Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (81 page)

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When Joni and Jefferson Airplane appeared on
The Dick Cavett Show,
David and Stephen bounded in, mid-segment, fresh from Bethel. In her long, low-cut, loden green crushed velvet dress, Joni exuded a blushing but steely, farm-girl dignity, next to tanned, lean, tartly sophisticated Grace Slick in tie-dye. Slick, still the reigning Acid Queen, got the lion's share of attention, sparring with Cavett (when she dismissively referred to him as “Sam,” he shot back, “Stop calling me the wrong name, Miss
Joplin
”) as if they were some odd-couple comedy team, but Joni's “Chelsea Morning” drew an almost awed ovation. Word of the transition from tough psychedelic hard rock to thoughtful, sincere music—soon to be advanced by James Taylor, and then, most fulsomely, by Carole on
Tapestry
—would be flowing from music critics' pens in a year and a half's time. The contrast, during this show, between Grace and Joni was the early, female version of that baton-passing.

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Apparently struck right away by the unique geography and female sociology of the place and scene she'd just moved into, Joni actually wrote the first version of the song in early 1968, when she was recording
Joni Mitchell.
Announcing, “I have a surprise for you,” Joni sang the Trina verse for Trina at the recording session; in gratitude, Trina promptly made Joni a black minidress with an antique lace pocket.

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Although the official lyrics are “Never been…,” Nash, musing about that moment in time, spoke them to this author as “I have never been…”

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After a bit more international roving—in Nepal, among other sites—and time in Marin County and New York City, the “red red rogue” became a yoga teacher and investment adviser who today shuttles between the D.C. area and Nairobi, where his wife is an executive of an AIDS-related humanitarian organization.

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Margaret went on to marry and have a son with a ballet dancer who then came out as gay. After they divorced, she married a man who was Hasidic; she became Hasidic, cutting off her long hair and covering her head with a wig. She spent her days washing the bodies of the dead, according to Jewish burial rites. In 1997 Margaret Corey died of an asthma attack.

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“A Case of You” may be one of the rare Joni songs that was written about two men. Although she told a confidante in the mid-1990s that it was about Leonard Cohen, she told Estrella Berosini that the song's signature line referred—literally—to intimate moments with James (who, in a 2004 magazine interview, Joni said was the best lover she'd ever had).

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Danny and Abigail eventually married, as did Stephanie and John. Both couples are now divorced.

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In the same way that the otherwise great minds at the 1964 World's Fair missed the mark by thinking that “revolution” for U.S. women would be exotically supercharged house-cleaning equipment, Roszak thought U.S. youth's loathed enemy was technology.

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A portion of the song's lyrics would, years later, be criticized as antifeminist—“Where you lead / I will follow” did sound servile. When the song became the theme song for
Gilmore Girls
in 2001, Carole and Toni took out the male-female references and rewrote the song to reflect the idea of loyalty, not slavish devotion.

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Joni and James did their background parts a week later; they are credited as “the Mitchell/Taylor Boy-and-Girl Choir.”

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The child actor from television's
My Three Sons
had become a photographer.

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Although James's women friends had, as Betsy Asher noted, formed a “fence” around him, Joni's confidantes recall that it was his family, not his friends, who intimidated her.

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In 1974, Gerry went to Boston on a self-appointed errand to intervene against the anti-integration school busing rioters; he returned home, Barbara says, “all bloody” from the confrontation. The next year he flew to Israel and tried to enlist in the Israeli army.

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Late in her pregnancy, Carole had occasion to run into Warren Beatty, who (recalls Abigail, who witnessed the scene) begged Carole to have sex with him, saying he'd never had sex with a very pregnant woman and wanted to know how it felt. Carole declined.

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When Stephanie and John's son Noah was born two years later, it would be practiced mom Carole who held the jaundiced newborn while the doctor gave his heel a needle prick. And when Carole and Stephanie were at a Connecticut Howard Johnson's in 1974 and the manager told Stephanie to cover herself with a blanket because the other diners were disturbed by her breast-feeding, Carole pointed to the one-year-old and coolly retorted, “Well,
he
seems to be happy.” “We were crusading hippie moms,” says Stephanie.

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By 2005, the average age of first marriage for a U.S. woman was just under twenty-six years old—a highly significant 5.5 years older than it had been in 1955, when the typical American bride was just over twenty. (The very fact that the term “average age of first marriage” sounds stodgy and even prejudiced today shows what this generation of women, its bards, and feminism did: they made marriage optional. Just about every educated urban woman who was born in the mid-1940s can count friends who have never been married or never had children yet have led exciting, distinctly unpitied lives. This was never the case before.)

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Helen Reddy's jingoistic “I Am Woman” became a hit a year and a half after Carly's, in September 1972.

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The original interface of glamour and feminine charisma with effective, mainstream, sell-it-to-America feminism can be seen in reading an early 1970s profile of Gloria Steinem by Leonard Levitt in
Esquire.
The intoxicating charm of Steinem to the many men with whom she (like Joni and Carly) was involved, and her just-prefeminist ability, through the 1960s, to become (as a song Carly would write with Jake puts it) “the girl…you want [me] to be” to the string of Kennedy-associated political figures and Manhattan journalists, editors, and publishers who were her captivated beaux was—not unadmiringly—described by Steinem's
friends.
The article was excoriated as an antifeminist hit job.

