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‘Maybe I am bizarre to some people …’ The unique, underrated mind of 70s singer Dory Previn

After a painful childhood and marriage, the US singer-songwriter used writing to understand her schizophenia. A new film explores the wondrous music she then made

Googling the song’s title, Holy Man on Malibu Bus Number Three, she discovered the mellifluous singer was Dory Previn: a Hollywood lyricist turned troubadour whose witty, incisive and deeply personal music ploughed its own furrow in the 1970s, amassing a cult following in spite of modest sales. Born in New Jersey in 1925, Previn endured a troubled childhood, subjected to abuse by her father (an ex-soldier who had been gassed in the first world war trenches) whose paranoid episodes came to a head when he boarded up the family in their home and held them at gunpoint for several months. Encouraged by doctors to write as a form of cognitive therapy … Dory Previn.Previn co-wrote songs for Tony Bennett and Judy Garland, as well as Doris Day – who became a mouthpiece for Previn’s frustrations, on the brink of feminism’s second wave, when she jauntily sang: “Control yourself, contain yourself, restrict yourself, restrain yourself.” A much-lauded soundtrack for the pill-popping melodrama Valley of the Dolls followed in 1967, a year that was between two nervous breakdowns for Previn: one in 1965 and the other in 1969 when she discovered that the actor Mia Farrow was pregnant with André’s child.

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