In New York I tried to contemplate, tried to meditate, tried not to drink so much. I tried to look for God, went to see gurus, met the Maharishi, and heard Krishnamurti speak at the New School in Greenwich Village. I went to my sessions with Ralph and then Julie, attended yoga classes and threw the I Ching (the process of casting coins or reading yarrow stalks, which tells you what ancient reading you have been given), and continued, between antiwar demonstrations and meetings of like-minded activists, to search for serenity and peace.
Following the party line of his group, Ralph encouraged me to see other people, not to have monogamous relationships, and to work on my freedom, my career, my wants and needs.
Stephen had a few things to say about all of this in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
Friday evening, Sunday in the afternoon
What have you got to lose?
Tuesday morning, please be gone, I’m tired of you
What have you got to lose?
Will you come see me
Thursdays and Saturdays?
What have you got to lose?
Stephen was very committed to his own path and profession, just as I was to mine. He had already had a successful career with Buffalo Springfield, and was an amazing musician. I had never heard playing like his. Stephen’s guitar was a voice with a personality, changing depending on the song but always finding the right path. Sometimes his sound reminded me of the old blues players, such as Son House in his white shirt and tie. Sometimes Stephen’s guitar would take off its tie and two-step in a country manner, as if it were wearing spurs and calling the dance. Then it could be very liquid. It always rippled along, filling the empty places in a song, and in my heart. I think I was always as much in love with Stephen’s great talent as a musician as I was with him.
We were both stubborn, and when we fought, we fought hard—about where we were going, what each of us wanted from our relationship. These were arguments that seemed to have no satisfactory conclusion. Afterward, we would kiss and make up and go on with our romance, trying to avoid the subjects that caused pain and to appreciate the wonderful things that were happening in our lives, in our careers, and in our love affair.
ONE day my manager, Harold, called to say that Life wanted to do a cover story on me. One of Life’s staffers, Irene Neves, thought that my music might stand in meaningful contrast to the violent conflicts—social, cultural, political, and military—that seemed to enmesh America in the turbulent spring of 1969. Irene wanted my face on the cover. It would not be out until May 1969.
“We can call you ‘the gentle voice amid the strife,’ ” she told me. I said I hoped to God it would do some good, but I doubted it would.
Rowland Scherman, the photographer, wanted to have pictures of me with Joni Mitchell, so we made trips to visit Joni at her home in Laurel Canyon. She and I posed in the tree house in her yard, and Joni and I played our guitars in her cabinlike living room, which was filled with sparkling chandeliers and stained glass and kittens (including the calico I had sent her the year before). Cookie was there with Joni and me. Irene and Rowland followed me—and sometimes Stephen—around the country as I performed concerts on my regular autumn schedule. Stephen and I wound up at Carnegie Hall in New York City later that year. There were photos of us together, looking as happy as two lovers could be. But we were grappling with a lot of tension, issues of control, and our age difference.
He wrote me from ten thousand feet above sea level on his way to Mexico to see friends and hang out in the sun for a week. His script wandered across the thin blue writing paper stamped “Eastern Airlines”: “I am going to get good and drunk now. Am I only too young to fathom your wretched old self?” I knew I loved him, but I didn’t know the answer to that simple question.
Before telling me he loved me, he wrote: “There’s only one person on God’s green earth that’s stronger, tougher, and wiser than you! And that’s me.”
I knew he was right, and still, I wanted to run.
IN November 1968, as the final mixes on Who Knows Where the Time Goes were being readied, I got a call from Ulu Grosbard, the director. He wanted to use my song “Albatross,” from Wildflowers, for The Subject Was Roses, which he was filming with Patricia Neal and Martin Sheen. I sent Ulu rough mixes of the new album and he thought “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” would also be right for the movie. He asked if we could produce a more up-tempo version, which brought Stephen and me back to the studio.
