New laws regarding abortion and no-fault divorce change the relations of the sexes, echoed in hits by Helen Reddy and Carly Simon and the acidic banter of Sonny and Cher. Dolly Parton pens the biggest-selling single by a female artist to say goodbye to Porter Wagoner.
At the Grammy Awards on March 3, Helen Reddy thanked “God because She makes everything possible” when she won Best Female Rock-Pop-Folk Vocal for “I Am Woman.” She had been looking for a song “that reflected the feminist consciousness” when “it dawned on me that I would have to write what needed to be said myself. Did I feel up to the task? Not really, but I remember lying in bed with the phrase ‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am Woman’ going over and over inside my head. I wasn’t even too sure what invincible meant, so I decided the phrase must be inspiration from above.”1
Her record producer fretted it made her seem “butch,”2 so she sang it on variety shows while she was pregnant to show she could “get a man.” It was used in the first women’s liberation comedy, Stand Up and Be Counted, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Stella Stevens. Deejays started telling Reddy, “I can’t stand this record! I hate this song! But you know, it’s a funny thing, my wife loves it!”3
In the documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words, feminist Gloria Steinem recounts how in 1969, “I went as a journalist to cover a hearing at which women were standing up and telling their abortion experiences. I had had an abortion when I first graduated from college. I was twenty-two, and there was no women’s movement then. There was no companionship. So I never told anybody. And I listened to these women testify about all that they had to go through. The injury, the danger, the infection, the sexual humiliation, you know, to get an illegal abortion, and I suddenly realized, why is it a secret? You know, if one in three women has needed an abortion in her lifetime in this country, why is it a secret? And why is it criminal? And why is it dangerous? And that was the big click. It transformed me, and I began to seek out everything I could find of what was then the burgeoning women’s movement.”4
In 1967, some states decriminalized abortion, including California with the Therapeutic Abortion Act signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. The Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion helped women find doctors and lobbied for legalization alongside social workers, doctors, nurses, and NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws). But in 1971, legalization failed in twenty-five states.
The case that changed everything was, of course, Roe v. Wade. Jane Roe was a pseudonym for Norma McCorvey. The daughter of an abusive alcoholic mother, she robbed a gas station at age ten and fled Texas to Oklahoma City with her girlfriend.5 When the motel maid caught them kissing, McCorvey was arrested and sent to Texas State School for Girls.6 Upon release, she lived with her mother’s cousin, who repeatedly raped her.7 She married at sixteen, but her husband was abusive. Pregnant, she moved back in with her mother. When she came out as a lesbian, her mother tricked her into signing over custody of her baby, then forced her out of the house.8 McCorvey put another child up for adoption the following year, then became pregnant a third time at age twenty-one in 1969.
Texas authorized abortion in cases of rape or incest “for the purpose of saving the life of the mother” but required a police report, which McCorvey didn’t have. She tried to find an illegal abortion clinic, but the authorities had shuttered them. Finally she was referred to lawyers Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington.
Coffee was gay and had been working on lawsuits to challenge sodomy laws when she realized a recent California abortion ruling could be applied to Texas.9 She needed a pregnant woman to build the case around, and an adoption attorney connected her with McCorvey.
Weddington was a minister’s daughter who became pregnant during her third year of law school by her future husband and underwent an illegal abortion in Mexico.10 After graduating she joined a women’s group to overturn the state’s abortion law and met Coffee.
Coffee gave McCorvey the pseudonym Roe (it rhymed with John Doe), and filed a case in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas against Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, who was the top law enforcement official in the county where McCorvey lived and thus would have been in charge of enforcing the state’s antiabortion law against her. In 1970, the Texas judges agreed the law was unconstitutional, citing the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the Supreme Court decided states could not prevent the use of contraceptives by married couples because the Bill of Rights created a “zone of privacy.”
But even though the court decided the statute was unconstitutional, it did not grant an injunction to stop enforcement of the law. Coffee and Weddington appealed to the US Supreme Court. Meanwhile, McCorvey gave birth and gave the child up for adoption.
