On the Road with Janis Joplin (16 page)

In L.A., while Big Brother is contending with John Simon, I keep in touch with the office and up-to-date on the arrangements for future gigs. When my work is done, I try not to feel guilty about splashing
in the Landmark pool. I hang out with Bobby and Paul when they’re free. In the evenings I often go to see the Committee at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset. For music, there’s the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, which is displacing the Ash Grove as L.A.’s premier folk club by virtue of the fact that the bar has become a favorite late-night hangout for rockers and actors.

Outside their long studio hours, Janis and the boys are alert for recreational opportunities. With our friends from the Committee as the catalyst, a party is organized on short notice for a weekend afternoon.
Howard Hesseman and Carl Gottlieb have made the acquaintance of two charming young women who are house-sitting in Calabasas, over in the San Fernando Valley, for the singer John Davidson. This is the upscale part of the valley, where the lots are measured in acres and many residents have horses. Davidson’s next-door neighbor on one side is Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ pitcher. Across the street is the movie director Don Siegel, who directed
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
back in the fifties and is currently working on a film with Clint Eastwood.

The house-sitters, Jackie and Lorene by name, are taken with Howard and Carl, and vice versa. (Howard describes Jackie, with great enthusiasm, as a blond bombshell.) Howard and Carl have spent a few nights in Calabasas. Jackie and Lorene have met some of Howard and Carl’s friends and find them fascinating. Why don’t we have a party? they say. It’s a big house. You can invite your friends.

Howard and Carl discuss this between themselves. Do these girls have any idea what they’re letting themselves in for? “Are you sure you want to do this?” they ask the girls. “You really do want to do this?” “Yeah. Invite your friends.”

There are many accounts of what happens at the party, on the day itself and long after. It gets under way in midafternoon. Janis is there, and Jim Morrison. That much is clear. Some other members of Big Brother and the Doors and the Committee. Many friends. Lots of people.

There are alcoholic beverages. We all bring some, and a wider selection is available after Jim Morrison smashes the glass door of Davidson’s locked liquor cabinet. At some point, Howard’s blond bombshell informs him that Morrison has thrown up on the cowhide rug in the rec room.

Janis, meantime, has found the pool table. When Morrison joins the game, the play gets lively. Pool isn’t my thing and I’m elsewhere at the time. Music is my thing, but no one has brought instruments to this party, so I’m cruising the house and the grounds for interesting conversations and beguiling women. After the fracas, I get fragmentary accounts. It’s like the police detective who interviews ten eyewitnesses to a crime and gets a dozen different stories.

Everyone agrees that Morrison offended Janis. He may have told her she can’t sing the blues, which would be a mortal insult. He also did her some physical harm.
By Howard’s account, Jim took hold of Janis by the hair and pushed her facedown onto a coffee table. Others say the tussle started at the pool table. Either way, Janis ran from the room, crying, and locked herself in a bathroom. When she realized she wasn’t seriously injured, the hurt was replaced by outrage. She emerged, found a bottle of whiskey, and tracked down Morrison. She broke the bottle over his head. Some say this happened outside; most agree it was inside.
Garry Goodrow’s old lady, Annie, insists that Janis threw the bottle across the pool table, while Garry, who was standing right next to Annie at the time, sides with those who say the bottle was in her hand when she hit Morrison with it.

Why would Jim Morrison provoke Janis? He’s a bigger star—far bigger at this time. The Doors’ first album, released more than a year ago, produced a smash hit single, “Light My Fire.” The single and the album both went gold. The Doors’ second album,
Strange Days
, is already out and
Waiting for the Sun
is in the wings, while Janis and Big Brother’s output to date is limited to the year-old Mainstream album.

Morrison is a phenomenon in his own right, but maybe Janis’s
news-grabbing rise threatens him. Fuck you, Janis, I’m a bigger fucking star than you are.
David Crosby, of the Byrds, has hung out with the drunk Morrison and he has formulated a theory: He thinks Jim is a masochist who gets drunk and stoned and picks a fight so he’ll get beat up. If that’s what he was after, Janis was ready to oblige.

