Judy Collins

by Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music

  BY the time Antonia was released in 1974, Stacy and I had been together for the better part of five years. In the last couple of years both of us had started seeing other people.

  While we were doing press for Antonia, I started seeing Coulter, my cinematographer on Antonia, on and off, and spending time with Stacy as well. When the reviews of the movie appeared, I began seeing Jerry Oster, a reporter for the Daily News. Jerry had given the film a rave review and showed up to interview me. For a short time there were three lovers in my life. So very sixties! In the seventies!

  Alcoholism was about to devour me, but it hadn’t slowed down my work and productivity. After completing Antonia, I began my fourteenth album, Judith. I had convinced David Geffen to arrange for Arif Mardin of Atlantic to produce the album, luring him to Elektra when normally he would not have done a project outside of Atlantic. I had heard some of Arif’s work and fallen in love with his arrangements and especially his production of a song on a Danny O’Keefe album, “Angel, Spread Your Wings.” I felt Arif would do an amazing production of a song I had written in 1973 about Duke Ellington called “Song for Duke.”

  Arif was a treasure, a multitalented Turkish American who had been producing artists for Atlantic Records for decades. I did not realize his deep history when we started to work together. He had produced Aretha Franklin for years as well as the Bee Gees and Bette Midler.

  He was a gentle, sweet, sophisticated man who had been raised in Istanbul and came to the States to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He began working with Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun in the early days of Atlantic Records. His gentle way of conducting record sessions, his ease with all kinds of people, from musicians to managers to agents and groupies, was comforting and professional. I got to know his wife, Latife, his children, Julie and Joe, and his friends and extended Turkish family.

  Arif was the producer on Judith, and I wanted Phil Ramone to engineer; it was an unusual request, since Phil usually produces. Ramone is another legend in the business, a robust, engaging presence, and the man who produced Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Luciano Pavarotti, Madonna, and Rod Stewart, among others. One of his most famous gigs was producing Marilyn Monroe’s version of “Happy Birthday” for JFK’s birthday on May 19, 1962.

  One of my most important choices for Judith was “Send in the Clowns,” which I’d discovered in Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music. Jonathan Tunick would do the orchestration. I was also ready to record a couple of my own songs.

  By now, I had begun to have serious vocal problems again. I had to warm up for an hour in order to sing, and even then it was touch and go. We got the album made, but only with a huge effort. I never would have succeeded without them. They babied me through, letting me sing in the morning, because after lunch and the wine that went with it, I could sing no more until the next day. It was humiliating, and all caused by alcohol.

  There was a quartet of musicians in New York at that time who made up my regular recording band—Tony Levin, Hugh McCracken, Steve Gadd, and Eric Weissberg. Along with Arif and Phil, they carried me through this difficult recording period.

  Arif added just the right touches to Judith. He suggested the Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth.” The great Jimmy Webb shows up on Judith as well, with “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” Arif’s wife recommended “Brother, Can you Spare a Dime?” by Jay Gorney and Yip Harburg. An Upper West Sider, Yip was always trying to convince me that I should sing “Over the Rainbow,” too, which he’d written with Harold Arlen, but I didn’t feel it was right for me then. Judy Garland was still very much alive in people’s memories, and the image of her singing while sitting on the edge of the stage, everyone’s heart in her hand, felt sacred. I did finally record it almost thirty-five years later.

  We added Steve Goodman’s classic, “The City of New Orleans.” Steve, a kind, loving, courageous man, plays on this rendition, along with a rollicking group of friends and colleagues. He first came to notice when he walked up to Arlo Guthrie in a bar and asked if he could sing him a song. Arlo said, “Yes—if you buy me a beer, you can sing the song for as long as the beer takes to drink.” They ended up sitting at the bar together while Steve sang “City of New Orleans” ten times or more, while Arlo wrote down the words and learned the melody.

  But the chart-topper from Judith was “Send in the Clowns.” Nancy Bacal, Leonard Cohen’s close friend from Canada who became a very close friend of mine, had sent me the cast recording of A Little Night Music the year before, and this song completely took hold of me. I didn’t care that two hundred other people had already recorded it. I knew I had to sing it. It is probably my most frequently played song, instantly recognizable from the sweet and sad counterpoint of the English horn in the background. I treasure the letter that Stephen Sondheim wrote me, thanking me for giving him his first top-ten single.

  After learning “Send in the Clowns,” I was finally able to see my way clear to “I’ll Be Seeing You,” one of my father’s favorites from the Great American Songbook. Sammy Fain, who wrote the song with Irving Kahal, used to tell me when we ran into each other at events at the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and around New York that of all the people who had sung it, he liked my version best.

  I said, “Oh, Sammy, I bet you say that to all the girls!”

