Judy Collins Read online

  Cookie and I had been occasional lovers during those years, sometimes finding each other at lonely hotels on the road or in hot tubs in Marin County, even once in his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was someone I trusted and felt comfortable with. Cookie had introduced me to Janis at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, where ninety thousand people in the audience lifted her to the sky like a new star in the firmament when they heard the raw despair in her voice and the raging determination to make it through; both would soon find their way to the album Cheap Thrills.

  Cookie was present at a strange encounter I had with Janis in the spring of 1968. It was at the Troubadour, a Los Angeles club owned by Doug Weston. I was there to hear Paul Williams the night before I was due to play a two-week gig. Cookie took me to the club, where Janis joined our table and she and I were reintroduced. We whispered hello to each other as Paul was singing “Rainy Days and Mondays,” a song destined to become a huge hit for Karen Carpenter in 1971.

  At the end of Paul’s set, Janis pulled her chair closer to mine. Her already famous face was a little puffy and her eyes gleamed from under tired-looking lids, but her energy attracted glances and attention to our table. She had to shout over the roar of the crowd’s attempt to get Paul back for an encore.

  “I’m coming to hear you sing tomorrow!” she said in a loud voice. I responded, hoping she could hear me over the noise, that I was looking forward to my gig. As Paul left the stage and the room quieted down, Janis leaned across the table, speaking softly, intimately, into my ear.

  “You know,” she said, “one of us is going to make it. And it’s not going to be me.”

  Janis’ words have haunted me for more than four decades. I have never quite known what to make of them. We did not know each other well, and she could not have known how much I was drinking. But it has been my experience that a drunk can spot a drunk a mile away. Perhaps it was simply her reaching out into the world for company.

  Janis and I laughed awkwardly then, strangely embarrassed, both of us, by the intimations of fate and the echoes of the early deaths of many artists. Janis’ drinking and drugging seemed all of a piece with her dramatic, in-your-face lifestyle and persona. Her audiences expected her to behave badly, to live out there on the edge. They took all she gave them and seemed to protect her with their screams, with their outsized enthusiasm, with their passionate, loud approval.

  The truth was, of course, that I was as close to the edge as Janis, but in the eyes of the public, I was the girl with wildflowers in her hair and, some said, a voice like a mountain stream. Janis was expected to fly too high and eventually to crash. I was expected to be the flower-child folksinger who might soar but would come softly to my feet in golden fields.

  Two years later, on October 4, 1970, Cookie, who was still her road manager, would discover Janis’ dead body in her room at the Landmark Hotel in L.A.

  Sad times, sad girl, gone at twenty-seven. Janis defined the riotous rock-and-roll circus of the sixties, and she had been right—she did not survive it.

  IN 1969 I was traveling back and forth from New York to L.A. as my affair with Stephen progressed. Crosby, Stills and Nash was beginning to record, and Stephen and I were still working on my new album.

  I found myself back in California in April for a concert at the Santa Monica Civic Center. Stephen met me at my hotel that afternoon; it was a time when our romance—thrilling but sometimes rocky—was difficult to manage, between his recording and my touring. He walked into my room that day at the Holiday Inn carrying a guitar case and smiling. We embraced, he wished me an early happy birthday, and I realized all would be well. I relaxed.

  Sitting down on the bed, Stephen gently, lovingly removed an exquisite instrument: a gorgeous antique Martin guitar with a tone as smooth as buttery caramel. He ran his fingers over the strings while I melted, hearing that Stills sound, like no other.

  Suddenly the big, ringing, open chords of his guitar and Stephen’s clear tenor filled that blank, nondescript hotel room in Santa Monica.

  It’s getting to the point

  Where I’m no fun anymore …

  I knew immediately that the song was something special, something timeless, something for me.

  Voices of the angels,

  Ring around the moonlight

  Asking me, since she’s so free

  How can you catch this sparrow?

