Chapter Twenty
As the tour drew to a close I was a mass of conflicting emotions. I was excited about going home to my girls, but I had enjoyed performing with James and Jo Mama so much that I was sad to think that we wouldn’t be doing those shows anymore. Others must have been thinking along similar lines, because the energy level at the last show was even higher than usual. If the decibel level and range of emotions had been elevated before, they were off the meter that night.
And then the tour was over.
As soon as I walked in the door of the house on Wonderland Avenue, my sadness disappeared. The enthusiastic greeting I received from Louise and Sherry mirrored my own delight at seeing them. Our dogs’ wagging tails and “Pet me! Pet me!” noses under our elbows only added to the joyous confusion of our arrival. My first thought on awakening the next morning was heartfelt gratitude that I was free of the airport–soundcheck–gig–hotel routine. I eased back into domesticity as seamlessly as if I’d never been gone.
Before Tapestry was released in March 1971, I had told Lou that I would do the tour, but I wanted no part of the public relations machine in which recording artists were expected to help the record company generate sales. Lou respected my wishes. He fielded all requests and kept me from having to do interviews. Just when I was thinking how happy I was to be enjoying a comparatively simple life, my twenty-nine-year-old body announced a major new development. I was expecting my third child.
My twenty-four-year-old husband was over the moon. This would be his first child. With two children already in our household, adding a baby wouldn’t cause as big a change as it might have for a couple with no children, though we definitely would need to move into a bigger house. The word “simple” no longer described our life. Before I could fully absorb the implications of this new development, Peter called to say that he was thinking of bringing the James Taylor–Carole King–Jo Mama show to his country of origin. Would Charlie and I be available that summer to travel around the United Kingdom?
We would.
Though we had to find a new house and prepare for a baby, Charlie and I were young enough to think we could do it all. During my previous pregnancies I had worked in the studio literally up until the day of delivery. As long as I didn’t leap around onstage, the baby and I would be fine. And because the UK bookings coincided with the girls’ summer vacation, Sherry and Louise, now nine and eleven, could come along.
James also brought someone important to him. In one of my memory snapshots of the UK tour, Joni Mitchell is sitting on a long wooden bench in the hospitality area backstage with one leg drawn up under her as she sketches line drawings of Louise and Sherry. On another bench Louise is playing an acoustic guitar almost as big as she is, while Sherry is drawing on a sketchpad, her long hair partially covering one side of her face. Joni is motionless except for her drawing hand. Her pencil moves rapidly and purposefully as it transmits the essence of what she sees to the expressive images emerging on each page. As Joni continues to sketch, her long blonde hair glows with the late afternoon light streaming in behind her through the french windows that frame the verdant summer forest of the Ullswater Lake Country. In Joni’s sketches, which she generously gave to Louise and Sherry, her visual artistry captured something fundamental about the spirit of each of my daughters that can still be seen in the woman each has become.
The UK tour ended, and then it was fall. The girls went back to school, and Charlie and I began settling into our new home. The house on Appian Way sat on a steep hillside atop Laurel Canyon. Though most of its outdoor space was unusable, it had plenty of room inside. The living room was two stories high, with a tall fireplace, a cathedral ceiling, and a balcony with a wall of bookshelves. To the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and other books and albums from the Wonderland Avenue house we added books about stages of a healthy pregnancy, what to name a baby, and how to prepare for home birth.
A couple we knew who’d had a healthy baby at home the prior year recommended Dr. Nial Ettinghausen as a midwife. Dr. E. was a D.P.M., a Drugless Practitioner of Medicine who combined watching and waiting with calm, knowledgeable guidance and prudent intervention. He had successfully delivered hundreds of babies at home with an extremely low rate of unusual incident or the need for transport to a hospital. We had some trepidation about home birth, but the support of our family physician as well as his offer to be on call calmed our concerns.
As winter approached, my baby and I grew bigger. We wouldn’t know its gender until it was born. When an X-ray taken by Dr. E. in the ninth month showed the fetus sitting straight up, I thought, Aww. Doesn’t it look cute sitting up like that! I didn’t realize that it should have been upside down for a headfirst presentation. When Dr. E. pointed out that it was in breech position with its derrière likely to emerge first, Charlie became anxious, and so did I. But our family doctor reassured us. Dr. E.’s years of home birth experience had included many safe deliveries of healthy babies in breech presentation. Since I had already delivered two healthy children, I was a good candidate for a successful breech delivery. And he, an M.D., would be less than twenty minutes away if, God forbid, anything went wrong.
Molly Norah Larkey was born in robust good health on December 31, 1971—not on our kitchen table, but in our kitchen. Dr. Ettinghausen had brought a nurse, a delivery table, and all the necessary equipment. Our childbirth classes had covered everything from how labor would progress to how to breathe and how to push. Naturally, when the time came to propel the baby out I forgot all the instructions. I tried pushing a few times with no apparent effect, then I gave one final, massive, superhuman push that felt as if I were expelling a Volkswagen. Dr. E. caught the baby and quickly flipped it over to reveal a vigorous little girl with a perfectly shaped head.
For the next ten days, Charlie spent every waking moment gazing at the miracle of Molly until he had to go back to work. To help me care for Molly I had the indefatigable Willa Mae, Molly’s sisters, and her two grandmothers, who had flown out to the West Coast to meet their new granddaughter as soon as they heard the news. In between cooing over the baby, our mothers told us how relieved they were that the birth had gone well. When they had given birth to us in the 1940s, women routinely went to hospitals. At the end of a weeklong stay, the new mother was sent home with bottles and instructions on how to make formula for her tightly wrapped little bundle of joy. Our mothers had considered themselves “modern” women because they’d had access to good medical care in a germ-free environment. Our choosing to give birth in the manner of their mothers’ generation had caused them some consternation. However, it didn’t bother my grandmother. When my mother told her that I was planning to deliver her great-grandchild at home and breastfeed her, my grandmother’s response was, “So vot’s so un-yuzhull?”
In the early seventies, few hospitals offered a birthing environment that combined medical resources with the social benefits of home birth. Today many hospitals offer birthing rooms with a homelike environment and enough room for doctors, nurses, equipment, a father or other birth partner, and older siblings. Ironically, more women are having babies at home in the twenty-first century because they can’t afford to go to a hospital.
I became pregnant again in the summer of 1973 and continued being a homebody, alternately working as a singer and songwriter. That pregnancy was less challenging physically than my pregnancy with Molly, but it seemed to last a lot longer—especially toward the end. During those months I wrote the songs for my album Wrap Around Joy with David Palmer, then Lou Adler produced the album and assembled some of the finest musicians in L.A. to record the tracks. “Jazzman,” featuring Tom Scott on saxophone, would emerge as the most popular song from that album, reaching #1 on November 9, 1974.
Charlie was twenty-seven and I thirty-two when our son, Levi Benjamin Larkey, arrived on April 23, 1974, in the customary headfirst presentation. After that our kitchen reverted permanently to its conventional use, and so did my body. Levi would be my last child.