O Janis
She loved her family but she left them. She hated Port Arthur, but she kept coming home. What demons drove Janis Joplin to her death?
(Page 2 of 4)
The book’s distinguishing feature is that it contains 25 letters from Janis that have never before been published. The letters are to Janis’ mother, and they reveal a young woman desperate to please her parents—desperate, in spite of her brave new world, to be the normal Port Arthur girl she could not possibly become. Unfortunately, Laura Joplin has used these letters to suggest that her sister was, in the end, just another young woman with a dog, a boyfriend, a nice apartment, a well-managed bank account, and a promising career. One of Janis’ roommates in San Francisco and closest friends, Sunshine Nichols, recalls the singer mocking the letters even as she wrote them. “This is what just drives me insane about Laura basing her book on these letters,” says Nichols today. “I mean, anybody who has left home knows the letters you write your parents are lies.”
In fact, the letters are exactly half the truth, the words of a woman torn in two.
JANIS JOPLIN GREW UP IN PORT Arthur in the late fifties, moved to Austin in the early sixties, and said good-bye to Texas in 1966. Her path to San Francisco had already been blazed by other young Texans who felt stifled by the culture of their native state. She caught up with them in a hurry: If there exists an icon of the counterculture, it is Janis Joplin. And yet psychically she remained trapped within the fault line that divided the two cultures. Janis was a middle-class white girl who sang the blues. No one had any difficulty reconciling this: The ear didn’t lie, and besides, Janis’ blues were a matter of public knowledge, excruciatingly so. Perhaps in counterculture etiquette, it was bad form to show anything but indifference toward the world you left behind, but Janis Joplin was far too honest to conceal her agony. Practically up until her last breaths, she spoke of her native state with the kind of hostility anyone could recognize as the language of the spurned: “They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state.” She said it so often that today Port Arthurans and the Joplins have had to resort to the shaky claim that Janis’ whole feud with Texas was just a well-rehearsed publicity hook that she and the media played for all it was worth—as if to suggest that the generation gap was nothing more than a PR ruse perpetrated by Timothy Leary and Spiro Agnew.
Yet it would be unfair to expect Port Arthur to make sense of the sixties when no one else has. The era dawned in the middle of a post-war daydream, when towns like Port Arthur were well-off and had no reason to anticipate anything but more of the same. By the time Janis Lyn Joplin entered Thomas Jefferson High School in 1957 at the precocious age of fourteen, Port Arthur had 57,000 residents, the majority of them beneficiaries of the oil boom. The boom meant that workers could afford a decent home, that their roads would be well tended and safe, and that their children’s schools would be well financed.
There remained something disquieting about the oil-town culture, however, something that traveled through the air with the rest of the refinery fumes, something that was not readily exhaled. A kid could get a good education in Port Arthur. But as David Moriaty, one of Janis’ schoolmates and longtime friends, says, “There was no social premium on being educated. In a normal small town, if you get educated, you become a banker or lawyer and attain a position of standing. In Port Arthur, the stillmen made fifty thousand dollars a year without much schooling.” The middle-class life made possible by the port was accompanied by a churchgoing small-town moral code. But the port also brought in other elements. Brothels operated in plain view. Gambling joints openly advertised their activities. “When we were in high school,” says Tary Owens, another friend and classmate of Janis’, “the city was on the one hand very straitlaced. But on the other hand, the town was absolutely wide open. I mean, the hypocrisy just glared.”
“The blacks in town, at least 40 percent of the population, lived ‘on the other side of the tracks,’ ” writes Laura Joplin. If oil-town prosperity reduced some of the financial inequality between the races, oil-town culture kept blacks in their place. During Janis’ last year of junior high, a frequent debate topic was “Will federal aid to education bring integration?” As Owens, who was on a debate team in Beaumont, recalls, “We weren’t allowed to argue the pros and cons of integration—it was a given that integration was a horrible thing. The argument instead focused on whether you could get federal aid without having to integrate.”