The case was argued in 1971, and reargued in 1972, by the twenty-seven-year-old Weddington. “I couldn’t go to sleep the night before. I was very conscious of how the fate of many women for many years would be resting in part on my argument,” she said.11 “There was a sense of majesty, walking up those stairs, my steps echoing on the marble. I went to the lawyers’ lounge—to go over my argument. I wanted to make a last stop before I went in—but there was no ladies’ room in the lawyers’ lounge.”12
Defense attorney Jay Floyd joked, “Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court. It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.” He was met with silence. Civil rights lawyer Margie Hames recalled, “I thought [Chief Justice] Berger was going to come right off the bench at him. He glared him down.”13
When it was Weddington’s turn to speak before the all-male Supreme Court, “I was so nervous until I stood, and once I was up I was totally calm.”14
On January 22, the court announced that seven out of nine justices voted in favor of Roe. They decreed that in the first trimester, the mother’s right to privacy meant the decision to abort was solely the right of patient and doctor. In the second trimester, states could regulate in certain cases. In the third trimester, when the fetus was old enough to survive outside the womb, the “potential life” of the “viable” fetus meant that states could regulate or prohibit abortion unless the mother’s health was in danger.
Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissented. White wrote, “In a sensitive area such as this, involving as it does issues over which reasonable men may easily and heatedly differ, I cannot accept the Court’s exercise of its clear power of choice by interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life and by investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it. This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs.”
The case did not top the headlines of The New York Times or The Washington Post, which prioritized the death of former president Lyndon Johnson. President Nixon made no public comment, though his private opinions were captured the following day on the Oval Office’s secret taping system. NPR’s Nina Totenberg summarized his comments: “I know there are times when abortions are necessary, he tells an aide [Chuck Colson], I know that—when you have a black and a white, or a rape. I just say that matter-of-factly, he adds. You know what I mean? There are times. [But] Abortions encourage permissiveness, he says. A girl gets knocked up, she doesn’t have to worry about the pill anymore, she goes down to the doctor, wants to get an abortion for five dollars or whatever.”15 Elsewhere in the tapes he opined that “it breaks the family.”
The most emphatic criticism came from the American Catholic Church, in a statement calling the decision “a catastrophe for America.” Within months it incorporated the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) to explore “every legal possibility” to challenge the decision. The backlash would play a significant role in the realignment of America’s political parties, influencing many Democrats to become Republicans.
But for the moment, the women’s movement had the wind at their back. On March 13, The New York Times reviewed Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women. It was developed during workshops given by feminists from the Students for a Democratic Society at Emmanuel College in Boston in 1969. “We didn’t have the information we needed, so we decided to find it on our own,” explained contributor Nancy Miriam Hawley.16 It covered birth control, pregnancy, abortion, postpartum depression, rape, STDs, menopause, sexuality, even how to deal with male doctors and a capitalistic medical system.
Simon & Schuster released the mass-market version of the book just as Carly Simon’s No Secrets album ended its five-week run in the No. 1 spot, from January 13 to February 10. The title song featured a couple determined to be honest about everything, including affairs, like the spouses in the film Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice after they attended a group therapy session at the Esalen Retreat Center. (The movie was adapted to a television sitcom in the fall of ’73, with a cast that included Robert Urich, Anne Archer, and Jodie Foster. It didn’t touch the movie’s spouse-swapping theme but did cover premarital living together and skinny-dipping.) Gradually the singer comes to regret hearing about her man’s dalliances.
It’s unknown whether her new husband, James Taylor, inspired the song, though he helped her write the opening track, “The Right Thing to Do.” In her memoir, she wrote she could tolerate Taylor’s distant nature because she grew up ignored by her depressed father, the original Simon of Simon & Schuster.17 Perhaps the melancholy in her songs like “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” and “Anticipation” sprang partially from that paternal void—and also from the sexual abuse she suffered beginning at age seven from a thirteen-year-old family friend, the same year she developed a debilitating stutter.18 She told People magazine, “It was heinous. It changed my view about sex for a long time. [Yet] I wanted to keep it quiet, because I wanted to keep it going.”19 When her mother said the boy could no longer come over, “I was devastated because I thought I was in a romance, which I think happens to a lot of girls. Your libido overpowers everything. You’re so libidinous even at the age of nine and ten. And sometimes there’s an outlet there. I bet in many more cases than we know about there is.”20
“We Have No Secrets” also strangely echoed a day that took place at LA’s Chateau Marmont in June 1972, a few months before Simon married Taylor. She was staying there with him when Mick Jagger invited to fly her to San Francisco to see the band perform. Theoretically the trip was to interview Jagger on behalf of The New York Times, though she and Taylor knew it was more. As she got ready to leave, Taylor tied a rubber hose around his arm. “This is what I do,” he said as he shot up in front of her for the first time, in one of the grimmer passive-aggressive guilt trips in pop history. “Maybe if you see me do it, it will take away the cat-and-mouse game.”21 She hugged him until the front desk called to say her limo was downstairs.
