Pack Up Your Sorrow:
Russian Songs, Broken Hearts, and Max
If somehow you could pack up your sorrows
And give them all to me …
—RICHARD FARIÑA AND PAULINE BAEZ MARDIN,
“Pack Up Your Sorrows”
IN September 1964 I started looking for a New York apartment big enough for Clark and me. The divorce hearing was scheduled for October 16 and the custody hearing for December 18, after which the judge would decide within a few months whether I would have my son with me. I had been advised by my lawyers to have an apartment in the city that could accommodate us both.
I found a place on West 79th Street near the corner of Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. I was nearer to my shrink and in a neighborhood of big pre-war apartment buildings, solid and grand—large spaces that were home to artists and all kinds of interesting people, a world somewhat different from the hippies and folkies of Greenwich Village. I was happy to be there but missed the Village. One of my neighbors was Elisabeth Bing, the well-known Lamaze practitioner. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and his wife would come to see Elisabeth and stop by to visit. I had room for Clark and was praying that Fannie Lou was right, that one day he would come to stay for good.
By the end of September I was totally settled into my new home. I even had my piano moved in—an old, great-sounding Steinway on which I have written most of my songs. While the divorce hearing went quickly, the final decision on custody of Clark would not be reached for another five months. Meanwhile, Peter remarried on December 27, to the woman he had been living with since our separation, Sue Tanstall, who worked at the American Friends Service Committee in Boston.
Harold Leventhal, my devoted manager, had been working for a number of months on a trip to the Soviet Union. The Cold War had kept most American performers off of the concert circuit in the USSR, but there was beginning to be a softening between the countries and a newfound taste for negotiation and appeasement in the arts as well as in politics. It was a window that would not be open long, but Harold thought he might be able to arrange a few shows in Poland and then in Moscow and other Soviet cities. He began to make real plans, talking to other artists about joining me. It would, in fact, be groundbreaking.
As soon as I found out about the upcoming tour possibilities for the following year in the USSR, I went to the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village and signed up for Russian language classes. For such a trip, we would have to plan far ahead. Soon I could write a little Cyrillic and say a few phrases. It would be an exciting time, and I hoped by then that I would have custody of my son. Perhaps he could join me on this amazing journey. He was certainly old enough to come with me now, and would love the travel and the music, the adventure of being in a new and exciting place where few Americans had visited.
I made another trip to Carmel in the fall of 1964 to sing and spend some time with Mimi and Dick in their little cabin near Joan’s. I visited with them one magical night in September 1964 and listened to their startling, unique songs, two of which I would record.
Dick wrote “Pack Up Your Sorrows,” with help from Mimi’s sister Pauline—it seemed the family was falling in love with Richard, giving him the space he needed, embracing him. Dick and Mimi first played this and some of the other new material for me in their enchanted house. The fireplace crackled and its light danced on the walls that night. I can see Mimi’s fingers on the guitar and the dulcimer laid across Dick’s lap, the quill he used to play it with plucking the strings, as they sang this sweet, simple song. Dick was the dark-haired gypsy with the wickedly handsome smile and all those songs in his heart waiting to be written, waiting to be completed by a woman he loved. Mimi was that woman now, gifted and beautiful, and the song spun out between them like jewels floating in a pond of light.
If somehow you could pack up your sorrows
And give them all to me
You would lose them, I know how to use them
Give them all to me.
I drank wine out of a silver cup, watched the fire, and listened. It was a truly mystical night of music and beauty.
Back in New York one weekend in October 1964, the journalist Al Aronowitz, who had become a friend after he wrote a piece about me for the New York Post in his column “The Beat Generation,” invited me to Woodstock. We were guests at Albert Grossman’s rambling old stone mansion. Aronowitz had recently introduced Dylan to the Beatles. He and Bob were friends, and Bob, Suze Rotolo, Albert Grossman, and his wife, Sally, were all there. We had a fine evening of laughter, food, and talk of music and art, and I remember going to bed exhausted and happy.
About three in the morning I was awakened by the sound of Dylan’s voice—which by then I knew well—drifting up the stone stairs outside my bedroom. I opened my door and, dressed in my best terry-cloth bathrobe, crept down the stairs to listen. I heard Dylan’s voice coming from a room at the bottom of the stairs, seducing and captivating as he sang, over and over, the lyrics and newly found melody to “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
The walls of Albert’s Woodstock retreat and the stairs on which I was perched to listen to Bob were weathered fieldstone. I sat in my robe, shivering a little from the cool air but mostly from the sweet sound of Bob’s voice, and those lyrics that struck my heart. In the morning over steaming cups of coffee, I thought about the song and about the genius who had written it. When he came down at noon, rubbing sleep from his eyes and running his hands through his rumpled hair, I told him that I wanted to sing the song I had heard on the stairs. Once back in New York, I would record it for my new album, Judy Collins Fifth Album.
