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Abigail Griffin: “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky”
By Raven Reyes for Vanity Fair
For nearly fifteen years, speculation about legendary singer/songwriter Marcus Kane’s muse – the charismatic, complicated object of desire at the heart of his most beloved songs, known to fans as simply “The Woman” – has been both the music industry’s most cherished parlor game, and the very private Kane’s most closely-held secret. Then a college student told a blogger a sweet story about her godfather, and the identity of “The Woman” finally came to light. Vanity Fair’s Raven Reyes packs her bags for rural New England and finds a truly unforgettable story about an extraordinary woman, the brilliant man who loves her, and the hidden legacy behind some of the greatest music of the twenty-first century.
This story starts three months before it actually starts. Let me explain.
In late February, a nineteen-year-old pre-med student at Mount Weather University named Clarke Griffin was interviewed by another student named Jasper Jordan, who blogs for the college radio station, for a feature about playlists for studying. In the middle of the interview, Marcus Kane’s “The Girl Inside the Mountain” came on in the office next door, and then – well, things got weird.
The interview is readily available on the Internet and has definitely appeared in your Facebook feed at least thirty times by now; however, as a brief refresher – or in case you are a charmingly analog scholar of pop culture who only gets your news from magazines – we’ve excerpted the relevant section below.
(You may, perhaps, be wondering whether Condé Nast was required to obtain legal permission to reprint this interview from the director of the college radio station. You may also be wondering whether or not that conversation was, perhaps, hilarious. The answer to both is exactly what you think it is.)
[EDITOR’S NOTE: By this point in the interview they have introduced Clarke to the readers, explained that this is part of a regular feature called “Study Break” where students from different academic departments share their Spotify playlists for studying on the radio station’s blog, indulged in some gentle mockery of the campus coffeehouse music circuit, and moved on to talking through Clarke’s playlist.]
JJ: So I think it’s interesting to note here that everything on this playlist is instrumental. That seems to be an area where a lot of our blog followers are very divided in their preferences, I mean as far as study music specifically.
CG: If I’m reading something, I can’t have music with words or I’ll get distracted. So my hardcore study mix is a lot of modern classical. John Adams, Nico Muhly, maybe a little Stravinsky. Sometimes jazz – Kind of Blue is in there too –
Solid choice.
Can’t go wrong with Miles Davis. But if I need an energy boost, I usually turn to – [There’s a weirdly long pause in which Griffin appears to be distracted by music coming from next door]
You okay?
[laughing] Sorry. Yes. Sorry. I disappeared for a minute. It’s this song.
We’re huge, dorky Kaniacs in this office.
Yeah. Sorry, I’m just – this is a little weird, I’m not used to –
Is it too loud? I can have Harper turn it off.
No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. Seriously. It’s just . . . Like, I don’t know if there’s a non-weird way to explain this, but –
You hate this song.
No! No, it’s – he wrote it for me.
Wait, what?
Yeah, he’s my godfather.
Marcus Kane.
Yeah.
Marcus Kane is your godfather.
Yeah, he’s known my mom for like twenty years.
Who’s your mom?
Oh, she’s not, like, famous. She’s a doctor. Her name’s Abby. I don’t actually know how they met or anything. I don’t think I really got what a big deal he was until I was in high school and I realized other girls had pictures of him as like their laptop screensaver and there were all these like fan Tumblrs and things like that. He was just Marcus. He was always around. He taught me how to play guitar –
Marcus motherfucking Kane was your guitar teacher?
[laughs] God, don’t print that! I’m terrible. I know like three chords. Don’t tarnish his good name.
So, this is legit. This is – you’re not bullshitting me.
This is legit. I’ll text my mom right now if you want confirmation.
No, I trust you. It’s just . . . insane.
Yeah, I can see that.
So you’re “The Girl Inside the Mountain.”
Yeah, in a way.
How did that even come about? He doesn’t talk much about the origins of that song at all.
It's a super sweet story. This one time he was staying with us for the weekend – I think I was maybe seven? Eight? – and I had a terrible nightmare. He and my mom were in the living room, reading, and I came running out there and I was crying and kind of hysterical and was telling my mom I’d had a bad dream about, I forget what, but I think I was maybe trapped underground or something.
