Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (24 page)

Sean seemed to think I was talented and smart, which was nice, because no one had ever told me I was smart before. He enjoyed putting me in situations that brought out the best in me, and he never ridiculed what was still so half-wild and messy about me.

One day at lunch in L.A. Warren Beatty walked in and sat down. I knew Warren from the movies, but mainly I knew he had been with Joni Mitchell. That made him some sort of a god to me. Sean asked me to sing for him. “Would you?” Warren asked. I sang something with my guitar and Warren rested his head on his hands, looking up at me with a dreamy look on his face, like he was watching a kitten knit mittens. When I finished, he tilted his head toward Sean and after a dreamy sigh said, “Where did you find her?” as if I were a puppy or something that could be acquired. I laughed at the absurdity of it
all.

nineteen

arriving

I
got another cool break that same year. I had been singing on NPR and talking about my life, and a director heard the interview and cast me as Dorothy in an all-star production of
The Wizard of Oz
that would be performed at Lincoln Center and broadcast on TV. He took a big risk in casting me, as I was the only unknown, and yet he was certain I was his Dorothy. I had never acted before but was excited to dig in. When I first showed up at rehearsal, the all-star talent was pretty intimidating. Roger Daltrey, Jackson Browne, Natalie Cole, Debra Winger, Nathan Lane, Joel Grey . . . and yours truly, who had no clue what she was doing in the lead role. Holy shit. Deep breath. I dove in and studied and worked hard.

Jackson would come over to my hotel with his girlfriend and listen to my songs, mentoring me along. He taught me to play a bit of slide guitar and gave me a lug nut to practice with. He was paternal and protective of me, and it showed one day when we had a comical misunderstanding. One day in the rehearsal studios I borrowed his shirt because I was cold. The next day he pulled me aside and said, “Jewel. I found what you left
in my pocket.” I waited for him to tell me what it was. I had no idea. “Jewel. I found it. Do you want to talk about it?” I could not imagine what he was talking about. He kept staring at me like I should come clean and I was getting nervous. Finally he said, “Look, I can’t make you talk about it. All I can say is, if you ever want to come clean, I’m here,” and walked away. I was perplexed but had no idea what I should feel guilty about. I walked over to my mom, who was waiting in the wings, and told her the weirdest thing had happened. Later that day I had another bout of the miserable headache I’d had for a week and went to my mom for some BC, a powdered aspirin that comes in wax paper. Suddenly it dawned on me. I ran over to Jackson and looked around as if to make sure we weren’t being watched, then pulled the sachet of powder out of my pocket and said, “Hey, you want any?” He looked at me with such shock and disappointment until I told him it was just aspirin. He was so relieved he laughed out loud and hugged me. “Jewel! I’m so relieved! I was so worried you were doing drugs! I quit years ago, but I had a friend come over and test it when I found it. He actually snorted it and said whatever it was, it wasn’t very quality shit!” “Did it get rid of his headache?” I asked, laughing.

The show went well, apart from a minor snafu when I lost track of where we were in the story and jumped ahead in the wrong costume, luckily realizing it just in time (when I heard my cue) to run out onstage with the wrong outfit on and my boots unlaced, but able to deliver the correct lines. Roger Daltrey as the Tin Man and Jackson Browne as the Scarecrow were unbelievable. The whole cast was encouraging and kind to me and I worked hard not to let anyone down and to make the director proud, as well as myself. I have never been competitive with other people, but I am highly competitive with myself. It’s pointless to focus on others, as we can only control ourselves. I set a high bar and then it is my own private race. No one knows I’m winning or losing but me. I try to make the hard parts
look easy, especially in my music. Whether it’s seeing if I can elicit a visceral reaction from an audience, hit a particular note, or get a song on the radio, it has been a wholly internal process that, as it grew and spilled over, eventually led me to awards and money and chart positions. I am convinced that if I had started out with an eye on the prizes, I would have failed. For me, success was finding the courage to be true to myself, and holding on to a sense of humor along the way while refining my craft.

