Read Online Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion - Free Book Online

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