IN 1965, after I had been living on the Upper West Side for a few months, and as preparations for the USSR trip were taking shape, I suddenly found myself facing an unexpected roadblock: I was having terrible trouble with my voice. I asked around for names of people to whom I could go for help, maybe a voice coach or singing teacher. They said I should seek out Max Margulis. I carried his phone number around on a tattered piece of paper.
One day when I was so hoarse I could barely speak, I called the number I had been given for Max. A man answered, and I introduced myself in my croaking voice and told him he had been recommended to me. He asked for the names of those who had suggested I call him, and I mentioned Irma and Mordecai Bauman, who ran Indian Hill, an arts camp in the Berkshires, where Carly Simon, Arlo Guthrie, and many gifted musicians and artists had gone. Ray Boguslav, who played guitar for Harry Belafonte and was a serious, gifted pianist as well, had also told me that Max was the only game in town if you were looking for a great teacher. Max seemed pleased.
Then Max asked me what kind of music I sang, and I told him.
“Oh, you people are never serious,” he said, the graciousness gone from his voice. “I don’t want to waste my time.”
“But I need help—I’m losing my voice all the time. I don’t know what to do.” I was truly becoming desperate. “Please, just let me come and talk to you,” I begged.
He said no again, but less firmly. His voice softened. Finally he told me, “Well, perhaps we could talk. But only talk, you understand!” Then he gave me his address and went on, “You just ring the bell for 8B.”
My mouth dropped open. I said I would be there within two minutes.
Surprised, he said he just might be able to squeeze me in, and asked where I was.
“I live next door to you, in 8A.”
I walked out my door on the eighth floor of my building, took two steps past the elevator, and rang his bell. When he opened the door, of course I recognized him, a slight man with glasses—looking very much unlike the ogre I had spoken to on the phone. I could see he was prepared to frown, but a small smile came to his lips, and I sensed playfulness somewhere behind the frown. We had spoken in the elevator a couple of times, exchanging only the briefest of hellos, but our encounters had been pleasant.
Max shook my proffered hand and invited me into the room. There was a blue rug on the floor. The walls were hung with original works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, paintings and sketches. A parakeet sang from a small cage in the kitchen, and the scent of roasting chicken filled the room. Max gestured toward the Steinway grand that took over one corner, and we began.
“If you just stay faithful to what we are doing,” he told me that day and for all the days that came, “it will change your entire life. Singing and the study of the voice is the most complete therapy there is, because it engages the lungs, the brain, the body, the soul, and the spirit.” Throughout my years with Max, he would emphasize two principles: “Clarity and phrasing are the secret.”
I endured the fight to get beyond the break in the voice, which all singers have and which the bel canto technique addresses. Bel canto, Max told me, is the Italian vocal style that includes a perfect legato line throughout the range of the voice, from top to bottom, and the use of a shimmering tone in the higher registers but without noticeable vibrato. In bel canto, Max would say, the voice should always be flexible, clear, and unencumbered by shouted phrases or harshness of tone.
Of course, this sounds deceptively simple. Transforming a rough, uneven voice that was “natural” but had great flaws took more than three years. I might get over the break between the upper and lower registers easily one week but at the next lesson be unable to do so. Max would sit at the piano; I would stand, a cup of tea prepared by Max’s wife, Helen, in front of me.
Helen was a pianist and cellist with dark hair to her waist who always made me tea and let her parakeet, Papageno, sit on my shoulder. He was named after the character in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Sometimes toward the end of a lesson Helen would come stand in the archway to the kitchen and listen.
“That was a wonderful sound you were making there,” she would say. “That was so clear.” They had been married for years. She was from Texas. Max would tell me he never went to Texas after the first time because of the chiggers.
Max’s father had been an opera singer in Chicago, and Max himself was an accomplished violinist. He had been friends with Gorky and de Kooning when the painters first came to New York—de Kooning as a stowaway—in the late 1920s. The trio shared a cold-water flat in lower Manhattan and one winter coat, which they passed between them when a trip to the freezing outdoors was required. Max had observed (aloud, no doubt, since they were very forthright with one another) that de Kooning seemed unable to paint hands accurately, and de Kooning responded by painting a picture of Max with hands not exactly perfectly formed and giving the painting to Max. It was this painting that Max got permission from de Kooning to sell—it eventually wound up in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—so that Max could buy the rare Guarneri violin he had coveted all his life.
