In 1963 my third album was out and doing well. My audiences had grown from small 1,800-3,000-seat town halls to Forest Hills (8,000-10,000) and the Hollywood Bowl (20,000). It was said that I made the ten- and twenty-thousand-seaters seem like living rooms and everyone there a personal guest.
I preferred singing to a lighted house or an outdoor venue because I could see the people. It was less scary when I was not singing to a black pit. I continued to appear in bare feet, usually wearing a simple dress and necklace. My hair was very long now, and straight, and the bangs had grown out completely. The effect was biblical but gloomy. I stood hunched over the guitar, a vocal coach’s nightmare, still singing many of the soft ballads, but adding the songs and spirit of the civil rights movement: “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low,” “Oh, Freedom,” and the anthem “We Shall Overcome.” I also added the sweet antinuclear song by Malvina Reynolds, “What Have They Done to the Rain?” “Joe Hill” became a favorite, along with the Dylan gems.
Despite this success, a sentiment harkening back to an essay on pacifism I wrote when I was fourteen began to haunt me. I was in a position now to do something more with my life than just sing. I had the capacity to make lots and lots of money. I could reach lots and lots of people. It would be a while before this sentiment would take root and grow into something tangible, but the intent was now evident and becoming stronger by the day.
I was shopping for groceries early one morning, just as the coastline mist was lifting from the quiet November streets of Carmel, and the checkout man said casually but importantly, “Kennedy’s been shot.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, and nodded and smiled and lugged the groceries off to the car. But his voice kept running through my mind, and with a queer sensation creeping up my spine, I turned on the radio.
Kennedy had been shot, but he was still alive and the entire country was in a sickly panic. I felt the stirrings of hysteria within me, not really knowing why. I didn’t believe the myths about him so much as I wanted him to be a heroic figure. Mimi and Dick and Kim and I gathered in the glass house and tried to absorb the shock together. I telephoned Ira.
“Darling, what a marvelous way to go! Rich, internationally famous, possibly the most powerful man in the world, sitting next to a beautiful woman, and ’poing!’ it’s over! Painless, quick . . . the lucky son of a bitch.”
At first I was stunned by his callousness, and a little annoyed, because I too was caught up in the national hysterical heartbeat . . . but then, I’d like to go fast like that, I thought, in a blaze of glory.
The Johnson for President Committee didn’t waste any time. The morning following the assassination, I received a telegram assuring me that the grand gala at which I had accepted to sing for Kennedy (a decision with which I was not very comfortable) would take place—the show would go on, only it would be for Lyndon Johnson, “just as the late beloved President Kennedy would have wanted it to be.” The late beloved Kennedy was still warm. I thought about the invitation and decided, as occasionally I do, that to say “no” was too typically rigid and shut too many doors, so I answered that yes, I would appear.
There were the usual dignified liberal actors and comedians who had all modified their heartfelt speeches to John F. Kennedy and now said something appropriate but not at all heartfelt for Lyndon B. Johnson.
Dressed in a seven-foot-long mink stole, frilled one-piece camisole, net stockings, spiked heels, and arm-length gloves, Ginger Rogers sang some forgettable song. To end the number, she bent over and thrust the fur between her well-spread and firmly planted (and stunning) legs and then slowly rose, dragging the long fur back between her coyly squeezed-together thighs, and finally arrived upright, arms in a V in the air, still singing, the poor overused mink loping about her shoulders and body, begging for a trip to the cleaners.
The production people were upset when they learned that I would refuse to join in a finale of the national anthem.
“But everyone’ll be looking for you! You’re gonna be a smash!” they pleaded.
I didn’t sing the national anthem, and I was a smash anyway. Perhaps not with Lady Bird when I dedicated a song to Jacqueline Kennedy (“A bright ember of our recent past”), but I heard that I was credited by the President for “knowing how to take advantage of a situation.” I started out with something diplomatic about his leadership, told him that he must listen to the youth, went straight for the jugular and voiced the people’s desire to stay out of a war in Southeast Asia, and then sang all of “The Times They Are A-Changin.’ “There was tangible electricity in the room when I sang the words. There was tumultuous applause. A nerve had been struck. Perhaps it was revulsion on the part of the younger people at the cavalcade of tinsel and bad taste which had preceded me, but I got the only encore of the evening and went back to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
Back home in Carmel the Young Democrats for Johnson were trying to get hold of me through old Doner. Johnson was of course planning his campaign strategy against arch conservative Barry Goldwater. Doner’s counsel was colorful and echoed my own instincts.
