Cat Power (4 page)

Within a few short years the utopian ideals of the sixties would recede as the doom, fear, and paranoia of the 1970s rode on the back of endless war, a broken, crooked government, and recession. But the Marshalls had no idea such dark times were on the horizon. It was still 1969! Free love was still alive! Without fear, the couple made the leap from madly in-love rock kids to young married couple.

“Myra looked like a model,” Leamon remembers. “And she was always smiling, just a really outgoing person. Charlie and Myra met and hit it off and got married.”

In May of 1970, mere months after they met, Myra Russell married Charlie Marshall in a modest ceremony in Atlanta. He was twenty-three, she was nineteen. “On the day of the dawning of Aquarius, we got married,” Charlie remembers, laughing. “It was a full hippie regalia. Flowers in the hair and everything.” Local rockers, artists, and hipsters gathered near the couple's home and made the eight-block walk en masse to the ceremony. “There were a few people with actual tambourines,” the former groom recalls. “We had a judge who was a wino who lived in the area, and the hippies just sort of adopted him. He'd given up on life, but he helped us perform the ceremony.”

Charlyn (pronounced
Shar-Lin
) Marie Marshall was born at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 21, 1972. Her birth was a very happy day, but within a few weeks the seriousness of Chan's parents' situation started to press upon them. They already had a young daughter at home, Miranda Lee Marshall, born in the first year of their marriage. Three short years before, Myra and Charlie had been carefree,
impassioned kids, in love and confident that their ideals were powerful enough to support a marriage and a family. But three years after they first flirted at a rock show, Myra and Charlie Marshall had two baby daughters, serious financial problems, few professional prospects, and an increasingly troubled marriage.

The Brick Wall failed to ride the coattails of the Southern rock movement and broke up shortly before the wedding. For the first time in his adult life, Charlie Marshall considered giving up music and pursuing a more conventional livelihood. He traded band practice for a series of retail jobs and tried to prioritize being a good husband, father, and provider for his family above his musical aspirations. Selling shoes was steady work but it hardly paid more than playing in a rock band, and it must have bred resentment in Charlie against his new family for making him cash in his dream for a cheap suit and a straight job.

“I came to a realization years later, after Myra and I got a divorce,” Chan's father explains, “that I can do whatever I want to do, but to really be happy and successful you need to do what you love.”

Not that Charlie was particularly committed to doing anything but exactly what he wanted when he was still living with Myra and the girls. Professionally, both Myra and Charlie made sacrifices for their young family, working square jobs just to pay the rent, but at home there was little discernible difference between how they lived before they had children and how they lived after Miranda and Chan were born. As the disillusionment of the early 1970s gave way to the soullessness and hedonism that defined the later part of that decade, the South's dispirited bohemians congregated by default in a stagnant Atlanta.

Myra, meanwhile, was dealing with much more sinister troubles than the breakup of a band or a few unpaid bills. Her mind was starting to play tricks on her. It's unconfirmed whether or not she was ever clinically
diagnosed as schizophrenic by a psychiatrist. What is clear is that her closest family members, including Lenny, Charlie, and Chan, speak about her as if she has been. The onset of schizophrenia typically occurs in late adolescence or the early twenties, and, according to Charlie and Chan, Myra was smack-dab in the middle of that range when she started displaying symptoms of the disease, including delusions, hallucinations, and erratic behavior.

Shortly after Chan's birth, Myra—who had intuitively good taste in music and art—discovered David Bowie, who was, at that point, barely known outside of London. At first Myra was just an impassioned fan, but soon her attraction transformed from enthusiastic interest to full-blown obsession. (Coincidentally, schizophrenia runs in Bowie's family as well. His infatuation with transformation and multiple identities may have appealed to Myra, who was battling contrasting versions of her own personality.) Myra became so infatuated with Bowie that in 1972, the year
Ziggy Stardust
came out, she dyed her hair rooster red like his and began referring to herself as Ziggy. “I grew up having to introduce my mom as Ziggy Stardust,” Chan has said.

With her new identity intact, Myra became even more restless, Charlie says. “When Chan was two years old, Myra freaked out,” Chan's dad remembers. “She just ran away.” Charlie says he had no idea where Myra had gone, no means of getting in touch with her, and no idea of when she would be back. Left alone with his two young daughters, he panicked. He called Myra's parents, who came down from the family home in Forest Park and helped take care of Chan and Miranda.

Myra's disappearance sent her fledgling family into a state of total disarray, Charlie claims, but it also resulted in the beginning of a reconciliation between her parents and their son-in-law. With his long hair and bell-bottoms, inconsistent employment history, lust for rock stardom, and
lack of education, Charlie was not the guy the Russells wanted their daughter to marry. But with Myra in the wind and their grandchildren left in Charlie's care, they were forced to deal with him.

Chan suffered from a lot of health problems as a child, including severe food allergies, so caring for her required the attention of both her father and her grandparents. “She couldn't drink milk, she couldn't have chocolate, she loved pets but was allergic to all of them,” Charlie remembers. “We were always afraid for her.” While Myra was gone, two-year-old Chan developed an ear infection so severe she had to be taken to the emergency room. “Chan's grandpop was there at the hospital,” Charlie remembers. “He never really liked my hair, but there he was, and he was hugging both of us. Her mom is gone and he's hugging me and I'm hugging Chan. I got a little teary.”

