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

! Joni looked at her mother, like, ‘What?! I didn’t do anything!’ But, instead of defending her, her mother took the doctor’s side and humiliated her in front of him. Joni felt she’d lost her mother’s trust. Then she started thinking, Maybe she’d been raped?—things like that. Later, she realized the discharge was from an antibiotic. She’s confronted her mother about it, and her mother says, ‘Poppycock! I never did that.’ But whatever was said that day, it affected Joni. She said, many times, that she didn’t want to be a mother—not [in 1965], not ever—because she didn’t want to be her mother.”
    Joan began wrestling with the good girl/bad girl duality provoked by that upsetting accusation of the doctor. She rejoined the church choir, but one night, after all the pious singing, she slipped around to a frozen pond with a friend who possessed a purloined pack of Black Cat Cork, Canada’s version of Camels. While the cigarette-dispensing friend and several other ten-year-olds were choking and gagging from the inhaled nicotine, Joan liked the experience. “I took one puff and felt really smart,” she has said. “I thought, ‘Whoa!’ I seemed to see better and think better.” She became a secret preteenage smoker—initiating a habit that, over fifty years later, she still has not defeated.
    Something even more significant happened in her tenth year: she fell in love with the idea of writing beautiful music. It was the majestically romantic “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” that did it. Composed in 1934 by Sergei Rachmaninoff at a make-or-break time—his Fourth Piano Concerto had been a failure and he’d been blocked for five years—the composition’s almost over-the-top emotionality made it a favorite for movie soundtracks. One movie that utilized it, The Story of Three Loves, arrived in the North Battleford theater in 1953. Joan was in the audience. Set on an ocean liner (an exotic site for a girl thousands of miles from any ocean), the movie consisted of three melodramas. As a kind of fantasy stand-in for transgression in the ultraconformist decade, melodrama was a cinematic staple aimed at women (director Douglas Sirk perfected the genre) and this trio was no exception. The first story essayed forbidden love: a boy (Ricky Nelson) becomes magically transformed into a man, only to fall in love with his female governess (Leslie Caron); in the second, a ballerina ( Tales of Hoffman and The Red Shoes star Moira Shearer) has a fatal heart attack while auditioning for a choreographer (James Mason), who then stages the ballet she inspired for her to view from heaven. In the third, a trapeze artist (Kirk Douglas) who is agonizing over his partner’s death rescues from suicide a woman (Pier Angeli) who blames herself for her husband’s murder by Nazis. These two fall in love, of course.
    Joan left the movie intent on tracking down the music. She went to Sallows and Boyd Furniture Store, which stocked 78s and let customers listen without buying. Joan asked for “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and listened to its fevered twenty-three minutes. “It was the most beautiful melody I’d ever heard,” she has said. She returned to the store’s listening booth again and again, “and I would just go into raptures over it—it was the melody; it killed me, killed me.” She’d already had a memorable brush with the emotive possibilities of the female voice—when she was seven, she’d heard an Edith Piaf record at a French-Canadian girl’s birthday party. At the point in the song when Piaf’s voice plaintively soloed and then joined the male chorus, “I had goose bumps,” she has said. “I dropped my cake fork.” The hours at Sallows and Boyd furthered that impact. Voice, melody: two of songwriting’s three elements were now lodged in