“Fucking morons,” he said throwing his hands back over his head in a wave of disgust. “Dis lousy rotten bunch of sons of bitches, honey, der all idiots! Vel, vot the hell. You gonna do it?”
“Do what?”
“Dey vant you to lead dem.”
“Don’t be silly. Can I have a pencil and paper?” I replied, and sat down at his dining room table and drafted a letter to President Johnson. I told him that I would consider voting Democratic as soon as he quit meddling around in Southeast Asia and brought home the troops which were already there, and which the administration was calling “advisors.” Doner looked on approvingly.
Like Doner’s, my problem was not specifically with Johnson. It was with all of party politics and most politicians. Their allegiance was to the nation state. Whether they were Chinese, Russian, American, or Tanzanian, they took the chance location of their birthplace as the most serious event in the world, and made a living out of it. Other people took it just as seriously, but were not in a position to do as much damage. And how could anyone get serious about party politics after watching five minutes of any convention where people regressed to age six, wore stupid hats, got drunk, screamed and shouted, and played with balloons, at a time when they should have been doing some serious contemplating about their futures and the future of the world?
I have never been involved in the campaign of any major political candidate, preferring to work entirely outside of the party structure. Occasionally I have slipped a check and a note of encouragement to some brave congressperson who has defied everybody and risked his or her return to office because of principles. I did not vote in 1964 and would not go to the polls until it was time to vote against Nixon in 1972.
My fourth album, Joan Baez in Concert Part Two, was out and doing well when I decided to take part in a small antiwar rally in Carmel. I may have organized it with Ira; I really can’t remember. There weren’t more than thirty of us, and we looked pretty scruffy, but we marked the arrival of the peace movement in Carmel. My psychiatrist drove past and had a look, and told me later that we looked too grubby to have much credibility.
The organizers of the Free Speech movement at Berkeley got hold of me, and I went up to sing and speak. Ira and I raised the subject of nonviolence, and developed a small following. But when I was asked back again and again to take part in their marches and rallies it was not so much because of an overwhelming interest in nonviolence but rather because I drew huge crowds. I understood that fact and bashed on regardless, slipping Gandhi in between songs and winning a few hearts and minds and annoying the “radical” left with my “moderate” ideas.
One day I led an enormous march from the steps of Berkeley’s famous Sproul Hall over to the grassy hillside opposite the building where the regents were having a meeting, the results of which would affect whether or not the students would get any of their demands. Ronald Reagan was one of those regents. Mario Savio was elected to go and speak with their spokesperson. While we waited, I led singing and others spoke. Mario came out of the meeting angry and disgusted, but worst of all, feeling beaten.
His discouragement may have been justified, but the protesters needed to feel fresh power at a time like that, as discouragement would spread quickly and turn into anger. I don’t remember if I asked for or just took the microphone.
I told them that their power was theirs and no one could take it away; all they had to do was demonstrate it (or words to that effect). They could make this their university. They could do something as simple as claim Sprouse Hall, I ranted on, mispronouncing “Sproul.” And that’s precisely what they did.
I was there when they went into the hall. Up in front of thousands of kids and press from all over the country and the world, I told them to go into that building with “as much love as they could muster,” and then I sang to them. Some of the more “radical” kids didn’t like me talking about “love” at such a serious revolutionary moment. Inside, the halls and rooms were filled with students holding seminars on everything and a seminar on civil disobedience led by Ira and me. There were also plenty of informers, I assumed. I wandered around singing and enjoying the sight of people who were feeling their own power, some for the first time.
Ira and I planned to be arrested with them if the police came. We waited many hours, and by two-thirty in the morning decided that there would be no arrests made that night. We left the building, planning to return in the morning, and as we were pulling out of the parking lot, the police moved in.
I supposed they didn’t want to arrest me because I was unfavorable publicity for them. We turned on the car radio, suffering with the kids, wondering if they would keep discipline and with it their dignity. Many did. Others tried. And others understandably panicked. But if there was ever to be a real nonviolent movement among white middle class kids in this country, they would have to learn that being nonviolent does not mean that you are protected from a policeman’s billy club. That night some of them learned that panicking brings the club down harder and faster than might have been the case if they’d kept singing. But, to their credit, they were brave, and they were scared, and Berkeley marked the beginning of a new level of activism and risk taking in the universities of the United States of America.
