China
Paul and I were spending the night at the Sheraton in New York (although Paul swears up and down it was some other hotel) when I decided that having a baby would be a good thing. The sixties had come to a close, the seventies were dawning, and music had taken up residence in the smaller areas of my brain, far overshadowed by purchasing power. Paul and I were living together in our new beach house, acquiring lots of expensive accessories: a hand-tiled pool, a geodesic dome, a gold Mercedes, a black Porsche, and a small recording studio in the lower floor of the beach house. It was the right time for a baby.
I imagined that the combination of Paul and me would be pretty interesting, since both of us are fairly strong and obnoxious, and it turned out that, for better or worse, our daughter China did end up inheriting both of those characteristics. When we were getting ready to make love in New York that night, I told Paul, “I'd really like to have your child. You don't have to marry me or take care of it or any of that kind of stuff,” I added, “because I can do that myself.”
Paul gave me that smile, the one where only one corner of his mouth goes up. Clearly, he was game, and he loved children. I had no idea if I was ovulating that night, but we knew we were making love to get pregnant, which made it very sexy. Later, when I counted back the days, the timing would have been just about right for it to have happened that very night.
I was comfortable having sex during my pregnancy; I viewed it like feeding the baby. You know, sperm must be healthy. It's protein. So I just went ahead and did it, because what are you going to do, poke its eyes out? I don't think women are set up that way. I've seen pictures of the way a baby sits in your stomach, so I always figured, as long as you didn't bonk the fontanel in the wrong spot, it was okay with me.
So, pregnant and planning in our Bolinas house, I arranged the brass crib next to the antique wooden cradle (a gift from Bill Graham) in a pink room that was already filled with infant necessities and other presents from family and fans. It was a peaceful and expansive time during which we tried to build the “perfect” atmosphere. A child was coming.
As part of the preparations, I bought a small house down the street from our main residence to accommodate the baby's nanny, Pat Dugan. A wonderfully easygoing woman, she was recommended by Bill Graham, who had hired her to oversee the food concession at the Fillmore Auditorium. She was exactly what we needed; she was great with children (she had four of her own) and she had a talent for cooking that would make Wolfgang Puck's grub taste like a bad day at Burger King. Besides her unusual desire not to learn to drive, she was one of the most normal, wonderful people I've ever met, before or since. To this day, she still has never driven a car, preferring to find her way to places with the help of friends or public transportation, a rare behavioral pattern for any Californian.
I wrote some lyrics and a few pieces of songs during the time I was pregnant, but most of my energy was focused on what I was determined to be: the atypical mother. This child would see it all, I promised myself. She'd have the education and the freedom to investigate all cultural forms. No religious or social imperatives would be imposed on her Aquarian mind. No instructions on how to make the perfect Martha Stewart melon balls—unless she asked for that kind of silly domestication. And I'd ask her, “What fascinates you? What do you want to do when you grow up?” Not, “Whom do you want to marry and how many children will you have?” She'd travel and learn, love and laugh, and experience all of it with an extended family of artists who'd show her, by example, that anything was possible.
Before my daughter arrived, I went on two rock-and-roll road trips, fat with child, trying to sing some budding right-wingers out of their my-country-right-or-wrong mindset. At the time, I really thought (hoped?) that the Republican party would just break up and dissolve in its own denture cleanser.
Youthful optimism and determination.
Riding high, sometimes literally, I was living a sixties romance novel. Paul and Grace, the unmarried romantic harbingers of “the Dawning Age of Aquarius,” were touring, saying it like it is, and waiting for a child to arrive. Some people probably thought that touring while I was pregnant was a foolish idea, but I thought it was fine. In fact, I couldn't imagine not doing it.
Since performing was such a huge part of who I was, I saw no reason to stop. I wore those big Middle Eastern caftans to free up the expanding gut, I ate for two, I flaunted my radical unmarried status, and accepted all the “May I carry that for you?” assistance I could get. People become very pleasant and helpful around pregnant women. Open the doors, fire up the torpedoes, let's cover the planet with the greediest species on earth.
