Guest Author: Sheila Weller

Today we are fortunate to feature an interview with Sheila Weller, author of the book GIRLS LIKE US: CAROLE KING, JONI MITCHELL, CARLY SIMON -- AND THE JOURNEY OF A GENERATION. Sheila writes social history for Vanity Fair (she penned the article about Ali MacGraw in Vanity Fair that we blogged about several weeks ago). She's also is a blogger on the Huffington Post (see here, here and here) and a senior contributing editor for Glamour magazine.

How did the women you profiled typify their generation?

For one thing, they had more creativity, ambition, and desire for adventure than they/we were led to believe, as children that we were allowed to have. We were little girls and preteens in the Mad Men era--and they, like we, burst out of that convention and re-made the rules, painfully, with risk (but also rapture), step by step. Not one of them had a stylist -- that de rigeur helper that Rihanna and Gwen Stefani and Taylor Swift count on. They styled themselves! But they were style-setters, showing millions of Americans a new way of dressing and embodying young adulthood. All of their looks have been recycled by designers over the years, again and again.

Photo found here.

Carole King got pregnant at 17 and so immediately shot-gun-married her (sexy, talented, brooding) boyfriend, but, while raising two kids (and taking care of this difficult guy) she became a worker-bee (this was very early for young women to embrace "work"), creating hit records. Then, most significantly for the generation, when the early '60s morphed in the mid-late '60s; when adventure, sensuality, communality, and hipness replaced earlier ideas of responsible adulthood -- she had a kind of second young adulthood: moved, with her young daughters, to Laurel Canyon, experienced different boyfriends, amassed a "family of friends," and embraced yoga and meditation. MANY early-married women in their late twenties threw off their "old lives" at this same time, and became "young again," and free, while still keeping the wisdom of their earlier selves. Carole was the wise, slightly older earthmother in her "family of friends," and the nurturance and loyalty she got and gave manifested itself in TAPESTRY, her 1971 masterpiece, which epitomized the entire early '70s, plain and simple. When Carole let her once-straightened hair grow out long and ripply, millions of girls like her threw away their straightening devices and stopped wanting to get nose jobs. She pioneered the natural earth-mother look with the form-fitting granny dress. The TAPESTRY photo of her at her window, doing her needlepoint set a template for girls for five years.



Joni, too, worked painfully to change from one kind of girl -- the dutiful, chaste, proper-proper '50s-bred Canadian prairie daughter -- into a new type that she in fact helped coin: the ethereal, dignified, creative bohemian....the evanescent, gossamer princess with her tastefulness, mystique, talent and high standards. She, too, got pregnant unmarried -- but instead of rushing to marry her boyfriend, she did the bravest thing...and something that, in 1964, some forward-thinking young women were just starting to do: She went through the pregnancy alone, in secrecy from her parents but NOT ashamed. She lived alone in a rooming house in Toronto, subsisting on stale donuts and pizza...but she sang every night in a coffee house, even as her pregnancy became evident. What a bold, brave move! To me, this life of hers (which other young women, in different ways, shared) was bolder than, say, Dylan's pretend life as a rail-riding hobo (he was a middle class boy from Minnesota, who got a ride to NY with a friend). Joni had the baby and, with great ambivalence and over a long period of months, first put the baby in foster care and then relinquished her to adoption. It was impossible to be a mother and a songwriter then (today, it's not only easy, but famous young women proudly tout their pregnancies and toddlers in US and LIFE AND STYLE magazine), and she made a choice that allowed another part of her -- an amazing musical and lyrical artist -- to emerge. After a brief marriage to the slightly "older, wiser" man we were supposed to want, she outpaced him, left him -- and truly embodied the new bohemian female spirit in the Summer of Love 1967: her antique clothes, her pen-tel'd psychedelic musings, her love of living alone in the roiling city ("Chelsea Morning") and her coining of a new way to take different lovers while not being viewed as vulnerable or pathetic ("Cactus Tree" -- she, and all of us then had to work at feeling emotionally and sexually liberated, we were literally "busy being free") finally evolved into a style of being female that she both embodied and described: the "Lady of the Canyon": mystical, sexy, glamorous, of few words, a man-magnet, hip, and earthy.

Photo found here.


Photo found here.

Carly was the woman of the whipsawing changes of the early '70s -- when feminism changed everything we knew. Young women were ditching their husbands and boyfriends because all of a sudden everything you thought you knew about man-woman relationships had...changed. The locus moved from the West Coast -- Laurel Canyon and SF -- to sexy-but-intellectual thinking-class New York City, where women from Seven Sisters colleges were writing political tracts and starring in political movies and writing sexy but political novels and poems. (Think: Gloria Steinem, Erica Jong, Jane Fonda, Ali MacGraw). Carly, who'd gone to Sarah Lawrence -- and who had come from an upper-crust family that had a comfortably liberated, even decadent, view of sexuality -- embodied this new '70s woman. Her "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be" was a ballad in which, for the first time, a young WOMAN questioned marriage because of the freedom that SHE, not he, would lose. Her spurt-of-fame whirlwind romances with the creme de la creme of guys -- Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger -- proved that you could be classy, respectable (her father, a publishing house co-founder), serious, intelligence...and still have a liberated love life. Carly's "You're So Vain" was the first (and most kick-ass) feminist rock song, proving that a woman could make fun of a guy who dumped her, with great wit and good will. It became one of the most famous and iconic rock songs of all time, but before that, it expressed women's new power and delicious comfort with power, in a myriad of ways. Carly was the young smart urban woman of the '70s -- high-topped felt hat, stovepipe pants, macrame shawl, tight, sleek, bell-bottoms: she embodied that 1971 birth-of-feminism/ smart Seven Sisters Girl look. Every woman wanted to look like her.

Photo found here.

Photo found here.


GIRLS LIKE US is now in paperback, with a new introduction and a special Book Club Readers Guide. You can order it from Amazon through the book's website www.girlslikeusthebook.com and see pictures, watch videos, and read reviews and author blogs as well. If you would like a copy of Girls Like Us, leave a comment. We'll have a drawing one week from today.