In 1964, after the election of Johnson, what had started as the Free Speech movement turned into a radical movement against American involvement in Vietnam. Seeing that nothing could come of our presence in Vietnam except disaster, I had a quiet revelation and decided to refuse to pay my military taxes. This move was personal, political, and public. At the time our “defense” costs amounted to approximately sixty percent of the national budget. I wrote a letter to the Internal Revenue Service which I reprint here:
Dear Friends:
What I have to say is this:
I do not believe in war.
I do not believe in the weapons of war.
Weapons and wars have murdered, burned, distorted, crippled, and caused endless varieties of pain to men, women, and children for too long. Our modern weapons can reduce a man to a piece of dust in a split second, can make a woman’s hair to fall out or cause her baby to be born a monster. They can kill the part of a turtle’s brain that tells him where he is going, so, instead of trudging to the ocean, he trudges confusedly toward the desert, slowly blinking his poor eyes until he finally scorches to death and turns into a shell and some bones.
I am not going to volunteer the 60% of my year’s income tax that goes to armaments. There are two reasons for my action. One is enough. It is enough to say that no man has the right to take another man’s life. Now we plan and build weapons that can take thousands of lives in a second, millions of lives in a day, billions in a week.
No one has the right to do that.
It is madness.
It is wrong.
My other reason is that modern war is impractical and stupid. We spend billions of dollars a year on weapons which scientists, politicians, military men, and even presidents all agree must never be used. That is impractical. The expression “National Security” has no meaning. It refers to our Defense System, which I call our Offense System, and which is a farce. It continues expanding, heaping up, one horrible kill machine upon another until, for some reason or another, a button will be pushed and our world, or a good portion of it will be blown to pieces. That is not security. That is stupidity.
People are starving to death in some places of the world. They look to this country with all its wealth and all its power. They look at our national budget. They are supposed to respect us. They do not respect us. They despise us. That is impractical and stupid.
Maybe the line should have been drawn when the bow and arrow were invented, maybe the gun, the cannon, maybe. Because now it is all wrong, all impractical, and all stupid.
So all I can do is draw my own line now. I am no longer
supporting my portion of the arms race . . .
Sincerely yours,
Joan C. Baez
I released this letter to the IRS and simultaneously to the press.
After the letter had been widely printed around the country and around the world, a representative of the IRS showed up at my front door, papers in hand, suggesting that I drop my whole silly idea and sign on the dotted line, pay up, and avoid a lot of trouble. I invited him in for a cup of coffee. He refused and asked me to please come to his office in Monterey. I went, like a fool, and the minute I was in his office realized that I shouldn’t have bothered to come. I sat in a chair and sulked while he finished up a telephone call. When he turned his attention to me he astutely remarked that I didn’t look too happy.
“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t like being here.”
Not understanding what I meant, he began reassuring me that as soon as I changed my mind and paid up I’d feel much better.
“No,” I said, “you don’t understand. I don’t intend to pay my taxes, and so coming here is pointless.”
“But, surely, Miss Baez, you don’t want to be a bad citizen, do you?”
“The way I see it you can either be a good citizen or a good person. If being a good citizen means paying to make napalm to dump on little children, then I guess I’d rather be a good person and refuse.” He became agitated.
“Surely you don’t want to go to jail,” he warned me, ominously.
“Well, I imagine I’ll go to jail sometime. It might as well be over something I really believe in,” I answered.
“But jail’s for bad people! Jail’s for criminals!” he warned me, becoming still more agitated.
“You mean like Jesus? And Gandhi? and Thoreau?” I said, beaming.
“Huh?” he said.
The IRS put a lien on my house, car, and land. It made no real difference in my life, though the public didn’t understand, and I got checks from all over the country from people who imagined me sitting out on a curbside with a tin cup in my hand. I continued refusing for ten years. Sometimes a representative from the IRS would appear at my concert venue and take cash from the register before it even reached the promoter. I was accused of being impractical, because, of course, the government got my money plus fines. But the point was that I was refusing to give it to them and that they were spending a lot of time and money to come and collect it. And meanwhile, the tax resistance movement was growing, as was criticism of not just the war in Vietnam, but all wars.
