Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (3 page)

In 1980, Joni would do something familiar to single women then turning forty—women wearying of the historically unprecedented time they'd logged as battle-scarred free agents, at the same moment that mating shibboleths were loosening: She would meet a wholesome younger man who was awed to be her lover, and she would marry him, with the male becoming the nurturer of the couple. Then, after a ten-year run, she'd end the marriage with
I am who I am; I am not changing.
Here was the cactus tree, a quarter century later.

Over these last twenty years her puzzling-out of her life and career would feature the same hurt, anger, and heightened self-regard shared by female age mates whose elevated expectations had left them unwilling to be pushed aside in the same “due course” of life that had bound earlier generations of women. Her “An angry man is just an angry man [but] an angry woman? ‘Bitch!'”—sung in a lifetime chain-smoker's raspy alto—would be a back page of the well-shared hymnal she wrote, whose psalms to ice cream castles in the air had been chorused in trilling soprano.

But all of this would come years in the future.

Meanwhile, in late 1964, Joni Anderson scraped by in Yorkville. She would perform a few weeks longer; then, in increasing desperation, she'd move into Vicky Taylor's crash pad and later to the closet-sized attic room of a male platonic friend, in a building marked for demolition. Finally, when her labor pains started, two weeks past her due date, she would check herself into the charity ward of Toronto General Hospital—and there confront what she was singing about tonight: she was having a baby she could not keep and would not keep.

Hundreds of accidentally pregnant girls made that decision every day, for the sake of the baby's well-being, their reputations or their parents', and their own desired freedom. But how could they experience the decision without guilt—or fail to internalize society's judgment of their relinquishment as selfishness? The burden of both judgments, the internal one
and
the societal one, would resonate incalculably over two-thirds of Joni's lifetime. As a close confidante of Joni's says, “
Everything
in Joni's emotional life has been about the baby.”

During their time on Huron Street, neither Joni Anderson nor Duke Redbird could have any idea that, thirty years later, by multiple coincidences,
he
would be the one to lead Joni's long-relinquished grown daughter to her.

But that was decades down the road. So much of life would be lived in the interim.

april 6, 1971: daring herself

When Steve Harris knocked on the door of Carly Simon's Hyatt Continental House room, he wasn't surprised at the fear he saw in her face. Harris, an A&R man at Elektra Records, had spent two months cajoling Carly, an unknown who had extreme stage fright, into consenting to a live concert, so necessary to promote the single, “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be,” from her self-titled debut album. The record had sold only 2,000 copies, but it had ignited water-cooler talk among the special group of record company secretaries and receptionists that Elektra president Jac Holzman had sent it to; word-of-mouth had started, and Holzman was determined to maximize it.

Carly and Steve had flown out to L.A. the other day, on one of those brand-new 747s, their mutual fear of flying blunted by old-fashioneds and Valium in the first-class cabin. They were determined to have fun and forget that the Big Night was looming. Since landing, Carly—an unreconstructed East Coast girl—had been playing the enchanted naïf. Despite her highly sophisticated upbringing (her father, Richard Simon, was the cofounder of Simon & Schuster), she had never been to California before, a poor-little-rich-girl-ism that amazed her. In between dates with Michael Crichton (she and Steve had nicknamed the very tall doctor-novelist “Big Boy”), she'd been marveling at the tropical L.A. colors, at the hotel's rooftop pool, and at the platform beds in their rooms—Steve's had a crown over it! She kept repeating the mantra “I can't get nervous because this is a foreign country; I'll be performing to
foreigners.
” In fact, though, she would be performing—opening for Cat Stevens at the Troubadour—
not
to foreigners but to L.A.'s music elite. And here was her fun-loving chaperone, Steve, come to deliver her to her Waterloo.

Carly collapsed on Steve's chest, “shaking and trembling, like a scared puppy,” Steve recalls. She was also stuttering; her long-extinguished childhood tic had resurfaced.

She was a tall, once chubby, now slim, leggy young woman in her mid-twenties wearing a floppy hat, a diaphanous skirt, and high boots. Her strong features—very full lips in prognathic face, low-bridged nose, sloe eyes—all cushioned in the remnants of baby fat, gave her a startling sensuality and made her ethnicity an enigma. (Her father was Jewish; her mother was half-German, part-Spanish, and, so the cherished family story went, part black.) As they got in the elevator, Carly told Steve that, as a child, she'd made up a special language to overcome her stammer. If only she could remember it!

That childhood of hers had been straight out of
The New Yorker.
Luminaries were guests in the Simons' living room. Carly and her siblings had attended the nearby private schools favored by wealthy, intellectual families, and the second generation replicated the first one. One of Carly's best friends, Ellen Wise Salvadori, was studying to be a Jungian therapist, while her husband was poised for deanship of a college art department. Her other best friend, Jessica Hoffmann Davis, was becoming a cognitive developmental psychologist. Carly's oldest sister, Joey, was an opera singer; middle sister Lucy married a psychiatrist. It was from this talk-rich world that Carly's song had percolated.

Rendered in her emotional contralto, the elegant ballad she'd written with her friend,
Esquire
writer Jake Brackman, presented a sophisticated woman struggling with a decision. She is in her thirties, but even though her friends have settled down, she's in no hurry to do so. Her boyfriend is the sentimental idealist about marriage;
she's
the hesitating cynic: “But soon you'll cage me on your shelf.” This song was the first antimarriage pop ballad written and sung by a woman.

