Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  Ryan was the emcee for the night, and he took control of the show while men in dark suits with wires in their ears—the president’s Secret Service detail—paced the hotel lobby and roamed the ballroom. President Kennedy and his brother Robert were to be seated directly in front of the stage. We would be looking right at them when we sang.

  Upstairs in the big suite where refreshments were being served (food and lots of bottles of whiskey and bourbon), Josh, Lynn Gold, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Odetta, Robert, Will Holt, and everyone else who was in the show welcomed me and peppered me with questions. They all wanted to know how I was feeling. Had the hospital been terrible? Was I able to smoke, to sing, to work, to go on the road? I was happy to tell them that the doctors had given me a clean bill of health, and I truly believed everything would be all right. Singing for the president was a great way to come back to performing.

  It really began to feel like a reunion of old friends. Will told me that if I had been diagnosed with TB in an earlier era, I would have spent a year or more at a sanatorium in the mountains somewhere. Now, with the drugs that were available, I’d be able to get on with my life, my divorce, my music, and my next album.

  But now I began to feel the sadness, the heartbreak, of leaving Peter, and it would come and go, painful and sorrowful, for years.

  The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had been making records for decades. They had toured extensively through the States after arriving from Ireland. I had known them since the television show at the Village Gate on the night that Jac Holzman signed me to Elektra. I admired and respected them, and we had a great time whenever we were together. They were in their standard uniform that night—white fisherman sweaters. Tom, who was also an actor, always flirted with me. I enjoyed their attention, very masculine but sweet and innocent. They were all married, mostly happily, and I knew from experience that some of them didn’t drink. Tommy Makem never touched a drop, having taken the “pledge” as a teenager in Ireland.

  Just before we went downstairs to begin the performance, they held out their hands for me to take an Irish friendship vow with all of them. I felt embraced and appreciated; it was the nicest thing they could have done for me at that moment.

  Robert proposed a toast, wishing us all well in the show—and expressing the hope that the poetry and music of the evening would help convince Kennedy to reconsider the war in Indochina. The show proved to be a great success, from what we could tell. Kennedy was smiling, nodding, clapping, and enjoying himself. I watched him when I was not singing. I had voted for him and celebrated his glorious triumph over Nixon, thrilled that this vibrant newcomer had found his way to the White House, signaling a new generation of leadership, empowering the youth of the country to make a difference. We were all enchanted with Kennedy’s personal charisma and ready to follow him toward the brighter world he promised. He said he would see that we got to the moon, and we believed him. The whole nation had watched him bring us safely through the Cuban missile crisis, making decisions that would protect the world from a nuclear holocaust.

  When the show was over, the performers all passed through a long reception line to shake the president’s hand. He was handsome beyond his photos. The cameras continued to roll as JFK touched my hand and looked into my eyes; I felt the electricity that comes from certain people. It felt as though he could do anything, answer any question, and solve any problem. He was the man, and you would do anything he asked.

  Afterward, I headed to New York, where I would be starting over.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Kettle of Fish

  The fishermen are pitching pennies

  In the sand beside the sea

  The Sunrise hits their oilskin boots

  and their painted boats and me.

  —JUDY COLLINS, “Fisherman’s Song”

  AT the end of March 1963, I spent a few days with Walter on Hudson Street. Finally free to be together, we found we didn’t get along as well. It was as though the fire had burned bright when we had to hide our relationship, but now the ice formed around my heart.

  Soon I found my own place in Greenwich Village. The rent was $135 a month. I had not worked for months, and there was no money. Jac had advanced me a little against royalties, but I could afford the apartment only because I shared the space with Vera Hertenstein, Jac’s secretary at Elektra.

  My new home, not far from Walter’s, was on the corner of West 10th Street and Hudson, in the heart of Greenwich Village. I felt somewhat lost, having left my home in Connecticut and my marriage. At the same time, I knew I had finally come home at last. Everything I needed was in New York, except my son, Clark. He would visit me on weekends and during vacations. Soon began the long and drawn-out custody fight to keep him with me permanently.

  For now, I lived in the center of the folk music revival. I was a couple of blocks from the Kettle of Fish and a few more from Cafe Fiorello’s, the Village Gate, Gerde’s Folk City on West 4th, and the Gaslight on MacDougal. I could wander at night over to the clubs to hear music and have a meal.

  The key people then at Elektra were Jac, who was president; Mark Abramson, who engineered and produced albums; Vera, Jac’s secretary; and Bill Harvey, who did the covers. By the time we started working together, Mark had been with Elektra for a couple of years. In addition to the artists he worked with, Mark had recorded the sound archives Elektra released in the late fifties and early sixties, in which trains whistled, dogs barked, motorbikes revved up, men snored, wind chimes sang. In those days you could find ambient sounds (for films or TV, mostly) only if you went out with a microphone and recorded them.

  Jac and Mark were both obsessive. Each had the ability to concentrate on the work at hand, which over nearly two decades came to benefit me when it came to recording. Mark was as totally focused on getting the best possible album out of me as he was on his train whistles. I liked him from the start.