I did my first Johnny Carson show. The producer had a “little chat” with me.
“You know, Joan, we’re so thrilled you could make it on the show, Johnny’s just knocked out. Really. Fantastic.”
“Thank you.”
“We wanna make sure everything comes off smooth, you know, because the reason people love Johnny so much is that he makes ’em laugh, you know what I mean? It’s the end of the day and they’re gettin in bed, and well, you know, heh heh, that’s a time when they don’t want to have to think about anything. They just want to be entertained. So the point is to just keep it light, and everyone will be happy.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. Except for one thing, that is. Ummmm. Well, let me put it this way. As a favor to Johnny we’d like to tell you not to say anything about income taxes.”
“Why did you have to say that?”
“Oh, just because, as a favor to Johnny ...”
“Why don’t you want me to talk about income taxes? I hadn’t intended to, but now I’ll have to know why.”
“Oh, c’mon, Joan, be a good sport.”
“I’m not a good sport. But if you’ll tell me why you don’t want me to talk about income taxes, I won’t. Isn’t that a fair deal?”
“Look,” he tried, now a little desperate. “Say I’m your best friend. I have a dinner party and invite a bunch of people, and I invite you, but I ask you to do me a favor. I ask you not to wear the color blue. Would you wear blue?”
“If you were my best friend you’d know that unless you gave me a good explanation for your silly request I’d come dressed all in blue.”
Just when I thought we were completely deadlocked, a Chicano producer, in a small office, whose name I remembered for years but have now forgotten, called me into his office.
“If you say, on Johnny’s show, that you refused to pay sixty percent of your taxes, someone watching might want to do the same thing, and Johnny’s show could be blamed, or even sued, for having influenced their decision.”
“Thank you,” I replied. I didn’t talk about income taxes.
As our involvement in Vietnam deepened, I was asked to do more and more talk shows. The average scenario went like this: I’d be invited out after a Teflon display or a quilting bee or a talking dog contest, and the interviewer would ask me something about my position on the war (You’ve been a real activist. You must feel pretty strongly about this . . .), and before I could get a sentence out he’d say, “Oh, just hold it a minute, we’ve got Bonzo Gritt here fresh from filming on the set of ’Forever America’ and he’d like to give his opinion,” and Bonzo Gritt would sit down and say “Well, Miss Buyezz, I’ve always admired your singing very much, but personally, I’m not gonna sit back and let the red plague creep across Indochina and around the world to our shores and swallow me up,” and the interviewer would say, “Thank you, Bonzo, and we’ll be back in a minute, after this message, ...” and there I’d sit. And then, after we came back on, I’d light into them like a cheetah, telling Bonzo that if he were committed he wouldn’t be sitting in that chair, he’d be “over there” fighting on the front lines. Then I’d appeal directly to the roomful of middle-American mothers who had been on a six-month waiting list to see this show, asking them if they thought their boys wanted to go to Vietnam, and if those busses that went to the induction center every morning at five o’clock were filled with young men ready to give their lives for their country, or young boys who were terrified and were there only because they’d gotten a letter in the mail telling them they had no choice. And the moms wouldn’t know whether to clap or boo, and then I’d sing, and no one would know what to think. I got over my shyness in a hurry, and began to actually enjoy the charade that inevitably took (and still takes) place on network television entertainment shows and to look at it as a challenge.
In my files is a 1965 picture of me in a bikini, walking along a lakeside beach. I look like a normal enough young woman, trudging along, a little preoccupied about something, and fresh out of the water. On the other side of the picture is a letter to my mother and father and, significantly, “everyone.”
Dear Mum—and Popsy and everyone—
This was at Searsville Lake. I had an interview.
My life is strange right now. I’m sorry I haven’t written. I always hope you forgive me for not writing.