  Emotions surged and clashed as I listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” I heard for the first time, perhaps, that Stephen knew much more about my life than I had ever given him credit for. He understood the wrenching pain I felt about being in therapy for my anxieties and alcoholism, as well as my deep distrust of men and of commitment. He knew better than I that there were problems nothing in our relationship would solve. It was not that I did not love him, or that he didn’t know I loved him. But there was the rupture that had occurred when my own determination met his—that I could not and would not give up control. It is all there in the lyrics, which were almost a self-portrait—perhaps a double portrait of two determined individuals, unable to come to terms with life together, and despairing of having to live apart.

  It would have been enough that he could spell out the troubles in our love affair, but the song itself was so glorious, so transporting, that had it not been about me, I would have dreamed it might have been—it was a triumph of writing, of feeling, of his deep melodic gifts. I had heard a lot of songs, and sung some that had become hits. I knew I was listening not only to my story but also to a song that was going to be for all times, not just for ours. It was a classic, and it broke my heart.

  I was in tears, my head in my hands and then my arms around his neck, our faces pressed together as though we could never be apart. There was nothing that was going to keep us together, yet nothing could part us. It was something I knew, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The song made me weep, as it would for years to come.

  When Stephen finished singing that afternoon in 1969, he held the guitar out to me.

  “This guitar was made in 1930. I found it in an antique shop, and had it restored.” Then he stepped over the luggage and the shoes that were strewn across my temporary one-night-stand hotel room as he was leaving.

  “Now you have the song, and the guitar.” At the door he turned back to me again. “And my heart.”

  Chapter Two

  The Gypsy Rover

  The Gypsy rover came over the hill

  Down through the valley so shady

  —Traditional, “The Gypsy Rover”

  ON a sunny afternoon in the spring of 1954, when I was fifteen, the Great Folk Scare, like a beautiful wild bird, flew into my living room and made a perfect landing.

  I had walked the ten blocks from Denver’s East High to where I lived with my family on Oneida, in East Denver. Ours was a house with stucco arches, a porch, a red roof of curved tiles, and a garden of roses and iris. Outside my window there was a small emerald lawn sheltered by a Russian olive tree whose pale lavender flowers gave off an exotic scent. I have often thought that this romantic place must have wooed the wild bird to win my heart, like a lover on the wing.

  I arrived home and was standing next to our Baldwin grand piano, but instead of beginning my practice, I turned on our walnut-encased Emerson radio.

  The announcer was discussing The Black Knight, a film set in the days of King Arthur, starring Alan Ladd. The sound track of the movie spilled into our living room, and the ballad called “The Gypsy Rover” stopped me in my tracks. It literally made me tremble. I knew at once it was meant for me.

  The song called to me with its sweet story and lilting melody, and I fell into its arms. All the sonatas and études, nocturnes and concertos of those brilliant and challenging composers—the pieces I’d been studying and memorizing and weeping over most of my life until then—suddenly paled next to the simple beauty of this new sound. “The Gypsy Rover” told a tale of a girl who runs off with a dashing stranger, an age-old story that won
my teenage heart, grabbed me by the soul, and changed my life forever.

  That afternoon I raced to Wells Music, I plunked down my precious babysitting money, and I paid for the thin red vinyl slip of a record from the sound track of The Black Knight. The man behind the counter, whom I knew from visits to the store to buy classical piano scores, seemed pleased by my interest in the song. He told me there were dozens of versions of “The Gypsy Rover” and that many traditional singers had sung and recorded it. He seemed to know there was a world out there called “folk music,” and pointed out the label on the record, which said that Leo McGuire, a Dublin singer, had copyrighted it in 1950. It was Leo’s version I had heard, sung in the movie by Elton Hayes, who played the part of the minstrel in The Black Knight.

  To me, “The Gypsy Rover” was as fresh as a new day. It was a song for a lover, for a dreamer, for a young woman yearning to move into other worlds.