Sean surprised me by flying my dad in from Alaska for opening night. It was such a welcome surprise. My dad and I didn’t talk often, although he had been sober, in therapy, and working on his own healing. And while I would not say our relationship was close at this point, it also wasn’t hostile or angry. I was working hard myself on figuring things out, dating someone who believed in me, acting with a cast of people I never dared to dream would be peers. And there my dad was to see it!

I don’t know if any of you were raised on a ranch, but my dad showed up in his “town clothes.” In Alaska we had two sets of clothes: work clothes we did chores in and played in, and town clothes we touched only when we were going to school or to sing. My dad wore his creased jeans and good boots and a clean new cowboy hat and his largest, sharpest, shiniest animal necklace. Did I mention my dad makes jewelry out of animal parts? Roadkill is an accessory where I come from. His pieces are actually very beautiful, made of eagle talons, bear claws, wolf teeth, and bird bones. As a thank-you to Sean for flying him in, Dad made him a grizzly claw necklace in the shape of an anchor, because he’d heard Sean had a tattoo of the same. He also wrote Sean a song. He was so excited about both that he previewed them for me before presenting them to Sean, and all I can say is I was so touched by the gesture that I could only hope Sean would be too. My dad is a very authentic and earnest person, and the song he wrote was his way of trying to understand and pay homage to Sean’s world, which was so different from his own. My
grandmother Ruth, who was living in Tennessee at this point, had kept every headline printed about Sean, and my dad had strung them together into a song. At the time, some of the lines were so uncomfortable that I was sure they would be seared into my mind forever, but as I write this now I can recall only a few. Sean sat through the song with a smile, seeing through to the heart and spirit of my dad’s intentions.

At the party after the
Oz
performance, someone came up to Dad, in all his glory, candlelight glinting off his shiny animal-carcass necklace, and said, You must be very proud of your daughter, she did very well. For some reason everyone in the room turned to hear his response. Jackson Browne, Debra Winger, Natalie Cole, all waited to hear what he would say. The room was hushed just as my dad slapped the guy on the shoulder jovially and said, “Well, I guess I put my best sperm into that one!” Awesome. The crowd was kind enough not to gasp collectively in horror, and I had to admit that as embarrassing as it was, it was touching. He did not change because he was around other people. And I knew that it was his way of acknowledging that he was not the best parent, but that he was proud of who I was becoming and the work I had done to get there. What seemed like an awkward and seemingly tacky moment to everyone else spoke volumes to me. He was growing and changing. We were a long way from healing but there was hope.

I had taken a general acting lesson in high school but there hadn’t been much theory or technique involved. There was one line in particular in the show that I had no idea how to deliver sincerely because it was so unlike anything I would say. I think it was something very simple, like “Oh golly.” I visited with Sean about my conundrum. He asked what I would say instead. “Um, I’m not sure, but probably something like ‘Holy shit!’” He said, fine, say that with my body and my voice but use the words in the script. He explained that what gets communicated has very little to do with what we say. Simple but profound acting advice. Life is
full of body language and subtext and people rarely say what is actually on their minds, but it all gets communicated anyway. I loved this about acting. When I wrote songs, the subtext and psychology of the characters were limited by the fact that songs are so short. Acting, I quickly saw, was all about subtext, and I was hooked.

As I stepped onto the stage to sing “Over the Rainbow” with Ry Cooder playing guitar and a full orchestra and the Harlem Boys Choir backing me up, and as I looked out into the beautiful auditorium of Lincoln Center and all the people sitting there, I was so overcome I could hardly sing. The recording reveals my voice cracking at the high note because I was choking back tears. When I said that famous line—“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”—I meant every word. It felt like a tornado was carrying me along and delivering me to a strange and magical new world. I had no way of knowing then how many other parallels there were, and that the all-powerful wizard was not real in my life either. There would be lions and tigers and bears,
oh my!
and the way home was not in someone else’s hands, but in my own. Behind the curtain there was a drama that would take years to unfold. But for now I was Dorothy, literally and figuratively. And I was just
arriving.

twenty

the long shot

W
hile I would like to have done some things better, I was proud of myself and of the whole
Oz
cast. The standing ovation at the end was overwhelming and felt good. Afterward there was a party, champagne was sipped in fancy glasses with pinkies extended, and everyone was dressed in expensive clothes. Apparently black was all that was available in New York City stores, and people let you know how important they were by the way they stood and how they treated the people who served them. My dad had been a good influence on me—he talked to taxi drivers the same way he did famous actors, and I loved this about him and still follow his example to this day.

