Linda Ronstadt steps back into spotlight while staring down Parkinson’s.
Singer returns to give talks 5 years after diagnosis with Parkinson’s
Linda Ronstadt doesn’t feel like company much these days. At least, not too much company. And on a recent visit, she is definitely not going to put on clothes and makeup.
Ronstadt is withdrawing from medicine she has been taking for more than three years that was supposed to help control her Parkinson’s disease. She suffers from nausea, vertigo, the works. That means no photo shoot today — though she makes it clear she isn’t a shut-in.
“You have to have a life,” Ronstadt says, “but I have to be very selective about what I do.”
That’s why this year, Ronstadt has chosen to come out in public again after her life-changing diagnosis five years ago. She has returned to public appearances last month in Tucson and Phoenix for “A Conversation With Linda,” where she recollected her career interspersed with snippets of recordings and videos. She even answered questions from the audience. Reviews from those events noted, with some surprise, how funny Ronstadt
was, as if she has finally made public the brilliant, chatty, outgoing private self her friends have always known.
She plans to showcase that charm again this fall in three Northern California appearances — Sept. 15 at Dominican University of California, San Rafael; Sept. 21 at Folsom Lake College in Sacramento County; and Sept. 29 at Mountain Winery in Saratoga.
But this morning, her short, reddish hair hasn’t seen a brush yet. Ronstadt is curled up under a blanket on a lounge in her Sea Cliff living room, a scarf around her neck.
Outside her home’s windows, the garden is in full bloom. Her two grown children live in a house in the back, and 1-year-old Tucker, whom Ronstadt rescued as a 5-week-old kitten trying to cross a Los Angeles freeway, stalks the living room magisterially. Her longtime assistant, Janet Stark, is busy in the kitchen. Her daughter, Mary, 28, whose painting of Tucker on a clothes hanger is hanging on the wall, calls to check in.
Life for Ronstadt is much different these days. One of the most celebrated female vocalists of her generation, the Grammy-, Emmy-, Golden Globe- and Tony Award-winning artist has taken a panoramic journey through music. With her sleek classic-rock hits ubiquitous on ’70s radio, her extraordinary career has touched on country, folk, jazz, bluegrass, Cajun, Mexican canciones, the Great American Songbook, Gilbert and Sullivan on Broadway, and collaborations with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, the Eagles and many others.
But after a lifetime of traveling the world singing, Ronstadt, now 71, spends most of her time at home.
For more than a dozen years after the symptoms began to affect her singing, Ronstadt had no idea what happened to her. The loss of her abilities was a startling mystery. “I knew it was something systemic,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t age. Doctors looked at my larynx and said it was in perfect condition, that I had a teenage larynx.”
She recorded her 2004 small combo jazz album, “Hummin’ to Myself,” with what she described as “a limited palette” and leaned on collaborator Ann Savoy on her final recording, the 2006 album “Adieu False Heart.”
She played her last concert in 2009 in San Antonio.
She retired not knowing why she could no longer sing, a mystery only solved years later by the Parkinson’s diagnosis. She initially suspected a tickborne disease was responsible. After her hands began to shake, she blamed the tremors on shoulder surgery. It wasn’t until she saw a neurologist in 2013 that she was finally diagnosed. A Conversation With Linda: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 15, $45-$85, Angelico Hall, Dominican University of California, 20 Olive Ave., San Rafael; 7:30 p.m. Sept. 21, $45-$95, Harris Center, 10 College Parkway, Folsom (Sacramento County); 7:30 p.m. Sept. 29, $39.50-$99.50, Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce Road, Saratoga. www.ronstadt-linda.com Ronstadt went public with the news in an interview with AARP Magazine.
“No one can sing with Parkinson’s,” she told AARP. “No matter how hard you try.”
Parkinson’s is a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that affects motor control. Usually appearing later in life, the disease develops slowly over years and is notoriously difficult to diagnose. In many cases, drug treatment can help resolve symptoms, but not for Ronstadt. She is among the 1 in 5 Parkinson’s victims who do not benefit from increased dopamine, she says.
Parkinson’s has reduced her gorgeous, glorious voice to a monochromatic near-whisper.She speaks in a tiny spray, gushes of words and sentences with almost no expression. Singing has long been out of the question.
“Brushing my teeth is the hardest thing I do all day,” she admits. “I’m like a window washer without a safety harness.”
But Ronstadt refuses to give up. With the same characteristic pluck and verve that drove her ceaseless musical experiments, she is staring down Parkinson’s with steely resolve. Ronstadt intends to shake, rattle and roll well into the future.
“Of course, I have a hard time talking, and traveling is ridiculous,” she says. “It’s just the nature of the beast.”
Ronstadt is now a full-time San Franciscan. She sold the historic hacienda she had owned for the past 10 years in her native Tucson and stays at a hotel when she visits her hometown.
Ronstadt maintains muscle mass through regular workouts at the gym (or, in recent days, with a physical trainer at her home), but the controlling impulses have been shortcircuited.
“It’s important to push that signal through my brain,” she says. “It takes a lot of will.”
Life goes on — just slower. Sometimes, on days like today, the urge to run and hide must be vanquished and she must remind herself of advice from one of the most famous Parkinson’s patients: “Michael J. Fox told me, ‘I make plans, and I keep them.’ ”
She faces her hardships with a tidy acceptance and complete lack of bitterness. If she has succumbed to moments of feeling sorry for herself, it doesn’t show. “I don’t want to sound whiny,” she says.
Her cell phone signals an incoming message. It’s a video selfie from Grammy-winning vocalist Aaron Neville, who appeared on her 1989 album “Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind.” He is sitting at a piano singing “My Mother’s Eyes” in his inimitable vibrato. Her hand shakes as she holds the phone and watches, eyes gleaming, enchanted.
Now people have to sing to her, not the other way around.