Girls Like Us Read online

  “Tonight we have for your entertainment…Joni Anderson!” the emcee announced.

  Joni had loved pop music before it had gotten so bubblegum. One of her favorite songs from high school—indeed, for decades to come, she would call it her favorite song of all time—was the Shirelles hit of four years before, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” It was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, a married couple who were among a group of barely-out-of-their-teens New York songwriters who mixed a deep infatuation with Negro church music and R&B with a Broadway songwriting style, and turned the results into Top 40 radio. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” had been the first pop song to address the risks of sex in a woman’s life—which was now, as she stood in the wings of the Half Beat, precisely Joni Anderson’s dilemma. Carole King had solved the dilemma the way girls always had—she married the boy who had gotten her pregnant in a big traditional wedding. Joni Anderson was dealing with her pregnancy in a brand-new way: unmarried and alone. She was extremely afraid her parents would find out about her pregnancy, yet she refused to let it stop her life or curb her dreams.

  “Joni’s been appearing here for the last two weeks and will be for the next three weeks,” the emcee continued. “Starting next Monday, we have her under contract. We hope she’ll stay here. We hope you’ll enjoy her as much as we have.”

  Yorkville was Canada’s version of Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where six years earlier, three Boston University coeds, in spontaneous protest, had thrown off their freshman beanies and had become best friends and soul mates. The three—a Boston Brahmin named Betsy; a Staten Island lawyer’s daughter named Debbie; and a California physicist’s kid named Joanie—were one of any number of cliques of folkie girls then asserting their nonconformist sensibility, playing English ballads on their Gibsons and Martins and reinforcing in each other an adventurousness that was otherwise hard for girls to pull off; guys could at least pretend to be romantic wanderers, while rebel girls could just get pregnant. (“There were tears over boys, and a harrowing trip to a doctor who was supposed to be able to ‘fix’ things,” the Betsy of the threesome—Betsy Minot Siggins—says today. “It felt like we were both the initiators of and the victims of the sexual revolution.”) But this clique turned out to be the clique: the one that advanced the narrative. The Joanie of the threesome, Joan Baez, didn’t just achieve stardom; her stardom constituted the first time in the United States that an arcane musical genre was lofted to commercial popularity on the strength of a female performer. Now, four years after her rise to fame and two years after she graced the cover of Time magazine, Joan Baez remained the gold-standard embodiment of the sensitive girl curled over her guitar. It was Baez’s bell-clear soprano that Joni Anderson was emulating.

  “Let’s give her a little bit of a welcome now—Miss Joni Anderson!”

  Through a round of applause, Joni strode to the chair, sat down, and, in a breathless, Canadian schoolgirl’s voice, said: “It’s sure refreshing to have a mic to work with for a change”—a giggle—“after some of the places I’ve been in.” Sympathetic laughter from the audience. What they (and she) didn’t know was that this moment would be one of her last singing songs meant to sound like traditional ballads. In less than a year, she’d begin to offer audiences the original songs of vulnerability, wit, wonderment—and only retroactively understood sadness—that she was starting to write. On the heels of those first compositions of hers would come a new wave of songs that, as she put it, were “beginning to reveal feminine insecurities, doubts, and recognition that the old order was falling apart”—songs that “depicted my times.” With that eventual torrent, in six years she would set the bar for emotional self-exposure—“confessional” songwriting—just about as high as it would ever be set by anyone. But tonight her self-exposure concerns were literal: She was single and at slightly over five months, visibly pregnant. Already, the small tiple was much easier to manipulate than the guitar.

  “The first song I’d like to do is a song about when a man becomes so involved in almighty liquor that he begins to think of it as a woman,” she said, with a smile in her voice. “And he calls his bottle ‘Nancy Whiskey.’”

  Her real name was Roberta Joan Anderson, and her family hailed most recently from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, eighteen hundred miles north of the North Dakota border. She had come to Toronto several months earlier, taking the train across the prairie with her art school boyfriend. Then he’d split, leaving her a painting of a moon as a goodbye-and-sorry-I-got-you-pregnant gift. She had recently moved to a room-with-shared-bath in a rooming house on Huron Street. It was from this extremely modest base that she was trying to make her way as a folksinger, without money or connections and in deep secrecy about her pregnancy.

  But if she was self-conscious, she hid it, as she strummed her tiple and gaily sang the traditional Scottish song—

  Whiskey, whiskey, Nancy Whiskey

  The more I kissed her, the more I loved her

  After the audience applauded her final bars of “Nancy Whiskey,” Joni announced: “In 1961 a man named Ewan MacColl wrote a song and entered it into a song contest in England. It wasn’t much of a surprise to anybody when it won.” What’s significant is that she would choose—of all songs, now—this violent faux–Child Ballad about the anticipation, birth, and loss of a baby. “It has very, very dramatic lyrics,” she warned as she began singing the song.

  Joni’s neighbor across the hall at her rooming house was a young poet from the Ojibway tribe named Duke Redbird. They’d squeeze past each other in the hall—Duke with his long black braids, Joni with her flaxen hair. He could see that she was pregnant, but he sensed from her attitude not to mention it. “Joni had a stoicism that reminded me of the Indian women I grew up with,” Redbird recalls. “When we’d walk by each other’s open doors, she never acknowledged her difficulties.” Inside her small room, pungent with incense, she showed him her scrapbook, proudly turning the pages and explaining the newspaper clips of her performances at coffeehouses in Calgary, a few in Edmonton, and her real-live TV debut, singing on a Saskatchewan hunting and fishing show.

