Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (14 page)

On July 30, Richard Simon suffered a fatal heart attack. “I showed up at Carly's father's funeral, and that's the first time she took me seriously,” recalls Delbanco. “It was a dark and complicated time for her.” Soon enough Carly and Nick were locking themselves into attic rooms in the secret-filled house.

Lucy Simon sees their father's death as being pivotal for Carly. “
My
relationship to our father was very stable; I always felt loved; there was nothing I had to prove to him. Carly didn't have the comfort of that kind of relationship with him.” It was the start of decades of unfinished business.

But the comforting attention of Nick Delbanco enabled Carly to avoid confronting it. Her romance with Nick continued when she entered Riverdale's sixth form and he went back to Harvard for his sophomore year. Even though Carly had to bend at the knees when she stood next to Nick to hide the fact that she was considerably taller, her friends thought it terribly glamorous that she was going with this debonair Harvard novelist. Actually, all the girls had artistic boyfriends—Jessica's, a sensitive, poetic would-be jazz musician (her mother referred to him as “Heathcliff”); Ellen's, every Riverdale girl's crush—handsome Vieri Salvadori, half Jewish, half Italian, on his way to becoming an art critic. Carly's once-difficult-to-tame hair was now long and lustrous; she tossed it, boho-vampishly, behind her right ear; it flowed down her shoulder. Next to her senior class yearbook photo—a sexy, wide-smiling sideways shot—is written: “There are always crowds around Carly: admiring younger girls, distressed seniors, and bewitched lads. They know she is sincere, that her emotions are free, and that she can feel and appreciate more deeply than many. Carly cares.” It would prove to be an enduringly accurate description.

Fueled by the pain of her father's death and the blush of new romance with an intense young writer, Carly threw herself into folk music—Odetta, Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Cynthia Gooding. She wrote songs, once attaching the Robert Burns poem “Ye Flowery Banks” to the ever-romantic melody of “Greensleeves,” another time writing with Jessica a faux–Child Ballad with phallic lyrics. “We loved the ‘bonnie, bonnie banks' songs and the ‘turtle dove' songs,” says Jessica. “Not for us fair maidens” AM rock 'n' roll.

For her application to Sarah Lawrence, Carly and Jessica composed an essay about a book that “changed my life”: Daniel Defoe's
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders.
The only thing was, neither girl had read the novel. They laughed until they wept as they wrote, “Moll faced adversity with the kind of courage I'd like to have in my life” and “In Moll I find the inspiration to be a confident woman.” It was a grand put-on.

Put-on or not, Carly was accepted at Sarah Lawrence. One night at the Stamford house just before Carly started packing for the dorm at the nearby campus, Uncle Peter watched Carly and Lucy harmonizing on a folk song and said, “You two should form a group.” The thought registered more strongly with Lucy than Carly. It would soon be Lucy, the secure older sister, who would drag Carly, the younger one frenetically proving herself, into the modest beginning of a career that would—for a deceptively long stretch of time—seem mostly unpromising.

1961–1964

By John F. Kennedy's inauguration—January 20, 1961—Carole King was close to slipping the bonds of adolescence. At two weeks shy of nineteen years old, she was a wife, a mother, and she had written the #1 pop song. On the bright, cold day that the handsome new president announced, “Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Carole was changing eleven-month-old Lou Lou's diapers at Brown Street and was probably refining the chord changes of what would be—in eight months—her and Gerry's second #1 hit, the bouncy and catchy (if significantly less weighty) “Take Good Care of My Baby.”

The Bobby Vee hit had started with the rudimentary melody that Carole had taken back from Cynthia Weil that April 1960 night because Gerry had not wanted Carole to write with another partner. But the song had really developed when the two new parents started working at 1650 Broadway (Gerry had just quit his job at Argus Chemicals), cramped in what Carole would later recall as a “little cubbyhole with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair, if you were lucky,” where “you'd sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubbyhole composing some song exactly like yours.” On any given day in the early 1960s, a tour through the cacophonous halls of Aldon would yield Carole and Gerry (perhaps working up “One Fine Day” or “Oh No Not My Baby”) mere yards away from Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield (maybe knocking out “Calendar Girl” or “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”), close by Cynthia Weil and her husband, fellow Madison High alum Barry Mann (who might be composing “On Broadway”—or “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” for the Righteous Brothers, which became the song most played on the radio of the next four decades, outplaying even the Beatles). Rounding out the group was Doc Pomus (his real name was Jerome Felder), a disabled polio survivor who, though white and Jewish, had been a blues and R&B singer. Pomus now wrote melodies with the much younger Mort Shuman, a Lincoln High alumnus, including “A Teenager in Love,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” and “This Magic Moment.” Eventually a third young married couple, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, joined the stable, specializing in songs for the young Phil Spector's “wall-of-sound” girl groups, the Crystals and especially the Ronettes, who, in the mid-1960s, kicked the Shirelles' and the Chantels' decorousness up a good notch with their pale-lipsticked, thick-eyelinered, teased-haired, sob-in-the-throat foxiness. Greenwich and Barry wrote “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home).”