Real-life personifications of the song—young women criticizing marriage, ending their marriages, and writing about it—were popping up all over New York now. Women's liberation had been the work of female civil rights and antiwar activists in collectives in Berkeley, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, for three years, but now it was fully entrenched in the young mainstream intelligentsia. Women in the media, arts, and academe—Carly's crowd—had come to view society and their personal histories through this powerful new lens that was supplanting all others. The movement relied on the intimate sharing of experiences: “consciousness raising.” As they pooled their stories about, among other facets of their lives, love (with a new, tough analysis replacing yesterday's commiseration), women came to view men's put-up-or-shut-up rules of romance in the same way that newly unionized nineteenth-century factory workers viewed “If you don't come in Sunday, then don't come in Monday” signs:
Two can play that game, baby.

This movement was about to get its own national publication. Right at this moment, as Carly and Steve Harris were stepping onto the curb at Santa Monica and Doheny, back in New York, a memo marked “Confidential: Some notes on a new magazine” was being circulated among
New York
magazine writer Gloria Steinem and a half-dozen other women; for its title,
Sister
and
Everywoman
vied with the odd-sounding
Ms.
And in law firms around the country, handfuls of attorneys were reframing as offensive and unjust practices that just a year before were regarded as unremarkably normal: separate newspaper job listings for men and women, rape victims' need for corroborating witnesses, banks' refusal to give women credit cards.

This new idea that was taking hold in the media and being argued in the courts—that young women had integrity—was having its echo in music. Carole King and Joni Mitchell had just arrived at the pinnacles of their careers, at twenty-nine and twenty-seven years of age, respectively. They were months away from achieving, for the former, commercial success unequaled in the recording industry; for the latter, respect unparalleled among her musician peers—by way of very different albums,
Tapestry
and
Blue,
that had this in common: neither had one false note in it. These triumphs would be clouded with pain. Carole's marriage to the one husband her friends would later wistfully call “the normal one” would end, leading her to a next marriage, in which the consequences of her husband's insecurity were infinitely more destructive. As for Joni, her “living on nerves and feelings,” as she'd later describe in a lyric on
Court and Spark,
would lead to a bottoming out, in the course of which she would issue a self-harming cry for help (she has referred to it as a “suicide attempt”) after being rejected by a famous boyfriend.

Carole and Joni were in many ways opposites. Carole was Everywoman; Joni, the Bohemian. Carole was a craftsman, a tunesmith; Joni, a poet, an artist. Carole was a comforting, accessible friend; Joni, the object of women's awe and men's infatuation. Carole (now pregnant with her third child) was maternal; she lived by adding. Joni was solitary; she lived by relinquishing. Carole's songs celebrated easy-to-grasp feelings in an optimistic spirit by way of clear, infectiously rhythmic expression. Joni's songs described complex needs and emotional states; they did not skirt pessimism; and—like the astonishingly original Laura Nyro, the only other female singer-songwriter Joni respected—she had begun to use her voice like a jazz instrument, with abrupt shifts of tempo, octave, mood, and volume.

But Carole and Joni were also alike: both were raised in lower-middle-class households. Neither was a sister (Joni, literally; Carole, functionally), and neither
had
a sister; the idea of confiding in women—that brand-new coin of the realm—was
not
second nature to them, nor was the inclination (Joni's “exposed nerve endings” and confessional songs notwithstanding) to bare their souls to friends. They shared a vague distrust of the chattering classes' “talking cure” and, in different ways, were self-directed. Both were instilled with traditional morality and had paid the price for defying it: Carole, bearing her first child at barely past seventeen; Joni, giving up a baby at twenty-one. Both were naturally ambitious; neither had sought to submerge her talent in a traditional female role.

As if each of these three women's lives represented one-third of a larger story—each, so to speak, a single-hued transparent gel, which when superimposed resulted in a full-color picture—Carly Simon's experience and work filled in the breaches of Joni's and Carole's, for she represented vulnerabilities the other two did not have. When woven together, the strands of their three separate lives, identities, and songs tell the rich composite story of a whole generation of women born middle-class in the early to middle 1940s and coming of age in the middle to late 1960s.

Unlike Carole and Joni, Carly came from a big family awash in estrogen. Carly, her two older sisters, and their sometimes-sisterlike mother (Andrea Simon loved not just to gossip with her daughters but also to flirt with their boyfriends) filled the house with grandiose female dramas and set up Carly's lifetime comfort with and appreciation of female friends. “More than Joni and Carole, Carly is a woman's woman—the notes and gifts, the concern, the phone calls,” says Betsy Asher, then wife of James Taylor's manager, Peter Asher, and a woman who was the chief hostess (and secret keeper) to L.A.'s rock world. But the solicitousness wasn't mere etiquette. A lifelong analysand in a therapy-worshiping subculture, Carly believed in the value of intimate confession (and she listened raptly as others poured their hearts out), and she confided with great, incautious gusto. “Carly doesn't have a privacy barometer—it
all
comes out,” says Jessica Hoffmann Davis. “Carly doesn't bring her defenses forward from one moment to the next; she doesn't give herself that buffer, that solace,” Mia Farrow agrees. Ellen Wise Questel (Carly's friend who in 1971 was Ellen Wise Salvadori now goes by her remarried name, Questel)
*
explains, “A mystic once said, ‘You have two eyes; one says yes to the world, the other says no. You need to see with
both
of them.' Carly sees more with the eye that says yes, and that makes her so vulnerable. She belongs in another century, the era of grand feelings and penned love letters. Carly would be perfect in a Tolstoy novel.” Stuck in New York (eight months pregnant) on the night of Carly's Troubadour opening, Ellen mentally replayed a defining moment from their teen years: “Carly's sitting on the school steps with her guitar, playing ‘When I Fall in Love,' and she's singing the ‘…it will be for-
ev
-er…' with
such
passion.” Neither Carly nor Ellen could know that, through an introduction tonight, the prophecy of that lyric—the inability to stop loving someone even after one
can
and
wants
to—would be set in motion in Carly's life.