  As fate would have it, at home again I took the delicate red vinyl out of its sleeve and placed it on the chair by our Emerson. I turned around to do something, and somehow I managed to sit on it, splitting it into pieces. A disaster! I didn’t have the money to buy another copy. I called Marsha Pinto and Carol Shank, my best friends and the dancers with whom I had performed the skit “Little Red Riding Hood” all over Denver that year—the Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club, and the Brown Palace Hotel, where we met Rock Hudson—telling them I had found a new replacement for “Little Red Riding Hood,” and asking them to get on the radio and listen for the song and write down the words. They were only too obliging; they, too, wanted something new to dance to. I described the song, and for a week we all turned on our sets as soon as we got home from school and listened for repeat plays. The movie was a big hit, so we heard the song many times that week. We wrote down the words, and I learned the melody, just as in the old and honored folk tradition, by ear and heart.

  It would be the beginning of my new life.

  MY romance with songs began early. When I was four months old in 1939, “Over the Rainbow” was playing on the radio. My mother, Marjorie, told me I was named after Judy Garland, although my father assured me I was named after Judith in the Bible, the queen who had cut off the head of the evil King Holofernes to save her tribe. I loved that. I would be a warrior, a queen, and perhaps a Hollywood star!

  I was surrounded by good music. My father, a successful radio performer and singer with shows in Seattle and Los Angeles, sang and practiced every day, and my parents started me on piano lessons by the time I was four. Daddy, blind from the time he was a little boy, was a fine musician whose daily programs were uplifting half hours of song from the Great American Songbook, readings from Ralph Waldo Emerson, old Mae West stories, and guest artists, whom he often brought home to dinner and who filled our house with joyful music. Even my godfather, Holden Bowler, who babysat me and changed my diapers, did so, I’m told, with an Irish tune on his lips.

  We lived in Seattle, then in Los Angeles, and in 1948, when I was nine, moved to Colorado, where my father had a new radio show. Denver was still a young city, and my eyes took in the grandeur of the “Queen of the Mountain Plains,” a glittering cluster of clean-lined buildings framed by the majestic Rockies, rising white and rugged to the west.

  When we moved to Denver, my brother Mike was five, and David was three. In Colorado my parents had two more children, Denver John in 1950 and Holly Ann in 1954. When I asked why she gave her fourth and fifth children two first names, Mom blamed it on the altitude.

  Denver was a mile high and the mountains soared to fourteen thousand feet. In the winters, dry champagne snowflakes fell on the streets and on the aspen and pine trees that grew in the parks. Snow was new to us. We scooped it into snowballs and snowmen. My father said Colorado was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. He wrote a song called “Colorado Skies” in 1950, and we would hear him sing it on his radio show among other musical treasures—the songs of Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and great old Irish ballads such as “The Kerry Dancers.”

  When I was ten, I contracted polio and was hospitalized for two months but recovered fully. I resumed the piano, practicing the classics, and my parents found me a new teacher in Denver, Dr. Antonia Brico, who believed I had the makings of a concert pianist—“the real thing,” as she put it. I practiced diligently, and when I was thirteen I made my debut with Brico’s orchestra, playing the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 10 for two pianos with another young pianist, Danny Guerrero.

  Danny was sixteen and good-looking. He had wavy dark hair that was swept back from his face, and at our rehearsals his attractive figure was always decked out in a suit and tie. He could play the piano like an angel. Mozart had written this concerto to perform with his sister, Maria Anna, whom he called Nannerl, and Danny and I were charmed by the thought. We would be Amadeus and Nannerl, at least for that night in February 1953 when we played the great concerto with Brico’s orchestra in Phipps Auditorium.

