Helplessly Hoping
I am yours, you are mine,
You are what you are
You make it hard
—STEPHEN STILLS, “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”
IN July 1968, while I was back in New York, Cass Elliot had a party in L.A., where David Crosby renewed an earlier friendship with Graham Nash, a singer with the English rock trio the Hollies. At some point in the evening Stephen showed up. In the creative brew that seemed always to be simmering in the canyons of Los Angeles, David, Stephen, and Graham sang together for the first time at that party, and the magic, Cass told me later, was tangible.
David and Stephen began lobbying hard for Graham to leave the Hollies, as well as his recording contract with Epic. By the end of the summer, Graham was in. He relocated to L.A., and the trio Crosby, Stills and Nash would begin its spectacular rise. Graham Nash brought a great deal more than the brilliant voice that filled in the high end of the trio’s harmonies. His calmness and his quiet wisdom proved invaluable over the years to come.
Meantime, I myself did not want to pack up and move to L.A., and therein, I think, lay the seeds of trouble in my affair with Stephen. On the surface, things appeared to be barreling ahead full steam, but, as in a beautiful old house bought on an impulse, the cracks began to show. New York had been my home for six years when Stephen and I met. If my heart sometimes still longed for Colorado and the grandeur of the Rockies, I had found my true place among the skyscrapers, hustle and bustle, dirt, noise, and frenzy of the Big Apple.
By now I was playing concerts all over the world, and when I wasn’t on the road singing, I was either fine-tuning a record in the studio, as I was doing now in Los Angeles, or planning the next album. I would return to New York at the end of every tour, every weekend of shows, to my son, to my cats, my manager, my therapist, my singing teacher, my friends, and now, not to Michael.
And there were the Sullivanians to contend with, always opposed to steady relationships, always encouraging free love and open marriage. I was seeing Julie Schneider now, after seven years with Ralph. It would not be until I was well out of the camp of my therapists that I had some idea of what had happened to me.
One day I mentioned to Stephen that I was going home to New York and would be talking to my therapist about us, about me, about everything.
“I hate shrinks like I hate bad gas in my car,” Stephen said in an angry voice, “and I hate New York!” He stalked into the bathroom and turned on the light. In the coming weeks we continued the argument—about New York, about my therapist, and about my moving to L.A. Of course I needed it all, and didn’t want to believe that my life in New York and all the rest could be incompatible with my romance with Stephen.
I always felt that any difficulties Stephen and I had were my fault, but looking back, I am quite sure now that it takes two not to tango. And I was learning that the magic and passion of our romance was never going to be enough to make me want to live in L.A. Even when Elektra had moved its studios from New York to L.A., joining Columbia and Capitol and many other artists, the lure of the West Coast wasn’t enough to make me want to leave the city.
I thought if I had to live in L.A., I would crawl into a small hole in some wall and expire—from fear, boredom, sunlight, and bad memories. Los Angeles still held the ghosts of childhood pain for me, of my parents’ unhappiness, of my mother running out of our white stucco house in west L.A. at three in the morning in her nightgown, with my drunken, blind father running after her, seeing with his uncanny radar, and dragging her back into the house, where I screamed and hurled myself into my mother’s arms, crying, “Don’t leave, don’t leave!” She never did, but the memory of those bitter nights haunted me.
In New York I tried to contemplate, tried to meditate, tried not to drink so much. I tried to look for God, went to see gurus, met the Maharishi, and heard Krishnamurti speak at the New School in Greenwich Village. I went to my sessions with Ralph and then Julie, attended yoga classes and threw the I Ching (the process of casting coins or reading yarrow stalks, which tells you what ancient reading you have been given), and continued, between antiwar demonstrations and meetings of like-minded activists, to search for serenity and peace.
Following the party line of his group, Ralph encouraged me to see other people, not to have monogamous relationships, and to work on my freedom, my career, my wants and needs.
Stephen had a few things to say about all of this in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.”
Friday evening, Sunday in the afternoon
What have you got to lose?
Tuesday morning, please be gone, I’m tired of you
What have you got to lose?
Thursdays and Saturdays?
What have you got to lose?