“The pressure was really terrific,” Carole has said, “because Donny would play one songwriter against another. He'd say, ‘We need a smash hit!' and we'd all go back and write a song and the next day we'd each audition [for example] for Bobby Vee's producer.” Al Kasha, who, as Jackie Wilson's A&R man, observed the process closely, says, “Kirshner would pit writers against each other, so you were constantly writing. He'd say, ‘The Drifters are up for a date' or ‘Bobby Vee is up for a date'—and they'd all be writing, day and night, trying to outdo each other.”

Cynthia Weil remembers that a frequent gambit was to try to ambush Donny at his office door when he came out to go to the men's room (“Sooner or later he'd
have
to go,” she reasoned), the better to find out who he was cooking up a deal with—what group to try to write a hit for. Donny “created this family of competitive siblings who all wanted to please him, and the way to please him was to write hit songs,” Cynthia has said. “We were always, ‘Donny, d'you like this? Donny, d'you like
this
?'” “I wasn't much older than they were, but they were like my kids,” Donny says. “I was their father, mother, psychiatrist.”

Between late-1950s early rock 'n' roll (Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis before the army) and the British Invasion and ascent of Bob Dylan, the songwriters Kirshner had collected essentially wrote the pop soundtrack for young America, yielding some 200 chart hits in a five-year period. Carole had a signature style now. As she would later describe it, “I loved taking simple melodies [influenced by] classical [compositions] and Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein—taking those melodic influences and putting [them] in the context of rhythm and blues's styling, phrasing, and rhythm.”

Life for Carole now was round-the-clock songwriting and mothering. She and Gerry would often take Lou Lou to Aldon, a major ordeal in the days before strap-on baby carriers and folding, lightweight strollers, when mothers of young children were essentially restricted to their homes and neighborhoods. In her memoir,
How I Became Hettie Jones,
the young poet Hettie Cohen, who married the noted young Beat poet LeRoi Jones (later to be known as Amiri Baraka), recounts arduously maneuvering a big, heavy baby carriage up steep loft stairs to get to a poetry reading. Carole, with her heavy stroller, like Hettie with hers, didn't let the supposedly dominating vocation—and the unwieldy accoutrements—of motherhood keep her from creating. “I didn't let the fact that I had a child slow me down. I just brought her with me,” Carole would later say. “I [was] like: ‘Okay! Feed the baby and then go to the piano!'” She sat at the piano with Lou Lou on her lap. Lou Lou, it is said, once slammed the piano lid on Carole's fingers to demand attention from her work-focused mother.

“I used to walk into Aldon, and the baby would be in a playpen in the middle of the office, and Carole would be at a demo session—it's just the way it was; we never thought about it,” says Cynthia, adding, “I had no idea why people wanted to have these noisy things anyway; I didn't get having babies at all.” Donny Kirshner remembers “my secretary was babysitting and diapering” Lou Lou while, in the smoke-filled songwriting cubicles, the young writing teams plunked out and hummed out and argued out a string of three-minute wonders. Being an infant and child in a home of constant, fevered songwriting “was really not an environment where [my parents] could have a family responsibility,” the adult Louise Goffin once bluntly told an interviewer. “I was like a kid with other kids, and it's been a long road figuring out how grown-ups actually function in the world.”

“These kids!” Kirshner marvels today. “Nobody in America knew who they
were
! But look at all this talent—these ethnic Jewish kids from Queens and Brooklyn, coming up with these universal lyrics!” Whether by way of a kibbitzy warmth that harkened to vaudeville or a serious melancholic literacy that suggested Gershwin, many of “the kids'” songs were also subtly Jewish. At a time when elite colleges still listed “Religion:_____” on application forms and enforced anti-Jewish quotas, and when country clubs, fraternities, and sororities rejected applicants on the basis of faith and ethnicity, young Jewish-Americans were incorporating their country's optimism and fairness into eager-to-please records that contributed to a looming spirit that would soon quash the remnants of institutional anti-Semitism.

But it was the far greater injustice of racism that the best of these songs really addressed. Being Jewish, the writers had an understanding of discrimination and an inclination toward social justice, and in some cases (Pomus and Shuman's, Leiber and Stoller's) a serious immersion in, or (Goffin's) an earnest infatuation with, the black experience. And they happened to be writing during one of the most dramatic and heroic periods of American history, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was emerging as America's Gandhi, helping to lead and endure the violent struggles comprising the civil rights movement. The Freedom Rides throughout the South; the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, and over a dozen other cities; the brutal fire-hosings and dog attacks ordered by Birmingham police chief Bull Connor, and the church bombing in that same city that killed four preteenage girls; the violent resistance to the enrollment of a single black student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi; and the murders of voter registration workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in that state's Neshoba County—all these events transpired during the time that Carole and Gerry were pounding out songs at their Brown Street piano and in their Aldon cubicle. A string of hits the Aldon writers produced—Carole and Gerry's “Up on the Roof,” sung by the Drifters; Mann and Weil's “Uptown,” sung by the Crystals; and Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector's “Spanish Harlem,” sung by the Drifters' Ben E. King as a solo artist—presented the struggles of people of color, not in the South, but in the place the writers knew and loved, New York, through a kind of pop companion-narrative to the civil rights movement. In this pieced-together canon there's an oppressed protagonist (“Everyone's his boss and he's lost in an angry land”) who's pushing against almost impossible odds, yet with humanity intact (“It's growing in the street, right up through the concrete”)—and, finally, trudging to high ground for a spiritual epiphany: “I climb way up to the top of the stairs, and all my cares just drift right into space.” White teenagers in suburban ranch houses may not have been closely watching the struggle in the South, but hints of its essence and grandeur were being laced into their driving-to-school and beach music, and something was rubbing off on them: a taste of the romance of multiethnic urban life and of a concept—“soulfulness”—that was taking hold as a cultural ideal beyond its core group.