As the sun lowers in the west, Howard and Carl have to leave because showtime for the Committee’s evening performance is approaching. By now, it is abundantly clear to Jackie and Lorene that the proceedings are beyond their, or anyone else’s, control. But what are we going to do? they plead with Howard and Carl. Are your friends leaving too?

Hey, it’s a party, Howard says. I don’t know, but I have to go to work.

Jackie follows them out to the driveway.
As Howard and Carl beat their retreat, Jackie sees that the Drysdales are having a barbecue. The ruckus at the Davidson house is of another magnitude altogether, and there’s a gaggle of Dodgers fans lined up at the Drysdales’ fence, staring at what’s unfolding next door.

—

O
N AN AFTERNOON
when John Simon doesn’t need Janis in the studio, she and I take in a more sedate entertainment, a matinee of
2001: A Space Odyssey
at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset, which has the biggest screen in L.A., maybe the world, at this time. It’s our first recreational outing together, just the two of us. We have a late brunch and early drinks at a nearby restaurant-bar before the show. Kahlua and cream instead of coffee, as I recall. At the Cinerama Dome we sit midway in the orchestra, on the aisle.
2001
is widely touted as a don’t-miss visual trip, and it lives up to its reputation. When we get to the dazzling light show where the spaceship zooms headlong into the most eye-boggling special effect yet produced on film, a dazed hippie rises from his seat and staggers down the aisle, past Janis and me, his saucer eyes riveted on the careening images. He kneels on the plush
red carpet right at the center of the screen, which has got to be eighty feet wide.

The curved Cinerama screen is made of vertical slats hung facing the audience, like a venetian blind set on edge, so the projected image reflects straight out and doesn’t lose brightness at the edges. The hippie puts his arms
between
the vertical panels and hugs the screen.

Uh-oh, here comes the usher.

I figure he’s going to give the hippie a hard time, but I’ve underestimated how far the prevailing ethic of the counterculture has spread. The usher puts a gentle hand on the hippie’s shoulder and says, “Hey, man, it’s only a movie.” The hippie smiles beatifically and allows himself to be led back to his seat.

For all the film’s visual pyrotechnics, it strikes Janis and me that the characters in the space-travel future are bland, two-dimensional, dull. They’re squares. Only the apes in the opening sequence are spontaneous and alive to life’s possibilities, most dramatically when they discover the potential of using bones as tools—and weapons.

After the movie, we repair to the same bar, where we agree over another round of drinks that we’re living in a period of exploration and discovery with music as part of the motivating force, and we don’t want it to lead to a future where the squares will be in charge of space travel.

—

T
HE
C
ALIFORNIA PRESIDENTIAL
primary takes place on the fourth of June. In the evening, as the returns start to come in, I follow them in my suite at the Landmark. Victory in California will clinch Bobby Kennedy’s position as front-runner for the Democratic nomination. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to Gene McCarthy, who was first to challenge Lyndon Johnson back before RFK entered the race, but McCarthy is a one-issue candidate, campaigning against the war in Vietnam. He appeals mainly to the educated middle class and the more moderate elements of the counterculture. Minorities and
the poor don’t feel that he has any special empathy for their problems, while Kennedy attracts all the factions that supported his brother, and more, including passionate support from the disempowered.

A few weeks ago, Janis and Linda Gravenites saw Kennedy campaign in San Francisco. He was touring the neighborhoods, his route announced in advance. Janis and Linda and Janis’s mixed-breed dog, George, moved out of the Haight in April, when we got back from New York. They’re on Noe Street now, in Noe Valley, a neighborhood that borders the upper Mission district. When Janis learned that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass just a few blocks from their apartment, she suggested they walk over to watch, and they got swept up in a vivid demonstration of Bobby’s appeal. Engulfed in the mob of onlookers, they saw Kennedy standing in an open car, held upright by two strong aides to keep him from being pulled from the car by the eager hands that reached out to shake his as the car crept along Castro Street.
At one point, Janis and Linda were lifted off their feet as the mob surged forward, but they emerged unharmed. Linda lost her shoes. They were affected by the emotional power of the crowd, and its palpable belief—the
need
to believe—that Kennedy could make a difference.