In the 1960s, Max taught singing to Italian tenors and basses and French sopranos who left a scent of exotic colognes in the hallway and the elevator. He taught Laurence Olivier to sing for the movie The Entertainer. He wrote for The New Masses, one of the left-wing papers of the time. He loved Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavarotti, and Ella Fitzgerald. He seldom ventured out to see anyone in anything, but when he did go out, you knew it was going to be something worthwhile.
Singing and speaking, Max believed, come from the same instrument, so singers and actors alike found his teaching valuable. Stacy Keach was his student for a time, as were Harris Yulin and Sigourney Weaver (who says her friends laugh when she says she studied with Judy Collins’ singing teacher).
He would sing “Vissi d’arte” or “The Last Rose of Summer.” His voice was no voice at all, but I got the idea. I would repeat the phrase. He would nod. I would repeat the phrase again, this time thinking of the clarity, of the smooth transition, the long line, thinking through to the end of the phrase, as he would remind me to do. I would start an “ah,” the vowel clouded, trying to get from low to high or from high to low, past the break. Max would sing it clearly. I would try again. I would rest, just looking out the window, thinking, “This is mad. This man is crazy, maybe. What am I doing here? I should be at Max’s Kansas City, getting drunk with Paul Butterfield, not here in this apartment, staring at an Arshile Gorky painting. I am a folkie.” But I spent a few hours a week for the next thirty-two years of my life in Max’s living room, learning from an eccentric, enormously intelligent man who would teach me everything about singing with the whole voice. I went in with a voice that was breaking up, hoarse on a regular basis, full of dark tones and compromised clarity. And then one day a few years after I first walked in that door, just like that, I sang the “oh” and the “ah” in a seamless ribbon of tone from top to bottom, no break, no cloud, and no clutter. Just music.
“Clear as a bell,” he said, and smiled, a rare thing for Max.
CLARK continued his visits to New York at least a couple of times a month for weekends and holidays. He had already made his bedroom in my new apartment into his own. Peter was not an unreasonable person, and since we had practically an amicable divorce, there was no need to legislate my visits while I was trying to get full custody of my son. The judge had instructed us to make arrangements between us for Clark’s benefit.
At the final custody hearing in late 1964, Ralph’s therapist had testified to my fitness as a mother, and encouraged the court to grant me custody. My mother, Marjorie, and Harold Leventhal would both be there to speak on my behalf. My lawyers had been sure that I would not lose my case.
But in May 1965, I learned that I had lost custody of Clark. I remember standing in my new apartment, looking out the window at the passing traffic on 79th Street, weeping. I hurled the telephone across the room and, throwing myself down on the couch—my new couch, next to the piano that I would not be able to play for weeks—I just cried my eyes out. I plummeted into a deep depression, fearing I was going to go under.
My lawyers told me that one of the main reasons I had lost custody was because I was in therapy. Today, you might lose custody because you are not in therapy.
I got very, very drunk.
Of course.
I TOLD Harold I just could not go on with the trip we had been planning to the USSR. I imagined getting into bed and never getting up. I contemplated suicide. Again.
“I know this is terrible for you, but you must pull yourself together and do this trip,” Harold said in response to my whining. “This is one of those times when you find out just what you are made of. I know you can do this!” Harold could always bring me back to reality. A lot had been done to prepare for this tour by canceling or postponing all my other concerts for the summer. If I didn’t go, I also wouldn’t have income for months.
“This is a break in the Cold War,” Harold said. “It is a historic time. The promoters over there are eager to hear you, not just because you are an American folksinger, but because you are Judy Collins.”
Harold was very persuasive. “You must go. It means a lot to those who have not seen or heard much Western music in decades.” He had been able to get our visas, no mean feat in those days. The Tarriers would also be on the trip, another reason Harold told me I must not cancel. He would go with us as far as France, where we would have dinner one night with Big Joan Baez in Paris, where Al was working for UNESCO. From there we would go on to Poland with Arlene Cunningham, who worked for Harold and would be our road manager on the trip at last. I surrendered.
I called my ex-husband and asked him if I could have Clark for the month of August, after I got back from the USSR. Peter was strangely agreeable, and I was thrilled. That meant that I would be able to take a house out on Long Island, where we had friends, and Clark and I would have a good long stretch together in late summer. I told Harold I could manage it—just. I would go.
