Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (9 page)

BOOK: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation
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When Joan was in fourth grade, a new minister, Reverend Allan Logie, arrived in town to take over the pulpit at Third Avenue United Church. The minister's older daughter, Anne, became Joan's new close friend. The same-aged girls were similarly dreamy and creative (under her subsequently adopted name Bayin, Anne would become a well-regarded photographer) and, like their friend Sandy Stewart, secretly rebellious. (“I found a kindred spirit in that one-stoplight town,” Anne would later write in a memoir about her friendship with Joni, published in the Canadian magazine
Elm Street.
) Both were ballasted by the same combination of propriety and artistic expressiveness: Anne's mother, the minister's wife, directed the community theater. Like Myrtle Anderson's pressed-flower scrapbooks and Shakespeare quoting, Laura Logie's trunks full of Elizabethan clothes fueled the girls' drama lust. In the same way that proper Bill Anderson belted the trumpet to release his inhibitions, Allan Logie, when not sermonizing from the pulpit, wrote witty poetry. Unlike Sandy, who was as stubborn and willful as Joan, Anne had a more cautious spirit and let herself be led by her new friend's charisma. “Joan was a force of nature, more daring than me,” Anne Bayin said, in the
Elm Street
memoir, adding: “She turned brooms into batons, she had a nose for fashion, she wore stars on her shoes and her dad's ties to school. She was a trendsetter. Kids copied her.”

Inspired by the royal domestic doings in the motherland (Princess Elizabeth bearing Prince Charles in 1948 and Princess Anne in 1950—and, upon her father's death, ascending the throne as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952), Anne and Joan cut old curtains into wedding veils and held mock weddings and other ceremonies in their backyards. They also had a Wild West infatuation. Anne dressed up as Annie Oakley, while Joan—who adored Roy Rogers (and whose favorite TV show was
Wild Bill Hickock
)—decked herself out like Dale Evans. A photograph of Joan—standing on the wooden porch of her house in a cowboy hat and cowboy vest, one cuffed-jeaned ankle crossed over the other, arms akimbo, her left hand on the handle of her toy gun—exhibits a self-possession rare for a nine-year-old. She even dared ask her Sunday school teacher—and Reverend Logie himself—a question about an apparent incest suggestion in the book of Genesis: If Adam and Eve were
all alone
in the Garden of Eden, and had two sons, Cain and Abel, and then Cain had a child—well,
who
did Cain have the baby
with
? No elder could answer the question to young Joan's satisfaction.

Joan, Sandy, and Anne sang in the church's junior choir, for which Frankie played the organ, under the direction of Mrs. Girling, whose loud voice thundered with vibrato. Singing star Peter was also the cutup; Sandy, Joan, and Anne got in trouble for laughing at him mid-hymn. During province-wide music festivals they'd wait their turn in the rear pew while junior choir after junior choir filed to the front, shuffled into neat rows, and, pigtails bobbing, sang “Hey, Nonny, Nonny, on yonder hill there was a maiden…'” while a stout woman sternly judged the entrants.

At seven, Joni started piano lessons, “with a real rush, with a thrill to play; I wanted to jump immediately into playing the piano beautifully,” she's said. But her teacher, Miss Trevellen, rapped her knuckles with a ruler when she improvised. Joni has blamed the place and times for curbing self-expression, and while that may have been true, even the more straitlaced teachers appreciated her spirit. Drab Miss Bready, who taught fourth grade at King Street School (to which the neighborhood children had transferred and of which Frankie's father was principal), wrote that Roberta Joan was “original.”

Into this churchly, small-town primness strode a villain: the polio virus. One morning in early November 1953, a week before her tenth birthday, Joan got out of bed for a normal day in Miss Fulford's fifth-grade class at King Street, but something was not right. She put on her pegged gray slacks, red-and-white gingham blouse with sailor collar, and blue sweater—but the dressing took some doing. As she has remembered it, “I looked in the mirror, and I don't know what I saw—dark circles or a slight swelling under my face.”
Something
was wrong. Was this a flu? Walking to school, Joan felt achy, but she managed to get through the day. The next morning she had
no
energy. When, at Myrtle's prodding (“Get up! Come!”), Joan couldn't rouse herself, Myrtle yanked her daughter out of bed—and Joan collapsed. She ended up being airlifted on a “mercy flight” to St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon, the capital of the province. She was diagnosed with polio, a highly contagious viral disease that, in its rare bulbar manifestation (where the lower brain stem is affected, damaging the interior horns of the spinal cord), could cause paralysis.