  Jac, who knew him well, said of Mark, “He always struck me as a person who wouldn’t be surprised by any oddity of human nature, a friend with whom you could confide your most agonizing personal secrets. He was amused by the human condition but took it seriously in a light way.”

  Mark was twenty-five, two years older than I was when we began working together in 1962. To me, he always seemed so much older and wiser. His dark good looks reminded everyone who knew him of a young Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he kept his body fit by running and working out, even though exercise was not yet in vogue. He was an intellectual who could often be found reading Henry Miller or Jean Genet, and his soft and gentle manner concealed steely determination. He was smart and at times very funny. Mark was in love with his college sweetheart, Janis Young. I knew Janis, and we sometimes even went out together, the three of us, or with Jac or others from the Elektra family.

  Mark did not drink or smoke, though I think he might have liked a little marijuana now and then, and maybe acid. Like many of us, he was searching for a spiritual path to follow that offered something more than the faith in which he’d been raised.

  Mark was imaginative, supportive, and always an enthusiastic companion on the long days and nights of mixing, looking for songs, haunting the thriving clubs in Greenwich Village. He challenged me to take greater artistic risks. The music we shared was a life-changing love affair, and if I had a constant, enduring relationship with a man in those years, balancing out my search for love and the people I might take hostage for a few weeks or a few years, it was with Mark, my musical soul mate.

  There is great intimacy in making music with other musicians, producers, and engineers. You spend interminable hours in the studio, and you think and talk about work and finding material. Mark and I searched and listened to what were mostly newly written songs by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Tom Paxton. We sat with Jac, getting his take on our choices, exchanging ideas about what we would record. We were already breaking the rules—the folk music police, especially the bible of the times, Sing Out, would not approve the new songs tha
t we were mixing in with the traditional folk repertoire—but Mark and I had discovered that doing the unexpected was what we liked best. The challenge was to do it as artistically as possible.

  Mark spread the word that we were looking for new songs. Between us, we knew just about everyone in Greenwich Village, and the songs started rolling in.

  I would run into singers on the streets and in the clubs at night: Phil Ochs, Dave Van Ronk, the deliciously cute David Blue. David, one of the old-guard Village singer-songwriters on Bleecker Street, was talented and good-looking, a folksinger with curly dark hair, an angelic face, and a sweet voice. I had a very brief affair with him. One night? Two weeks? A month? Truly an example of “if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there!” David had an antique single bed in which we struggled to find room for our passions, and for his boots, which I finally got him to remove. In the few mornings we spent together we would get cups of coffee and wander through Washington Square Park below the tiny apartment where he lived, listening to the banjo and guitar players, and he would sing me his songs in a seductive voice.

  I would meet up with Tom Paxton on my strolls through the Village. He always had a twinkle in his blue eyes. Two years older than me, Tom was a hell of a good writer who played guitar and had a sweet, unaffected voice. Over a cappuccino at Cafe Fiorello’s we would talk about our lives. He said he had been born in Illinois and partly raised in Oklahoma, where Burl Ives had inspired him. He became enchanted with folk music, listening to the recordings of Woody and Pete. He had been in the army typing school at Fort Dix in New Jersey, and would spend his weekends in Greenwich Village, hanging out in the clubs listening to music and learning. After his discharge, he came to the city and auditioned for the Chad Mitchell Trio. When he sang one of his own songs, “The Marvelous Toy,” for Milt Okun of Cherry Lane Music, Tom became Milt’s very first client. Tom went on to write many great and enduring songs.

  Whenever Tom ran into me on Bleecker Street he would want to sing me a song right there. If it was raining, he would pull me into a storefront and start singing “Rambling Boy,” “The Last Thing on My Mind,” or “Bottle of Wine,” which had particular resonance for me.

  Bottle of wine, fruit on the vine

  When you gonna let me get sober?

  Many of the artists I would meet and get to know, like Tom, were already on Elektra. It was a small but happy family in the Village. I could wander over to Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and buy guitar strings and copies of Sing Out. The magazine had established itself as the voice of the folk movement, with Irwin Silber’s editorials (Irwin would be the one to write the blistering slam of Dylan’s electric transformation at Newport in 1965) and songs by new writers, as well as articles on their music and their lives. I could get the skinny on where everyone was playing.

  From time to time I would make my way down Hudson Street to see Walter, but our lovemaking had grown practical and mechanical. It still comforted me, but now it also made me a little wistful; I remembered how passionate it had felt at the start. Walter had become a security blanket for me, and I wasn’t quite ready to give that up.

  As soon as I was settled in my new digs, I would go to pick up Clark for a couple of weeks’ visit to my new home in New York. Peter would drive down to the midway point on the Merritt Parkway—some sterile and desolate Howard Johnson’s—where we would meet to exchange scowls and Clark, though my heart would sometimes ache for my lost marriage.

  My apartment mate, Vera, had become a friend over the two years I had been recording for Elektra. She was single, slim, and good company. Thankfully, she was also a hell of a cook; her spaetzle was one of our regular accompaniments to roasted veal shank. I had been a pretty good cook once—baking bread and pies on a woodstove, managing the kidney pies, tacos and enchiladas, meat loaves, and great big pots of spaghetti sauce—but all of that was a distant memory now. I was on my own, sharing the living room and my spacious bedroom (but not my bed) with Vera.

