Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (8 page)

The story of how Mitchell wound up “barefoot and pregnant” as a young, unmarried woman living in Toronto's Yorkville district is hardly original. In the summer of 1964, Joni and a fellow art student named Brad McMath bought one-way train tickets from Calgary to Toronto— the “Big Smoke”—to attend the Mariposa Folk Festival. They wanted to see Buffy Sainte-Marie—the Canadian-born, Maine-raised folksinger with the debut smash “Universal Soldier” ticking up the charts—who would one day record Mitchell songs “The Circle Game,” “Both Sides Now,” and “Song to a Seagull.”

Mitchell couldn't have known what would happen to her life in the space of the next few months, but she began her journey with a creative bang. En route, inspired by the rhythm of the steel wheels, she penned what she called her first “real song,” “Day After Day.” The trip across the vast Canadian landscape took three days, and when the young, reportedly “affectionate” couple arrived in Toronto, they headed to the fairgrounds, only to discover the site had been moved at the last minute as a result of a “not-in-my-backyard” revolt by the citizens of Orillia. All the staging and sound equipment had to be moved overnight to the Maple Leaf baseball stadium. Brad and Joni helped load the trucks, then passed out from fatigue in a nearby field. They had no money. They had no prospects. For McMath, a tall, handsome guy who was clearly revelling in the picaresque hippie moment, the lack of responsibility was probably the realization of a boho dream. Joan Anderson, on the other hand, was just beginning a brand new nightmare.

Exactly when Joni discovered she was pregnant is not clear, but she figures she lost her virginity and got pregnant in the same breath. Either way, on the outside, she carried on as if nothing had changed. She continued working at the local Simpson's department store to earn enough money to make it into the musicians' union, and she continued playing gigs until her belly got too big for her to hold a guitar—somewhere around her seventh or eighth month. The people around her knew she was pregnant, but they said nothing because everyone in her peer group had left home to escape the tyranny of parental judgement and the establishment rules of the status quo.

First Nations poet Duke Redbird lived across the hall from Joni and gave her apples—because she didn't look all that well nourished, and she would later admit that her diet had been “atrocious.”
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Redbird says the young Anderson could be heard composing songs behind a closed door. She and Redbird talked about art and spirituality, as well as the injustices suffered by Canada's First Nations community—such as the tragedy of foster homes and “residential schools,” where children were removed from their ancestral homes, stripped of their language, and often molested sexually. Mitchell touches on these themes in the song “Cherokee Louise”: “She runs home to her foster dad, he opens a zipper, and he yanks her to her knees.”

Joni had a lot on her mind as she entered her final term, and when she walked into the Toronto General Hospital maternity ward in February 1965, at the age of twenty-one, she was no doubt focussed on what was best for the baby. McMath was long gone. He bolted back to the west, first to Saskatchewan and eventually to San Francisco to be a part of the boho mother ship hovering over the Haight like communal smoke rings—wait, those were communal smoke rings. McMath heard things were warmer in California. But for Joni, things were hospital cold. She was surrounded by medical equipment in a sterile environment where even the people were unfriendly. She says because she was a charity patient, and because she was a young, unwed mother who was about to give up her baby, the staff was curt.

According to adoption advocacy groups, Mitchell gave birth during what was called the “baby scoop” era, when women were placed in maternity or “wage homes” as a sort of “punishment” for engaging in sexual intercourse before matrimony. The women were dubbed “inmates,” and if a biological father was still part of the picture, contact with the villainous inseminator was forbidden. Ever since legal adoption started in Ontario in 1921, the main objective was to ensure that the biological parents had no lasting connection to the baby, thereby sparing the child from what was considered a dangerous moral example. The secrecy aspect of adoption became law in 1927 at the urging of adoptive parents, who believed the bonding process demanded exclusive parenting roles.

