I Dream of Joni, page 18
MITCHELL: I do and I don’t. Maybe I do. Maybe I know a little. Maybe I don’t know anything. I’ll tell you by that I think I’ve done my—people are too possessive about their children, too egocentric with their children anyway. I reproduced myself. I made a beautiful child, a girl. When—but at the time I was penniless. There was no way that I could take—she would have been—I was not the right person to raise this child. There was no indication that I would—I don’t have a good education; I couldn’t keep her. It was impossible under the circumstance. I had no money when she was born, none. Imagine. I mean none of the music would have come out. We would have just been—I would have been waitressing or something. It wouldn’t have been—fate did not design this to occur.
In April 1995, after various tabloids had stirred the pot, Mitchell went public in the pages of Vogue. “I had a child,” she told the magazine, “and I was broke, literally penniless.” A year later, after one of Mitchell’s art college classmates talked to the supermarket tabloid the Globe, the publication ran a brief story about Kelly. If the Greater London Radio broadcast and the Vogue piece had more or less slipped under the radar, the Globe article did not. Hundreds of wannabes and maybes and impostors got in touch with Mitchell’s management; a waitress named Kelly at a restaurant in LA Mitchell frequented asked her mother if she’d been adopted. The foster mother who had cared for the real Kelly for seven months sent baby photos to Mitchell’s managers; Weller writes in Girls Like Us that Mitchell looked at the photos and said, “ ‘My daughter… my baby… my child’ as if the sheer ability to mouth those words was intensely relieving.” Mitchell thought the baby looked just like her maternal grandmother, Sadie, the one who’d kicked a door off its hinge.
Mitchell started looking for Kelly. Meanwhile, Myrtle told the Calgary Sun, “We would have been supportive if we had only known.” But she also told them, “It’s Joni’s fault this is coming out now; she’s too open and frank about it. This is really embarrassing.”
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When Kelly was seven months old, she was adopted by David and Ida Gibb, schoolteachers who lived in the Toronto suburb Don Mills. “When [our son] David was three and a half,” Mrs. Gibb told Maclean’s magazine, “we were doing very well and we wanted to share it with someone. Taking a child into your home seemed like a good way of doing it.” The Gibbs gave Kelly the new name Kilauren.
Kilauren led a fairly privileged life—private school, family vacations to warm, non-Canadian shores. At first, the Gibbs didn’t tell Kilauren that she was adopted, because they wanted to protect her, and because they were afraid of losing her. But when Kilauren was fourteen, she started wondering why there were no pictures of her before the age of eight months. Her mother tried to explain it away by saying that a camera had not been handy at the time, or that Kilauren was a second child and that second children don’t have as many pictures taken of them. These explanations did not sate Kilauren’s curiosity. It didn’t help that Kilauren’s looks and personality were so different from the Gibbs’—she was much more headstrong and striking-looking than them.
That same year, 1979, Kilauren and her brother were walking on a beach in Jamaica during a school vacation when a talent scout from the Elite modeling agency spotted the young beauty. Kilauren would spend the next ten years as a professional model, working all around the world. Her face would grace the Evian spritzer bottle—a bottle that Joni, coincidentally, would sometimes clutch on airplanes to help with dehydration, totally unaware of the act of hydration-based pietá that she was engaged in.
While vacationing with her parents at a hotel in Miami Beach in December of 1991, Kilauren, twenty-six, told her parents that she was pregnant (with her boyfriend, Paul Kohler, a drummer), whereupon her parents told her that she’d been adopted. On hearing the news, Kilauren was confused and angry. She started searching for her birth mother in earnest.
Through a friend’s connection, Kilauren got her name put at the top of the Children’s Aid Foundation’s Match Program list, through which adoptees at age eighteen could find out information about their birth parents without learning their parents’ names. Kilauren received a registered letter from the foundation around 1996; it told her “Your mother was from a small town in Saskatchewan and left for the U.S. to pursue her career as a folksinger.”
Eight years earlier, Duke Redbird, the Indigenous poet who had lived across the hall from Joni when she was pregnant in Toronto, had told fellow York University student Annie Mandlsohn, “Never tell this to anybody, but I lived in the same house as Joni Mitchell; she had a baby and nobody knows.” Now, in 1996, Mandlsohn’s boyfriend Tim Campbell introduced Mandlsohn to Kilauren. (The boyfriend had grown up in the same suburb as Kilauren and Kilauren’s boyfriend.) When Kilauren showed Mandlsohn the Children’s Aid letter stating that her mother was a folk singer who’d moved to the States, Mandlsohn said, “Kilauren! Your mother is Joni Mitchell!”