  By now I had grown more confident about my own songwriting. On Judith, I included three new compositions, each of which came out of its own place deep within me. It is not always clear what or who inspires a song, but I am very certain of what triggered the writing of “Houses.” I spent three months out on Long Island in 1972. Stacy was around some of the time, and my son was with me as well. I would practice the piano dutifully every day, and then I would write in my notebooks. One day that summer I got a call from Stephen. We had remained friends, but we hadn’t spoken in quite a while. He must have been a little bit lost in his own world just then, and I know what that feels like. He spent about an hour telling me what was going on in his life. I listened, laughing at the appropriate times, but I also crossed my eyes, my fingers, and my toes, knowing he couldn’t see me. I tried to break in a few times to respond or say something, but he finally hung up without asking me how I was, how I felt, or even what I was doing. Later that night I had a dream in which I told him everything that had happened to me. And the next day I wrote the song.

  You have many houses, one for every season

  Mountains in your windows, violets in your hands

  Thru your English meadows your blue-eyed horses wander

  You’re in Colorado for the spring

  When the winter finds you

  You fly to where it’s summer

  Rooms that face the ocean, moonlight on your bed

  Mermaids swift as dolphins paint the air with diamonds

  You are like a seagull, as you said

  Why do you fly bright feathered sometimes in my dreams

  The shadows of your wings fall over my face

  I can feel no air, I can find no peace

  Brides in black ribbons, witches in white

  Fly in thru the windows, fly out thru the night.

  Duke Ellington and I were represented by the same agent in Europe and the United Kingdom, a wonderful man named Robert Patterson. One day in New York in 1974 I got a call from Robert and his wife, Sybille, asking me to come to the Plaza Hotel for drinks and dinner. When I got there, they explained that Duke was terribly sick and that he was going to call in a few minutes to talk to Robert about canceling his upcoming tour in the United Kingdom. We began our dinner, and the call came. Then Robert passed the phone to me. I remember standing near the long velvet curtains by the window, looking out at the lights in Central Park twinkling through the trees. Duke’s voice was weak, but he spoke to me so kindly, and asked me about my upcoming record, about my touring. How did I like working in Europe? Did I have family? Wasn’t I glad I was a musician so I could lead this kind of life doing what I loved and making people happy?<
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  The next week Duke died, never having left the hospital. I made my way in the rain to the viewing in the mortuary in Harlem, stood in line for hours, and then touched the great Duke’s hand as he lay in his casket. I went to the funeral with Sybille and Robert, and sat in the front row in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Ella Fitzgerald sang, as did Sarah Vaughan, and the Billy Taylor Quartet played. I have always thought the Duke gave me, in our conversation, some courage to face the trials that were barreling toward me like an oncoming train.

  I wrote “Song for Duke” after the funeral:

  The people stood around the church

  Ten thousand people there, they say, or more

  Black and white and rich and poor

  They were there to say goodbye.

  That same week my son Clark overdosed at Windsor Mountain School in Massachusetts. We had hoped the staff and the environment might help him stay away from drugs. But once again we failed to treat his problems effectively, because no therapist understood that his problems were not emotional but the result of a genetic tendency to addiction that had been handed down to him. From the hospital in Pittsfield, he and I went down to Maryland to look into Sheppard Pratt, an institution for people with all kinds of mental illnesses. They had no substance abuse program then, and at that time I still didn’t understand that my son’s problems were the same as my own. I thought his drug use was somehow different from my drinking and there were no rehabs anywhere to be found.

  But Clark did well at Sheppard Pratt, and we had a good series of therapy sessions together. I spent a lot of days traveling to Maryland to be with him. The day we were scheduled to meet with his father, Clark ran away. He wound up somewhere on the coast of Maryland. He called me to say that he would let me know where he was going, but he didn’t want me to try to find him.

  I wrote “Born to the Breed” while my heart was aching to find him.

  Clark was sixteen.

  “LOVE the one you’re with,” Stephen sang, and perhaps it is just that simple. My therapists certainly believed and reinforced that whenever they could: see a lot of people, don’t get stuck in a rut with the same person. It all suited my personality and my lifestyle, but I burned with guilt when affairs ended, and never found myself happier afterward. I just felt alone.

  When Stacy and I parted in 1974, we remained friends, and we are still bonded in blood, since my sister, Holly, was married to Stacy’s brother, Jim Keach, for a number of years, and their son, Kalen, is Stacy’s nephew as well as mine.

  During this period, Nancy Carlin sent me “Bread and Roses,” for which Mimi Fariña wrote the music, inspired by a poem written by James Oppenheim about the 1912 strike by female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

  As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day

  A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,

  Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses

  For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!

  Bread and Roses became the title of my 1976 album, also produced by the team of Arif Mardin and Phil Ramone.

  The album itself pays tribute to a broad range of composers and artists, from Duke Ellington to Elton John, as well as some old English folk songs I had picked up along the way. It also contains a song, “Plegaria a un Labrador (Prayer to a Laborer),” by the great Chilean songwriter and theater director Victor Jara, often called the Bob Dylan of Chile. Jara was murdered, along with so many others, during the 1973 Chilean coup d’état. He was arrested for his leftist activities and because he was a guitarist who played songs of the people as well as antigovernment material. His ribs and hands were broken before he was shot to death in the Chile Stadium in Santiago. I went to a screening of a documentary about Jara’s life at the New York Film Festival in 1976. I met his widow, Joan Jara, a dancer and activist who had worked hard to challenge the Pinochet regime. Joan later sent me a tape of the song and a note that said: “My husband loved your songs, and I know he would have wanted me to get this to you.” I recorded the song last, just before the album was released in November 1976.

