| Jewel : Pieces Of UK |
| Home/Magazines/Mail On Sunday/14th March 1999 |
Report by Caroline Graham Photograph by Andrew Southam
Something special indeed. At the age of 24, Jewel may still be relatively unknown in Britain, but in America she is the biggest singing phenomenon since Madonna. And just as Madonna's brash sexuality personified the 'greed is good' Eighties, so Jewel's gentle folk songs, child-like poetry and New Age musings sum up the caring Nineties for a new generation.
Her debut album, Pieces Of You, a collection of 14 songs written when she was 18, sold a staggering 10 million copies and remained in the US charts for three years, becoming one of the Top 10 debut albums of all time. Sales of her latest album, Spirit, have already soared past the four million mark.
Her achievements don't end there. The soft-spoken, 5ft 6in singer is dyslexic, yet her literary accomplishments include an unprecedented £1.5 million advance for a poetry book, A Night Without Armor. Though panned by the critics, it spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication last May. Book Of Memoirs, stories from her Alaskan childhood for which she received a £1 million advance, will be published by HarperCollins this summer in the UK, shortly after her British tour, which starts on May 4.
And, taking her lead from Madonna, who broke into Hollywood with Desperately Seeking Susan, Jewel is heading for the big screen later this year as the star of the American Civil War drama Ride With The Devil, directed by Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm).
The kid from Homer, Alaska, spearheads a multi-million-dollar marketing machine, which has carefully honed her image from jean-wearing folksy girl-next-door into sexy poet laureate for the feel-good generation. 'Jewel has made her mark by being the first folk singer to regularly take the stage with her guitar in four-inch heels and a miniskirt,' gushed Vogue magazine.
Her similarities to Madonna do not end with the way she is directing her career. She even had a stormy love affair with the Material Girl's former husband, Sean Penn. The much-publicised romance helped to heighten her public profile.
The pair started dating in 1995 when Penn split from actress Robin Wright, now his second wife and the mother of his two young children. Penn gave Jewel the break she needed when he invited her to write a song for the soundtrack of his film The Crossing Guard. He also directed the video for her song 'You Were Meant For Me'.
Jewel's advisors carefully crafted their budding star into a sex kitten. The girl who once professed to be so naive that she needed lessons to apply make-up was soon being primed by make-up guru Kevyn Aucoin, who tidied up her 'innocent but sexy' look by highlighting her bee-stung pout and clear, green eyes. Then she trimmed off her remaining puppy fat with a watermelon and vegetarian diet and traded the dippy-hippie clothes for designer couture. She drew gasps from the audience, and ended up on front pages throughout America, when she arrived at the 1997 Grammy Awards wearing an £8,500 Versace gown that left nothing to the imagination. 'I didn't know it was see-through,' she later protested.
Entertainment Weekly summed up her look as 'Dave Crockett and Versace duke it out on the tundra', and Time hyped her on the cover as 'Pop's New Goddess'. But back in Homer, a tiny fishing hamlet 250 miles south-west of Anchorage, the re-making of their small-town girl into a big-time star caused consternation. Schoolteacher Brenda Dolma, who taught Jewel until she was 13, says: 'I looked at the pictures and I thought, oh dear, girl, what have you let them do to you? We thought she'd gone too far.'
Jewel and her 48-year-old mother, Nedra Carroll, now live in a £2.1 million mock-Tudor
mansion in San Diego, California. But with the hits comes the writs. Last November,
Inga Vainshtein, Jewel's first manager and the woman who discovered her performing
at a coffee house, filed a £6 million lawsuit for breach of contract and loss of earnings
against mother and daughter. The writ contends that Nedra forced Vainshtein out of her
manager's role. It also alleges that Nedra ran her business ideas past a psychic channeler
called Jackie Snyder, who 'purportedly evaluated the advice by communing with some
entity referred to as "Z".'
Caryn Brottman Sanders, one of Vainshtein's lawyers, says: 'It's difficult to manage someone when your business decisions are being made by an ancient spirit. Let's just say that my client believes she has been very wrongly treated. She discovered Jewel when she had nothing. Jewel has risen from obscurity and abject poverty to become one of the most famous and successful recording artists of the decade. Her commercial success is thanks to my client.'