Charlie gives the impression that, at least for the first few years of his marriage to Myra, he was around, dutifully putting his nose to the grindstone at a series of jobs he vaguely hated while Myra combated increasingly debilitating mental problems. But according to Chan, Lenny, and Leamon, Charlie's presence in the girls' lives, even in those early years, was much more erratic than he lets on.

“Charlie left her for some reason,” Leamon recalls. “Another girl? That's real foggy. … He wasn't around. Gone for whatever reason. I don't know if he decided it wasn't the right thing, or got cold feet 'cause she was having kids or they didn't get along or money. I don't know. I wasn't here.” Chan has put it more bluntly: “My dad left when my mom was pregnant
with me
. My mother took off when I was two. They were young, drank too much, did drugs. They didn't really want kids.” Chan has even gone so far as to suggest that Charlie Marshall might not be her biological dad, that instead she might be the daughter of pianist, songwriter, and fellow sixties Southern-rock scenester Spooner Oldham.
“My mom had my sister, then when she was pregnant with me, my dad left,” Chan has explained. “When I met Spooner, his wife was like, ‘Man, you really remind me of my husband.’ I never understood why my dad wasn't around … so I started putting two and two together. I asked him and he says he doesn't remem— I haven't asked my mom yet. I don't wanna—but I don't think it's true. I think I am my father's kid. I don't know.”

After being gone for a little over a month, Charlie says, Myra eventually reappeared in Atlanta, eager to reclaim her girls. According to Charlie, this was easier said than done. “They weren't going to give her the children back,” Charlie says. “I sat down with Myra. I said, ‘Why don't you get your life in order right now, and we'll get you the kids back, but you've got to get a job.’ She got the babies back, but Myra had a lot of demons she was working with at that time.”

Myra had always been precocious—her wit was one of the qualities that attracted Charlie to her on that first night at the Spot—but Myra's sass mutated into nastiness. “It was tough living with Myra because of mean things that she would do,” Charlie recalls. “I'd have friends that would come over, and we'd be talking about music or me getting a job doing this or doing that, and she would just belittle me in front of every body.” Leamon isn't quite as blunt, but he confirms that Myra's outspoken nature continues to get her into trouble. “She's tempestuous,” he says. “She can't hold a job for some reason. Gets a job and somebody makes her mad after a while. She's a pretty hard worker, but she doesn't know how to stay out of the way of everybody.” At first, Charlie didn't realize that his wife may be unwell, and by the time he did, he didn't know what to do about it. And her increasingly erratic behavior put a serious strain on the couple's already tenuous marriage.

Decades later, Charlie regrets not getting his wife some help. “I wish
we had gotten her diagnosed, maybe they could have given her medication,” he says. At the time, the girls were living with Myra's parents and the young couple barely had money to buy food and pay rent. Doctor's-office visits for the adults in the family weren't on their list of priority expenditures. “We didn't even have money to do other things, much less go to doctors,” Charlie remembers. “There were problems with Myra and there were problems with me, too.”

With Myra back at home, the Marshall family settled into a state of relative stability, but not dealing with her problems almost ensured that in time they would eventually worsen. “It's bad for brains to be crazy,” Dr. David Ewing, a psychiatrist and an expert on the subject, observes succinctly. “The longer they're crazy, the less likely they are to get better.” Two years later, Myra and Charlie would split up for good, but in the interim the young parents tried to keep their own issues under control while they focused on providing for Chan and Miranda. Myra worked mostly during the day and Charlie worked mostly at night, so with Miranda's help, he made sure the girls got up, out of the house, and on their way to school.

“Miranda is very motherly,” Lenny says of his and Chan's older sister. “They're sisters so they're the same in some instances, but they're different. Chan is more of a free spirit and Mandy is more of a motherly type.” Miranda's evident maternal instincts meant that she took to responsible-older-sister tasks like packing lunches and organizing schoolbooks for the morning. Chan, on the other hand, was tough to get out of bed and moved at a slower pace, always singing to herself or trying to finish a picture she'd been coloring instead of focusing on getting out the door.

When the girls were very young and their parents were still together, Chan and Miranda attended elementary school in Buckhead, a sprawling, moneyed community in northern Atlanta. “It was a very simple time,”
Charlie remembers of the most stable years his daughters would ever have as children. “They would have lunch at school, then I'd pick them up or Myra would pick them up. We'd bring them home and they would both have to do their homework. Chan was not a good student, but she was interested in learning.”

Chan agrees that she was an unwieldy child, easily distracted and shy but drawn to the spotlight. “I was pretty daydreamy and spazzy,” the singer has recalled. “I was energetic. Never could sleep. Always running all over the place. I wanted to be a comedian. I liked making people laugh.” She also agrees that conventional do-your-homework-get-an-A type scholastic behavior wasn't her strength, saying that of all the teachers she had as a kid, every one of them except her art teacher would be surprised to discover she's become successful. Art was Chan's favorite subject and the only one she was really good at. Both Miranda and Chan were extremely creative children who spent more time painting with their mother, or making collages and singing, than doing homework. “They were always drawing,” Charlie remembers. “We'd buy them coloring books and Chan would say, ‘See, Daddy, I stayed between the lines!’”