That’s dark shit for an eight-year-old.
I think I’d just watched a thing on Sesame Street about anthills that day and it freaked me out.
Okay, that’s hilarious.
Anyway, so I’m crying and yelling and having a little baby meltdown, and Marcus just picked me up in his arms and carried me back to bed and tucked me in and said he was going to give me a present that would make scary dreams go away. And he sang me this song – I think he kind of just made it up as he went – about a princess who lives underground and all the exciting things that happen to her. And the most important part, he said, was that the mountain was full of secret doors. She could come and go whenever she wanted, and if she thought she was trapped, she just had to stop and look around because there was always another way.
I am legit tearing up a little. That's bonkers adorable. What did your mom think?
Oh, she loved it. She used to sing it to me herself sometimes. She was never a musician or anything, but she has a really pretty voice. She sang it to me when I couldn’t sleep. She said he’d been writing songs about her for years but he gave the very best one to me.
Wait.
Shit.
Say that again.
It’s not –
Holy shit, Clarke.
Yeah, I don't really want to go into this. I'd like to cut this part. I didn't - I wasn't thinking.
“He’d been writing songs for her for years.” That’s what you said.
Can we please go off the record?
You can’t ask to go off the record after you’ve already said it.
Look, it’s not – she’s a super private person, we don’t talk about this stuff.
She’s “The Woman.” Your mom is “The Woman.”
Look, I can’t – that part’s not my story to tell.
You know you basically just confirmed it, right?
This interview is over. [Clarke gets up and leaves the room. She does not return any calls or emails from Jordan or the director of the radio station.]
* * *
This is where things begin to get messy.
It takes less than five minutes after the blog post goes live before the news finds its way to Twitter and Reddit, and only another five after that before Abigail Griffin’s phone begins to ring and she finds herself under siege. If you would like a foolproof recipe for pissing off an entire community, the best way to do that is to clog up the voicemail of the town’s most respected surgeon with hundreds of requests for autographs and interviews so people who need an appendectomy can't get through.
Abigail Griffin is a public person. Celebrities can go hide out on their private islands when the press is too much for them, but Griffin is a doctor. It is vital to her work that she be easy to find. The hospital does not have a P.R. team so much as it has a sixty-two-year-old office manager named Ed who occasionally fields inquiries from the local paper. Absolutely no one is equipped for the international media firestorm that ensues. Finally, under great duress, Griffin retains the services of a publicist, who counsels her – correctly, as it turns out – that the majority of these calls are from media outlets, all of whom want first crack at the exclusive story, and once one of them gets it, the hysteria will die down.
This is where I come in.
I should mention here that I knew Abigail Griffin’s name and identity almost three months before everyone else did.
I should also mention that Jasper Jordan’s parents are my next-door neighbors.
A word about music journalists and our strange hobbies. Sussing out the identity of “The Woman” – the gritty, charismatic heroine of nearly every Marcus Kane song you know and love – has become something of an industry parlor game over the past fifteen years since he burst onto the scene with The Woman That Fell From the Sky and became a legend. Like Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat or Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, she has become an addictive mystery, her identity endlessly debated by armchair experts who have spent years carefully combing through lyrics for clues. Kane's discography paints a remarkably detailed portrait of the interior life of this woman whom we’ve all come to feel, in some way, that we know intimately, but reveals precious few identifying details. Dark eyes. A sad past. A daughter with golden hair. Not much to go on, until Clarke Griffin showed up.
Kaniacs tend to fall into one of three distinct camps with regard to “The Woman.” One insists she’s fictional. Or, perhaps more accurately, mythic - the Dulcinea to his Don Quixote, the dream woman he envisions before him but can’t have. Others assert that she’s clearly a composite character, drawing on traits from multiple figures in Kane’s life. There’s something a little infantilizing about this view, I think; it implies no living person could possibly have that complex a personality.
I am in the third camp.
I have always believed she was real, and Jasper Jordan knows it.