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Stevens, it would turn out,
was
spiritual. After a near-drowning in Malibu in 1975, Stevens vowed to pay God back for saving his life; he converted to Islam in 1977 and has lived, taught his religion, and (until recently without the religiously forbidden musical accompaniment) sung under the name Yusuf Islam ever since.

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Abigail adds, “I think Carly's graciousness and generosity might have been mistaken for conceit by some people at the beginning—‘She has so much; why does she flaunt it?' That kind of thing. Maybe some of the guys were a little suspicious of her.” But a few years later, “when Danny and I were in some turmoil, Carly invited me to stay with her and James at the Vineyard. She was wonderful.” “Carly worked double-time to win over James's crowd,” Betsy Asher says. “But there was real caring underneath her social effectiveness.”

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Shortly after Carly and James married, in 1972, Arlyne Rothberg arranged a lunch, at Mr. Chow's in L.A., between Carly and Joni, at Carly's request. Arlyne invited Linda Ronstadt along to dilute tension. Carly and Joni were so wary of each other that they barely lifted their forks and mediator Arlyne didn't either, out of anxiety about the situation. “
Linda,
” Arlyne says, “was the only one of us who ate. She ate everybody's lunch!”
In 1996, Joni and Carly had dinner together. Afterward Joni told a friend, “I had no idea what a great person she was.” They talked about James, and when Joni realized that Carly had essentially never gotten over him—the man Joni had come to view as cruel (and may not have entirely gotten over herself)—Joni was very moved. Ultimately, says a friend, the two women ended up “laughing about him.” In subsequent meetings—one with Betsy Asher—they talked about themselves (with notoriously voluble Joni doing most of the talking), instead of about the man they had shared so long ago.

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The “man” at the party who inspired that line was almost certainly Warren Beatty. “Oh, let's be honest, that song is about me; it's not about Mick Jagger; it's about
me,
” Beatty proudly told an interviewer in 1999. However, in one of Carly's very earliest comments about the song (in November 1972—before it was released, much less gossiped about), she let slip that “I had about two or three people in mind” when she wrote the song. Jake's rightful packaging of best friends Beatty
and Nicholson
—both lovers of Carly's in that last year (as were their friends Bob Rafelson and Rafelson's brother Don) whose “passing on” of her from one to the other to the other to the other felt hurtful and ultimately offensive to her—leads to the likelihood that the “vain man” was really the “vain
men
”: that whole clique of cocky, hip, filmmaking—and girl trading—bachelors who often “walked into” Hollywood parties, together or separately, with yacht-boarding entitlement and aplomb.

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Jim Gordon's intensity with the drumsticks unfortunately portended future dysfunction; he later became a schizophrenic and is currently in prison for murdering his mother.

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Some close to James Taylor believe that he never got over his sense of competing with Mick Jagger, and that he may have felt that a flirtation, or more, between Carly and Jagger had re-upped toward the end of their marriage (during the same period that James had a lover). “It burns him to this day,” says one insider. During one Australian concert, when James was already divorced from his second wife, Kathryn Walker, James discovered that the Rolling Stones were staying in the same hotel as he was, and were playing a bigger stadium. He was “furious at this,” says someone who spoke to him during this time—“and you don't carry that around for thirty years unless you really have a problem with Mick.”

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Peter Asher had used his erudite British accent to beg Laurance Rockefeller, the chairman of the board of his family's Rockefeller Center, in which Radio City is housed, to allow, for the first time ever, a
rock
concert to be held on that wholesomely tourist-friendly stage.

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The public gallery in the L.A. courtroom in which Daniel Ellsberg, former RAND Corporation military analyst, stood trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers (secret government documents pertaining to the Vietnam War) to
The New York Times
was star-studded—Barbra Streisand and Joan Didion attended daily. And when Ellsberg turned forty-two, a month before Carole's Central Park concert, all four Beatles attended his birthday party.

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Carole lost touch with both Camille and Barbara, her closest childhood friends. Especially hard for Camille was one occasion, in 1976, when she and her mother, Mary (bearing a hand-crocheted pillow with
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”
embroidered on it), tried to visit Carole backstage at the Beacon Theatre (Carole's performance had featured special guest Bruce Springsteen, who duetted with her on “The Loco-Motion”) and were turned away, very likely without Carole knowing they had come. They left her a note and never heard back. Shortly after that, Camille and Barbara tried to contact Carole about their Madison High reunion. They got a form-letter refusal back from Carole's publicist.

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She would soon purchase hundreds of acres of land in Connecticut for the guru, the sale of which eventually helped fund Yogaville, the guru's town in Virginia.

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Though disco music (which enveloped the country from 1974 to 1977 and whose female queens were Gloria Gaynor, Bette Midler, and Donna Summer) is generally dismissed as trivial, it was not without significance. It legitimized gays as a force in the social and popular cultural fabric of America. Although the Stonewall riots that triggered the gay rights movement occurred in 1969, as late as November 1973 it was not eyebrow-raising for Jackson Browne to toss off the words “faggots” and “fag” in an interview with Cameron Crowe in
Rolling Stone.
That publication, from its 1967 inception, stood for a rock world that was every bit as macho as sports and the military—as was its publisher, Jann Wenner. It is a measure of how things have changed that today Jann Wenner (still firmly in control of and identified with his
Rolling Stone
) is “married” to a man and they are the parents of a child, conceived by a surrogate. Wenner and his partner, Matt Nye, even gave themselves a baby shower. Imagine traveling back to 1971 and telling the magazine's readers and subjects that such a thing would happen.