Janis: Her Life and Music Page 2
Though Seth didn’t prefer nights out dancing, he did enjoy alcohol and occasionally smoking cannabis, legal in Texas until 1937. During Prohibition, he taught himself how to make beer and bathtub gin, which he sometimes shared with Dorothy’s father, Cecil, to his teetotaling wife Laura’s chagrin. As for Dorothy’s vices, she took up smoking at a time when cigarettes were marketed to women in advertisements as “torches of freedom.”
In 1935 Amarillo, amid the Dust Bowl in the northwestern plains of the Texas Panhandle, had about a 25 percent unemployment rate. A college friend advised Seth that the Texas Company (later renamed Texaco) was hiring in Port Arthur, in the southeast corner of the state. The subtropical city on the Gulf Coast had the world’s largest oil refinery network, a sprawling complex crowded with smokestacks spewing fiery chemical plumes into the air. This thriving industry made the Great Depression seem nonexistent. So Seth packed his few belongings and drove nearly seven hundred miles to Port Arthur, where he hated the humidity, mosquitos, and refinery exhaust. But the friend who recommended him had been correct: the growing city and its largest employer, the Texas Company, offered a man like Seth the chance to earn a decent living and work indoors. He would, indeed, do better than his parents had. Impressed with his intellect and engineering skills, the Texas Company hired Seth as a manager overseeing the construction of metal containers used for shipping petroleum around the world. There is no suggestion that Seth particularly enjoyed or found great satisfaction in his work, yet he certainly did appreciate the security of a management position for a man of his background. And he gained a sense of importance, especially during World War II, when he would receive three draft deferments on account of his expertise at America’s sole manufacturer of oil shipping containers. He would work at Texaco for the next forty years.
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“Port Arthur is 100 percent oil” is how a 1932 geology book described one of the three towns comprising the Golden Triangle: a man-made canal linked Port Arthur to Beaumont (surrounded by oil fields) and Orange (home to Consolidated Steel). On January 10, 1901, Texas oil was first discovered at Spindletop, four miles south of Beaumont and fifteen miles north of Port Arthur. The legendary oil well “began with a roar, shaking the ground under the derrick, spewing first mud, then rocks, then six tons of four-inch pipe out of the ground, hurling it into the air like soda straws,” according to Texas historian Lonn Taylor. “Then a 150-foot plume of oil erupted, and it spouted 100,000 barrels a day for nine days before drillers could cap it. Spindletop marked the beginning of the modern petroleum industry. Texas—and the world—would never be the same.”
Port Arthur’s origins actually predated the discovery of oil. Five years earlier, it was founded and named by self-made railroad tycoon and visionary Arthur Stilwell, who built the city along his newly constructed rail line that originated in Kansas City. Ninety miles east of Houston and twenty miles from Louisiana, Port Arthur was situated on the shore of Lake Sabine. The eccentric Stilwell wrote later that his “hunches” for choosing the town’s location came from mystical “brownies,” or “spirit counselors,” who whispered to him in his sleep. In 1898 Stilwell financed the arduous completion of the seven-mile canal, modeled on Egypt’s Suez Canal, connecting Port Arthur to the Gulf of Mexico. He built a grain elevator and a port, with a British ship transporting to Europe the produce that had traveled by train from the Midwest.
But the next year, Stilwell’s Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad Company went bankrupt, and Port Arthur’s development fell to John W. Gates, a shrewd Gilded Age entrepreneur who originally helped finance Stilwell, only to then oust him from their partnership. A barbed-wire magnate later bought out by U.S. Steel, Gates’s nickname was “Bet-a-Million”—the result of a prodigious gambling habit. Among the bets that paid off were his financing numerous oil wells near Spindletop, his founding the Texas Company, and his purchasing the Port Arthur Canal and Dock Company. He built a major refinery and public buildings, including St. Mary Hospital and Port Arthur College. Gates remained the town’s primary benefactor until his death in 1911.
