Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller Page A

hot compresses several times daily—this treatment pioneered by a World War I–era Australian military nurse nicknamed Sister Kenny, who had devised the method after she’d observed Aboriginals successfully treating their polio victims that way. *
    Joni has said that her back muscles were affected by the polio (“It ate muscles in my back” is how she put it), and that for a while, as she lay in the hospital and submitted to the scalding compresses, she didn’t know if she would walk again. Fortunately, she would not be left with a limp or a shortened leg, which were common effects of the illness (“She ran all over the place! She ran up and down stairs; she didn’t complain,” says Chuck Mitchell, of Joni eleven years later), although she would complain, in the 1980s, of vague effects of post-polio syndrome. The real effect was emotional. Her second husband, Larry Klein, says, “Joni’s bout with polio at a young age was probably the one crisis—well, that, and the baby—that sculpted her inner resolve and sensitivity into the form that led to her strong talent as an artist. She certainly talked about polio as the thing that changed her: she had been a very outgoing child, and that illness was a huge experience that forced her inward.” As Joni has said: “I think the creative process was an urgency then. It was a survival instinct.”
    â€œSurvival” is apt; young Joan fought her polio. She has said, “I remember, the boy in the bed next to mine was really depressed. He didn’t even have polio as bad as I, but he wasn’t fighting it—he wasn’t fighting to go on with what he had left…I had to learn to stand, and then to walk [again]. Through all of this, I drew like crazy and sang Christmas carols. I left the ward long before that boy, who had a mild case of polio in one leg [and] lay with his back to the wall, sulking.” She has also said that she made a promise to the Christmas tree in the ward that if she recovered, she would “make something of myself.”
    Selfless though the Grey Nuns may have been, even in tending severely ill children they did not relax their unforgiving moral code. One of them excoriated Joan for moving in such a way on her bed that her bare legs were visible to that sulky little boy while she was singing him a Christmas carol. “I was nine years old…and he was pouting and picking his nose and…telling me to shut up, when a nun rushed in and practically beat me up for showing my legs. A nine-year-old to a six-year-old!” Joni would later say. (On the other hand, she got along well with the ward’s charismatic Sister Mary Louise, who eventually became mother superior and whose charity Joni admired. After she became famous, Joni sang at events at the sister’s behest. “She grabbed me by the ear and put me to work,” Joni has recalled. “She wanted me to join the order and write my memoirs.”)
    Joan was discharged from the hospital after six weeks, and her recovery was supervised by Myrtle, who homeschooled her for a year—blackboard, homework, and all. It was during this intense bonding between punctilious mother and convalescing daughter that an exchange occurred in a pediatrician’s office that, Joni has told friends, was central to her life. One of a number of those to whom Joni has recounted this incident says, “Joni never really put this together in her mind until much later, in her adult life, but then she started seeing it as so central—as the crux of things. Here’s what happened: she was ten—it was after the polio.” A medication she had been taking (she would much later deduce) caused secretions, and Myrtle took her to the doctor, who performed a kind of external gynecologic examination. “The doctor said, ‘You’ve been a naughty girl, haven’t you?’ He was accusing her of having sex. She was ten