Stephen was very committed to his own path and profession, just as I was to mine. He had already had a successful career with Buffalo Springfield, and was an amazing musician. I had never heard playing like his. Stephen’s guitar was a voice with a personality, changing depending on the song but always finding the right path. Sometimes his sound reminded me of the old blues players, such as Son House in his white shirt and tie. Sometimes Stephen’s guitar would take off its tie and two-step in a country manner, as if it were wearing spurs and calling the dance. Then it could be very liquid. It always rippled along, filling the empty places in a song, and in my heart. I think I was always as much in love with Stephen’s great talent as a musician as I was with him.
We were both stubborn, and when we fought, we fought hard—about where we were going, what each of us wanted from our relationship. These were arguments that seemed to have no satisfactory conclusion. Afterward, we would kiss and make up and go on with our romance, trying to avoid the subjects that caused pain and to appreciate the wonderful things that were happening in our lives, in our careers, and in our love affair.
ONE day my manager, Harold, called to say that Life wanted to do a cover story on me. One of Life’s staffers, Irene Neves, thought that my music might stand in meaningful contrast to the violent conflicts—social, cultural, political, and military—that seemed to enmesh America in the turbulent spring of 1969. Irene wanted my face on the cover. It would not be out until May 1969.
“We can call you ‘the gentle voice amid the strife,’ ” she told me. I said I hoped to God it would do some good, but I doubted it would.
Rowland Scherman, the photographer, wanted to have pictures of me with Joni Mitchell, so we made trips to visit Joni at her home in Laurel Canyon. She and I posed in the tree house in her yard, and Joni and I played our guitars in her cabinlike living room, which was filled with sparkling chandeliers and stained glass and kittens (including the calico I had sent her the year before). Cookie was there with Joni and me. Irene and Rowland followed me—and sometimes Stephen—around the country as I performed concerts on my regular autumn schedule. Stephen and I wound up at Carnegie Hall in New York City later that year. There were photos of us together, looking as happy as two lovers could be. But we were grappling with a lot of tension, issues of control, and our age difference.
He wrote me from ten thousand feet above sea level on his way to Mexico to see friends and hang out in the sun for a week. His script wandered across the thin blue writing paper stamped “Eastern Airlines”: “I am going to get good and drunk now. Am I only too young to fathom your wretched old self?” I knew I loved him, but I didn’t know the answer to that simple question.
Before telling me he loved me, he wrote: “There’s only one person on God’s green earth that’s stronger, tougher, and wiser than you! And that’s me.”
I knew he was right, and still, I wanted to run.
IN November 1968, as the final mixes on Who Knows Where the Time Goes were being readied, I got a call from Ulu Grosbard, the director. He wanted to use my song “Albatross,” from Wildflowers, for The Subject Was Roses, which he was filming with Patricia Neal and Martin Sheen. I sent Ulu rough mixes of the new album and he thought “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” would also be right for the movie. He asked if we could produce a more up-tempo version, which brought Stephen and me back to the studio.
The night Stephen and I finished recording, I had a plane to catch to New York. Stephen said he was going to stick around the studio for a little while. I later learned that he gave John Haeny a hundred dollars and told him to “roll tape.” Stephen said John could leave and he would turn off the machines when he was finished.
What Stephen recorded that night, alone with his guitar in the darkness, would not be revealed for forty years.
THE passion and intensity of my relationship with Stephen, and its troubles, reached its peak during the fall and winter of 1968, when political and cultural fires raged across America.
Who Knows Where the Time Goes was released in November 1968, and “Someday Soon” immediately hit the charts. I went on the road with my touring band, and for a while even managed to ease up a little on my drinking. That was partly the result of some diet pills given to me by the newest in a long line of doctors.
It would be many years before I could admit that my use of alcohol might have played a role in the breakup of my romance with Stephen. As the friction increased between us, I convinced myself that our quarrels were the necessary fuel of a great affair of the heart. But probably because of alcohol I couldn’t tell what was normal from what wasn’t, and by now alcohol had resumed its grip on me.
I could not seem to surrender and stay in one place long enough to find out what was going on. I was losing control of our romance, and my life.
The one thing that remained stable and steady in those years, like a long marriage, was my visits to my psychologists. I paid for their cars, their houses, helped send their children to private schools.
On the cover of Who Knows Where the Time Goes is a photo by Len Steckler of me peering out from a field of the deepest blue, with my eyes wide open.
I was seeing things clearly out of those eyes, or so I thought.