On February 19, 1965, Joan Anderson gave birth to a daughter she named Kelly Dale—after the bright emerald green that defines the fertile Canadian landscape in summer. After the birth, the nurses bound Joni's breasts to stop her from lactating—a practice she would later call “barbaric.”
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They probably would have booted her out the door a day or two after delivery, but there were complications so she was allowed to see and hold the baby, who was, go figure, really cute. Suddenly, the young mother started to envision a future that could contain, and maybe even support, another life. But reality dug in. “I have no money. I have no home. I have no job. When I leave the hospital, I have no roof over my head,” she told the
Los Angeles Times
in her first in-depth interview after she revealed her secret to the public in 1997. “But I kept trying to find some kind of circumstance where I could stay with her that wouldn't be malforming to her and to myself.”
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She thought she found the answer when she met Chuck Mitchell, a nice-faced folksinger from Detroit with a mild degree of fame. Chuck played the headliner's lounge on the main floor of the Penny Farthing, the Toronto club where Joni Anderson was playing the less glam room for nobodies upstairs. Chuck Mitchell had never brought his bag of tricks to Toronto before, but chances are the crowd had heard a lot of his repertoire, which consisted of his ode to the Weimar era: plenty of Brecht and Weill to guarantee theatricality. When Chuck and his accompanist, Loring Janes, started butchering “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song Joni had been struggling to learn, she ran downstairs to catch it. “He'd rewritten some of it, and badly, too... so we immediately got into a conflict,” Mitchell later said.
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When the boys went to catch Joni's set upstairs, Loring noted her playing, musicality, and fretwork. Chuck noticed her gams.

Chuck and Joni were engaged within thirty-six hours of their first encounter. And they may as well have already been married, since Chuck intimates they slept together—and Joni says they argued—from their first night together. The dynamic seems to have continued over the course of their brief, nearly two-year marriage. As Joni walked down the aisle a few months after accepting Chuck's spontaneous proposal (he says he was shocked when she said yes), she told herself: “I can get out of this.”

She did get out of it, but for the first month of that hastened and maybe-not-so-sacred union, she was thinking about the baby. The young couple even went to the foster home to visit her, but Chuck wasn't the one with the latent parenting plans. He says he left the decision up to her. She says he didn't want to bring up another man's baby. The argument continues, but chances are they're both right. “One month into the marriage, he chickened out, I chickened out. The marriage had no basis, except to provide a home for the baby,”
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Mitchell told the
Los Angeles Times
, rendering any notion of genuine romance null and void from the beginning.

Chuck Mitchell—the man she describes in “I Had a King” (on
Song to a Seagull
) who dressed in “drip-dry paisley” and “carried me off to his country for marriage too soon”—still tours as Chuck Mitchell. The name has cachet, thanks to his famous ex-wife. They toured as a duo for a while and scooted across the country in the Porsche (a 1956 356A coupe) Chuck bought himself with the wedding-gift cash, but eventually Joni was looking to go solo—both onstage and in life. She tried to do the domestic thing. She was a good nester. In public, she nodded and supported Chuck. Drawing on her deep reserve of textile, artistic, and fashion skills, she turned their walk-up apartment in Detroit's student ghetto into an antique-filled pad worthy of a spread in the local daily. They were, or at least appeared to be, a hip couple who entertained and put up a stream of touring acts. Chuck could probably see the bitter scrawl on the bar wall: Joni was going to be bigger than he was. He didn't want to separate—at least not onstage or as business partners. (The two formed Gandalf Publishing together, a nod to their shared
Lord of the Rings
fascination; the name was formally approved by the famed author after the Mitchells made the request in writing.) As she told the BBC's Mary Black in 1999, Mitchell saw Chuck's reluctance to separate as only logical: “He made more money with me than he did without me. He held the purse strings completely.”
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Chuck says he was feeling trapped under a wave of contempt, then finally did the manly thing and admitted he was “scared.” Mitchell replied to this gesture of masculine vulnerability with her unique brand of sympathy: “You're bringing me down.” Chuck says he responded in silence, mouthing the word “Bitch!” under his breath. Things soon disintegrated to the point where Chuck started getting jealous, and Joni enjoyed the power. When Chuck felt the only way to control his wife was to turn her over his knee and give her a spanking—literally—that was the end of the marriage, but not before Joni received her green card allowing her to work in the U.S. “She was very ambitious, very calculating and very self-centred—and so was I,” Chuck Mitchell said in an interview with David Gardner of the
Daily Mail
in 1996.
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Shortly after Joni received her coveted work visa, she was on tour and playing poker somewhere in Michigan when she turned to the complete stranger next to her and said: “I'm leaving my husband tonight. Will you help me?”
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As Mitchell explained in
Motion Picture
magazine in 1975, her impulse to bolt had been building. “Chuck Mitchell and I were husband and wife for about nine months. That's all it took to end,” she said. “He was seven years older than me, and I married him about thirty days after I'd met him for the first time.”
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That stranger said yes—so apparently there's a man out there with the best moving story ever. They rented a U-Haul, drove back to Detroit in the middle of the night, and lugged half the contents of the apartment down five flights of stairs. That was the end of Mrs. Chuck Mitchell. But by the time she hit New York City hours later, she had given birth to a new creation with a catalogue all her own: Joni Mitchell—single, and singular, artist.

