Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (79 page)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weller, Sheila.
Girls like us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon—and the journey of a generation / Sheila Weller.
    p. cm.
   1. King, Carole, 1942–2. Mitchell, Joni. 3. Simon, Carly. 4. Singers—Biography. 5. Rock musicians—Biography. 6. Women rock musicians—Biography. I. Title.
ML400.W35 2008
782.42164092'2—dc22      2007043445
[B]

eISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6477-5
eISBN-10: 1-4165-6477-2

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Footnotes:

^*
The dating of this day has been estimated to the best of Camille Cacciatore Savitz's memory.

^*
Here and throughout, a woman who uses one name in her current life but as a character in this book was known by a different name may be referred to in two, or more, ways. Some women married, divorced, and remarried and changed names at each juncture, making the process of identifying them both as characters at any given point in the narrative
and
as quoted sources slightly more complicated. Apologies to the reader for the sometimes confusing last-name-shuffle.

^*
Sister Kenny had fought the European medical establishment (which advocated a different treatment: immobilization, splinting, and casting), eventually finding more open-mindedness in the U.S., where her technique was partially supported by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and taught in a Minnesota hospital. Sister Kenny–trained therapists then fanned north to Canada.

^*
In 1964 Richard and Mildred Loving could still be jailed if they returned to Virginia, where they had been indicted in 1958 for “miscegenation”; they had recently filed a lawsuit that would lead to the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring unconstitutional the ban against interracial marriage in over a dozen other states.

^*
There were a lot worse things than infidelity and humiliation, and they weren't condemned or illegal. “Domestic violence” didn't exist in the penal code. A man's violence toward his wife was considered a “family matter” that the police could not be faulted for not interfering with, and it wasn't even much of a social shibboleth. In fact, it was so taken for granted that a man's violence to his woman could be a sign of passion that when Eva Boyd told Carole and Gerry that her boyfriend had struck her during an argument that then turned conciliatory, they wrote a song—impossible to imagine being written today—called “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss).” The Crystals recorded it. Many radio stations, however, refused to play the record.

^*
“Carole has been wonderful to me,” Dawn Reavis Smith says today. Dawn—whose relationship with her father was able to flower once he and Carole divorced, in 1968—was “always” included in postdivorce Gerry's assemblage of his daughters, she says. “Whenever Louise and Sherry were visiting Gerry, Gerry would send for me, too. His brother would pick me up and drive me to him, or I was flown out [to California]. I always felt secure and supported. I never had to search for my father. Louise always knew that we were sisters. Sherry didn't understand it until she was much older; Louise tells a funny story about how for a long time Sherry thought I was her ‘soul sister,' not her biological one.” Dawn moved with her mother to North Carolina for high school. Jeanie got a degree as an early childhood specialist and opened a day care center; Dawn attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Majoring in journalism, she became a TV news reporter for CBS in Greenville, South Carolina, and then for ABC in Little Rock. She married UNC basketball star Kenny Smith, who became a star player for the Houston Astros; they had two children, then amicably divorced. Dawn has remained close with her half sisters, Louise and Sherry, and she was a bridesmaid at Louise's wedding.

^*
Weekly hootenannies—anyone who wanted to could sing—harkened back to Seeger's Almanac House and became a tradition in clubs, in coffeehouses, and on college campuses everywhere.

^*
Folk-world mixed couples were routinely set upon, even in relatively sophisticated Los Angeles; and, as a measure of the violent disapproval for interracial unions, even white girls who were simply socializing with friends who happened to be mixed couples were “sent a message” by the authorities. Around this same time Tamar Hodel, the young white wife of black folksinger Stan Wilson, and her best friend, teenage Michelle Gilliam—soon to be Mama Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas—had been rounded up by cops who had burst into a social gathering. Tamar and Michelle were driven to an L.A. station and booked. Tamar, being married to a black man, was
a priori
in jeopardy. But Michelle's “crime”? According to the angry sergeant: being “at that party with all those niggers.”

^*
D'Arcy went on to have a successful career as a UN-affiliated international forestry consultant. She now owns a bed-and-breakfast in western Canada with her daughter.

^*
In the United States, approximately 1.5 million young women gave birth in similar homes from 1945 to 1972.

^*
On some Web sites and reissues, the spelling has been changed to “Winken, Blinken and Nod.”

^*
Upon his novel's release, twenty-three-year-old Delbanco would be greeted with unqualified praise from high quarters. Mark Van Doren hailed the novel as “a tale of great richness, told with superb economy”;
Saturday Review
extolled its “lyrical intensity” and “characterizations…that glitter with the awesome truth of human anguish”; and
The New York Times
called it “a true work of imagination.”

