In the excitement surrounding Kilauren's reunion with her birth mother, meeting her birth father almost seemed an afterthought. Trying to contact MacMath, Ted Barrington phoned Linda Miller, an old acquaintance from Don Mills--without realizing that she was MacMath's wife. "I'd photographed Ted's wedding five years ago," Miller laughed. "The marriage only lasted six months. So yesterday he phoned me up out of the blue, because I'm the only photographer he knew, and he said, 'Have you heard of this Brad MacMath guy?'"
That, as it turns out, is just one in a trail of bizarre coincidences linking Kilauren to her past--slim degrees of separation between Sixties abandon and the Nineties commitment.
Kilauren's biological parents were both art students in Calgary when she was conceived. They moved to Toronto during the pregnancy and discussed settling down. "Oh yeah," sighs MacMath, "we had to go through all that. But we were not communicating." He went back to Saskatchewan, then on to California. "I was trying to be an artist," he says, "and when she got married to some other guy, I just divorced myself from the whole situation. That was the last straw."
Mitchell, in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, says that her main concern at the time was to conceal her pregnancy from her parents. "The scandal was so intense," she recalls. "A daughter could do nothing more disgraceful. You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody." Mitchell's mother, however, now says, "If we had known she was expecting a baby, we would have helped. I'm sure we would have encouraged her to keep the baby, but we didn't know anything about it until several years later when she and Chuck separated and she was home and told us about it."
Mitchell remembers giving birth in a Toronto hospital, where "one of the barbaric things they did was they bound the breasts of unwed mothers to keep the milk from coming," she says. Complications, she adds, kept her in the hospital for 10 days with her child. During the early years after the adoption, Mitchell told the Times, she "worried constantly" about the child's health because her pregnancy diet had been "atrocious." In an interview on CBC Newsworld's Pamela Wallin Live--broadcast, by coincidence, on Feb. 19, 1996, Kilauren's 31st birthday--the singer explained that she had no recourse but adoption. "I didn't have a penny," she said. "I had no money for diapers, or a room to take her to. There was no career on the horizon. Three years later, I had a recording contract and a house and a car, but how could I see that in the future?"
In 1968, Mitchell's career began to take off. She won a Grammy for her album Clouds, and singer Judy Collins turned one of its songs, Both Sides Now, into a hit. Another cut, Chelsea Morning, would later inspire Bill and Hillary Clinton in naming their daughter. In 1970, Mitchell released Ladies of the Canyon, which featured such classic songs as Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock and The Circle Game. The same year, she recorded Blue, an intimate excursion into loneliness and loss, which many consider her masterpiece.
Although Mitchell kept her secret from her parents for several years, and from the media for almost three decades, those close to her knew. "It was very much part of her life," singer Murray McLaughlan told Maclean's. "I think she was always looking for the child." Another friend, Toronto music manager Bernie Fiedler, remembers being with her at the Mariposa Folk Festival about four years after Kilauren's birth. "There was a couple with a little girl wanting to speak to Joni. We went over and talked to the girl, who must have been 4 or 5, and afterwards Joni turned to me and said: 'That could be my daughter.' I will never forget that. She was obviously suffering tremendously."