He calls me at eleven-thirty p.m. on a Tuesday night, and he is closer to hyperventilating than I have ever heard him. He tells me the whole story, carefully and slowly, like the journalist-in-training he is. Then he reads me the transcript. Then he explains that the interview is part of a series, they’re auto-queued and posted in order, and Clarke’s won’t go up until the beginning of finals week in May. Jasper has not told anyone else at the radio station what Clarke Griffin told him. Nobody else was in the room. His blog posts are password-protected, as is the file on his computer where he stores the recording. “Unless she told anyone else," he said, "and it really didn't seem like she had, for the next three months we're the only two people who know that Clarke Griffin’s mother is Marcus Kane’s ‘The Woman.'"
I freak out so loudly that Kyle hits me in the head with a pillow until I get out of bed and close the door behind me.
Once in my office, I make Jasper take me through the whole thing again, and again, and again, until I am note-perfect on every detail. Then I thank him profusely, hang up and get to work. I have a head start, but no idea how long it will last.
I decide, upon careful consideration, not to contact Clarke Griffin. I don’t want Jasper to get into trouble, and I want confirmation from another source. So I begin with research. I find everything on the Internet about Abigail Griffin, and I memorize her like a criminal profiler. She was born Abigail Constance Arker forty-three years ago in Columbus, Ohio, only daughter of an elementary school teacher and a circuit court judge. She was top of her class at Harvard Medical School and married environmental attorney Jake Griffin a year after completing her residency at Sloan Kettering. Only a few years later, Jake went out to run errands and never came back; he stopped at the bank to deposit a paycheck, found himself in the middle of an armed robbery in progress, and was shot in the act of calling the police. Clarke was only four years old. Abigail packed up her daughter, sold the apartment, and left a remarkably impressive New York career behind to move to rural Western Massachusetts, about three hours outside the city in a town we’ve been asked not to name. She has lived there ever since.
Nothing in Abigail Griffin’s life would indicate where she could possibly have crossed paths with Marcus Kane, though my instincts immediately zero in on the New York years. Kane would have been an up-and-comer then, appearing from time to time in smaller venues throughout the city. I decide to do some more thorough digging, and call in reinforcements.
There are exactly six people in the world, by my calculation, who know more about the career of Marcus Kane than I do. I call them all. I start with Sylvie Simmons, award-winning biographer of Leonard Cohen, who has been rumored for years to have her eye on Marcus Kane as the subject of her next book. The others include respected music journalists from Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Guardian, the New York Times and the New Yorker, all of whom have profiled Marcus Kane extensively over the years. The sixth is a senior executive from MTV.
Their answers are unanimous. They have never heard of Clarke or Abigail Griffin.
I call my editor and tell her I have a story.
* * *
You may have noticed that there’s a rather obvious piece missing from the story I’ve told you so far.
Marcus Kane.
I assemble my dossier on Abigail Griffin, feeling a bit like a stalker, and I call Marcus Kane’s agent, who I’ve dealt with before many times. She is weird and terse on the phone and tells me she’ll have someone call me back. No one does. I let a couple days go by – Kane just finished a tour, the whole team is probably overworked and exhausted, I don’t want to be a jerk about this – and then try again. This time she does not pick up. I have the email address of someone in the PR office at Kane’s agency, and I try him. I am politely informed that Marcus Kane is not giving any interviews right now. I try the agent again, this time using my editor’s name, leaning rather heavily on the “ . . . from Vanity Fair” part. I am rebuffed once more, with even greater firmness. I try three more possible contacts and strike out each time. The whole thing is beginning to feel rather surreal – I’ve never found Kane and his team anything less than affable and cooperative in all the six years I’ve worked for this magazine. And that’s when the penny drops, and I realize how stupid I’ve been.
Clarke Griffin is a smart girl. She would have called her mother and her godfather the second she got out of that interview. I do not have the secret head start I thought I had. Marcus Kane did not know who would come knocking on his door to chase down the story of Abigail Griffin, but he knew it was a matter of time before someone did. And I’ve just walked right up and announced myself. “Me! Me! I’m the journalist here to invade your personal life!”
This is not an auspicious beginning.