  ONCE Bread and Roses was complete, I began to lose all my inspiration and motivation. My thoughts of light and laughter and inner peace seemed to dissipate and then disappear entirely. I was emotionally and spiritually dying, although I battled to keep up a respectable image of recording and touring.

  David Geffen had left Elektra in 1975, turning over control of the company to Joe Smith. Joe was good for me, supported my albums, and followed through on the marketing of Judith, which had been made on Geffen’s watch. Joe did what he could for Bread and Roses. When the double album So Early in the Spring came out in 1977, catapulting “Send in the Clowns” back into the Billboard top ten, Joe made sure that Judith got an additional promotional boost as well.

  THE Vietnam War ended in April 1975, and we celebrated as helicopters lifted American civilians and some Vietnamese men and women from the embassy in Saigon, stragglers hanging from the underbellies of the Hueys as they flew to the safety of ships waiting offshore. Rejoicing filled the streets. The war, and with it the anger and angst that had filled our lives for a decade and a half, was over.

  BY 1977, I was seeing double much of the time. I began to plan the rest of my life with Jerry Oster—or at least what might be left of my life, for by that time I was very busy dying.

  “Out of Control” was one of the few songs I wrote about being over-the-moon in love, but the title could have referred to just about any aspect of my life: over the top, but going under.

  I was weepy and wilting with heartbreak and despair. My field of vision had narrowed to what seemed like a slit. Clark was in and out of schools and even jails and institutions by this time. The only thing that really thrilled me was that he had come home to live with me in New York. He went to high school, finished his degree, and stayed sober. I was desperately trying to keep it together. And then Jerry left.

  I was a wreck, but one of the things I had done over the years since my affair with Stephen was to keep in touch with him. From time to time we would talk, and the closure that we initially had not had took place slowly over time. It was as though the relationship was tied to my staying alive through the worst of my drinking. I could hang on to him in the storm.

  I went to Miami in February 1976 and stayed with Stephen and his mother, Ti, and his sister Hannah in his beautiful house on a canal. Stephen’s marriage to Véronique Sanson, the French singing star, had ended and she had moved back to France, leaving her son, Chris, with Stephen. Every night Stephen would come home from the studio, where he was recording a new album. He and David and Graham had gone their separate ways two years before, each making his own solo album after their enormous successes in the late 1960s. Stephen had a couple of very successful singles during those years, “Love the One You’re With” as well as “Change Partners,” very much in tune with my romantic pursuits at time.

  I would wait up for my ex-beau, swimming in his pool, hanging out with Ti and Hannah. They must have thought a ghost had descended upon them, and a drunken ghost at that! I would drink all day, not ready yet to give it up, and then drive alone to the beach, where I would pass out in the sun for a couple of hours. These were very dark times for me. Ti and Hannah and Stephen were very patient and very kind, hoping, I am sure, that any minute I would pack up my bags and fly back to New York, leaving them in peace.

  I could no longer go without drinking for even a few hours; in truth, I hadn’t been able to do so for three years. I was totally losing my voice and, for the first time in my career, canceling concerts, sometimes several weeks’ worth at a time. In 1977 I was diagnosed with a hemangioma, an abnormal buildup of blood vessels, on my left vocal cord. (In drinkers, hemangiomas often appear on the face, as bright red cheeks or nose.) If I performed one concert, I would become immediately hoarse afterward and have to cancel the rest of the shows in the run. I would then go on a course of predni
sone, which is a very strong steroid; and in a few days, my vocal cord would be better and I would try again. Meanwhile, I would hole up in a local hotel with the ten or eleven people who were on tour with me—pianists, drummers, road managers, everyone on salary, of course—and we would all swim in the hotel pool and sleep and eat, and I would drink. Constantly, every hour, every day. Vodka was my drink of choice then. I was convinced it was undetectable, not knowing it was seeping out of the pores of my skin, announcing my illness to everyone around me.

  Then I would try another ragged attempt at singing. Friends of my mother called her in tears to tell her that they had heard me in Portland, San Francisco, or Chicago, and that her daughter’s career was over, that her voice was a tattered remnant of what had taken her to stardom. Even my scheduled appearance on The Muppet Show in May 1977 in London had to be rescheduled. I called Jim Henson to tell him that I was really too ill to come to London and do the show. We had known each other since the early seventies, when he asked me to appear on Sesame Street. I still find it hard to believe that drinking made me cancel on Kermit and Oscar and Snuffleupagus!

  Jim understood. He told me to get well, and postponed my appearance until the fall, when I finally did The Muppet Show. I was barely able to sing, but I made it through. A few days later I was back in New York for surgery to remove the offending capillary on my vocal cord.