When Seth arrived nearly twenty-five years later, Port Arthur was bustling with oil refineries, chemical plants, and shipyards, its canal and port busily shipping petroleum. The population had increased to fifty-one thousand, with an influx of refinery workers from across the state and Louisiana, including French-speaking Acadians, or Cajuns, as well as African Americans and Latinos. From 1930 to 1935, East Texas oilfields “had created the state’s great family fortunes,” Bryan Burrough reported in his history of Texas oil, The Big Rich. At the time that Seth became an employee, the Texas Company (“the most brash and aggressive of the companies”) had “refocused its operations, deemphasizing exploration in favor of refining and marketing.”
Soon after signing on, Seth sent for Dorothy, who quickly found a job, at Port Arthur’s Sears-Roebuck in the credit department. The young couple’s goal of settling down, raising a family, and rising to the middle class was under way. On October 20, 1936, Seth, twenty-six, and Dorothy, twenty-three, married, with no relatives making the journey east to attend. On nights out, the newlyweds partied at the boisterous roadhouses that dotted Highway 90, across the Sabine River, in Vinton, Louisiana.Years later Dorothy recalled dancing on tabletops at the same clubs where her teenage daughter would herself raise hell.
The Joplins spent the first seven years of their marriage industriously saving money for the future. One June day, six months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into World War II, Seth came home from work and told his wife, “Let’s do something for posterity,” according to Dorothy. Thirty-seven weeks later, Janis Lyn Joplin was born at nine thirty in the morning on January 19, 1943, at St. Mary Hospital. Twenty-one days early, she was eighteen inches long and weighed only five pounds, six ounces, but was healthy.
After her birth, which he didn’t attend, the businesslike Seth, thirty-two, personally typed his twenty-nine-year-old wife a wry memorandum: “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.”
The new parents cherished their baby, whose every milestone was documented by Seth’s camera. Janis would be the center of their world—a spotlight that she’d always crave—for the next six years, until their second child came along. Seth, though by nature a shy man with a dark outlook on life, would treat his firstborn like the son he’d hoped for. Dorothy, who wanted for her daughter the perfect, respectable life she’d never enjoyed as a girl, devoted herself to full-time mothering. She planned to bestow on her child every opportunity to make her a success. And baby Janis’s easygoing temperament helped inspire the new parents with a faith that they would succeed.
“She never was cranky or cross or troublesome,” Dorothy recounted. Janis began crawling at six months and standing when less than a year old. Her blue eyes would light up when her father came home from work; as a toddler, she began a ritual of meeting him at the front door. After dinner, Seth settled into his easy chair to read a book and listen to Bach and Beethoven, his eyes sometimes welling up from the beauty of it all. He was very different from most Port Arthur dads.
Janis considered her father “a secret intellectual,” she said later, describing him as “a book reader, a talker, a thinker. He was very important to me, because he made me think. He’s the reason I am like I am.” Her independent streak certainly came from Seth, but although she’d rarely admit it, Janis was equally her mother’s daughter, absorbing Dorothy’s fascination with fashion, her intense desire for control, and, of course, a powerful singing voice that offered a way out of a staid, restrictive life. Although Dorothy had turned that down, Janis would not.
About four y
ears earlier, in 1939, the Joplins had taken a major step toward their goal of a middle-class life. They left their rental downtown on Sixth Street for their first home: a larger, two-bedroom brick house at 4048 Procter (Port Arthur’s main street), with enough room for Dorothy’s mother and her youngest sister, Mildred, to live with them. The Easts had finally divorced, with Cecil relocating to Kansas City and cutting off communication with his children. “If I’d had a choice about which parent I kept in touch with, it would have been him,” Dorothy said later of her freewheeling father. “But… he physically and emotionally divorced himself from all of us.” Laura and Mildred East stayed with the Joplins for seven years, until Janis was three and the war ended.