Last month, Jewel counter-sued Vainshtein claiming that she acted illegally as ' an unlicensed talent agent' and never had a legal and binding manager's contract, Vainshtein, who is said by friends to feel 'deeply hurt', refuses to go into detail because of the pending action. All she will say is: 'The truth will come out in court. Let's just say I'm very, very upset.'
Problems also arose for Jewel on the set of Ride With The Devil, which Ang Lee puts down to her lack of acting experience. 'I sort of underestimated the difficulty of putting her against experienced and talented actors,' he says. Others, however, talk of her prima donna behaviour. One source told Entertainment Weekly: 'She would do really distracting things. It was real "Viva la Diva" time.'
But Jewel refuses to apologise for her transformation or her popularity. 'I don't want to waste myself on what's frivolous,' she says. 'When I look back, I really don't think I'm going to care that I sold 10 million records or what people said about my poetry book. I don't feel successful, I feel accomplished. The part that doesn't sit well with me is that it seems a little arbitrary. I went from being homeless to being rich in four years. And granted, I am blonde and I am talented and thus the world feels it should pay me a lot. I am just damn thankful. And sure, sex sells.'
She believes she has perfect empathy with her legions of fans. 'It's so easy to feel alone and to feel you are the only one going through what you're going through. You feel very isolated when you're young. If I can help, that's great. Why can't I be sexy and spiritual?'
She even talks of her boyfriend of the past year, rodeo star Chris Douglas, in terms of her sexual appeal. 'He's a real guy,' she says, 'but I am coming to terms with my sexuality. That way kids can go: "Wow! She's just as confused as I am!"'
For Aunt Mossy and the rest of Jewel's family back on their homestead in Homer, the 'Jewel phenomenon' is overwhelming, but not unexpected. Mossy laughs: 'Jewel's plan was to conquer America. Now she's taking on Britain and Europe, too. Good on ya, girl!
'Anything that girl ever wanted, she got. She always had a fierce ambition to go with that God-given talent. I remember her looking at me, cool as you like, when she was about nine or 10. She told me: "I'm going to be a big star, you know." And I looked into her eyes and I never doubted her for a second, not a single second.'
For Jewel's millions of American fans, mostly adolescent girls who avidly read her homespun philosophy - packed with gems like: 'If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we're all okay' - her rise from backwoods obscurity is an inspiration.
Her Swiss grandfather, Yule Kilcher, left Europe on the eve of the Second World War and struck out alone 'in search of Utopia'. He found it on a mountainside overlooking picturesque Kachemak Bay, at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula where the Cook Inlet meets the Gulf of Alaska.
Yule, described by locals as 'a tough-as-hell hippie', and his wife Ruth raised their eight children, giving them names like Sunrise, Stellavera and Catkin, in a tiny log cabin on 800 rugged acres of wilderness where the eldest, Atz, Jewel's father still lives.
Jewel and her two brothers, Atz Jnr and Shane, share a freezing bedroom. The cabin had no heat, electricity or indoor plumbing - Jewel credits her good skin to washing in crystal-clear icy mountain streams. 'We'd be canning salmon after school when other kids would be watching television,' she says. 'You'd get up at five in the morning and there would be frost on your eyelashes. I'd cook breakfast, milk the cow, walk three miles to the road, then hitchhike to school. It was a very poetic existence.'
Homer (population: 4,133) still regards Jewel as its very own homegrown flower child. 'She always had an inner drive to succeed,' remembers Brenda Dolma. 'She would walk through the snow to get to the road. But what you have to remember is that all the other kids from this area did it, too. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary for us. I was the teacher and I had to yomp from my unheated cabin, too. Back then, it was the norm for all of us.'
The ever-expanding Kilcher family were known affectionately as 'the Von Trapps of Homer' because of their shared love of music. Aunt Mossy says: 'There was always music. We didn't have television so we would all sit around singing. Our family believed that if you played together, you stayed together. Some folk would call us dippy hippies, but music's in our blood. You can't live in a place as wild and beautiful as we do without feeling spiritual and wanting to express yourself. Jewel was raised in a family of musicians and poets. None of us thought her talent would change her. She was just a kid who could sing.'
But Jewel's parents had bigger ambitions for their golden-haired daughter. From the age of six, she played with her parents at local bars/ They gave her a $5 bill each time she moved and smiled on stage. Jon Faulkner, manager of the Land's End Hotel which hired them, says Jewel's yodelling always brought the house down.
Then, when she was eight, Jewel's parents divorced. She stayed with her father, whom
she describes as a 'mean' drinker, 'out to lunch' . Singing was the one thing they had in
common. 'So I sang my little brains out. He'd scream and curse and I'd be crying and I'd
still sit there and practise.'
Things got so bad at home, Jewel spent increasing lengths of time with Mossy on her neighbouring farm. 'I came to see Jewel as the daughter I never had,' says Mossy. 'She would hang out here and we would sing and talk and write poetry. She was a lovely girl. But she was also a dreamer. You felt she always knew there was something more out there. She had wanderlust in her eyes. She wanted to travel. She wanted to write. And, most of all, she wanted to sing.'
Jewel did all three. At 16, she left Alaska for San Diego in a battered blue VW camper van to visit her mother. She worked as a waitress while Nedra encouraged her to follow her dreams and even moved into a van beside her. The two washed in McDonald's toilets and survived on peanut butter sandwiches. Jewel earned £40 a week playing at the now defunct Innerchange coffee house on the beach. She says of those times: 'I read Plato and Kant. I became spiritually aware. I began to believe I could do anything I wanted to do.'
Inga Vainshtein was at home in Los Angeles when a breathless friend called her. 'He said: "Get down here immediately. There's a girl singing at this little coffee shop and I have never heard anything like it in my life."'
Vainshtein says her mouth dropped when she saw Jewel perform. Vainshtein immediately contacted Atlantic Records president Danny Goldberg, who signed the young ingenue to a £200,000 three album contract. It was then that the money men and massive marketing machine swung into action.
Cheerful ditties like 'Do You Want to Catch a Cold With Me?' were replaced by earnest love songs such as 'You Were Meant for Me' and 'Who Will Save Your Soul?', which became hits in America.
Atlantic spent £500,000 on an 18-month promotional tour, which promised a singer 'who has the wisdom of an 80-year old, the hope of a four-year-old, the compelling voice of a 20-year-old.'
Jewel repeated her New Age mantras to anyone who would listen. She told Rolling Stone magazine: 'I don't touch alcohol. I am drunk on life.' She spoke openly of her belief in angels. To one interviewer, she said piously: 'Talent is like newly seeded grass. If it's walked on or if it isn't nurtured, it dies.' The Washington Post dismissed her lyrics as 'trite and hackneyed' but the American public, tired of grunge and gangsta rock, liked her wholesomeness and lapped it up.
'The key to marketing her was to have her out there relentlessly,' says Ron Shapiro, Atlantic's vice-president. 'She worked harder than any artist I have ever known. And the public just loved her.'
Jewel played 40 cities in 30 days. She gave interviews from dawn to dusk. Shapiro adds: 'We invested heavily. When she finally broke, she broke big.'
But her success and new lifestyle grates somewhat with Jewel's family back home in Homer. Her failure to return last December for the funeral of the patriarch, Yule Kilcher, caused dismay. Yule, who was 85 when he died, was considered a local hero. Flags were flown at half-mast in Homer as a mark of respect. Jewel told her family that prior business commitments prevented her from coming.
Some worry that she may be forgetting her priorities in the heady pursuit of fame and money. One family member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says: 'There's business and there's family. Jewel should have made the time to come back and pay her last respects to her grandfather. It seems all this fame and fortune is turning her head. She's forgetting where she came from.'
Staring out over Kachemak Bay on a frosty March afternoon, Aunt Mossy is more
restrained. 'I won't speak ill of Jewel,' she says quietly, 'but I hope that she doesn't change
too much. I hope she remembers the wind in her hair and the snow at her feet. We haven't
seen or heard much from her lately. She couldn't make it back for the funeral because
she's such a busy lady these days. That was real sad. There are so many people who want
a piece of her time now. I wish she'd keep in touch more. I really do.
'The last time I spoke to her properly was more than a year ago. She told me she carries a clam shell from Kachemak Bay with her everywhere to remind her of home. I know she's still our kid at heart and hope people out there love and respect her as much as we all do. Jewel is taking on the world. And we wish her the best. But one day, we hope she comes home to Alaska.
'This is where her heart is,' Mossy continues. 'You can all have a piece of her, but we want her back some day. We hope she doesn't forget us in the meantime.'
Jewel makes her UK debut at the Guildhall, Southampton, on May 4. Tour details and booking: 0115 912 9126.
| Jewel : Pieces Of UK |
| Home/Magazines/Mail On Sunday/14th March 1999 |