^*
Today Nicholas Delbanco is the author of twenty-four books, mostly highly regarded fiction, and directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is considered one of the most significant writers of fiction in America. The character in Delbanco's 2006 novel,
Spring and Fall,
about the forty-years-later resumed romance of college lovers, is at least partly based on Carly.

^*
Carly's high school boyfriend, Tim Ratner, joined the U.S. Air Force, active duty, and flew reconnaissance flights in Vietnam. And, two years before the hit music of ex-101st Airborne member Jimi Hendrix would help turn Vietnam into America's first rock 'n' roll war, Tim sang his and Carly's beloved show tunes and standards in the air force chorus, which performed in shooting distance of the rice paddies.

^*
However, he wasn't always so nice. In his 1987 novel,
Is This Allowed?
, Donaldson wrote what Carly calls “an unflattering, ball-busting scene”—with real names used—in which she and her husband, James Taylor, are sitting with Willie during a trip to London “and I'm making signs to Willie behind James's back.”

^**
Soon after his breakup with Carly, he lived in a brothel and wrote a novel. From 1985 to 1995 he was a crack addict and a pimp, while continuing to write—novels, plays, newspaper columns. He invented a character, right-winger Henry Root, whose phony letters incited credulous response from Margaret Thatcher, among others. His last book, the satirical
Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics,
was called “fiendishly entertaining” by the
Guardian Unlimited.
When he died in 2005, at seventy, the
London Daily Telegraph
eulogized him as “a pimp, crack fiend…a lazy, self-indulgent sex addict and a comic genius.”

^*
For a while he was diagnosed as schizophrenic; eventually he was diagnosed with what was then called manic depression and is now called bipolar disorder.

^*
The house band at the Au Go Go was the Blues Project, whose members Joni would get to know at around this same time. Both the Flying Machine and the Blues Project were blues-based bands of coddled white boys (a fact mocked by James Taylor in his introductory patter to his “Steamroller”), but there was a difference: the Blues Project boys were middle class while the Flying Machine were the sons of the cultural and intellectual elite. Aside from James (whose father was the dean of the college of medicine at the University of North Carolina), Joel (whose “Cole Porter world” parents, as Joel's wife, Connie, viewed them, socialized with Broadway eminences), and Danny (whose mother was a prolific novelist), bass player Zach Wiesner's father, Jerome, had been President Kennedy's main nuclear science advisor and would soon become the president of MIT.
The
band on the street at the time—the one to beat—was the jug band turned rock band, the Lovin' Spoonful, soon to produce the infectious hits “Do You Believe in Magic” and “Summer in the City.”

^*
One day in late 1964, Roger (then Jim) McGuinn (who'd recently been playing with Bobby Darin) picked up his twelve-string guitar and, because his Byrds needed an introduction to “Mr. Tambourine Man,” set eight notes inspired by Bach's “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” to a nonfolk beat he says he got from the Beatles' appropriation of a Phil Spector beat. McGuinn chose the Dylan bar that had the most new-hipster appeal: “the ‘boot heels to be wandering' were like Beatle boots, Kerouac boots.” The revolutionary genre of “folk rock” was born.

^*
It had been created in mid-1965, during the culture-changing Byrds concerts at Ciro's (the once iconically glamorous Sunset Strip nightclub, reopened under new ownership), by sculptor Vito Paulekas and dancer Carl Franzoni. Paulekas was a wild-eyed guru who (though few of his acolytes knew this) had spent four years in prison in Massachusetts in the 1940s before moving to L.A. for self-reinvention. Paulekas and Franzoni trained a troupe of young “freakers” in the sensual body movement that soon became synonymous with late-1960s dancing. When you walked into Ciro's in 1965, heard the music, and saw the (stoned) dancing, you were jolted by its radical fluidity, gentleness, and introspection. “You knew a new world had arrived,” says one habitué. The Byrds took the Paulekas-Franzoni dancers on tour with them later that year, but they were too ahead of their time. The group got beat up in the Midwest. But, as with so much from that era, gross irresponsibility and tragedy lay on the flip side of the ecstasy. An acid-tripping Paulekas set his young son atop a high ladder in his art studio one night, and the child fell to his death. It is unlikely that Paulekas was prosecuted for the fatal negligence.

^*
Although the Pill was still not legal for unmarried women in many states, many doctors prescribed it to them anyway.