Still devoted to her mother’s faith, Dorothy joined the evangelical First Christian Church, a branch of their Nebraska denomination. As for Seth, he “hadn’t been brought up in a family that was religious,” Dorothy said. “That man didn’t belong to anything in his life.” The Joplins’ youngest child, Michael, remembered “Mom asking Pop if he wanted to go to church. He always said no. I asked him why once, and the gist was he didn’t believe in God. He believed in spirituality, but not organized [religion]. He didn’t like the preaching.” Seth stayed home every Sunday, while Dorothy and Janis—and eventually siblings Laura and Michael—went to the service. As with his passions for classical music and literature, Seth did not overtly express his atheism outside the Joplin home. To be an “out” atheist was to risk harsh judgment, even shame, from the deeply devout Port Arthur community. Only those close to him knew and accepted, and even admired, Seth’s convictions. Among that small group was his eldest child, Janis.
Nevertheless, at Dorothy’s insistence, Janis was baptized at age ten by immersion at the First Christian Church on Procter Street; she would attend services there through junior high. (Thirty years later, Janis’s paint-by-number Jesus Praying at Gethsemane would be discovered in a church closet.) Like her mother, Janis first sang publicly in the church choir, and Dorothy taught her in Sunday school. Seth did not object to any of it. The dichotomy between her parents’ beliefs, and their mutual respect, became young Janis Joplin’s normal.
As a child, Janis displayed her father’s restless inquisitiveness. “She was always curious about everything,” according to Dorothy, and “if she asked a question, I answered it straightforwardly, even if it was embarrassing. She was probably hyperactive, although I didn’t know it. I thought she was just intensely interested in what she was doing. I didn’t know that was something you [could] attempt to control.” On the back of a photo of a visit to Seth’s family in Amarillo, where the rambunctious Janis was allowed to run wild, Dorothy noted that Janis had lamented to her parents, “We are going home now. I’ll have to be good.” In Port Arthur, appearances mattered: Dorothy, increasingly status conscious, wanted a genteel, proper middle-class daughter. She dressed little Janis in home-sewn playsuits and ruffled frocks, sometimes with gloves and a hat, and much later would teach her to expertly wield a needle and thread.
Janis shared her parents’ love affair with music. Dorothy purchased a used upright piano and began teaching four-year-old Janis to play and sing. Seth was proud of his wife’s talent, and at first encouraged his daughter’s efforts. “She started on piano lessons to learn scales and keys,” Dorothy recalled. “I found some wonderful books of children’s songs so she could learn to sing and I could play the primary note on the piano and she could get the pitch. From my own singing experience, I could help her with the tone and make the sound of a vowel or consonant correctly. She learned to sing folk songs and started singing them when she went to bed at night. It was absolutely enchanting.” Dorothy jotted down on a photo of Janis “sings herself to sleep.”
As the Joplins’ dreams of economic security seemed to be coming true, Dorothy suffered a setback. Still in her early thirties, she was found to have a benign tumor on her thyroid gland. During surgery, the doctor irreparably damaged her vocal cords—and destroyed her singing voice. Soon after, Seth, a quiet, distant man who had trouble expressing his feelings, demanded they give away the piano. He claimed that Janis’s “banging on the keys” now got on his nerves. “He’d had a hard day at the office, and you can imagine what those scales were like to him,” Dorothy tried to explain. “He said, ‘We just can’t keep the piano.’ We didn’t fuss or quarrel about it. When one of us had a vehement opinion about something, the other would accede to that opinion. So I got rid of the piano. It broke my heart.”
Perhaps suffering anxiety over her mother’s hospitalization, followed by the subsequent loss of music in the house, Janis began sleepwalking. One night, Dorothy found her outside on the sidewalk, seemingly looking for something. When she asked, “Where are you going?” Janis kept saying over and over, “I want to go home.”
In the coming months, Dorothy suffered two miscarriages before giving birth to their second daughter, Laurel Lee “Laura” Joplin, on March 15, 1949. A colicky baby, Laura cried constantly, demanding much of her mother’s attention. Six-year-old Janis learned to fend for herself, or she would seek out her father, who seemed to recognize himself in his daughter and, for a time, always welcomed her company. As if she were his son, she’d accompany him to the barbershop, where, after Seth’s haircut, the barber would trim her bangs.