I have a choice of things to do with my life. I think it is time to charge in head first. I want to start a peace movement. It began to hit me about two months ago. The time is ripe and I feel I could do anything I want. The sky is the limit. I think it will start in the fall. I don’t know yet what exactly I’ll do. Ira has some ideas he says he thinks could be tremendous but he wants me to see if I can come up with any first. He says he can get some of the best organizers in the country when we need them. I just feel that people are searching and groping for something real, something truthful—The movement will be nonviolent. It is terribly vague, but I see no harm in preparing yourself in spirit for something even when you are not sure exactly what it is. I have to be ready to sacrifice just about everything I have. Who can ever tell if he’s ready to do that till the time comes? My car, my house, my sleep—I must take care of myself. I’m sorry there are so many I’s and my’s in this letter but I must get it down on paper for you guys. I must be ready not to die for something, but to live for it, which is really much harder. Like flying in airplanes and having the flu in jail sometime. That’s pretty hard, but who knows. I have to keep my “head straight” as the beats say ... To know what I am doing before I do it and while I am doing it—and to admit to myself and everyone else if it was wrong after it’s done—a march—a vigil—a meditation—anything.
Wow. I got wound up——I am a leader
I love people
I will need help—yours and everyone’s
OK? you guys?
I love you—
See you in jail—
I leave for a trip in two days—I will let you know—
Your egomaniacal
daughter—
Someone had to save the world. And, obviously, I felt I was the one for the job. I went through a period of self-purification to prepare myself for the “movement,” by simply exaggerating my usual behavior.
Then one day I told Ira that I did not want to remain an ignoramus forever and asked if he would consider tutoring me more formally. Ira claims that I suggested the next idea, and I think that he did, but the discussion evolved into a proposition that we form a school called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.
We asked two friends to help us: Roy Kepler, owner of a superb local bookstore, and a WWII war resister who had spent time working in mental hospitals for alternative service and in prison during the Korean War, and still a sturdy pacifist and one of the world’s most decent people; and Holly Chenery, who was possibly the brightest woman I’d ever met in my life. She was a rigid vegetarian, absolute nonviolence advocate, and had the only truly organized mind of the four of us.
The school was to be run in seminar style, unpressured and unhurried, and would cost a minimal amount to attend. We would use a reading list, and the various seminars would consist of discussions on the reading. We would subscribe to the journals and newspapers which could keep us best informed about world affairs, and also to various nonviolent action journals and bulletins. And we would have organized meditation.
The perfect little schoolhouse presented itself to us in the middle of Carmel Valley, only ten minutes from where I lived. It had a kitchen, a big room for the seminars, adequate toilet facilities, and a place out back for Ira to live. We bought it with my money and began holding seminars almost immediately. There was no problem getting students. There was, however, a problem with the couple across the street, who had up till that time lived relatively quiet and protected (and, I thought, boring) lives. Now they let it be known to the community, and, in fact, to the world, that they were in peril of losing their peace and security. Communist hippie weirdos were invading the valley and threatening their way of life.
We had to evacuate the school until we’d been up before the county board of supervisors. We were in court for weeks, and held classes everywhere from a local park, from which we were removed, to my own house, which was illegal for us to use as well. The area’s staunch and starched conservatives showed up in court to defend the upright couple, while our supporters were people from all over the Monterey Bay area, some with influence and some just plain folks, and our students.
Holly spoke and was most impressive in her no-nonsense drab cotton skirt and Peter Pan-collared blouse, short-cropped hair and thick glasses. And Ira was irresistible as usual, appealing to the forbidden fantasies of the twittering, supposedly hostile, clubby wives. When it was my turn to speak, I was wearing a proper dress and shoes. We had been referred to as the “lunatic fringe”; I said that I supposed I was the lunatic and Ira’s beard provided the fringe. Everyone laughed. Then I said that my opponents were worried about the property value on their forty-thousand-dollar houses going down but I was a homeowner, too, and had one hundred thousand dollars invested in Carmel Valley and I, too, was worried about my property value. Then I sat down.
In the end, the wife became so distraught that she destroyed her own case by listing the twenty ways, which she had written down on a napkin, that we had made her life unbearable. By around point sixteen—we “had forced her to seek psychiatric help”—it was clear that her problems extended far beyond the property line, and we were granted the permit to teach and study nonviolence in beautiful, peaceful Carmel Valley.
During the first four years of the Institute I studied regularly, and acted as “teacher’s aide” to Ira. Speakers, scholars, and activists came from all over the world. Martin Luther King’s people shared time with us, and Ira and I went to the South to take part in their conferences and planning meetings. We were visited, sometimes in the night, by frightened young men from nearby Fort Ord who wanted to know how to get out of the Army and into Canada.