Those early days at Aldon were so halcyon, sometimes Donny Kirshner couldn't believe his own life. How did this hard-hocking self-admitted coward from Washington Heights get so lucky? One day in early 1961, for example, he'd just gotten off the bus (he never learned to drive), in South Orange, New Jersey, walked the few blocks home, and picked up the ringing phone. It was his friend Bobby Darin, imploring Kirshner, on behalf of himself and his fiancée, to “get us a rabbi, a priest—
anybody
who can marry us; we'll be there by eight,” Kirshner recalls. A week earlier the pair had secretly taken their wedding-license blood tests in the Kirshners' living room; now, here was beautiful blond Sandra Dee (née Douvain)—local girl turned Hollywood star—“in a gorgeous purple coat-dress,” walking in and reclining on Donny and Sheila's white Barcalounger, waiting for the clergyman—“and I'm standing there, pinching myself,” Kirshner says.

As for the life that Carole tumbled into, it was unique. She and Gerry
had
to become close friends with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil because, as Cynthia says, “nobody else
lived
like us”—very young, married to their professional partners (with whom they often passionately quarreled), working all the time, and so competitive that when the two couples drove up to the ski house Cynthia and Barry had rented in New Hampshire, they made bets on which couple's songs would be played more on the radio. Carole and Gerry had discovered an exotic new food that few Americans knew about in 1961 (and most wouldn't discover for another twenty years), and they turned their colleagues on to it. After sessions, Mike and Jerry and Carole and Gerry, or Carole and Gerry and Cynthia and Barry, would go to a little Japanese restaurant in Times Square and talk arrangements and demos over the odd, tasty delicacy the Goffins ordered for them: raw fish pressed atop thumb-sized rice blocks—sushi.

Carole and Cynthia's bond, much more than Gerry and Barry's, had a two-against-the-world quality. For although the music industry was full of slightly toughened older women in counterintuitive roles ( Jewish women in their forties were frequently managers of male black R&B singers, for example), most
very
young middle-class women did not behave the way Carole and Cynthia did. It was embarrassingly unfeminine in 1961 to be a piano-banging, moon/June rhyming, argumentative workaholic. The ideal was the whispery-voiced, wry-smiling Jackie or the aloof mascot-coquette. A September 1961
Life
magazine, with Jackie on the cover, ran a long pictorial on the new rage, surfing (which would help spark a fascination with hitherto-boondock Southern California that would, a few years later, draw the music industry there), featuring a photo of a pretty girl with a board. It bears a caption that begins with two sentences that were
not
considered insulting then: “Most girls lack the strength required of good surfers. Some try hard; others mostly decorate the shallows.”
Decorating the shallows
was exactly what cool girls were supposed to do, and do well, and
want
to do. In most late-teen, young-adult circles, Carole and Cynthia would be considered uncool.

Still, if you jumped from the peer to the historical context, Carole and Cynthia were actually filling large—if little-remembered—shoes. The 1920s and 1930s had been a kind of unacknowledged Golden Age of women tunesmiths. There was Dorothy Fields, with her lyrics for “I Can't Give You Anything but Love,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “A Fine Romance,” and “The Way You Look Tonight”; Dana Suesse, who wrote “The Night Is Young and You're So Beautiful” and “You Oughta Be in Pictures”; and Ann Ronell, of “Willow, Weep for Me” and, thumbing its nose at the Depression through Disney cartoon characters, “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

But for all their historically ballasted success as women songwriters—and their equal if not superior contribution to hit-making with their husbands—Carole and Cynthia reflexively yielded to their men's egos. Their songs were always listed as being written by “Goffin and King” and “Mann and Weil”—guys' names first, period. Both loved their men more than their men loved them. Cynthia, who had been writing theater songs for Frank Loesser's publishing company and who'd then gone to work writing with Teddy Randazzo, had caught sight of Barry Mann—Brooklyn-macho, high-strung, in cowboy boots—when he walked in with Howie Greenfield one day to try to sell a song to Randazzo, and she was so taken by him (“I
had
to know him”) that she asked the receptionist where he worked, was told “Aldon”—and applied there simply to meet him. “I got signed by Donny,” she admits, “because I was stalking Barry.” (They married just about a year later.)