Still, by reading Jack Kerouac books, Janis and her friends got a taste of the black world; more importantly, they heard black music on the radio. By the late fifties, Elvis Presley had been drafted and Buddy Holly had died, and little was left that deserved the term “rock and roll.” In contrast to the sickly sweet pop tunes that dominated white radio stations, the music of traditional folk and blues musicians such as Willie Mae Thornton, Odetta, and Leadbelly carried a raw honesty that was devastatingly seductive to Janis’ crowd. Devastating, because that raw honesty served only to underscore the inconsistencies in Port Arthur’s moral fabric.
Had Janis Joplin been able to overlook these inconsistencies, she might have passed her days in Port Arthur untormented. For there was much to recommend the girl. She was intensely bright, an excellent student, with a natural gift for painting, and her doughy features were not without their appeal. But the same acute sensitivity that made her a painter also made her resent the social obstacles to individuality. By her junior year in high school, they seemed to hit Janis all at once: Why did girls have to wear their clothes and hair just so? Why were the practices of drinking, cursing, and having sex forbidden and yet widespread throughout Port Arthur? And why could you listen to black music on the radio and yet not have black classmates in school?
“A key to her personality was that she could not abide hypocrisy,” says David Moriaty. Janis spent her junior year hanging with the senior beatnik crowd, which included Moriaty, a jazz musician named Jim Langdon, and a music enthusiast named Grant Lyons, who Janis would later credit with having introduced her to the music of Leadbelly and Bessie Smith—the music that inspired her to sing. She wore black turtlenecks and tights (the closest she could get to pants, which were forbidden by school authorities) or sometimes skirts, which she took pains to hem just above the knees. They passed the evenings driving restlessly through town, singing along to the songs on the radio—Janis and the boys, freethinkers plowing through nights that burned with the demon glow of the refinery lights.
If the boys were a little weird—and they were—then that could be forgiven. A guy was expected to go off the beam now and again. But when Janis fell into their company and took the night drives and drank beer and dyed her hair orange and hollered “F—k” in the high school hallways, that was something else again. Talk began to spread. She was weird. She was obscene. She was no longer a virgin. She was a whore! Boys who had never met Janis bragged openly that they had slept with her. Girls in the locker room cast furtive glances toward Janis’ private parts to see if there existed some kind of visible evidence of her promiscuity. The barbs were aimed specifically at Janis, the female—despite Laura Joplin’s assertion, in Love, Janis, that “the guys got as much flak as Janis did.” (Tary Owens, who was interviewed for Love, Janis, distinctly recalls, “She bore the brunt of the abuse.”) But for a time it was only low talk. “When she was in our group in high school, she was under our protection,” says Moriaty. “But after we left, she got messed with. Her senior class essentially turned on her.”
For all the differences between the Joplin biographers, they agree that Janis Joplin’s life took a drastic turn for the worse in 1959. Her protectors had graduated. She had grown pudgy, and her acne festered to the point that her face had to be sanded. Classmates began to follow her down the hallways, calling her a pig, asking her for sex, goading her into saying the word “F—k.” Rather than ignore them, she screamed back obscenities. Janis could not keep her mouth shut. She decried segregation in class and thus was declared a “nigger lover.” She continued to wear her skirts short and to spend evenings with beatniks at the Sage Coffeehouse or slugging beer in Louisiana juke joints, ensuring her status as a cheap girl. It is possible that a part of her relished her position as teenage outlaw. It is absolutely certain thatshe was not about to change for anyone. Yet it is equally certain that Janis suffered—not simply out of frustration over Port Arthur’s unwillingness to concede that her way was the right way, as Laura Joplin theorizes, but also because she felt socially inadequate. Privately she would paint her nails and agonize over her figure. She felt downcast when no one asked her to the senior prom and experienced further dejection when the senior class’s steering committee attempted to bar her from attending the school’s Black and White Ball. Many years later, starry-eyed reporters would ask her what it was like to be Janis Joplin, only to hear the singer bemoan her failure to have a husband and children. Beneath the pleasures of celebrity, Janis Joplin—the Janis who was not asked to the prom, the one whose craving for acceptance was matched only by her refusal to behave acceptably—would not find satisfaction.
My Library