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The name didn’t mean much to Kilauren; she owned none of Joni’s albums, though she had loved Joni’s duet with Seal, “If I Could.” (When Kilauren later hears “Little Green” for the first time, she’ll tell Joni, “God, it’s so cryptic, Joan. I never would have known it was for me,” a statement that seems to echo Rolling Stone’s assessment of the song, which stated, “It passeth all understanding.”) But Kilauren started Googling and, on JoniMitchell.com—a wonderfully encyclopedic website founded by longtime fan Wally Breese, who was looking for an “unselfish” project to commit himself to after he’d received a cancer diagnosis—found fourteen points of comparison between herself and Joni, including blond hair, blue eyes, and prodigious cheekbones. “The more I read, the more I realized how alike we were,” Kilauren told the Toronto Sun. “She was a singer, I was into music. She was an artist. I painted. We both enjoyed the same things.” Kilauren had started smoking at age eleven; had almost made Canada’s Olympic swim team; and had become a professional model at age sixteen. “Like Joni, I was really headstrong,” Kilauren will later tell the Toronto Globe and Mail. “My parents didn’t like my doing modeling, but nothing could stand in my way.”
After confirming with Duke Redbird that Joni had been pregnant during the winter—Kilauren was born in February—and then successfully filling out a questionnaire that Breese, the JoniMitchell.com founder, had devised to deal with the emails flooding his inbox, Kilauren was given the go-ahead to write to Joni’s managers, who didn’t write back for six weeks. Kilauren’s parents, the Gibbs, found a photo of Kilauren taken the day she left her foster mother, and sent it to the managers, who matched it against the photos the foster mother had sent. Mitchell had one of the managers call Kilauren. “He came back and said it made his hair stand on end,” Joni told the Los Angeles Times. “He said it’s like you’re talking to the same person.” Joni was on vacation when the manager called her back with Kilauren’s phone number. Joni called Kilauren and left a message on her machine: “It’s Joni. I’m overwhelmed.”
Kilauren has said that, in her first phone call with her birth mother, Joni “wanted to get it off her chest, how sorry she was that she gave me up. How broke she was at the time—she couldn’t even get the money together to be in the musician’s union. She couldn’t tell her parents about the whole thing, having a baby—she was brought up in a Victorian household.” Kilauren tried to allay Joni’s feelings of guilt. “She asked me how my childhood was, and I was honestly able to tell her that it was fabulous,” she said. “It was a great childhood, probably the best. I think now, that I could have been raised in California, and been a Bel Air brat. I’m really happy that I got my family to raise me, in down-to-earth style. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
When the news broke, Kilauren got interview requests from Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters, and Larry King. She disconnected her phone and abandoned her apartment. Strangely, she opted to let her then-boyfriend, an orthopedic parts salesman named Ted Barrington, speak for her. (Kilauren’s friendship with Ted goes back to 1979; their parents were both members of the Donalda golf and tennis club.) When Maclean’s magazine called, Barrington asked for $10,000 for an interview with Kilauren. Maclean’s, being a legitimate publication, told him that they don’t pay for interviews, whereupon Barrington told them, “It’s all business to me. The money’s for Kilauren. She’s a student right now”—Kilauren was living on student loans while studying desktop publishing at George Brown College in Toronto—“and she should be able to profit from this, at least monetarily.… Joni’s asset-rich, but not cash-rich.” He added, “If you’ve got an offer, let us know. You have my pager number.” Later, after Barrington spoke with Joni’s Vancouver-based manager, whom Kilauren had by then put in charge of publicity, Barrington apologized to Maclean’s: “I was out of line. All the good stuff is at the back end with book deals and all that. I’m just worried about Kilauren being exploited. I’m just worried about my girlfriend.”
* * *
On Thursday, March 13, 1997, Kilauren and her five-year-old son, Marlin, flew to Los Angeles to meet Joni. It was dark by the time a limousine deposited Kilauren and Marlin at Joni’s house in Bel Air; the duo walked up to the wrong door. “I heard a voice coming from above, looked up, and there she was like Juliet on her balcony,” Kilauren has said. Joni had paintbrushes in her hand because she’d been working on a canvas.
The mother and daughter’s initial contact felt both reassuring and fraught. Joni: “She looked at me and I looked at her, and we made the same sound at the same time: ‘Mm-hmm.’ We had the same speaking voice. She looks a lot like my mom.” Kilauren: “When we met at the front door in the kitchen with hugs it felt like I had gone away on a trip for a couple months and I was coming home.” Joni: “I’ve had pain and joy in my life, but nothing like this. It’s an unparalleled emotional feeling.”
During their nineteen-day “get acquainted” session, Joni and Kilauren found themselves talking for hours at a time. Sometimes they would simultaneously make the same remark. Amy Scholder, a writer and editor hired to work on a Joni autobiography that got shelved, had lunch with Joni and Kilauren and Marlin during this period; Scholder said, “It was uncanny how alike Joni and Kilauren were. When you think of the nature/nurture thing—they were meeting for the first time, and they were so similar.”
But mostly the mood of the reunion seemed to be rhapsody. “Every once in a while I’d just blurt out, ‘It’s my kid!’ ” Mitchell has said. “We’d rush towards each other and hug and do some silly dance.”
* * *
But if such outpourings of relief and communion and joy were perhaps to be expected, one outcome of the reunion was not: for the next ten years, Joni would write no new songs.
There’s no accounting for inspiration or creativity. Their origins are mysterious. But certainly we have clues and intimations. The fact that Joni and Kilauren’s reunion was followed by Joni’s fallow decade would seem to give credence to the theory that Joni’s deferred motherhood—and not other forces such as, say, her competitiveness, or her anger toward Myrtle—was the furnace of her artistry.
But of course, making art, like most actions in life, is the product of tens if not hundreds or thousands of tiny and sometimes unknowable factors, and thus we can’t rule out any possible catalysts; the Great Wall of China, as we know, is partially held together with grains of sticky rice. Joni’s pal Malka Marom once posited to Joni the theory that Joni’s output was an effort to prove to Myrtle that she wasn’t a quitter, whereupon Joni told her to desist with her stupid psychological theories. (Myrtle was very much alive during the fallow period, though—she died in 2007—so this reading doesn’t quite scan.) When musician Ani DiFranco interviewed Mitchell for the Los Angeles Times in 1998, DiFranco wrote, “When I suggest to her that perhaps feminism is not just political slogans and short haircuts, that it can be something different for each person, she waxes poetic about the nobility of women staying in the home. She even cites the breakdown of the family and says children are not ‘playing in the backyards anymore’ because their ‘mothers are not at home,’ implicating feminism, and no other social or economic circumstances, as the cause of the problem. This seems ironic coming from a woman who, at a young age, made the difficult decision of adoption for her child, when confronted with the choice between motherhood and career.” This last sentence caused the newspaper, days later, to run a response from the two managers who were handling Mitchell at the time: “Notwithstanding the emotional impact of this comment,” the managers wrote, “it happens to be wrong. There are a number of infinitely more significant reasons for Joni to have made the difficult decision that she did.”
And what does the woman herself say? “I quit everything in ’97 when my daughter came back. Music was something I did to deal with the tremendous disturbance of losing her. It began when she disappeared and ended when she returned. I was probably deeply disturbed emotionally for those thirty-three years that I had no child to raise, though I put on a brave face,” Mitchell told Camille Paglia when the social critic talked to her for Interview magazine in 2005. “Instead, I mothered the world and looked at the world in which my child was roaming from the point of view of a sociologist.”
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Joni remembers seeing Prince—whom she has called “the most amazing performer I have ever witnessed”—at one of her shows in the early seventies. “When he was fifteen, I think, I played Minneapolis,” she has said, probably referring to her January 16, 1976, appearance at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Auditorium, when the wee dynamo of sensual funk and rock would have been two years older than her estimate. “I remembered him because he has those distinctive eyes—he’s like a puffin, or an Egyptian wall painting. And he sat to the left of me in the front row with his head kind of cocked at me like a puffin bird. I played a lot of my stuff to him.”
Ever the nonconformist, Prince claimed that his favorite Joni album was the one that had met with the greatest resistance from critics and Joni’s fans at the time, 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Here Joni had turned away from confessional, first-person lyrics, training her gaze instead at marriage and suburbia in a series of ironical character portraits written in third person. (Prince’s enthusiasm for the record has been equaled by no less a light than Elvis Costello, who has called Hissing “the masterpiece of that time.”) Prince tried to get in touch with Joni via a letter written in his usual vegetable soup of U’s and hearts and 2’s and 4’s; it is safe to assume that a letter from Prince, like a text from your twelve-year-old niece, resembles the Bayeux Tapestry. But, as Joni has put it, her employees threw the letter out because they assumed it hailed from “the lunatic fringe.”
Regardless, Prince proceeded to pledge his troth. In his song “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” from 1987’s Sign o’ the Times, he quotes a line from Mitchell’s hit “Help Me” when Dorothy hears her favorite song on the radio. He also used Joni’s tunes as the pre-concert music on his tours.
Once Prince and Mitchell became friends, he tried to tell her how to write and market a hit single, but she didn’t want to listen. Nevertheless, when New York magazine asked Mitchell in 2005 which music, of all the music made by people who’ve cited her as an influence, she most admired, Mitchell said Prince’s.
The Joni song that Prince is most readily identified with is “A Case of You,” the song that the music director of the tastemaking New York City radio station WFUV once called “sort of our ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ” Prince called it “A Case of U” and covered it repeatedly, turning it, alternately, into a Jimi Hendrix–style guitar fantasia, a tender ballad, and a reason to flee the stage. (After running out on the audience at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre in April 2016 days before his death, Prince returned to the stage to say, “Sometimes I forget how emotional these songs can be.”)
After Prince and Mitchell had befriended each other, he sent her a song that he hoped she would cover, “You Are My Emotional Pump, You Make My Body Jump.” But alas: “I called him up and I said, ‘I can’t sing this—I’d have to jump around in a black teddy,’ ” Joni told Mojo magazine in 1994. “He’s a strange little duck, but I like him.” (Joni also balked in 1986 when she and Larry Klein went to a Prince show in Denver. When Prince asked Joni to join him on the chorus of his hit “Purple Rain,” Joni said she didn’t know the lyrics. Whereupon Prince helpfully explained that the song’s chorus runs, “Purple rain, purple rain / Purple rain, purple rain.”)
Though, at first blush, the impish His Royal Badness and the world-weary jazzcat troubadour would not seem to have much in common, both were creatively restless and prone to blurring genres on their mostly self-produced albums; each made music that was emotionally fraught and sexually frank; both flirted with androgyny and were associated with berets, cold weather, and falsettos. They both refused to play the promotional game (at one press conference, Prince responded to any question he didn’t want to answer by playing the theme to The Twilight Zone on a keyboard; once asked by an MTV host how he felt, Prince responded, “I feel with my hands”) and grew disenchanted with the music business around the same time: Prince wrote “SLAVE” on his cheek (he was pissed at how Warner Bros. had marketed one of his records, and thought the company was limiting his artistic freedom by stipulating how often he could release his work) with the same vigor that Joni once yelled “Slavery with tenure is not attractive!” at David Geffen.
But, in practical terms, the most important bond between Prince and Joni may have been their mutual love of parties. On the heels of the hugely successful film and soundtrack of 1984’s Purple Rain, Prince held a listening party of his next record, Around the World in a Day, at the Warner Bros. offices in Burbank. How does such an event get arranged? By the seat of one’s pants: Prince had one of his employees call Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Mo Ostin at noon on Thursday, February 21, 1985, to say that Prince would like to play the new record for key Warners executives that afternoon at 4:00. The Warners conference room was summarily decanted of its table and most of its chairs; the lighting was muted; flowers were spread on the floor. Then a small parade of Prince admirers—his stepbrother, Duane; collaborators Wendy and Lisa; Prince’s father; Joni; and the tiny wonder himself—promenaded into the conference room, all holding flowers. (One Warners executive said at the time, “We’re like, Haight-Ashbury.”) Prince sat on the floor and was very quiet once the music started playing; when Joni, seated next to him, pointed out certain chords or progressions she liked and asked him where he got them from, he said, “From you.” Lest he be forced to endure any uninspired reactions to this new music that was less commercial than Purple Rain, Prince, before the album ended, stood and left the room.
