This is the Life
A friend recently gave me a biography of Joni Mitchell and I’ve kept it in the car as a casual read while I’m waiting for the ferry on either side. There’s a lot of waiting around involved in living on an island. I worshipped Joni as a sixteen year old and memorized all her great hits word for word. I can still break into “The Last Time I Saw Richard” “This flight tonight” “A Case of You”, etc. I might have difficulty with the high notes. She was like a god to me. Now, of course, I feel like we could talk across the kitchen table. Funny how age is such a leveller. Our stories are both done. We’ve both lived a life. We can chat. Now. Almost as equals. Isn’t that strange?
I was skimming through the book and came to a part where she found herself pregnant at forty-two while she was on a concert tour. She realized it was a last chance for a baby, but she’d been drinking heavily, staying up all night doing lots of cocaine, not eating, was worried about all this and then she started to bleed. She went to a clinic and as the doctor was giving her a d&c she heard him keep saying, “I can’t believe I’m doing this to Joni Mitchell”. Her partner, music producer Larry Klein, was on a concorde jet on his way to London at the time. Joni says a few pages later that the music world has always been run by gangsters, gangsters who happened to like music.
And as I sat there at the ferry landing the antique phrase from the 1920s, “racketing around” came into my mind, a life of racketing around, along with an image of my dead beautiful, singing auntie, Glenice. There is a blonde singer in my family too. Not as famous as Joni, and she didn’t write her own songs, but she was even prettier than her. Joni had a rather long, horsey face. The Vikings swept down into the middle of England and there are a lot of blue-eyed blondes in my family, and everybody else’s family in the region, as a result. I was an insipid blonde. My sister Deb is the stand-up blonde. But Glenice was a world apart.
Glenice swept into my eleven year-old world on a dark and stormy night. I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Derby and we must have been getting ready for bed when there was a knock on the door. The rainy night revealed my auntie Glenice standing at the threshold in a long black wool, hooded cloak. She entered the house with apologies for being so late and her speaking voice was so velvety and low I was mesmerized by it. She had black eye-liner rimming her eyes, long straight blonde hair with a fringe, pale pink lipstick, a short mini-dress and black knee boots. She was the most glamorous thing I had seen in my life, outside of a movie or magazine. She was a visitor from another world. A better, more fun world. She asked if I would “be a love and get me an ashtray”. She then proceeded to smoke using a black cigarette holder. Everyone smoked in those days, if you didn’t you were a bit suspect, like being a non-drinker. Perhaps you were a homosexual? But nobody smoked like that! No one I had encountered in my eleven year-old life. Who was this exotic woman in my world of fluffy slippers and “house coats”. I could hardly sleep.
There were other encounters with Glenice over the years. I remember rummaging through her wardrobe in London looking at her clothes, the rhinestone jackets, tulle-skirted dresses, fur coats. I remember her banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and swearing and shouting at the people upstairs to be quiet and it was so shocking. I had never heard anyone talk like that. And like Amy MacDonald sang in “This is the Life”:
And you’re singin’ the songs
Thinkin’ this is the life
And you wake up in the mornin’
And your head feels twice the size
And you’re thinkin’ where you gonna go
Where you gonna sleep tonight?
But it was the crooks in the business and the constant rip-offs of pay and one thing or another and all the accumulated madness of her life that killed her at fifty-three of liver cancer. And when she went I was thirty-six and I remember thinking, where’s the tragedy in this? She’s had a child, husband, she’s lived a life, she’s old enough to die, but now, of course, at seventy I realize that wasn’t old. Although she’d lost her looks already, and not everybody has, at fifty-three. But, she was sick and nobody knew. Least of all the London doctors who kept diagnosing lumbago.
The last time I saw Glenice she told me to buy leather boots in Brindisi, on the heel of Italy, if I was going traveling in Europe. Everyone knew that was the best place to buy boots.
The last word from Glenice was through a Ouija board many years ago. I apologized for not helping her out with her rent money for that month in 1975 like I said I was going to. I had spent the money on something else. She said she knew that, of course, because she had all the information in heaven, and it was all water under the bridge and she said she wanted me to live a happy life.
The family still has a recording of her from the late 1950s, when I guess she was about 18, singing Rosemary Clooney’s song, “Sentimental Journey” and it’s the most mellow, glamorous voice ever. The life of an artist is hard. On the other hand, you don’t need to pinch yourself to know you’re alive.