Mitchell wrote about this chapter in her life in the lyrics for “Little Green,” a song that seemed to the general public more like an empathetic portrait of a lost woman than any brand of personal biography when it first appeared as the third track on
Blue
. According to Mitchell, she first penned the tune in 1967, then rewrote it several times before recording it for posterity as a natural extension of the emotional catharsis
Blue
represented at that moment in her life. The song was both personal therapy and wishful prophecy, as it helped a mourning mother cope with the surrender of her child. It also asserted hope for a better tomorrow and a “happy ending.” This type of magical optimism in the face of sadness was a key feature of Mitchell's oeuvre at this time. Early on, she learned that the best way to cope with emotional hardship was to transform the destructive energy into something constructive. She turned to her career as the central creative project in her life, and she reaped a different brand of reward.

When Mitchell spoke with Cameron Crowe in 1979, long before she told the world about Kelly Dale, he asked her about children and whether a life without them might be too lonely. She said, “That's the part about it... I don't know, really, what your choices are. Obviously, that's a constant battle with me. Is my maternity to amount to a lot of black plastic? Am I going to annually bear this litter of songs and send them out into the marketplace and have them crucified for this reason or that?”
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Mitchell didn't have a whole lot more hope for a flesh-and-blood baby. She told Crowe, as she told several other reporters, that she didn't think the world was a nice enough place for a new life. “I wouldn't frivolously get pregnant and bring a child into this world, especially a world that has such a difficult future as the one we're facing. Also, the children of celebrities have been notoriously troubled,” she said. “But when it comes to the business of raising children, I finally feel emotionally stable enough to deal with it. It's taken me this long, but it may be something that's denied me.”

Mitchell was thirty-five when she said those words, and to some degree they were prophetic. She conceived again with her second husband, Larry Klein, but she miscarried—a sad event that began the amicable unwinding of the eleven-year relationship. Mitchell would only realize her “motherhood” in 1997, when she decided to look for Kelly Dale. Rumours about a Joni love child had been circulating ever since she told Michael Watts of the
Sunday Times
in 1983 that she'd given birth to a daughter and given her up—raising hopes among many young women that Mitchell might be their long-lost matriarch. The only way the reunion could be fruitful was if Kelly Dale—now called Kilauren Gibb—was seeking her birth mother. Turns out, Gibb had been eager to learn the truth about her biological parents since learning at the age of twenty-seven that she was adopted. (Explaining the late revelation, her adoptive parents said they thought she already knew and never saw any point in making her feel like an outsider.) It was only when Gibb became pregnant with her first baby that she finally learned the truth and filled out the requisite paperwork to start the search process.