The night Stephen and I finished recording, I had a plane to catch to New York. Stephen said he was going to stick around the studio for a little while. I later learned that he gave John Haeny a hundred dollars and told him to “roll tape.” Stephen said John could leave and he would turn off the machines when he was finished.
What Stephen recorded that night, alone with his guitar in the darkness, would not be revealed for forty years.
THE passion and intensity of my relationship with Stephen, and its troubles, reached its peak during the fall and winter of 1968, when political and cultural fires raged across America.
Who Knows Where the Time Goes was released in November 1968, and “Someday Soon” immediately hit the charts. I went on the road with my touring band, and for a while even managed to ease up a little on my drinking. That was partly the result of some diet pills given to me by the newest in a long line of doctors.
It would be many years before I could admit that my use of alcohol might have played a role in the breakup of my romance with Stephen. As the friction increased between us, I convinced myself that our quarrels were the necessary fuel of a great affair of the heart. But probably because of alcohol I couldn’t tell what was normal from what wasn’t, and by now alcohol had resumed its grip on me.
I could not seem to surrender and stay in one place long enough to find out what was going on. I was losing control of our romance, and my life.
The one thing that remained stable and steady in those years, like a long marriage, was my visits to my psychologists. I paid for their cars, their houses, helped send their children to private schools.
On the cover of Who Knows Where the Time Goes is a photo by Len Steckler of me peering out from a field of the deepest blue, with my eyes wide open.
I was seeing things clearly out of those eyes, or so I thought.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Amid the Storm
Oh the prickilie bush
It pricks my heart full sore
If I ever get out of the prickilie bush
I’ll never go in it any more.
—Traditional, “The Prickilie Bush”
THE Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago on August 26–29, 1968, would be one of the last massive expressions of the peace movement in the sixties. Before the convention, I spoke to William Kunstler, the lawyer for my friends David Dellinger and Abbie Hoffman, and asked him what he expected to happen there. Harold, still my devoted manager, was busy arranging my tour schedule so that I could get to Chicago that week but was concerned for my safety. He and I wanted Kunstler’s sense of what to anticipate.
“I expect the worst,” he said, “and pray for the best. The Yippies want to have a presence there, to rally and demonstrate, of course, but the country is so divided on this war.” We met at Harold’s office, where I was sitting in his big captain’s chair. Kunstler leaned over me with his bristly gray hair flying about his face.
“And we can’t seem to get our permits. Mayor Daley is acting as though they are expecting a rebel army in Chicago, instead of these loving kids—these Yippies.” I thought about that table of bright-eyed peaceniks gathered for the press conference in the spring. “I admit, I’m worried about the boys,” Kunstler finished. William was not only a lawyer but also an activist. He knew that the refusal of Illinois to grant permits for a peaceful gathering was an attack on freedom of speech and expression. If the permits didn’t come through, Harold warned me, I would technically be breaking the law as an entertainer performing in a public place wit
hout a permit.
A few days before the convention began, I spoke with Abbie Hoffman about all of this.
“If there are no permits,” Abbie said, “they’re going to bash our heads in if we demonstrate.” Allen Ginsberg and a lot of other people, including Harold, had become very uncomfortable about the Yippie plan to go to Chicago anyway. It was clear that the city was not going to welcome the Yippies or any other peaceful demonstrators.
“Daley is spoiling for a fight,” Kunstler added, referring to Chicago’s mayor, “and the rumor is that the National Guard is going to be there with tanks and guns.”
Abbie advised me not to come, and I made the decision: I was not going to go to Chicago if things did not change. I would sit this one out.
Walter Cronkite described Chicago at the start of the Democratic convention as a “police state.” By the time the Yippies and all the delegates got to the Windy City, there were riot squads on the street, National Guardsmen with billy clubs at the ready, and a sense that a war, not a political convention, was about to begin in Illinois.
Phil Ochs and Dave Dellinger went anyway, without permits, and put on a Peace Concert with William Burroughs and a few other artists. And the city of Chicago did its worst. In the footage of Chicago’s expulsion of the antiwar protesters, you can see people running, being beaten bloody, and being hauled off in police vans.