I leave Kane be for the moment and decide to try another tack. There is, after all, one other person in the world familiar enough with Kane's songs and the stories behind them to potentially confirm whether I’m on the right track with Abigail Griffin.
If I can get to him.
And if he’ll speak to me.
And if he isn’t – as is rumored – certifiably, straight-up batshit insane.
But I’m running out of options, and I’ve already burned through one of my three months, and I’m praying that if Marcus Kane won’t give me the information I’m looking for, maybe his producer will. So I bite the bullet and decide to take a wild swing at contacting the musical legend who sent Kane multi-platinum, whose fanatical and obsessive creative genius helped shape the arc of his entire career, delivering Kane Grammy after Grammy and arguably changing the course of popular music for decades to come.
Enter Thelonious J.
* * *
Grammy-winning producer & rock impresario Thelonious J (photo courtesy City of Light Records)
Compared to spending a week and a half trying to chase down someone from Kane’s management team, the process is laughably anticlimactic. But Thelonious J is the head of a billion-dollar record label, and there is always someone to answer the phone. I call the main line, ask for his office and am cheerfully transferred with no fanfare to one of his many assistants, to whom I introduce myself as a journalist from Vanity Fair who would like to beg five minutes of Mr. J’s time for a very brief phone interview. I am half-expecting a hushed exclamation of horror at my presumption – “No mortal is permitted to address Thelonious J!” But of course, no man is a legend to the people who do his filing, so she politely asks me to leave my contact information so someone can get back to me. Then she asks me what this press inquiry is in reference to, and I decide to bite the bullet.
“It’s for a piece on Marcus Kane,” I said. “I have some questions for him about Abigail Griffin.” The name means nothing to her, but she promises to pass the message along and somebody will be in contact with me soon.
Twenty-six minutes later, my phone rings. “You found her,” says the unmistakable voice on the other end of the phone. “I’m impressed.”
Thelonious J has called me back himself.
I get no details out of him except validation of the one fact I’ve been running around for five and a half weeks now, trying to independently confirm: Abigail Griffin is “The Woman.”
I know who she is. I know how to find her. And I am the only one.
I call her the next morning. I am careful. I am polite and prepared. I introduce myself as a writer for Vanity Fair, I give her my contact information and ask her to write it down in case she needs to reach me later, and only then do I ask the question I’ve been dying to ask.
She hangs up the phone. When I try back, there’s no answer.
I call five more times over the course of the next week, but Abigail Griffin does not pick up the phone. Neither I nor my editor wants to run the story without her participation and permission, but we are quietly devastated at the thought of someone else beating us to the punch in May when Clarke’s blog post will arrive like a bolt from the blue and pretty much break the Internet. I resign myself to the loss. I take my friends out for drinks and I tell them I know who “The Woman” is and they ask when they’ll get to read about it and I tell them “Never” and sigh into my bourbon. Kyle hides his Marcus Kane CDs to avoid sending me into another tailspin of irritation like the one that ended with me yelling at the cat.
Then the story breaks. The media goes insane. Griffin's tiny New England town is under siege, with reporters and celebrity stalkers everywhere. The hospital hires extra security. There are flashbulbs in her face in the grocery store. Clarke takes a leave of absence from school, where life has become just as chaotic for her. I am torn between regret for The Story That Got Away and enormous sympathy for these two women caught in the maelstrom of celebrity unprepared.
On June 3rd my phone rings. It’s just after noon. I’m technically on lunch. I consider letting it go to voicemail, and only pick up on the off chance it’s the Thai place calling back to say there’s a problem with my order.
It’s not my lunch. It’s Maya the publicist. “Congratulations,” she says. “Pack your bags.”
I am not sure I'm understanding her correctly.
"She finally realized that the only way for the storm to die down," explains Maya, "is to pick a respectable publication, give one very thorough interview, and everyone else clamoring for an exclusive will go away as soon as there's no exclusive to be had. And you were first."
"When you say 'thorough -'" I ask her.
"She only wants to do this once," says the publicist. "She says she'll tell you everything."
Twenty-four hours later, I am sitting on Abigail Griffin's couch.
She tells me everything.
END OF PART ONE