  I had been settled in my Village digs only a few weeks when a court-appointed social worker from Connecticut came to visit me and evaluate my fitness as a mother. The divorce was moving forward, and Peter and I had started the battle for custody of Clark. The social worker sat in my one little rocking chair, under the window that looked out over the White Horse Tavern.

  The woman from the agency strode into my apartment with a frown on her face, clearly neither amused nor impressed by my rocking chair, my imploring looks, my roommate, my cheap apartment in the Village, or my profession. She was in alien territory, coming from the clean streets of the Connecticut suburbs, and looked extremely uncomfortable, as I am sure I did as well. The meeting was tense and her disapproval was obvious. But as she searched through my apartment, full of Clark’s toys and his books—Dr. Seuss, whose Green Eggs and Ham we read over and over together, and Curious George—she seemed to soften. Still, she made no promises. When she left I fell into a deep depression. If I had to rely on this woman to plead my case, I might as well give up, I thought.

  My law firm, famous for their success in custody agreements, told me there was no way I could lose custody of Clark. Mothers did not lose custody, they assured me.

  In April I asked Jac to find me a lawyer to write the new Elektra contract, as we were approaching my third album, and he suggested David Braun. David was busy setting up the legal relationships between record companies and their clients and represented a lot of my peers at the time. David, gentle, smart, and kind, would become my lawyer and lifetime friend. And he did right by me, as well as by Elektra.

  ON April 12, 1963, Jac and I went to see Bob Dylan in concert at New York’s Town Hall. Dylan was singing new songs, songs that made me sit up and listen in a completely different way. Jac kept poking me in the ribs—“That one,” he would say, or “That one would be perfect for you!” I wrote down some of my impressions from that night in my journal:

  It was quite an experience; suffice to say that this boy is not by any stretch of the imagination an entertainer, but he sings songs that he has written, with almost no voice, playing the simplest of chords, not looking so great in his dusty jeans and leather shirt, with a rig on his neck to hold the harmonicas he plays, and all the while looking something like a dancing bear … and I feel that this was the most important concert I, personally, have ever been to. His material is so unfettered by any attempt at entertaining … that it makes everyone else working in the field look a little pale by comparison. I heard Pete Seeger three nights later sing one of Bob’s songs at the Bitter End, and there is nothing like the material he [Dylan] writes anywhere around.

  Bob Dylan had arrived. I always felt the explosion of Dylan’s going electric at Newport two years later paled in comparison to the impact of the first songs that night at Town Hall. “Blowin’ in the Wind” shot out like a bright star in the firmament as if it had been divinely inspired.

  After hearing Bob at Town Hall, I decided to record “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” which I performed at Town Hall in 1964, and “Masters of War,” which I sang on my third album.

  Pete Seeger had a show that week at the Bitter End, and sang that new song of Bob’s. Pete and Toshi, his wife, Harold Leventhal, Mark Abramson, and I all had drinks after Pete’s show. We talked about the war—when and where the next rally would be held, and who would be singing. Pete was so young, so vital, and such a singer! Toshi was a powerful Japanese woman who seemed to be a great force in Pete’s life. Pete said he had known the minute he met Toshi, in 1943, that they would spend their lives together.

  That night I decided I was going to record “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

  Walter got me paid singing gigs on whatever he was producing. I did film recordings, commercial jingles, and some singing for the score of the television production of Birth of a Nation, by Millard Lampell. The dollars began to float into my purse and then my bank account. Having a roommate helped, and I started to get on my feet financially.

  When Clark
visited we wandered the city, combed the Village for toy shops, went uptown to stare at the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. We ate burgers, fries, and sundaes at Rumplemeyer’s on Central Park South, and sang songs together while I played the guitar. Sometimes we would meet friends for an iced orange drink on Sheridan Square and tool around 8th Street and the West Village.

  Although I was thrilled to be living in the Village, and glad to have Harold helping me get my recording career moving with Elektra, I could also see that all these external trappings of stability and success couldn’t make me whole. I was still Judy, still troubled, on the road or in New York, having affairs or not. I began to see that the inner demons were still eating away at whatever serenity I momentarily achieved.

  By the summer of 1963 I had fallen into a deep depression again. My drinking worried me more and more. I could never count on waking up with a clear head. Efforts I made to moderate my intake of alcohol were pathetic and, finally, useless.

  I remember one day in particular. The sun was pouring through the windows that looked out onto Hudson Street, where the trucks rolled downtown. The Hudson River gleamed and danced between the buildings on the West Side. I felt like hell, hideously hungover and extremely anxious. Although the social worker didn’t know about my drinking, and I would say even now that the drinking did not interfere with my relationship with my son, I was worried. Harold and my new agents had set up enough dates to keep me busy in the coming weeks, but that particular day was quiet; everything looked bleak. I wouldn’t see Clark for another couple of weeks, and I was lonely.