Mr. Serious
Don Henley is passionate about his cause - and his critics
Author: Peter S. Canellos
Publication: Boston Globe
Date: December 15, 1990
Abstract: Henley talks about topics such as environmental and political concerns, especially his pet cause Walden Woods.
It is a warm day. "Global warming," says Don Henley, as he climbs into a black car for a cross-town drive to a human rights luncheon hosted by Jimmy Carter.
Henley has been promised a 15-minute meeting with the former president - 15 minutes to persuade Carter to join Henley's campaign to save Concord's Walden Woods, the lands that inspired naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
The car jolts and honks its way through midday Manhattan traffic, past the giant office buildings and apartment houses that mark New York. "All these monuments to architects do not impress me as much as a forest," he says.
An ambulance screams by. Two ungainly trucks pull alongside the car. "It's so peaceful here," he quips.
A flood of yuppies wearing business suits spills into the lunch-hour streets. "I don't think people were meant to live like this, packed together like sardines," he says. "It makes them violent."
The car pulls to a stop at New York University. The lunch is full of men and women with gray suits and gray hair. Henley stands out in his brown suit and tinted granny glasses. But most seem impressed by the rock star. "It's the first time I've seen one of them in a tie," says one guest.
After the lunch, Henley makes his pitch to Carter. The former president is receptive.
Henley's calendar is weighted with dozens of similar meetings, fund-raising dinners and benefit concerts, such as tonight's at the Orpheum Theater headlined by his pal Warren Zevon.
Many observers say Henley, 43, is burying himself in the Walden Woods project in part to rebut opponents who made comments he took to mean he was a Hollywood lightweight, "an airhead." The Walden Woods, some people say, have become a 2,680-acre chip on Henley's shoulder. He is desperate, they say, to prove he is a Serious Person.
Don Henley, serious?
"Don," says his best friend, Irving Azoff, "watches CNN the way some people watch MTV."
In fact, Henley's fans, many millions of whom bought his latest album, "The End of the Innocence," already know he is serious. The album is Henley's benediction for the '80s, an assault on lawyers, stockbrokers, television preachers and Reagan-era materialists.
Many Henley songs, such as his current single, "New York Minute," are lyrical morality plays, like something Arthur Miller might produce if he were hip and could carry a tune. As with Miller, many of Henley's plays end in disillusionment, not only of the characters but of the singer and of society.
"I wrote a song for the 'Hotel California' album called 'The Last Resort,' which pretty much encapsulizes what's going on now, but I guess I'll have to write it again, another version," he says. "I'm still writing the same song. I'm just trying to get it right."
Henley's intensity is lampooned by music industry gadfly Mojo Nixon in his satire "Don Henley Must Die." Nixon said in an interview that he wrote the song because he was offended by Henley's "pompous and self-aggrandizing manner." The song suggests that Henley has forgotten that he is, you know, a singer, not Mr. Jesus Christ himself.
Henley claims he is not angry at Nixon, because "Mojo Nixon is a grain of sand in the desert," "a frustrated little boy" and "an angry boy looking for attention."
Henley's defenders argue that he has reason to be upset: Madonna strips to enliven her videos, Eddie Murphy and Sylvester Stallone travel with entourages that would make King Fahd blush, and Mojo Nixon accuses Don Henley of drawing attention to himself?
"He is one of the most committed people I've ever met in my career in public service," says Kathi Anderson, director of the Walden Woods project and a longtime aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. "He wants to grow and improve and do things properly. He expects no more from other people than he expects from himself, but he expects a lot from himself."
Henley claims that "my skin's gotten a lot thicker in the last 10 years," and he has wearied of staring down critics. When he sang with the Eagles, the mega-successful '70s band with which he first made his mark, Henley raised eyebrows by penning angry rebuttals to music writers who attacked the band's albums.
"It was something I enjoyed, parrying," he says. "The critics took it more seriously than I did. It was fun for me. I could put words on paper. I could see if I could be snottier than they are. It's like sword fighting. Touche."
Many who know him, or have observed him heading the Walden Woods project, suggest that more than a little of the old, hypersensitive Henley remains.
He personally negotiated with developer Mortimer Zuckerman to buy a parcel of land in Walden Woods, until the negotiations became too acrimonious and others took over.
Zuckerman bought the land for $ 3.1 million in 1984 and is threatening to build an office complex. He wants $ 7.4 million. Another Walden Woods developer, Philip DeNormandie, trimmed $ 2 million off his selling price to help the conservation effort. Zuckerman, Henley contends, is holding out for blood.
"The man is filthy stinking rich," Henley says. "He can afford to do better."