Jagger dueted with her on “You’re So Vain,” the No. 1 single from January 6 to 26, though Simon maintained it was written before she met him. The second verse was specifically about actor Warren Beatty. Simon’s frequent co-writer Jacob Brackman was a screenwriter, and through him she met and had affairs with filmmakers Terrence Malick and Bob Rafelson and actor Jack Nicholson.22 It was Beatty she fell for, though. He was currently on a two-year hiatus, researching his future epic about American Communists, Reds, while living in the decidedly non-working-class Beverly Wilshire Hotel rewriting the script for Shampoo with Robert Towne, his self-portrait of a Hollywood sex addict.
The day after one late-night visit from Beatty, Simon spoke rapturously of the experience to her analyst, until the stricken therapist felt compelled to inform her, “You are not the first patient of the day who spent the night with Warren Beatty last night.”23 When Simon confronted Beatty over the phone, he “howled,” she wrote in her memoir. “All to his credit that he was up for the hilariousness of the situation.”24
Initially, Simon’s producer Richard Perry enlisted Harry Nilsson to duet with her on “Ballad of a Vain Man.” But Jagger got wind of the session and arrived to join them at the mic. Quickly, Nilsson realized, “The two of you have a real blend—you should do it yourselves,” and stepped aside.25
“Electricity,” she wrote. “That’s what it was. I wanted to touch [Jagger’s] neck and he was looking at my lips. The electricity was raw and hardly disguising its power. Having sex would have actually cooled things off.”26 Jagger no doubt relished celebrating his vanity with a woman who famously resembled him. Many believed that he married his wife Bianca because she looked like him, his own Narcissus pool to gaze upon.
Afterward, she and Jagger improvised on the piano. Jagger biographer Marc Spitz quoted Simon: “We wrote a song together that became a song on the Stones’ next album called ‘Til the Next Goodbye.’ I thought that that was going to be a joint venture, but I’d never heard from Mick about how he’d like me to share the royalties. It’s the very least I can do to thank Mick for turning what could of been an ordinary record into an iconic huge song for me over the years.”27
It was hard to imagine that the worldly mixture of humor, spite, and resignation in “You’re So Vain” could have arrived in an earlier decade. It was a fitting anthem for a year that witnessed the toppling of many powerful men, from President Nixon to Marlon Brando’s character in Last Tango in Paris, branded “Égoiste!” by Maria Schneider before she shoots him. On television’s first reality show, An American Family, Pat Loud inspected her husband’s credit card receipts and discovered his philandering, then cornered him when he returned home from a business trip. “I’ve spoken to a lawyer, and this is his card … and I’d like to have you move out.”
“Fair deal,” he managed with false bravado. “I won’t have to pack.”
Newsweek’s March 12 issue featured the Louds on the cover with the headline THE BROKEN FAMILY. In Sweden, writer-director Ingmar Bergman helmed a six-part miniseries titled Scenes from a Marriage that also chronicled a couple’s dissolution, starring Liv Ullmann. The Swedish media claimed the country’s divorce rate doubled afterward.28
In the US, the percentage of marriages that ended in divorce had spiked at 43 percent right after World War II, then dipped to 26 percent in 1950, down to 21 percent by 1958 (per the US Department of Health). But it climbed back to 26 percent in 1967 and increased rapidly thereafter, partially due to the Pill and the success of the women’s movement in securing greater employment opportunities.
Many historians also consider the rise of no-fault divorce a primary factor. In previous decades, one partner had to prove that the other broke the marital contract through adultery or cruelty, often necessitating hiring a private investigator to follow the spouse to gather evidence. After a handful of states began allowing couples to claim irreconcilable differences in the 1960s, a slew of states followed suit in the early 1970s. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the divorce rate increased to 35 percent in 1970, then to 43 percent in 1973, on the way to its all-time peak of 53 percent in 1979.
60 Minutes aired a segment on August 17 in which a private detective observed that he used to chase only husbands who vanished, but now investigated the disappearance of an equal number of women. He theorized the women’s liberation movement had inspired them to leave their marriages. The episode was based on a Life magazine cover story on Wanda Adams called “Dropout Wife (A Striking Current Phenomenon).” On 60 Minutes, Adams explained how she felt restless in her marriage and missed outside stimulation, so she left to move in with two other women, taking her daughter while her husband kept the two boys, shocking many viewers.
