, was onstage already, and his presence dominated the room even though at that moment it was filled only with waiters and performers. Ryan was an impressive man, tall and handsome, with dark hair that fell over eyes that seemed to single me out, looking directly into mine. I knew Robert from New York, where Harold had introduced us. He was fifty-four then, but already his face was familiar from his acting in The Longest Day—about the D-Day invasion—which I had seen on its release in 1962. I had the feeling that Ryan couldn’t have cared less if the crowds had not yet arrived. He was the same in public as in private. His looks and demeanor set him apart as a star, but his smile was warm and welcoming and his politics (he was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam) were as friendly to my own as his smile. He put his arms around me in a welcoming embrace, and I felt I belonged; he was someone who made you feel that way always, whether he was in the limelight or you were, or neither of you were. It is a rare quality.