On 25 March 1976, with her 2 1/2 year-old-son, Ethan, and nanny in the next room, Phyllis Major Browne (wife of Jackson Browne) killed herself with a drug overdose.
She had attempted suicide a number of times before, once after a break-up with Keith Richards, and another time around her marriage to Browne (in December 1975), only a few months before her final attempt.
Jackson Browne's former girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, attended Phyllis' funeral (which angered Browne). According to Sheila Weller's book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And the Journey of a Generation, Mitchell had attempted suicide after her own breakup with Jackson Browne, swallowing pills and cutting herself, but vomited the pills and survived.
Mitchell's song "Not to Blame" from her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo is said to be about Major's suicide ("the frailty you despise/And the looks you love to drive to suicide"), which prompted a response from Jackson Browne, "She's not a happy person, and what she says in that song is absolutely, 100 percent wrong. And it's really very nasty, very, very ill, you know, very bad-spirited of her to make this kind of conjecture."