Each seminar began with ten or twenty minutes of silence, and each day included one full hour during which everyone was asked to desist from distractions like reading, thumbing through magazines, chewing gum, smoking, wandering aimlessly, doing crossword puzzles, or sleeping. One day a week we were silent for the whole afternoon. For some, the silence was difficult; for others, impossible. For me it was difficult, but very important.
And, of course, we studied the concept, theory, history and application of nonviolence in all its aspects, from use in personal relationships to internationally organized methods of fighting oppression. The more I read and talked and argued and discussed, the more devoted I became to the concept. What became strikingly evident to me was that in order to hold fast to the principles of nonviolence, one had to have unerring faith in them, and be ready to die in the course of holding to them. It was no good saying that “nonviolence works, up to a point.” That only meant that when things got too difficult or the activist was threatened with punishment, or was not attaining victory fast enough, it was time to switch to something more expedient. The decision to abandon nonviolence is understandable but means that nonviolence is being used only as a tactical method of achieving change, and not as a principle according to which the adversary, no matter how brutal or inhumane, is also in need of being freed.
I read the assigned books, but most of my learning came from listening and discussing. I became very spiritual. I spent days on end listening to Gregorian chants, and developed elephant skin on my feet from tucking them under me when kneeling in prayer. I continued touring, advertising the Institute while on tour, and recorded Farewell, Angelina and the Christmas record, Noel.
I was giving only about twenty concerts a year but was not, as some people assumed, trying to conserve myself for the future. I just found that life on the road was physically and spiritually unhealthy.
As the Institute flourished, I vascillated between being a star on the road and a servant of God at home. Most of the money I earned I simply gave away. Just about any request that came in, if remotely connected with nonviolence, would be honored with a check of between fifty dollars and five thousand dollars. Many of the concerts I gave were benefits, for cooperative nursery schools, Quaker Meetings, peace groups. The record royalties poured in steadily, so there was not much limit on funds, and there was no limit on how much I would give away.
There was a great deal of profound joy in my life, but there was practically no fun. I didn’t know much about having fun. I felt too guilty, as though I wasn’t supposed to start having fun until everyone in the world was fed and clothed.
I quit reading what the papers said about me because either they portrayed me as more self-sacrificing than I was, or they didn’t like me and said, in a variety of ways, that I was a fake.
Al Capp, creator of the “L’il Abner” comic strip, launched the most imaginative of the negative attacks, introducing a character into his strip called Joanie Phoanie. She was a slovenly, two-faced, showbiz slut, a thinly disguised Commie, who traveled around in a limousine singing “songs of protest against poverty and hunger for $10,000.00 a concert.” She put out albums like, If It Sounds Phoanie It’s Joanie, which included “Lay Those Weapons Down, McNamara,” “Throw Another Draft Card on the Fire!” and “Let’s Conga with the Viet Cong.” Looking back at both the strip and the situation, I have to laugh. At the time, I couldn’t. Mr. Capp was slandering my name, my causes, my music, and, of course, my persona. I got huffy, and huff turned to rage. I never sued Al Capp. I asked for a retraction but did not get one. Al Capp publicly denied to all who asked that Joan Baez was Joanie Phoanie.
Many years later I would read: “The truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you could invent,” but at the time my righteous indignation came from feeling guilty about having money, even if I was giving most of it away. In my heart of hearts, I thought I should not have anything. And that’s where he stung me.
Was Al Capp right? The puritan in me said that unless I learned to live free of possessions, like Gandhi, I was less than perfect. Gandhi’s aim was to be detached from all desire. I tried to be detached, but did not succeed. I was attached to my house, my boyfriends, my ever-changing wardrobe, and my demons. Mr. Capp confused me considerably. I’m sorry he’s not alive to read this. It would make him chuckle.
My confusion about being rich and famous was compounded when I went to Europe in 1967. I had been there to perform only once before, on a television tour in 1966. In Belgium I fell in love with a Parisian photographer who was assigned to cover me for a magazine. We walked all over Brussels and he took hundreds of pictures of me. Then we went to Paris where he escorted me to an Yves St. Laurent fashion show. He kept saying the show wasn’t verrry interrresting because it was the end of the season; I didn’t know which season he meant, and the show looked pretty inter-rrresting to me. The last item of the day was a wedding dress which was actually supposed to be a big white cake with satin ribbons and veils tied around it and the model’s arms and legs sticking out.