Later that year, the family decided to move to a better neighborhood: “The lady who lived on our left was married to a sailor,” Dorothy recalled. “I don’t think she knew any normal words in the English language. She cursed worse than anybody I ever heard in my life! I did not want [my children] growing up learning that kind of language.” The Joplins took the next step up the class ladder and bought a larger home in Griffing Park, a leafy new subdivision just outside the city limits. They had made it to Port Arthur’s version of suburbia.
The white frame house at 3130 Lombardy Drive, quite modest by today’s standards, featured a generous yard where Janis played. Seth tended a backyard garden, and Dorothy baked pies made from pecans picked from their trees. Janis immediately found friends among plentiful neighborhood kids, with whom she roughhoused on playground equipment built by Seth, and put on plays and puppet shows in a theater he constructed. Since her infancy, the Joplins had frequently photographed Janis, and now they took pictures of the two sisters, dressed in identical outfits sewn by Dorothy.
Janis would spend Saturdays with her father, visiting the Gates Memorial Public Library, an imposing Greek Revival–style edifice—Seth’s own kind of church. “At my house,” Janis said proudly, “you got a library card as soon as you could write your name.” Like her father, she learned to treasure books and showed an early aptitude for reading, recognized soon after she entered first grade at the nearby Tyrrell Elementary School in the fall of 1949. Her parents had done all they could to ready their firstborn to become a popular and high-achieving student in Port Arthur’s well-funded school system.
CHAPTER 2
TOMBOY
I nearly fell out of my chair, I was so excited!
—JANIS JOPLIN
An intuitive child, Janis sensed that Seth Joplin wanted a son, and certainly she knew that her tomboy roughhousing pleased him. Her deep connection with her father, initiated by her greeting him after work each day, continued until the Joplins’ third child, their only son, Michael, came along. Janis felt the loss of that intimacy acutely, viscerally, and it fueled both her lifelong neediness and her imagination.
Socially, Dorothy hoped that Janis would model herself after her. She organized a troop of Blue Birds, similar to Girl Scouts, who met regularly at the Joplins’ home, where Janis “was outgoing and made strangers welcome,” Dorothy recalled. She constantly sought her mother’s approval and would always demand more of her attention than her other two children, Dorothy said.
Janis was so book smart and took to school well enough that her first-grade teacher advanced her to second grade halfway through the year. Then, at age seven, she skipped ahead to third grade in the fall of 1950. The
advanced placement proved to be a social handicap: Janis was as much as eighteen months younger than some of her classmates, and smaller than most of her friends. Yet her diminutive stature didn’t stop her from acting the equal to her older—and larger—playmates, who sometimes forgot how much younger Janis was.
“She enjoyed the physical aspects of playing,” said Roger Pryor, a neighbor two years her senior whose family’s home abutted the Joplins’ backyard. “She liked to play with the guys, boys’ sports, baseball. She wasn’t bashful, and she could argue. She initiated more than she responded: ‘Let’s do this! Let’s play this game!’ She was stubborn but likable.”
At ages ten and eleven, Janis, still the unabashed tomboy, was unself-conscious and saw no problem in going shirtless like the neighborhood boys during Port Arthur’s long, hot, humid summers. “She played outside without a shirt until she was in the seventh grade,” Pryor recalled. “She was slow in physical maturation. Nobody ever said anything about it, but it was strange behavior for a girl.”
Some kids considered Roger a bully, but Janis was fearless and always stood up to him. She even challenged him to wrestling matches. “I felt really ill at ease wrestling with a girl,” said Pryor, “and here was Janis wanting to wrestle. My parents had told me time and time again, never fight with a girl. She chased after me. If she caught you, she [sat] down on you. I remember her sitting on me, grinning. Janis would just laugh like a triumphant victor.”
Janis may have pounded on Roger because she had a crush on him. Also, a part of her was possibly jealous of the friendship he’d developed with her father. Seth “really liked me,” Pryor recounted. “He treated me like a son. He would talk to me, spend time with me, make things like slingshots.” Her father also encouraged Janis’s rambunctiousness, with no thought whatsoever of encouraging her to stay inside and play with her dolls. He built stilts and an oversized seesaw for Roger and Janis.