I would be with my old friend Eric Weissberg, who had played guitar and banjo on many of my albums. Clarence Cooper, a rail-thin man with a sweet, wood-smoky voice and heart problems, would also be part of our group on guitar. I adored Clarence, a shy and gentle man from Virginia. Clarence recorded the blues and gospel record Going’ Down the Road, for Elektra in 1954. I had known Coop since he replaced Alan Arkin and Bob Carey in the Tarriers, and had worked with him in Chicago. He appeared frail, and by the following year he had retired from the Tarriers. George Wein would ask Clarence’s help in putting together the blues and gospel shows for the Newport Folk Festival.
Also with us was Al Dana, who had replaced Marshall Brickman in the Tarriers. Our technical manager, John Gibbs, had a light heart and a light touch, and I knew he would make the music sound right and the hotels as comfortable as possible.
I had grown up reading Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Pasternak—Crime and Punishment, The Double, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Dr. Zhivago. I felt a closeness to Russians from reading all those books in the night, reading until I could not keep my eyes open. In my classes at the New School I had learned to say hello, goodbye, and thank you in Russian; from Ethel Raim, Walter’s ex, who made records with a group called the Pennywhistlers. I had even learned, over the course of the first six months of the year, to sing a song in Russian.
I called my mother and asked her if it would be all right if I took my sister, Holly, with me. I thought if I could just have my beloved sister along, I could make it. Holly was eleven and was thrilled at the prospect. She and I were very close, but in some ways, she felt more like my child than my sister, being only six years older than Clark. Mother agreed that Holly should join me for this trip, and I really don’t think I could have done it without her. She was articulate and great company even at eleven. She loved Clark; we talked about him all the time, filling the gap left by his absence. I was grateful for her presence in my life, and for the knowledge that the three of us would be together at the end of the summer.
After Paris, we flew to Warsaw, where we landed in the airport in Krakow, sang a concert that night, and then boarded a bus. In the morning we drove through the beautiful countryside, past houses with roofs of grass, chickens pecking among the flowers, women in their patterned aprons waving, men in work clothes, horses nodding as they pulled plows, children everywhere. Throughout Poland, our concerts were advertised as “Judy Collins and Her All-Negro Band.” Clarence, tall and dignified, was followed around in the towns by a gaggle of little blond boys and girls who had never seen a black man before. In Rzeszow, Poland, we had to delay our show for the night, postponing it till the next day, because the town needed the electricity that would have run the lights at the concert in order to operate the coal mine, its single source of income. At our stops along the way, when we needed a drink or a rest, we found what my sister Holly called “memory water,” a cold, bottled drink that was thirst- and sorrow-quenching.
About halfway through our travels into the lush, green Polish countryside, our bus passed a sign on the highway that read “Oswiecim”—Auschwitz. I knew we had to stop to pay our respects to those who had suffered unspeakable atrocities beyond those arches.
The man behind the wheel of the bus made gestures that indicated he had no idea what we wanted. Our translator intervened. A skull and crossbones greeted us with “Halt! Stol!” Barbed wire clung to the walls of dark buildings; rooms were piled high with shoes and eyeglasses, teeth and clothes; a sign spelled out “Krematorium.” We saw the open doors of ovens where bodies had been burned, and then peered into the shower rooms where the victims had been gassed after giving over their few precious belongings, murdered while the butterflies bobbed gently among the Queen Anne’s lace in the yard.
In stunned silence, we made our way to the only bright spot in this place of horror, a low-slung brick building where the children had painted brilliant colors, clouds, happy faces, and rainbows on the walls before they, too, perished.
Holly and I were weeping by the time we climbed back onto the bus, our eyes down, our minds numbed. Our driver said he was sorry we had stopped, but we disagreed, knowing it was important to have borne witness, to grieve, and to honor in some small way the victims of the Holocaust.
I was glad Arlene Cunningham had come on the trip. She worked for Harold and was a true professional and totally discreet—so much so that I would not know until much later that she had been an assistant and friend to the actor Montgomery Clift for many years, up until his death. She is a truly brilliant woman who later married my friend Dan Kramer, photographer and famous for the cover of the Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home, as well as many other iconic photos of the 1960s.
We flew to Moscow, and from there to the seaside cities in Russia. I taught Holly the Russian for tea and cheese and sang my Russian song in all the venues, where the audience would scream with delight, clap, and laugh at my Russian accent. Then they would demand, stomping their feet on the floor, that I sing it again. (When I got back from the trip Pete Seeger asked me to sing on his program Rainbow Quest. So I sang “Dorogoy Da.” My Russian was better by then.)