We went into the dressing rooms and he handed me a five-thou-sand-dollar dress to try on. It was beautiful. “Everry wooman should wearrr a drrress like thees at least once een zee lifetime.”
Back at his studio I posed in it. It was white, and heavy with tiny beads. I felt beautiful in it. I also felt mystical, spiritual, and queenly. I loved it. But then I started to cry and couldn’t stop until I’d taken it off.
He took me shopping in the hidden fashion warehouses of Paris, where I bought a classy blue gabardine pantsuit, and another in kelly green. I bought silk blouses and scarves, and Pierre Cardin shoes. Then he took me out in my new clothes and the insecure skinny Mexican from my past was not even a shadow of reality, and the hopsack and ashes, Joan of Arc, madonna was temporarily eclipsed as well. We went to a private club where I danced with him, and his friends, until they collapsed in exhaustion. The disc jockey played one of my songs and everyone clapped. When I couldn’t dance another step we got into my friend’s car and drove around Paris. I was still dizzily happy when dawn broke over the Tuileries and we breakfasted in a small cafe where I simmered down into a dreamlike state and nearly fell asleep with my head in a big plate of eggs and croissants. I was having FUN.
He took the cover photos for the Noel and Joan albums, and for my little book, Daybreak. I was infatuated with Europe. I was infatuated with the photographer. I was infatuated with my new clothes, all of which I gave away and replaced with something resembling a nurse’s uniform when I went to Japan the next year.
That same year I went to Austria and saw the Lippizaner horses. A hand-kissing, heel-clicking horseman insisted I sit in the reviewing stand with the head riding master and a couple of generals. I was delighted.
I went riding with a count. He was a handsome count, but not a very nice one, having as many ladies lined up in his parlor as he did horses in his grand stables. He wasn’t too interested in me because after we were on our mounts, mine a gigantic Irish thoroughbred and his an even bigger something else, he discovered I couldn’t take the jumps and his whole adventure was ruined. He left me in the charge of his more thoughtful sister and galloped back to find better pickings while there was still plenty of time for a royal romp in the woods.
Then I went to Italy.
Marco, whom you will hear about later, took me shopping on the Via Veneto where I bought two fine flowered silk dresses which clung to my body and fluttered around my knees like Arabian silk in a desert wind. In California one would have said, “I felt good about myself.” But I would have said that I felt like the queen of the world.
That same summer I gave a short concert tour in the States. I had sold out two halls in Washington, D.C., and was closing the tour by returning to do a third. The D.A.R was refusing to let me use their very own Constitution Hall, which we had already supposedly rented. Manny and my road secretary and childhood friend Jeanne and I installed ourselves in the grand old Hay Adams Hotel and planned our strategy. One call from Manny and the press jumped on the story, giving me, for the first time in the States, extravagant amounts of sympathetic coverage.
Secretary Udall, of the Department of the Interior, instantly gave me permission for a free concert at the base of the Washington Monument.
Wearing one of my “queen of the world” dresses I danced in and out of our aging but plush sitting room, doing one television news show after another and every newspaper interview I had time for. Each television news team would leave the Hay Adams and go directly to speak to the grand duchess of the Daughters of the American Revolution, or whatever she was called, who was sitting in her parlor giving her side of the story—namely that Miss Buy-ezz was an anti-American demoralizing influence on our boys over in Veet-nam, etc. To her credit, the grand dragon presented her case convincingly and well, but she was not queen of the world that day. I was.
And by 1967 much of the press was becoming very cynical about the war. The last thing I saw on TV before we left for the concert was a boy and girl walking to that very site with a picnic basket swinging between them, and the commentator was saying, “It looks like a beautiful evening at the Washington Monument, where the grounds are already crowded with spectators who have come to see the free concert by Joan Buy-ezz. . .”
When the queen of the world woke up the next morning, her manager had stuffed newspapers under her door. The most conservative said she had sung before eleven thousand people; the most liberal said fifty-five thousand. The police estimate was forty thousand. That was all wonderful, but it was the note from an Austrian count, who had arrived in Washington suddenly and by chance, which gave her the most lazy sense of glee she had ever had. Accompanied by a large bottle of Rémy Martin, the note requested that she join the count for dinner that evening. But the queen of the world leaned back on her plumped-up pillows and stretched and decided that even if she was doing nothing that evening she would be much, much too busy. She was learning how to mix fun, having nice things, and enjoying life a little, with doing what she thought was her calling. She went home to Carmel Valley and kept her silk flowered dresses.
