Exactly where it is she wants to be seems an open question, bewildering to her and even more so to her manager. If he is asked what his most celebrated client is doing now and plans to do in the future, Many Greenhill talks about “lots of plans,” “other areas,” and “her own choice.” Finally he hits upon something: “Listen, she just did a documentary for Canadian television, Variety gave it a great review, let me read you.”
Manny Greenhill reads. “Let’s see. Here Variety says ‘planned only a twenty-minute interview but when CBC officials in Toronto saw the film they decided to go with a special—’” He interrupts himself. “That’s pretty newsworthy right there. Let’s see now. Here they quote her ideas on peace…you know those…here she says ‘every time I go to Hollywood I want to throw up’…let’s not get into that…here now/her impersonations of Ringo Starr and George Harrison were dead-on,’ get that, that’s good.”
Manny Greenhill is hoping to get Miss Baez to write a book, to be in a movie, and to get around to recording the rock ‘n’ roll songs. He will not discuss her income, although he will say, at once jaunty and bleak, “but it won’t be much this year.” Miss Baez let him schedule only one concert for 1966 (down from an average of thirty a year), has accepted only one regular club booking in her entire career, and is virtually never on television. “What’s she going to do on Andy Williams?” Manny Greenhill shrugs. “One time she sang one of Pat Boone’s songs with him,” he adds, “which proves she can get along, but still. We don’t want her up there with some dance routine behind her.” Greenhill keeps an eye on her political appearances, and tries to prevent the use of her name. “We say, if they use her name it’s a concert. The point is, if they haven’t used her name, then if she doesn’t like the looks of it she can get out.” He is resigned to the school’s cutting into her schedule. “Listen,” he says. “I’ve always encouraged her to be political. I may not be active, but let’s say I’m concerned.” He squints into the sun. “Let’s say maybe I’m just too old.”
To encourage Joan Baez to be “political” is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue “feeling” things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, “all vague.” Her approach is instinctive, pragmatic, not too far from that of any League of Women Voters member. “Frankly, I’m down on Communism,” is her latest word on that subject. On recent events in the pacifist movement, she has this to say: “Burning draft cards doesn’t make sense, and burning themselves makes even less.” When she was at Palo Alto High School and refused to leave the building during a bomb drill, she was not motivated by theory; she did it because “it was the practical thing to do, I mean it seemed to me this drill was impractical, all these people thinking they could get into some kind of little shelter and be saved with canned water.” She has made appearances for Democratic administrations, and is frequently quoted as saying: “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger”; it is scarcely the diction of the new radicalism. Her concert program includes some of her thoughts about “waiting on the eve of destruction,” and her thoughts are these:
My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But its really God — playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven — shattering stained glass — playing a gigantic organ — thundering on the keys — perfect harmony — perfect joy.
Although Miss Baez does not actually talk this way when she is kept from the typewriter, she does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone’s adolescence. This openness, this vulnerability, is of course precisely the reason why she is so able to “come through” to all the young and lonely and inarticulate, to all those who suspect that no one else in the world understands about beauty and hurt and love and brotherhood. Perhaps because she is older now, Miss Baez is sometimes troubled that she means, to a great many of her admirers, everything that is beautiful and true.
“I’m not very happy with my thinking about it,” she says. “Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Come on, Baez, you’re just like everybody else, ’ but then I’m not happy with that either.”
“Not everybody else has the voice,” Ira Sandperl interrupts dotingly.
“Oh, it’s all right to have the voice, the voice is all right…”
She breaks off and concentrates for a long while on the buckle of her shoe.
So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences. “One day we went around the room and told a little about ourselves,” she confides, “and I discovered that boy, I’d had it pretty easy.” The late afternoon sun streaks the clean wooden floor and the birds sing in the scrub oaks and the beautiful children sit in their coats on the floor and listen to Ira Sandperl.
“Are you a vegetarian, Ira?” someone asks idly.
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Tell them, Ira,” Joan Baez says. “It’s nice.”
He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. “I was in the Sierra once.” He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly. “I saw this magnificent tree growing out of bare rock, thrusting itself…and I thought all right, tree, if you want to live that much, all right! All right! OK! I won’t chop you! I won’t eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to liver
“But what about vegetables,” a girl murmurs.
“Well, I realized, of course, that as long as I was in this flesh and this blood I couldn’t be perfectly nonviolent.”
It is getting late. Fifty cents apiece is collected for the next day’s lunch, and someone reads a request from the Monterey County Board of Supervisors that citizens fly American flags to show that “Kooks, Commies, and Cowards do not represent our County,” and someone else brings up the Vietnam Day Committee, and a dissident member who had visited Carmel.
“Marv’s an honest-to-God nonviolenter,” Ira Sandperl declares. “A man of honesty and love.”
“He said he’s an anarchist,” someone interjects doubtfully.
“Right,” Ira Sandperl agrees. “Absolutely.”
“Would the V. D. C. call Gandhi bourgeois?”
“Oh, they must know better, but they lead such bourgeois lives themselves…”
“That’s so true,” says the dreamy blond boy with the violet marble. “You walk into their office, they’re so unfriendly, so unfriendly and cold…”
Everyone smiles lovingly at him. By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm.