Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller

Author:Sheila Weller [Weller, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women's Studies, Composers & Musicians, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780743491471
Google: 4n5LMaA2xMsC
Amazon: 0743491483
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-04-07T12:00:00+00:00

True to her cohort, in early spring 1970, at just about the time of Ladies of the Canyon’s release, Joni split for the Mediterranean with a Canadian poet friend named Penelope. “I had difficulty…accepting my affluence and my success,” Joni later said, of this period. “Even the expression of it seemed distasteful.”

In Crete Joni and Penelope drove a mountain road through citrus orchards to a harbor enclosed like a half-curled hand by sandstone cliffs that dropped down to the azure sea. The cliffs housed 1,200-year-old tombs turned caves, originally the homes of the ancient Minoans. People still lived in them. This was Matala.

The two women rented an apartment in town. One night they went for ouzo at Dephini’s, a beachside taverna, where a wild-eyed, twenty-four-year-old North Carolinian held forth. His name was Cary Raditz. Cary had been an ad copywriter in Winston-Salem and had worked at an art gallery in Chapel Hill in his two postcollege years, but after running off to Matala, he had morphed into a larger-than-life character with long, curly red hair and a devilish beard. One night he dressed like an Afghan horseman—in Pakol cap, loose pants, tunic, and sandals; the next, like a Greek shepherd in blouselike shirt, flared pants, short jacket, and knee-high fisherman’s jackboots, with embroidered caskol tied around his brow. A crooked walking stick completed the conceit. In his one year in Matala, Cary had commandeered a cave to live in, had opened a leather shop and begun making what he boasts were “the best sandals in southern Europe,” and had taken several murky trips to Afghanistan, barely evading arrest, which heightened his prestige among the hip and druggy expats. “I was an outlaw,” he recalls now, “and a self-created sonuvabitch.”

Cary was Dephini’s—he was cook, bartender, dishwasher, waiter, and bouncer. He also marketed his sandals there. Diners would take their shoes off and Cary would trace their feet on parchment for his partners at his shop, while he danced around, Zorba-style, simultaneously manning the oven, the bar, and the cash register.

“All these other men were putting Joni on a pedestal, and she didn’t like that,” notes Estrella. “Cary didn’t have the misfortune of seeing her perform—he met her in neutral territory; that’s why she went [to Crete]. She needed life to be harder.”

Actually, Cary Raditz had heard “Both Sides, Now.” But he wanted to bust Joni a bit. “I had heard that Joni Mitchell was in town, and I saw her with my friends, and they’d get weird—giddy and silly and kind of obsequious,” says Cary. He figured he could cut her down to—maybe even seducible—size by the oldest male trick in the book: being mean to her.

The night that he saw Joni in the taverna, “I was short with her, I was dismissive of her.” During the wild dancing, everyone in the taverna broke their plates. Witnessing the ear-splitting crash of china to floor, Joni—Myrtle Anderson’s daughter, after all—instinctively took a broom and swept up the crockery shards created by the people in her party.

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