  My mother, who was a gifted seamstress and for many years made most of her children’s clothes on her Singer sewing machine, spinning out calico shirts for the boys, velvet jackets, skirts, and flowered dresses for me (my sister Holly was still a glint in my father’s eye), did something unusual for that performance. She bought me an organza dress, off the shoulder, long and flowing and white as the snow that fell the night of the concert—the biggest blizzard in a decade. Everyone—the dozen who made it through the snowdrifts—agreed that we had played well, and complimented me on my playing and on my beautiful dress.

  For the next two years I would continue to study with Antonia Brico. But her dreams for my classical piano career were not to be.

  I DISCOVERED very early in my life that I had an ear for melody. I could hear a song and play it on the piano, hear a piece of music I was attracted to and sing it, and find the harmonies that suited me. This talent was one that carried me easily into the performance of popular music, as well as driving my teacher nuts. She was used to classically trained musicians who studied the scores in order to learn the music, and she was convinced that my peculiar gift would lead me away from Mozart and Debussy.

  In spite of the success and excitement of my young life, at fourteen I began to experience deep depressions and their brooding and debilitating effects. Perhaps it was because I was in hormonal upheaval, but I had no real idea why they happened. They came on at unpredictable times.

  I had also already experienced the first of what would become a lifetime of migraine headaches, for which I was sent to a doctor and given all kinds of tests and a drug called Cafergot, which helped. My mother said my grandmother had suffered from migraines something terrible.

  These depressions sometimes occurred before the migraines, but not always. Depression might hover on a day when I was alone, and I might dose it with sugar, to which I was already developing an addiction. The migraines as well as the depressions would usually pass in a few hours.

  But one day my depression was utterly different. It seemed to take me by the throat and send me down into the deepest part of myself, where there was something I could not fight. For the first time I realized how I could escape these terrifying feelings. I had been fighting with Brico about not practicing enough, and my father wanted me to play a piece in public that I found far too demanding. (The onset of these feelings was often preceded by a paralyzing fear of not doing something perfectly.) That day I knew there was a way out.

  I found an unopened bottle of a hundred aspirin in the bathroom cupboard and spent an hour downing the entire bottle, a few pills at a time. Almost at once I felt ill. I was eager to die, but not if it was going to make me throw up! I called my friend Marsha, who sent her father over. Dr. Pinto told me to make myself throw up, and that I would live.

  Live! I had not planned on living, and now I would have to deal with the consequences.

  I felt uncomfortable for a few days, but I had taken action, gone to the edge and over. I knew that the pressure needed to be relieved someho
w.

  Of course, no one talked to me about what I had done, not directly. There was no counseling, no therapy, no group that I might go to, no suicide or grief counselor who would be sent for. These were still the dark ages for mental health issues.

  What I did must have been a terrible blow to both my parents. My father sent me a heartfelt letter of contrition in which he expressed regret at being so hard and demanding. My mother, Marjorie—beautiful and gifted—was not unfamiliar with trouble. She was slim, with auburn hair she curled into the fashion of the 1940s, high cheekbones, and big eyes in which I used to say I saw pieces of fruitcake. When my mother dressed to go out for an evening with my father, she looked to me like a movie star in her silk blouse and long skirt, her hair done and her makeup on, and the scent of Chanel No. 5 in the swirl of her satin cloak. Her life had not been easy, for in marrying a man who was blind she’d opted for a life that was both different and difficult.

  Mother was one of nine and had seen her share of problems. She was pretty cool about most things, and my suicide attempt was no exception. But afterward I felt her watching me, her eyes scanning for trouble, her hands kind as she reached out to me, her smile more tender. She also stopped chasing me around the room with a broomstick when I misbehaved. I might have said it was almost worth it!

  Music saved me, as it always had. I found a young guitarist, as well as a drummer and a piano player, for “The Gypsy Rover.” My friends Marsha and Carol were dancing the parts of the young lass and her lover, and soon we were performing our new piece at all the usual haunts where we had done “Little Red Riding Hood.” Our heads were filled with dreams of making it big and taking “The Gypsy Rover” to Las Vegas.