In February, Loretta Lynn’s country No. 1 “Rated X” described the fallout from her split with her husband: his friends hit on her, while the women in the community talked behind her back. Even Tammy Wynette, the most vocal advocate for standing by one’s man, released “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” in which her four-year-old plays dress-up and says, “I want a divorce.”
The dissolution of one of the country’s most famous couples played out in real time on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. The couple had engineered a remarkable comeback from the previous decade. After their films Good Times and Chastity failed at the box office, they owed the IRS $270,000 and found themselves playing deserted casino nightclubs.29 During a gig opening for Pat Boone at the Flamingo in Vegas, Cher started needling Sonny, and the audience started laughing. She began trying to make the band laugh by calling her husband “dummy” or staring with eyes glazed over in boredom while he spoke. Their onstage shtick synced with the zeitgeist of “putting down the man.” CBS gave them a variety show, the writers helped Cher eviscerate Sonny, and the program was one of the top three from 1971 to 1973.
Behind the scenes, they lived in different parts of the house, though he still tried to control when she left and went to bed. The only time he liked her going out was to shop, though he didn’t actually want to hang out with her. He went out on his own and cheated. She stayed faithful for a while, then started seeing men in their touring band and, briefly, Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin. Sonny didn’t care; he just told her to keep the illusion going. “All we did was work. That was our relationship: work,” she said. “For five years before I left him, I wanted to leave, but The Sonny and Cher Show was so popular that I was afraid.”30
“America will hate you,” Sonny warned. “You’ll never work again.”31
Then she ran into manager David Geffen at a Neil Young concert. She didn’t recognize him, though she’d met him a decade before when he was a gofer for Phil Spector and she sang backup on Spector’s records. Now they hit it off. Cher thought she’d found a new gay friend to hang with, but Geffen told his therapist the next day he was in love with her. To her surprise, she found herself embarking on an affair with him that week.32 The relationship lasted two years.
Even though Bono was seeing other women, he told her not to see Geffen, no doubt recognizing the threat he represented. Geffen reviewed Cher’s contract and determined quickly that it was “slave labor.”33 Her solo hit “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” was MCA’S bestselling single, yet Bono received half her profits. “Half-Breed” and “Dark Lady” were two more solo No. 1s that he got a piece of.34 Geffen connected Cher with Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra’s attorney to help her file for divorce, claiming “involuntary servitude.”35
A similar scenario played out in the realm of country music, though this TV/recording duo was never married. Dolly Parton said, “I was trying to get away on my own because I had promised to stay with Porter [Wagoner’s TV] show for five years. I had been there for seven. And we fought a lot. We were very much alike. We were both stubborn.”36 Also, Parton noted, “I don’t mean this in a bad way, so don’t play it up that way—but he was very much a male chauvinist pig.… That’s why we fought like crazy, because I wouldn’t put up with a bunch of stuff. Out of respect for him, I knew he was the boss, and I would go along to where I felt this was reasonable for me. But once it passed points where it was like, your way or my way, and this is just to control, to prove to you that I can do it, then I would just pitch a damn fit. I wouldn’t care if it killed me.”37
Whenever she broached the subject of leaving, he would grow irate about breach of contract, so she decided the way to best communicate was by writing “I Will Always Love You.” “It’s saying, ‘Just because I’m going, don’t mean I won’t love you. I appreciate you, and I hope you do great, and I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I’m out of here.’ … And I took it in the next morning. I said, ‘Sit down, Porter. I’ve written this song, and I want you to hear it.’ So I did sing it. And he was crying. He said, ‘That’s the prettiest song I ever heard. And you can go, providing I get to produce that record.’”38
She cut it on June 13 in Nashville and rode it to the No. 1 country spot twice, in 1974 and again in 1981 when it was featured in her film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Elvis Presley wanted to record it, which thrilled Parton—until his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, insisted she had to share half the songwriting royalties with the Presley Organization as part of the deal. She turned them down. People told her she was crazy: it was Elvis Presley. “And I cried all night.… [But] something in my heart said, ‘Don’t do that.’”39
In 1992, Whitney Houston covered it and topped the pop charts for fourteen weeks—the biggest-selling single ever by a female. And thus, Dolly said, “I made enough money to buy Graceland.”40 Though she didn’t. By that point she already had her own theme park, Dollywood.