This was the height of the Canadian polio epidemic, which was well on its way to afflicting 8,878 people, mainly children, out of a national population of less than 15 million. While polio cases in the far more populous United States had
decreased
by a third (from 58,000 to 35,000) over the previous year's figures, polio in Canada had almost doubled, from its 1952 tally of 4,755. (The wide availability, in 1955, of the polio vaccine created by Jonas Salk would virtually extinguish the disease in both countries.)

The higher impact of the disease in clean, uncrowded Canada made sense. At the turn of the twentieth century, the polio virus had circulated endemically. Children in then typically large families were exposed to it as a matter of course and developed immunity, which was reinforced by the maternal antibodies they'd acquired from having been breast-fed by immune mothers. But as the practices of breast-feeding and having large families came to be eschewed as “low class,” these ostensibly better-nurtured children were deprived of an indemnifying brush with the virus. This is what made polio so horrific and ironic. Here were civilized families: small, clean, orderly. Yet, as if being punished for virtue, they were ravaged by this paralyzing virus. The poster child for postwar progress—a coddled only child raised in a home kept spotless by a class-conscious mother, in a roomy, clean-aired town—was a prime candidate for this nightmare.

When her classmates, almost none of whom had ever been on a plane, heard that Joan had been
flown
to the hospital, a pall of tragic glamour hung over her in her absence. “It was so dramatic,
so Joni,
it took my breath away,” recalls Anne. “I confess, my first unforgivable reaction was one of envy, before reality and fear set in.” As for Joan's parents, they “were devastated—you could read it in their faces—but they never cried. Oh, no! No crying from Joan's mother,” says Sandra. “She was very strong.”

The polio unit at St. Paul's was run by the locally legendary Canadian order the Sisters of Charity, also known as “Grey Nuns.” Well before the caseload doubled, the Grey Nuns had been scrambling worriedly to accommodate the glut of new patients who were rolled into the ward daily with high fevers, throbbing headaches, and the virus racing toward their nervous systems. On August 25, 1952, a Grey Nun had written in the group's log: “The polio epidemic is at its full…We pray Mary to protect the youngsters from this sickness,” only—less than a month later—to have to amend the assessment: “Polio cases are multiplying. To help our overworked nurses, the public health department is sending six additional nurses…. Nine iron lungs are working all the time; eight of which are borrowed from other hospitals in the province.” (Iron lungs were tank respirators into which polio victims were slid on large trays with only their heads exposed. The loudly hissing tanks pushed air pressure into the patients' diaphragms and chests, doing their breathing for them.) At year's end the hospital had treated 358 polio patients; 15 died.

As 1952 had turned to 1953, bad had turned to worse, and by April 20, 1953, plans were made to enlarge the polio ward to a polio department, with a separate entrance, so that the highly contagious new patients “would not pass through the main part of the hospital,” as the nuns put it. It was through that new quarantine entrance that Joan Anderson was wheeled—past the mortifying phalanx of iron-lunged children—and settled into a bed in the full children's ward. As if the terror, the fever, and the isolation weren't punishment enough, the ten-year-old was subjected to a torturous-seeming regimen: she was wrapped in almost scalding hot compresses several times daily—this treatment pioneered by a World War I–era Australian military nurse nicknamed Sister Kenny, who had devised the method after she'd observed Aboriginals successfully treating their polio victims that way.
*

Joni has said that her back muscles were affected by the polio (“It ate muscles in my back” is how she put it), and that for a while, as she lay in the hospital and submitted to the scalding compresses, she didn't know if she would walk again. Fortunately, she would not be left with a limp or a shortened leg, which were common effects of the illness (“She ran all over the place! She ran up and down stairs; she didn't complain,” says Chuck Mitchell, of Joni eleven years later), although she would complain, in the 1980s, of vague effects of post-polio syndrome. The real effect was emotional. Her second husband, Larry Klein, says, “Joni's bout with polio at a young age was probably the one crisis—well, that, and the baby—that sculpted her inner resolve and sensitivity into the form that led to her strong talent as an artist. She certainly talked about polio as the thing that changed her: she had been a very outgoing child, and that illness was a huge experience that forced her inward.” As Joni has said: “I think the creative process was an urgency then. It was a survival instinct.”