In Odessa, in an outdoor arena near the Potemkin Steps, the audience threw apples at me on the stage. This time, we had been advertised in Odessa as “Judy Collins and Her Rock and Roll Band,” and when that didn’t pan out, the sailors off the big ships in the Black Sea were not pleased. They wanted to rock and roll, and there we were, singing gentle folk songs. It was the first and, thankfully, the last time—so far—I have had to dodge apples on a stage!
Our translator, the zaftig Nadine, went onstage every night to introduce us in Russian and English. For these brief appearances, Nadine had borrowed a corset from the Bolshoi Ballet costume department. Holly and I cinched her into it before our show, pulling the strings while Nadine held her breath and braced herself against a wall with the two of us at her back, straining like mad dressmakers with their favorite mannequin. I don’t believe Nadine ever corrected the misimpression that we were a rock-and-roll band, the Tarriers and I, but she was good company and seemed to like our music. But she only ever gave us three choices in the restaurants, and since my Russian was not yet so hot, we never ate anything but beef Stroganoff, chicken Kiev, and lamb (shashlik).
I loved the Russian audiences. They were wildly enthusiastic and gave us standing ovations that sometimes lasted ten or fifteen minutes. People showed up with flowers, pictures of themselves and their families, and books about the cities we visited for us to take home to show our American friends. In one city on the Black Sea the audience stood in a pouring rain with umbrellas raised over their heads—umbrellas of every color—while we sang and sang, even after the main show was over, doing encore after encore. Sopping wet, they then gathered, a thousand or so of them, to greet us as we left the stage and went back onto our bus. The crowd swarmed over our bus, clapping and shouting, “We love you!” We were wet and happy. It took half the night to get back to our hotel.
I remember standing in line for hours in Moscow’s Red Square, staring at the ancient minarets and waiting to see Lenin’s tomb. I would drink to the revolution! I suppose I would actually drink to anything in those days. I had brought a bottle of strong dark vodka with me from Poland, and as it soon ran out, I decided I had to get as much booze as I could at the dinners because I was embarrassed to ask our translator to order bottles in the hotels and shops on the road.
We stayed in the Peking Hotel and drank slippery Russian vodka out of shot glasses, hurling the fiery silver down our throats. Finally, someone told us how to say “More vodka, please”—it was one of our Russian promoters, I think—and thank God! I was dying there, going into withdrawal. Clarence and Al Dana and I drank, and Arlene might have put a few away. Neither my sister, of course, nor Eric did any boozing. The Russians, who drank as much as I did, didn’t bat an eye. I was drinking half a fifth easily by then, but they couldn’t read my mind, and I was finally going to have to say “More, much more!”
In Moscow we sang at the Moscow Opera House, a white building adorned with curlicues, ribbonlike scrolls, and wedding cake filigree. The crowds were enthusiastic, applauding, stamping their feet, hollering, and carrying on until we did a number of encores in this great hall, where so many artists have performed, including Van Cliburn and Byron Janis, pianists who were often able to bridge the cultural gaps between the USSR and the United States. Our reviews, read to us by our translator, were ecstatic.
On our last day in Moscow Nadine and the reporter who’d traveled with us left us at the door of the American embassy. We were to be given a big party to celebrate the end of our trip, and we begged them to come, but they told us they could not because if they did, they would be accused of spying. The Cold War, we learned, had not thawed as much as we had been led to believe.
The party was at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. ambassador to the USSR, Foy D. Kohler. He was from Ohio and was our host that night. When we told him we were upset that our translator and the journalist could not join us at the embassy, he just laughed and remarked that the countries had come a long way but still had far to go. He, too, told us that if our Russian friends appeared at the U.S. embassy, they might be accused of spying, but also they might lose their membership in the Communist Party, and that would be very bad for them, since the Party was the only means of advancement and acceptance in the USSR.
We had a fine time at the embassy that last night in Moscow. The Americans and Russians who were there really knew how to drink. There was vodka aplenty! I was poured onto the plane home the next day, trying to look my best.
It had been a bittersweet trip, but by the time I was through, I was glad Harold had insisted I go. My sister, Holly Ann, had been such a lovely and enthusiastic presence. Her beauty, wonderful mind, and spirit helped me with the pain I was feeling about losing custody of Clark. She brought me smiles and kept me company all throughout the trip.
We visited great and fascinating countries whose histories were filled with shadow and light and whose people had welcomed me with their flowers, their cheers, and open arms. Someday, I promised myself, I would return.
But for now, I couldn’t wait to get home again to noisy, dirty, fabulous New York City—and to my son.