At about 10:00 p.m. on January 24, 1971, while Paul and I were entertaining a coke dealer and his wife at our home (no, I didn't do cocaine while pregnant), I said, “Paul, saddle up the mare, we're going to Jerusalem.” It was time. We drove forty-five minutes from Bolinas to French Hospital in San Francisco, where they took me to a cell with a gurney in it. When they offered me a three-milligram Valium, I almost laughed out loud. For a person like me who'd literally wallowed in a pharmacopoeia, three milligrams of anything was not about to do the job. And incidentally, that was the last drug of the evening, not by any choice of mine.
I'd previously told my doctor that when I was ready to give birth, I wanted an anesthetist to administer copious amounts of whatever they had in stock to kill the pain. But the anesthetist never showed up. In the spaces between the contractions that were turning me into a rictus-faced gargoyle, I inquired as to the whereabouts of the missing drug dispenser.
“Oh, he isn't here yet,” the various nurses informed me, something they continued to say all night long. I hadn't taken any La Maze or La Modge or whatever-it-is classes, because no matter what kind of cute tiny breaths you practice, I figured that in the final analysis, you've got a mass the size of a cantaloupe coming out of a hole the size of a fifty-cent piece.
That simple bit of physics means PAIN.
I told myself that women had been doing this thing called childbirth forever. Don't worry about it, I kept thinking. Remember that it's only a few hours of hideous groaning and then you have a whole new person to love. So I had my daughter by natural childbirth, an accidental route I'd definitely not chosen.
I'd been warned that newborns do not look like the Gerber baby. They said “it” would probably be a blood-covered, squalling, blue-faced, wrinkled mess, so I was ready for a remnant of some atomic mishap. But she was a lovely, smooth-skinned, pink-and-white being, content to just lie there and be cuddled and admired by her mother.
On January 25, as I held my newborn baby in my arms, a Spanish nurse came into my hospital room to attend to antiseptics and linens. She was holding a framed certificate that looked like a high school diploma, and she said, “We give these to all the new mothers. You see, it says where she was born, what time, and the name of the baby goes here.” She pointed to an empty line in the document. “What is your baby's name?” she asked.
I noticed a crucifix around her neck and spontaneously said, “god. We spell it with a small g because we want her to be humble.”
It was only a few hours after my baby had arrived, I was holding the miracle of birth in my arms, and I was already messing with somebody's head. The nurse asked me to repeat what I'd said. I obliged her. After hearing it a second time, deciding that the blasphemy was real, she haltingly entered “god” on the parchment, probably expecting to go through her life repeating novenas for her participation in this profanity. When she was through filling in the irreverent name, she ran to the telephone to call Herb Caen, the same beloved San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist who'd inspired me to leave Florida many years prior. He published the information about the birth and the supposed appellation Paul and I had chosen, which would, by virtue of the deity's extensive popularity, make it impossible for my daughter to live up to her presumed given name.
Her real name is China. San Francisco has a large Asian community, and Paul and I had observed that the Chinese follow spiritual practices that seem to offer more equanimity than the fear- and guilt-ridden dogmas of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Thousands of years before the Western Bible was written and rewritten and burned, and rewritten again during the Inquisition, the Oriental people had realized that the yin/yang or 50/50 take on human existence produces more acceptance and self-control. To Paul and me, this seemed a better alternative to the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” ethic that permeates Western civilization. And aside from the fancy polemics, China is the name of a delicate and feminine form of artistic expression in clay, as well as useful eating utensils.
Seemed like a good combo.
Since I never paid much attention to the couplings of other celebrities, I didn't know that Michelle Phillips, another rock-and-roll mom, had named her child Chynna. In fact, I didn't know that Michelle even had a child. Several years after the birth of my daughter, when someone asked me if I'd made the spelling different from the name of Michelle's daughter on purpose, the answer was no. In fact, I was so intent on being original with my daughter's name, if I'd known Michelle's kid was named Chynna, I probably would have called mine Xlopdy. Circumstances were such that two of the very limited number of couples in the sixties rock world who played together and loved together just happened to give approximately the same name to their firstborn girl.
A million to one.