“Survival” is apt; young Joan
fought
her polio. She has said, “I remember, the boy in the bed next to mine was really depressed. He didn't even have polio as bad as I, but he wasn't fighting it—he wasn't fighting to go on with what he had left…I had to learn to stand, and then to walk [again]. Through all of this, I drew like crazy and sang Christmas carols. I left the ward long before that boy, who had a mild case of polio in one leg [and] lay with his back to the wall, sulking.” She has also said that she made a promise to the Christmas tree in the ward that if she recovered, she would “make something of myself.”

Selfless though the Grey Nuns may have been, even in tending severely ill children they did not relax their unforgiving moral code. One of them excoriated Joan for moving in such a way on her bed that her bare legs were visible to that sulky little boy while she was singing him a Christmas carol. “I was nine years old…and he was pouting and picking his nose and…telling me to shut up, when a nun rushed in and practically beat me up for showing my legs. A nine-year-old to a six-year-old!” Joni would later say. (On the other hand, she got along well with the ward's charismatic Sister Mary Louise, who eventually became mother superior and whose charity Joni admired. After she became famous, Joni sang at events at the sister's behest. “She grabbed me by the ear and put me to work,” Joni has recalled. “She wanted me to join the order and write my memoirs.”)

Joan was discharged from the hospital after six weeks, and her recovery was supervised by Myrtle, who homeschooled her for a year—blackboard, homework, and all. It was during this intense bonding between punctilious mother and convalescing daughter that an exchange occurred in a pediatrician's office that, Joni has told friends, was central to her life. One of a number of those to whom Joni has recounted this incident says, “Joni never really put this together in her mind until much later, in her adult life, but then she started seeing it as so central—as the crux of things. Here's what happened: she was ten—it was after the polio.” A medication she had been taking (she would much later deduce) caused secretions, and Myrtle took her to the doctor, who performed a kind of external gynecologic examination. “The doctor said, ‘You've been a naughty girl, haven't you?' He was accusing her of having
sex.
She was
ten
! Joni looked at her mother, like, ‘What?! I didn't do anything!' But, instead of defending her, her mother took the doctor's side and humiliated her in front of him. Joni felt she'd lost her mother's trust. Then she started thinking, Maybe she'd been raped?—things like that. Later, she realized the discharge was from an antibiotic. She's confronted her mother about it, and her mother says, ‘Poppycock! I never did that.' But whatever was said that day, it affected Joni. She said, many times, that she didn't want to be a mother—not [in 1965], not ever—because she didn't want to be
her
mother.”

Joan began wrestling with the good girl/bad girl duality provoked by that upsetting accusation of the doctor. She rejoined the church choir, but one night, after all the pious singing, she slipped around to a frozen pond with a friend who possessed a purloined pack of Black Cat Cork, Canada's version of Camels. While the cigarette-dispensing friend and several other ten-year-olds were choking and gagging from the inhaled nicotine, Joan
liked
the experience. “I took one puff and felt really smart,” she has said. “I thought, ‘Whoa!' I seemed to see better and think better.” She became a secret preteenage smoker—initiating a habit that, over fifty years later, she still has not defeated.

Something even more significant happened in her tenth year: she fell in love with the idea of writing beautiful music. It was the majestically romantic “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” that did it. Composed in 1934 by Sergei Rachmaninoff at a make-or-break time—his Fourth Piano Concerto had been a failure and he'd been blocked for five years—the composition's almost over-the-top emotionality made it a favorite for movie soundtracks. One movie that utilized it,
The Story of Three Loves,
arrived in the North Battleford theater in 1953. Joan was in the audience. Set on an ocean liner (an exotic site for a girl thousands of miles from any ocean), the movie consisted of three melodramas. As a kind of fantasy stand-in for transgression in the ultraconformist decade, melodrama was a cinematic staple aimed at women (director Douglas Sirk perfected the genre) and this trio was no exception. The first story essayed forbidden love: a boy (Ricky Nelson) becomes magically transformed into a man, only to fall in love with his female governess (Leslie Caron); in the second, a ballerina (
Tales of Hoffman
and
The Red Shoes
star Moira Shearer) has a fatal heart attack while auditioning for a choreographer (James Mason), who then stages the ballet she inspired for her to view from heaven. In the third, a trapeze artist (Kirk Douglas) who is agonizing over his partner's death rescues from suicide a woman (Pier Angeli) who blames herself for her husband's murder by Nazis. These two fall in love, of course.

BOOK: Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation
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