Ira and I were on a pilgrimage to the Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky to meet a holy man. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, he was a well-known pacifist and poet who had been writing more and more openly and strongly against the war in Vietnam. His order had already silenced him once. We had been reading his essays and poems at the Institute.
I don’t remember being invited, but I do remember going. Ira and I teased each other about our closet desire to meet someone really holy who would magically touch our lives and change us into perfect people. Knowing we were fantasizing nonsense didn’t stop us from dreaming.
I went into one of my religious states at the sight of the monastery. Then I wished the monks were hidden behind bars in great hoods, because the first one I saw was tripping over himself, acting suspiciously like a Joan Baez fan.
Thomas entered briskly and greeted us warmly. He was an absolutely lovely man. His face was good and cheerful and kind. He emanated warmth and honesty. Perhaps there was yet hope.
The first thing he wanted to do was get off the property and buy some junk food for lunch. Of course, I thought, he must be sick to death of gluten bread sandwiches and homegrown beet juice. At a local fast food joint he bought two cheeseburgers, a chocolate milkshake, and a large order of fries. Ira and I had hamburgers and Cokes. The three of us, sort of like Piglet, Owl, and Pooh, went out into the middle of a field and had a picnic. Ira was Owl, and I was Piglet. Merton looked considerably like Pooh.
The good monk enjoyed his cheeseburgers so much that our trip was surely worth it for his lunch alone. I believe we talked about Gandhi, nonviolence, the war in Vietnam, but what I remember clearly was discussing the subject of his discipline. He wanted more than anything to travel. He wanted to see Bangkok, but he was not allowed to. His superior, for whatever reason, had decided that it was in Thomas’s best interest to stay at Gethsemane. I had the strong feeling that it was in the best interest of the Catholic Church. He was much too outspoken. Ira tried a string of arguments, most of them based on the foolishness of vows if they were interfering with the broadening of Thomas’s life experiences, his art, his passion. Merton only laughed, his eternally cheerful face becoming flushed.
After our picnic we went back to the monastery, through it, and out the back. Through a little bit of woods, by a narrow footpath, we came to where Merton lived in a small cottage by himself.
He opened a little wooden cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Irish whiskey, which he and Ira began to down with amazing speed and alacrity. Ira began saying, “C’mon, Thomas, what’s the real story, aren’t you going nuts in this place with all these sophomoric boring junior monks looking up to you as God?” and Merton would answer quite solidly, though with a slur, that his calling was here, and here he would stay.
“What about women?” said Ira, waving his glass through the air in a big swoop, as if to indicate many thousands of women. Merton said something about a lady he had met and said he had, well, more or less, fallen in love.
“Aha!” Ira said, mean as a ferret. “What do you DO about this woman?”
“I can love her in the spirit!” shouted Thomas, waving his glass around the room, a little defiantly, I thought.
“Nonsense,” I interjected. “What about her body?”
“Her body isn’t here! And anyway, I don’t need it to be here.”
“What if it was here?” I plugged on. I wasn’t drinking.
Merton indicated that he could still love her in the spirit, though he was sounding less and less convincing. Ira asked where she lived.
“In Lexington,” Merton said, wistfully.
“But we’re going to Lexington tomorrow evening!” Ira whooped, thoroughly caught up in the moment. “Why don’t you skip vespers and come with us? We’ll drive to Louisville and get the plane to Lexington! C’mon! You can do it!”
To my great surprise, Merton did not hesitate for a second. He was on his feet dancing around the room, saying, “... and then I could spend the night and then I could be back before matins the next morning and no one would ever have to know. . .”
I was mortified. I didn’t want to be a party to devilment in the life of a good, intelligent, and kindly monk.
“Ira,” I said reproachfully—but he was beyond reproach. And he was a little drunk. Needless to say, so was Thomas.
Well, Thomas Merton never came with us to Lexington. In the sober light of morning, in some little southern motel, Ira changed his mind. I made him place the call. Merton was disappointed, like a child. He was no doubt relieved, too. I think we told him the plane was full. We didn’t have the nerve to say that we’d been crushing our own fantasies in urging him to break his discipline, and all three of us would regret it in the end.