Ed Linde, Zuckerman's partner, says, "Mort certainly doesn't have a dispute with him. Whether Don Henley knows it or not, we're doing nothing but trying to recover the costs we've put into the site."
Azoff, who became friends with Henley when he worked for the Eagles' management company and who later managed the Eagles himself, says, "Don's been known to be a little thin-skinned. That's because he's so passionate. He's a fighter. Once maligned, he'll come after you."
Henley paints his East Texas childhood in primary colors: a red sky, blue streams for wading and catching frogs, swaying green fields. "There were old black men plowing fields with mules," he says, as if describing the dewy, antebellum opening of "Gone With the Wind."
"I always had a dog," he says. "I love dogs. I don't care for cats much."
Henley is an only child. His memories of childhood are warmed by his love for his late father, who farmed and roamed the outdoors. Henley remembers his father, who had an eighth-grade education, as a voracious reader who taught him to love books.
"He had an appreciation for nature," he says. "He loved to grow things in the ground. He'd take me to a pond to feed the ducks."
Henley studied the philosophical writings of Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson while in Margaret Lovelace's English class during his final two years of high school in tiny Linden, Texas. Lovelace remembers Henley as "reserved, I think I'd call him, but very well liked by students and teachers."
"I think he learned from Emerson and Thoreau some values that will keep us from destroying ourselves," Lovelace says. "He's become a conservationist. From Emerson, I think he learned the importance of self-reliance. I think that helped him a lot. I think literature should teach us not how to make a living but how to live life."
Henley corresponds frequently with Lovelace and considers her one of his great mentors. Her teachings seem to motivate him to save Walden Woods. In his black-and-white view, the Walden Woods project seems to loom as a battle between Margaret Lovelace and Mort Zuckerman.
Henley majored in English literature at North Texas State College but dropped out in his fourth year to be with his father during his father's final illness.
From there he moved to California, and the Eagles and the world.
Although he is a leading member of Hollywood's brain clique, counting as close friends such second-generation Hollywood kids as Carrie Fisher and Bonnie Raitt, he says he has always feared becoming a celebrity.
Henley's celebrity-eye view of the United States isn't always pretty. He says he sees blow-dried politicians make regular, cynical pilgrimages to Hollywood to raise money; the media fecklessly make and break idols; crazy fans bare their anger and lonely hearts.
"It's dangerous," he says. "I get threats from lunatics all the time, as do most of my peers. I live behind gates and an alarm system. I didn't grow up that way."
The contrast between his idyllic remembered childhood and the trials of his adulthood informs his music. He sees himself as a messenger from a simpler place and time, caught up in a society on the verge.
"I went to the Dakota for the first time a few weeks ago when I was here, and I stood on the spot where John Lennon was shot," he says. "It was a very strange feeling. My life's been threatened a couple of times. I get some letters from absolute psychotics who are out walking the streets."
Henley fights the notion that the Walden Woods project has unusual importance in his life, noting that he's embraced many environmental causes. "It's just a job that needs doing," he says. "I need this publicity and aggravation like a hole in the head. If I had the money I'd buy the damned thing myself and give it to somebody and get it over with."
Others see the Walden Woods campaign as an expression of his deepest convictions and desires. Through the fund-raising activities, Henley presents his Thoreauvian beliefs to a wide audience; vindicates his childhood; redeems his celebrity for a good end; wrestles with the developers and other perceived villains he's attacked in music; and proves his effectiveness outside the music world.
The task is daunting. He must raise enough money to buy two multimillion-dollar development sites, plus a third site for an affordable housing project that was to have been built on one of the development sites.
"I can see it's going to take quite some time," he says, without a trace of weariness. "This could take two or three more years."
And then, presumably, he will move on to another cause. But the never-married Henley hints at a more permanent future as a family man. "I wouldn't mind doing what John Lennon did: be a house husband and cook. I love to cook," he says. "Let the wife deal with this chaos. I've dealt with it for 25 years."
Irving Azoff says, "The guy's a candidate for a great parent. If you asked me 15 years ago, I'd say he'd be married and have kids. But Don's a guy who likes to think and stay young, and the thought of settling down probably subconsciously signifies getting old."
Azoff says his favorite Henley song is "Desperado," the ballad about a Texas loner Azoff calls "the best vocal performance and best song ever written."
Henley, too, puts "Desperado" among his three favorite songs and derides critics who once speculated it was written about the Symbionese Liberation Army. "It's about people who can't accept love and affection from people," he says. "I call them eternal boys." And he acknowledges that, like many of his songs, it is in part "a memo to myself."It may be raining
But there's a rainbow above you
You gotta let somebody love you
Before it's too late.