My mom was in all her glory, and was eating up the attention and culture. You would never have known she was raised in a tiny cabin in Alaska; you would have thought she came from money and power. I noticed that when people congratulated her on my performance, her reaction just seemed a bit off. I didn’t know how to put my finger on it except to say that while my dad was eager to let people know how hard I’d
worked, my mom gave the impression somehow that she was responsible for my performance. It was just a sense that I got. Like she was envious. It was a strange feeling to have a talent and an opportunity that somehow she wanted to claim as her own.

Things with my mom had become increasingly complicated. At first she was just looking out for me in my career. I trusted her because she was my mom, after all, and her interest and caring had been so hard to come by. I was desperate to feel safe and loved, and it seemed that since I’d been signed to a record label, my mom had really stepped it up, wanting to be sure I was not taken advantage of. It wasn’t long before she brought up the question of compensation for her time and dedication and her unique wisdom and so I had a talk with Inga about sharing the management role. Inga was commissioning 15 percent—of nothing, as I wasn’t making anything yet, but 15 percent at any rate. My mom wanted an additional 15 percent. I felt that was too much, but it was hard to argue with either of them, so I asked them each to take 10 percent, and we would all eat the cost of having two managers. An artist is responsible for all costs, so managers can charge back hotels, flights, food—anything related to managing the act. Plus they commission the gross of any income, taking their share before the cost of doing business. So theoretically if I make five hundred dollars for a gig, the managers get 20 percent of it. Then I have to cover the costs of touring, which are most likely higher than five hundred dollars because I have to pay a tour manager, a sound guy, and for a vehicle to get around in (assuming I don’t also have a band to pay), and so I borrow money from the label that I will owe back to them. Then the managers charge me for their plane tickets and hotel if they came out and helped on a show. Then a video costs about five hundred thousand dollars, and a marketing budget is way more expensive—and the costs stack up against the artist. An artist is about one million in
the hole just to see if a record even has a shot at working, and then that money needs to be paid back to the label before it starts splitting the profit with you once you have recouped. The odds of recouping and making money before you are dropped from the label are very slim. Then you pay your agency 10 percent of the gross of all touring, your lawyer fees, then pay all your costs of doing business out of what’s left over, then pay taxes . . . and that’s how a lot of artists are signed to a big record deal and may even sell a million records and not be recouped and are dropped without ever making a cent. If an artist has taken a big advance on signing a record deal, that will have to be repaid as well.

Needless to say I didn’t feel good about giving up more percentage points for my mom to manage me, but I desperately loved her and believed she was the only person looking out for me. She went with me everywhere. It was the closest we had ever been and it made my child’s heart so happy to have her with me. But she also had incredibly specific views on things, and she always seemed to set herself up as the wisest person in the room. Increasingly I found my own self-esteem shrinking as her magnanimous spirit permeated every aspect of our lives. I began to believe she knew more than I did about everything and that I would be nothing if she weren’t looking out for me. Having my mom around simply felt good. She said she was my soul mate, and we were meant to do great things together. If I listened to her, everything would be just fine. My lack of confidence, my fear, and my need to be loved created a perfect breeding ground for doubt and dependence—she was the only person I needed to listen to.

Sean and I parted ways before I ever became famous. The breakup was hard for me. My self-worth came from outside myself, from the approval of others. After Sean, I turned to my mom with more resolve. She was more than happy to be my source of self-worth. It seemed she gave or
withheld tenderness depending on how I behaved, and I could be trained the way dogs are trained with treats. I would do anything for love.