Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (20 page)

With her folksinging career modestly launched, Joni was growing frustrated by the strictures of art college. “You wouldn't touch color until semesters of black and white; you had to have a lot of basic aesthetic and skeletal understanding of anatomy,” says Beverly DeJong. Joni has told interviewers that she became “very disillusioned that there were people around me getting C's because their technical ability was only average, even though their creative ability and originality was greater than mine. This was something I recognized, so at the end of the year I quit art college and began a search through music.”

True enough, to a point. Joni did leave at the end of the first year, and to pursue music. But she had an additional motive.

• • •

At some point in the second semester Joni and Rick Williams broke up, and another first-year art classmate with whom Joni had been friends became her boyfriend. His name was Brad MacMath. He was from Regina, and he was very handsome: extremely tall with piercingly deep-set, up-slanted eyes and high cheekbones. Like Joni, he switch-hit straight and wild, though on campus he, too, cut a deceptively clean-cut figure. “He seemed more Ivy League, button-down,” Bruce Sterling says. Yet he was such a freeloader and a cigarette bummer that, Joni would later wryly recall to friends, for his birthday, she bought him a glass-bottomed pewter mug, with the endearment “The Mooch” engraved on it. And in their subsequent hitchhiking, Brad's reluctance to bathe left him with, as her friends say she reported, “the worst BO she ever smelled.”

Joni has told the media and even confidantes (who believe the story, which she imparted with great conviction) that Brad MacMath was her first lover and that, as she put it to a reporter as recently as 2001, “I lost my virginity and got pregnant all in the same act.” It's striking that she felt the need to present herself this way. Did the shock of the long-ago doctor's remark, the panic felt by D'Arcy Case and other girls “caught” pregnant, and Myrtle's stern moralism all weigh on her so heavily that, decades and a counterculture later, she
still
had to see herself as the Good Girl, paying for her first lapse from grace?

In the summer of 1964, Joni and Brad MacMath boarded a train east, for Toronto. The two were headed for the Mariposa Folk Festival, a three-year-old, three-day event held in the nearby town of Orillia. But the almost-cross-country trip had a second purpose. Whether knowingly or just out of instinct and common sense, Joni was following the current Canadian practice for unmarried pregnant young women: going far from home to bear her child in secrecy. She just wasn't doing it in the traditional—protected—way.

At the time, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of secret maternity homes for Canadian girls who had gotten themselves “in trouble.” Parents of girls who were lucky enough to secure placement (waiting lists had lengthened with the beginning of emboldened sexual activity) sent their daughters 3,000 miles, from Vancouver to Toronto, or vice versa—or two-thirds of that distance across the country—to live in the private maternity homes that sprouted up in every Canadian city and sizable town.
*
There, as Canadian TV journalist Anne Petrie (a 1967 alumna of one such home) recalls, in her book
Gone to an Aunt's: Remembering Canada's Home for Unwed Mothers,
the rule was “No last names—ever.” “[T]he girls just disappeared” from their own communities, Petrie writes. “The cover stories were vague. ‘Gone to visit an aunt' was typical.” Until Petrie wrote her book in the late 1990s, her own siblings never knew of their sister's secret baby, born and given up for adoption thirty years earlier. Parents eager to protect the “family name” were key in the process. Says Sandra Jarvies, president of the main organization, Canadian Birth Mothers United, of those women who gave up their babies for adoption: “Of the about 300 single mothers who gave birth in the mid-1960s and gave up their babies for adoption whom I've talked to, almost
all
used their parents to help them; if you couldn't tell your parents, you were
really
in trouble.”

Canadian girls who decided to forgo, or
had
to forgo, the help of their parents—who wanted or needed to hide their pregnancies
from
them—could still get into these secret maternity homes, with their hot meals and dorm-style beds, by traveling to another province and registering confidentially. But in mid-1964—in addition to the girls whose parents helped them, and in addition to the girls who got into the pregnancy homes by themselves—there began to appear a
third
type of pregnant, unmarried Canadian girl: the bohemian girl who rejected the hypocrisy and constriction (and the coddling) of being hidden away. Many of these girls were making a statement—“I'm pregnant and unmarried and
not
ashamed of it.” Joni Anderson was one of these girls, but only up to a point. She rejected the idea that she should feel shame, and yet family disgrace was not a concept she was thumbing her nose at, by any stretch of the imagination. She was going far from home, but no one—neither her parents nor a proprietress of a protective maternity home—would be helping her. She would be out in public and self-supporting, even though she had no plan for how she'd make money, yet manage to conceal the pregnancy from her parents at all costs. In short, she was choosing the path of greatest risk and least protection.

What help Brad might provide was questionable from the outset. The help that Joni wanted from Brad was also questionable. Unlike D'Arcy, who'd desperately wanted to marry Rudy (and did so, to disastrous results, divorcing him soon after their daughter was born), Joni was
not
in love with Brad MacMath.

The unwanted pregnancy seems to have spurred Joni to take new creative risks—to write her own songs; she wrote her first, what she called a feeling-sorry-for-myself song, “Day by Day,” on the train ride to Toronto. The closer she got to delivering her baby (in increasingly desperate circumstances), the more her work—singing and starting to write—seemed to preoccupy her, perhaps both to distract from the frightening inevitability of imminent birth and possibly to set up an emotional and moral bargain: if I give up this unsought baby, then I'm not going to do so for nothing. If I make this serious relinquishment, I will use my reclaimed life to “give birth,” as it were, to something else. In the months after she had her baby, who was put temporarily into foster care and then put up for adoption, Joni would write a flood of songs so beautiful and original, no one who'd heard her covering the folk standards at those midwestern Canadian coffeehouses or hootenannies could have anticipated their volume or virtuosity. It was as if she heard her grandmothers say: “We had babies in provincial poverty and we never reached our creative potential. If you heed our warning by refusing the first path, then when you go the second path, make it worth it—put your whole heart into it.”