It would be another seven years before the Vietnam War came to an end; ten thousand more men would be dead. The wide-eyed optimism of so many young men and women who devoted themselves to speaking out against the war would be dashed. Many would retreat into silence; many others would become even more radicalized. It was a dangerous, precarious moment for the nation.
DURING late November, I had a two-week gig at the Cellar Door, a folk club in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., where I was sharing a bill with the Journeymen. I loved working the Cellar Door, singing for the political elite who gathered there, and hanging with the charming owner, Sam L’Hommedieu. Five years earlier, when the club was called The Shadows, I had sung there in the somber week following the assassination of JFK.
One day as I was walking past the smart shops in Georgetown, I saw a young man behind a storefront window, hunched over a potter’s wheel. I stood mesmerized, watching him shape elegant bowls and vases, each beautiful in its simplicity. I marched into the store and convinced him to give me lessons on how to throw pots. I spent the next two weeks throwing clay during the day with Jim, the potter, and singing at the Cellar Door at night. By the end of the gig, Jim had me turning out some reasonably decent pots, even if most of them looked a lot like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
When I got back to New York, I went down to the Lower East Side, where I bought clay, a wedging board, a Randall kick wheel, and a small kiln, and I embarked on my new passion. I was still throwing comically misshapen pots that sagged to one side or the other, but I was keeping at it.
One day Stephen rushed into my apartment. Rugged and handsome, he dropped a bunch of roses wrapped in cellophane on the table and started chattering about a business meeting in midtown. Crosby, Stills and Nash’s demo was all the buzz in the music business, and David Geffen, who represented the group, was looking to finalize a contract. I must have looked a disaster in my spattered apron, with bits of clay clinging to my long hair, but Stephen took it all in—the wheel, the kiln, the clay-covered girl, the mess—and smiled. He kissed me on the nose and twirled me about the room, then casually picked up a lump of raw clay from my wedging board, pushed it around for a little while, and put it down. In his hands it had become a sculpted head. His own head, it seemed to me: the nose, the eyes, the tilt, the shape. Beautiful.
We put the sculpted head in the kiln and drank a couple of glasses of wine while the clay cooked. When a bit of clay fell off the side during the firing process, Stephen lost all interest in the now-imperfect head, but I decided to keep it anyway. It was perfect enough for me.
I kept Stephen’s sculpture in the window of that apartment and then my next apartment, where I have lived for nearly forty years now. Perched on the sill next to the purple glass vases and the little crystal pot of porcelain flowers that Sandy Denny gave me were the ashes of my beloved cats, Clyde, Sunshine, Moby, Jam, Midnight, and Ruffles. Also there was that sculpted head, which watched over me through the years as I worked and practiced and struggled to become a writer.
But those loving—and lovely—moments between me and Stephen were becoming few and far between. We spent that winter arguing, via long-distance telephone and sometimes in person, about how we were ever going to make our relationship work if neither of us would give an inch. A sensation of helplessness began to creep into our life together.
THE following year, in 1969, the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” dominated the airwaves. While much of the world had its eyes on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Nixon began the process of “Vietnamization” in Southeast Asia. In July, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Over the course of that same summer, the great Judy Garland would die after a lifelong battle with alcoholism and drug addiction, and the flower-power generation would produce its defining moment, the music extravaganza of Woodstock.
Nineteen sixty-nine was a triumphant year for me. I spent much of my time writing, not only composing songs but also keeping journals, recording my dreams, trying to capture my life and my thoughts on paper. We celebrated Clark’s birthday on January 8. Clark was taking drum lessons, and I was continuing my own lessons every other day with my neighbor Max.
I was still in therapy, which continued to help me survive my suicidal thoughts, but my alcoholism continued unchecked. I did not know how near the edge I was walking. I only knew that in spite of all the success, I was descending into the nightmare of the booze.