  Still, Duke Redbird worried about his neighbor, who was living on pizza and donuts. He mentioned his concern to his brother so much that one day his brother arrived at Duke’s door with a bag of apples and said, “Let’s give them to that pregnant girl.” The two young men knocked on Joni’s door and held out the fruit. “They’re root, from nature; good for you now,” Redbird’s brother said awkwardly. Joni gratefully—and hungrily—took the bag. There were other signs of her vulnerability. “Late at night,” Redbird says, “when Joni’s door was closed, I’d hear her playing her guitar and singing: not words, just sounds, like she was using her voice to meditate. I was struck by her melancholy.”

  That same melancholy was in her voice now as she continued to sing what she had identified as the MacColl song (it was actually written by Sydney Carter) to the Half Beat patrons:

  Rock-a-bye, baby, the white and the black

  Somebody’s baby is not comin’ back…

  After covering a Woody Guthrie number, among other songs, Joni packed up her instruments and exited the club, perhaps stopping to jam at the crash pad of her friend Vicky Taylor, with whom she would soon form a duo. Then it was back to the Huron Street room and her meditative strumming and vocal yodeling. Listening from the hall one such night—maybe it was even this night—Redbird was moved to pick up a pen and write a poem, which, though never published, he has kept to this day: A “woman with the cornsilk hair and sweetgrass [incense] in her hand” is on a water journey, navigating a river’s “invisible shoals” and “silent rapids”—the poem was explicitly about Joni’s pregnancy, her circumstances. Redbird understood both the risk (those “shoals” and “rapids”) and the lack of acknowledgment of and respect for that risk: its “silent,” “invisible” nature. Indeed; male folksingers might boast of riding the rails, but few of the young ones, including Dylan, ever did. (Dylan hadn’t e
ven hitchhiked to New York—he was given a ride by a friend.) For girls, the tougher though completely unacknowledged and unsung rite of passage was being pregnant, alone, penniless, and courting scorn in a rented room far from a home that you couldn’t return to. Sometimes Duke Redbird would knock on Joni Anderson’s door and ask if she was all right. She never said she wasn’t.

  Over the next three years, Joni’s life would be typical of many North American women’s when the early to mid-1960s—that Jack-and-Jackie-influenced era of glamorized traditional marriage—slowly turned into the later 1960s, and a new culture was spawned, both by the neo-Edwardian style of the English groups and by the softer offshoots of psychedelia. Just as some of Joni’s counterparts attending college would marry young professors, Joni would marry a man eight years her senior who was already living the life she thought she wanted. But as she pulled ahead of her husband in talent and ambition, she would realize—as other girls would—that young marriage to a sophisticated man was not the start of Real Life but, rather, an impediment to it. She would write her prematurely wise song about the cycles of age in part to lambaste Esquire’s claim, during those years, that, as she put it, “a woman was all washed up after 21,” and she would move to New York in 1967, just when single women were starting to live in cities in a new way: eschewing the old regulating supports—roommates, day jobs—for solitary, emotion-driven, night-based experience. Sex was then newly immediate—an innocent generosity, a basic communication—but romance was rough and ready laissez-faire capitalism, the only rules of the game being men’s rules. Joni’s cactus tree metaphor would be a secret playbook and shared record for the relatively few young women who lived in that then vulnerable manner.

  Joni would leave for L.A. when California dreaming was becoming a reality, and she would become both the It Girl and anthropologist of her newly coined female archetype, a rusticated American version of Left Bank femininity. She would write the haunting national anthem of her generation’s most emblematic gathering, and she would play Wendy to three choirboy-voiced Lost Boys powwowed from equal tribes, and with one of them she would legitimize the gallantry of a new kind of intimacy. She would leave this ideal love to set off as a vagabond, living in a cave with a self-made outlaw who “kept [her] camera to sell.” Young women who liked “clean white linen and fancy French cologne” had never toured Europe like this before. In 1970 it was the only way many of them would want to do so.

  Throughout the next decades, the 1970s through mid-1990s—years when young women would push the limits of independence, ambition, and self-fulfillment as never before—Joni would compose the bumpy epic poem of that exploration. She would choose the title of the signal album Hejira because she liberally interpreted the Arabic word to mean “to run away, but honorably,” something that women were starting to do: even when the After was no better than the Before, when the destination was worse than the starting point.

  Those songs would echo Joni’s own life journey: solitary cross-country road trips and even more solitary months in the woods; a fan-shearing turn to jazz; an almost unceasing, night-crawling workaholism, yielding twenty-one original albums and a “crop rotation” of paintings, as well as a self-assured choice of long-term lovers. These were men who—since they “mirrored [her] back simplified” and were far less wealthy and celebrated than she—stood in almost intentionally pointed contrast to her male friends, who were the most successful and glamorous men in Hollywood. In all of this she would turn a new twist on an old type, the “dame,” the tough, cranky, boastful woman living for her craft. But where previous versions (Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein) were masculinized, she would remain, illuminatively, feminine.

  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.