Joni herself seems to have believed that the loss of the baby equaled the beginning of the songs. Though she has today firmly settled on a narrative that blames her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, for the adopting-out of the baby (something Chuck Mitchell adamantly disputes), she spontaneously reacted differently the very first time an interviewer (for Greater London Radio, in June 1990), playing “gotcha” journalism, outed her airtight secret. After the setup, “Do you miss having a close-knit family?” to which Joni replied, “Well, we [she and her second husband Larry Klein] have cats and also I have a lot of godchildren. I haven't had children by choice, really,” the interviewer pounced: “You
did
have a child, didn't you, when you were very young? Do you know what happened to him or her?” Seemingly stunned, Joni confessed [emphasis added]:

Once they disembarked the train in Toronto. Joni and Brad took a bus to Orillia, but there they discovered that the Mariposa Festival was hastily being moved to Toronto—“at the last minute,” recalls festival organizer Martin Ornot, “the township's council ruled that we could not present the show because a lot of people were hanging out.” Ornot turned to three youngsters who had just traveled to the concert, sleeping bags under their arms—Joni, Brad, and a third person—and asked them to help load the trucks. “Joni was very attractive and really sweet,” Ornot recalls. “Brad was tall and good-looking, and she introduced him as her boyfriend. They were a nice couple, and definitely affectionate. Joni and her friends helped load things on the truck, and I made arrangements for them to get passes for the festival, which was held at an old baseball stadium, in exchange.”

Joni and Brad remained in Toronto, living at a rooming house. Calling back her post–high school experience, she got a job at Simpson's Department Store to save enough money for the $150 musicians' union dues, and she and Brad fell into the hippie life. (“Brad was the original hippie—proud that he never had a job for more than four months,” says one who heard the story from both Brad and Joni.) In the early autumn weeks after Mariposa, Martin Ornot would see Joni around Yorkville Village, the charming eighteenth-century neighborhood of cul-de-sacs and one-way streets bounded by Yonge Street, Avenue Road, the Toronto Museum, and the University of Toronto, which was the spawning ground for folk clubs: the Purple Onion, the Mousehole, the Riverboat, the Cellar Club, the Gates of Cleeve, the Penny Farthing, the Night Owl, and many others, perpetually opening and closing. “I didn't notice that she was pregnant,” Ornot says, “and I would have noticed, if it was visible, because I was myself thinking about pregnancy—my wife had just given birth.” Joni had a fetching look—“she wore long gowns or jeans, leather jackets, holding her guitar, she had long hair”—and a compelling way about her. “She seemed quiet. If vulnerability can be translated into people wanting to do things for her, then she was vulnerable. You really wanted to be around her and help her, if you could. It wasn't that she was needy; it was that she was so nice.” Joni had apparently begun writing, though not playing, her songs. “When we spoke, it was usually about her songs,” Ornot recalls. Toronto was the big league—established artists like Ian and Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, and Buffy Sainte-Marie played the Toronto clubs. “I assisted her,” Ornot says—in recommending clubs to seek work in, in giving her repertoire advice—“in any way I could.”

Eventually, Brad left for Regina (he would later journey to Haight-Ashbury and be one of the original residents in that quintessential hippie community) and Joni moved into the Huron Street and Avenue Road rooming house, across the hall from young Ojibwa Indian poet Duke Redbird. “We were all like flower children,” Redbird recalls. “Dylan and Baez were saying that things should change, and we in Yorkville felt that way. We were kids; give peace a chance.” While Joni never talked about her increasingly visible pregnancy—and Redbird “assumed she was getting through a difficult period”—she talked about “spirituality,” Redbird recalls. “Because I'm a native person, we talked about earth and spirituality. She was from the prairie; she brought an innate amount of spirituality with her. She was composing. The conversations we had were about her music and her lyrics,” none of which Redbird can remember. Redbird, in speaking of the plight of his fellow First Nations people, as Native Canadians call themselves, experienced the same kindness that Joni had visited on polio-stricken Doug Bovee. “She had this immense reserve of feeling for people who were having difficulty—the downtrodden and unaffiliated.” His friendship with her “represented a bridge between the WASP world, which she belonged to, and the world of the disenfranchised.”

As the weather grew colder, the population of Yorkville shrunk. Gone were the thousands of tourists who'd swarmed around all summer, primed as they'd been by “beatnik” cartoons in the Toronto
Telegram,
such as one showing a suited young man bearing a milk bottle, a loaf of white bread, and an oven-ready fowl, approaching a couple—bearded, sandaled guy and long-haired, capri-pants'd girl—entwined under a dangling bare bulb, and saying, with puzzlement: “But I thought you said to bring a chick, a bottle, and some bread.” Now only a couple of hundred people—club owners, folksingers, students, and shopkeepers—remained. Without Brad around to help at all, Joni played as many gigs as she could, in a variety of coffeehouses. Folksinger Jeanine Hollingshead remembers a visibly pregnant Joni at the Sunday and Monday night hootenannies. “She was showing—we all knew—but, gosh, she kept working.” The women on the scene wore short mod dresses with swirly paisley prints and high go-go boots, or longer skirts, but whatever you wore, getting on six and seven and eight months, you couldn't hide a pregnant belly. “The question” among the folksingers, Hollingshead recalls, “was always, who was the daddy? And would she keep the baby? But it was nobody's business and nobody asked. We had all left our small towns to get away from that gossip, that judgment.”