Stephen and I spoke less frequently now, though we still felt the tug of attraction. We talked late into the night about our yearning to be together. But still I resisted. While our love affair was cooling down, Stephen’s new trio was gaining heat. Ahmet Ertegun had signed Crosby, Stills and Nash to a deal with Atlantic Records, and the early buzz on the street was already fantastic. Stephen was busy scheduling and rehearsing for their initial concert tour to coincide with the summer release of the album.
On March 4, 1969, I got a call at home from Joe Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival. I had never met Joe, but I certainly knew who he was. Everyone had heard about Joe Papp, the visionary who made Shakespeare accessible to the masses in New York City. His groundbreaking 1956 production of The Taming of the Shrew, starring Colleen Dewhurst and presented at the East River Amphitheater on the Lower East Side, had gained him the support of Brooks Atkinson, premier theater critic for the New York Times. That was all Joe seemed to need to take the next step for Shakespeare in the Park.
New York City gave Joe the use of the Delacorte, a semicircular outdoor amphitheater overlooking Turtle Pond in the shadow of Central Park’s Belvedere Castle. Joe then convinced the city to give him the use of the old Astor Library in the East Village, which was scheduled for demolition, for a dollar a year. He rescued the classic building on Lafayette Street in the nick of time. There he created the New York Public Theater, which would become a world-renowned venue for innovative and exciting work of all kinds for nearly six decades; the building itself was designated a landmark. He also established Joe’s Pub at the same location, which did for music what the Public Theater did for the dramatic acts.
Joe sought to nurture contemporary playwrights at the Public, and support a diverse roster of plays. He always surprised New York with his choices, and now he was turning his hand to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
Joe already had a hot team putting the cast together. Gerry Freedman was directing; Joe, Gerry, and Bernie Gersten were producing. As I heard the story, they were sitting around the offices of the Public Theater on a bright March day trying to figure out who they could get to sing John Morris’ new songs. Morris had just finished the mus
ic for the movie version of The Producers and had written other scores for Mel Brooks’ films. The cast included Stacy Keach for the lead, Olympia Dukakis for Anitra, the witchy, many-armed sorceress, and Estelle Parsons as Peer Gynt’s mother. All they needed was the long-suffering Solveig.
“You know,” Gerry said, “Solveig’s songs sound a little like Judy Collins. Who do we know who sounds like Judy Collins?” Bernie, he knew, could probably find what he was looking for among the thousands of singing and acting ingenues in New York.
Joe went straight to the point. “Why don’t we ask Judy Collins?”
“She would never do that!” Gerry said with absolute certainty.
“We’ll call her and find out” was Joe’s reply.
Of course, Gerry was right—at first, anyway. I said no. I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Who Knows Where the Time Goes had just come out, so there would be concerts to do, and TV appearances. “Someday Soon” had been released as a single and was moving up the charts. I consulted with my friends and my manager, Harold, and they all agreed it would not be a wise move to jump into the theater now, with so much going on.
But I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and after an hour, I called Joe Papp’s office back.
“I wonder if I could hear the songs,” I told Joe.
“You will love them,” he said, “and when you hear them, you will see why you have to do this!” He sent over the four songs written for Solveig. They were love songs, songs of yearning, and they were very beautiful songs. The first real hurdles to my doing Peer Gynt had been successfully cleared, and I agreed to give it a try.
“I knew you would come around!” Bernie told me. “We’ll have a great time, and you’ll love Stacy Keach.” He was certainly right about that last part.
March 10, 1969, I went to the Public Theater on Lafayette Street and met with Gerry, Joe, and Bernie. We talked about the play and the plans for the summer. I would meet the other actors in the rehearsals, which would begin in May. I really didn’t know what I was getting into, but … the Shakespeare Festival? New York? Home, with my son and my friends and my cats? And my therapist? Sounded great to me!
Judy Collins Page 24