I have followed Bobby’s California campaign. Even on TV, the effect of his presence is a phenomenon. His public appearances produce a quickening of the blood. The pundits think he might even carry Orange County, which is usually so right-wing that the ghost of Joseph Goebbels could be elected sheriff by acclamation. The people mob Bobby everywhere—in Oakland and Watts and in the fields where Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers labor. The crowds laugh at his jokes, and their eyes glow with hope. Maybe more hope than should ever be vested in one human being. The loss of Martin Luther King should have taught us that. Now, with King gone, all that hope is looking for somewhere to light, and it has settled on Bobby. We are all fallible, the Kennedys along with the rest of us, but I see in Bobby an awareness of his own fallibility. The self-deprecation
that dominates his humor is real, and there’s a sadness in his eyes that reveals a new depth of understanding.

South Dakota holds its primary on the same day as California. In one precinct on a Lakota Sioux reservation, Kennedy polls 878 votes against 2 for Johnson, who is still on the ballot because of the requirements of the voting laws, and none for McCarthy.

When I’m confident that Kennedy is headed for a convincing win, I leave the Landmark for the Tiffany Theater on Sunset. The Committee’s barbed skepticism is a bracing reality check for anybody who lets himself get starry-eyed over a politician. Tonight I find the comedy elevating and I stay for both shows.

In addition to the familiar routines I know well, the Committee is performing in L.A. one I haven’t seen in San Francisco. Here, as in the Committee Theater on Broadway by the Bay, the actors work on a bare stage with a few chairs that get moved around a lot, becoming the seats of a car, chairs in a doctor’s waiting room, or whatever else the actors’ imaginations conjure up. The back and sides of the stage accommodate six or eight doors through which the actors come and go.

In the piece that’s new to me, the actors take a question from the audience, something serious, like “How do I avoid the draft?” or “How do I make peace with my parents?” and they improvise off it. There are two TV sets atop the framework that supports the doors, one at each side of the stage, facing the audience. For this routine only, the TVs are turned on, set to different channels, the sound off. The idea is that they tap into the cosmic synchronicity of events. If something on one of the TV screens strikes the fancy of the actors, they play off it. Often they ignore the TVs, but from the audience’s point of view sometimes the juxtaposition of what’s happening onstage with the images on TV is hilarious, sometimes it’s bizarre, sometimes uncanny. The piece is a long-form improvisational exercise, one of the Committee’s more existential routines, and they perform it only in the second show.

The election coverage is over and the networks have returned to late-night programming by the time the sets are turned on. There’s a movie on one station and a talk show on the other. It’s a little after midnight.

Partway through the piece, one of the networks interrupts the program in progress with a news bulletin. At this time, there are just the three networks and the educational channel and it’s the Big Three that cover breaking news. The bulletin is from the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where Bobby Kennedy’s election headquarters are located. The network reporter is in a large room with an empty podium on the dais in the background. The reporter’s face is deadly serious and the people in view behind him, moving hither and yon, appear to be on the edge of panic. A crawl at the bottom of the screen says Robert Kennedy has been shot. . . .

One of the actors turns up the sound on the TV and we begin to piece together the story: McCarthy has conceded. Kennedy concluded his victory speech minutes ago and left the room to go through a kitchen pantry. . . . There are reports of shots fired . . . and Kennedy is wounded. . . . The other TV, the silent one, is still beaming out the regular program. Now the second TV goes blank mid-program and then displays a “Special News Bulletin” logo. . . . On comes a familiar news face.

For anyone who lived through John Kennedy’s assassination, the report of shots fired at another Kennedy is a bad case of
déjà vu
.

The actors tried at first to play off the news report, but the pace of the routine faltered and it has come to a halt. Actors and audience alike stare at the images. After a while, the actors sit down, some onstage, some in the audience. . . . Kennedy has been taken to a hospital. . . . There is no report on his condition yet, but now we see news footage of the hotel pantry, where TV cameramen were present when the shots were fired. The images of Kennedy lying on the floor, people churning around him, some screaming to get back, give him air, are chilling.