Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (25 page)

In the harbor of ideas, a big ship was turning. If you were, in 1966–67, a female college senior at an elite private college or a top-tier progressive university—Michigan or Berkeley or Northwestern or Wisconsin—you saw a forked road. Some of your friends were planning postgraduation weddings, while others were secretly rebelling against those first boys they'd had sex with. One day, on a break between classes, a girl of the second sort might pick up a stranger, bring him back to her apartment, and crisply sever her long-(if indifferently) held belief in love as a prerequisite for sex in one half hour. As she slipped afterward into her lecture hall seat, she would realize
I can do this.
But
this
wasn't sex per se. That
would
have been cheap. What she had done was all about sophistication and risk. As Sara Davidson paraphrased her and her Berkeley roommates' thinking in her time capsule 1977 memoir,
Loose Change,
“We decided we were going to be like [D. H.] Lawrence's women. We would not marry for security or be hampered by convention…It's almost as if we took vows then: we were going to make life as interesting a journey as possible and were willing to suffer pain if necessary.”

A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door
just
as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme—so whimsical, sensual, and urgent—that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco—glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls—was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term “flower children” would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam.

At the nearby Monterey Pop Festival the Mamas and the Papas were passing the baton to Big Brother and the Holding Company's Janis Joplin: sweat drenching her bell-bottomed white rib-knit pant suit as she wailed in bluesy angst. The festival, which featured Jimi Hendrix's first filmed guitar immolation, drew a glamorous young elite that seemed to have just materialized one day. This was the New Hip, and D. A. Pennebaker's footage soon displayed it in all its envy-stoking splendor: almost uniformly beautiful young people, wafting to the music in slow motion while radiating that essential property of any ascendant new cultural scene—they were your high school “in” crowd in fresh costume.

The music world's function as stand-in to the high school cafeteria was also, cruelly, served by the stinging rejection experienced
*
by the most talented new artist there, Laura Nyro, an overweight, shrill, and seemingly possessed writer-pianist whose brilliant, original songs were as American as Stephen Foster's and Irving Berlin's. (“
That
should be the National Anthem,” the Blues Project's Steve Katz said of “Stoned Soul Picnic,” while Stephen Sondheim declared: “In economy, lyricism and melody, it is a masterpiece.”) Nyro's dazzling word soup mixed imagery from antebellum plantation life with Damon Runyon and Stagolee, yielding a white girl's reverent obsession with soul. Joni considered Laura Nyro her only female peer, and Carole's hits had influenced Laura, just as Carole would be influenced by Laura's first album.

In spring 1967, if you walked down the street as the Young Rascals' “Groovin'” drifted from one of the brand-new head shops, you had to agree with that dreamy song: there
wasn't
“
any
thing that's
bet
-ter” than this golden moment.

• • •

All this shimmering possibility knocked at the cage of Carole's troubled marriage.

Morally disciplined and long-suffering with Gerry, Carole now began to follow her instincts. Even though she and Charlie had broken up, she continued to rendezvous with him, in the apartment he shared with his new girlfriend, Stephanie Magrino. Stephanie knew Carole had been to see Charlie because she, a dark brunette, had found a strand of Carole's light-brown hair in their bed, and Charlie had confessed.

Charlie and Danny Kortchmar were now members of the Fugs, the local-legend group headed up by poets Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ken Weaver. As Charlie describes them, “The Fugs were a link between the Beat generation and rock 'n' roll.” The group's Peace Eye Bookstore had a hand in turning the sleepy, ethnic and poor Lower East Side into the newly renamed soon-to-be-hippie haven, the East Village. Stephanie was working at the Fillmore East, assisting Joshua White, who'd perfected a newly essential component of psychedelic music: the light show. This world that Charlie and Stephanie had effortlessly fallen into was a planet away from Carole's bourgeois New Jersey. Carole was not too old for this new world; rather, the life she was living was too old for
her.
She'd gotten on the elevator when young adult life had meant responsibility and sober idealism. Now it meant playfulness, politics, and sensuality.

Through it all, Carole and Gerry continued writing together. Though their marriage was crumbling, the greater bond of their musical collaboration was in overdrive. Now that the new Dylan- and Beatles-led forms of music were dominant, it was natural that they, nothing if not competitive, would pound on the door of that rejecting new order, demanding to be included. They would be awarded entrance by way of their “Wasn't Born to Follow,” a folk-rock-like melody with airily poetic lyrics (“You may lead me to the chasm where the rivers of our visions flow into one another”) that attracted the hipness-gatekeeping Byrds, who eventually chose to record it. But it was not this out-of-character song that endured. Rather, a very different song, perfecting the pop-soul idiom they had pioneered, would constitute their pre-divorce masterpiece.

Gerry had run into Jerry Wexler outside of Grand Central Terminal one day, and from his limousine window Wexler had shouted: “You and Carole should write a song called ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.'” A few weeks later the pair showed up at Wexler's Atlantic office and, he recalls, “they said, ‘Here's ‘Natural Woman.' You told us to write it.'” After everyone laughed at how literally the two had taken the suggestion, Carole sat down at the piano. It was a spiritual song—full of gospel blue notes and blue harmonies—disguised as a love song, in three-four time with a swing feel. Wexler recalls, “I thought: Oh, my God, is this wonderful, or what?! It was a hit, I
knew
it.”

Wexler wanted to get it to Aretha Franklin, who was at the peak of her fame with young white listeners. She had been dubbed the Queen of Soul, largely as a result of her biggest hit to date, Don Covay's “Chain of Fools,” in which Wexler's respect for her gospel genius was tweaked by a Brill Building touch: Ellie Greenwich, who with her husband, Jeff Barry, had written latter-day girl-group songs (“Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Leader of the Pack”), added the irresistible “chain,
chai
-ain,
chaiiin
”s in the background. Still, Wexler knew “Aretha could be picky.” Recently Paul McCartney had sent her a beautiful song called “Let It Be,” with churchly cadences that seemed tailor-made for her. “Aretha said, ‘I can do that,'” Wexler recalls. “She cut the song, but for whatever reason didn't okay a release on it.” Eventually—tired of waiting for Aretha's release, and dismayed that the Queen of Soul had acted so dismissively—the Beatles cut their own version, more Anglican choirboy than Baptist congregation. Would the same fate befall “Natural Woman”?

It didn't. The Queen not only recorded and released it, but “[t]he song has become part of Aretha's…persona, a product of her own soul,” Wexler wrote in his autobiography,
Rhythm and the Blues.
For young women in the fall of 1967, “Natural Woman” was a watershed—a hymn to female sexuality right after the Summer of Love. From being worried that your heart might “be broken when the night meets the morning sun” to wailing, “Oh, baby, what you done to me, you made me feel so good inside…”—now
there
was a sea change. With its gospel melody's sanctified, tender fatigue, “Natural Woman” didn't express dewy love or even happy love; rather, it romanticized that very “willing[ness] to suffer pain if necessary” on life's “journey” that Sara Davidson, her friends, and countless young women now yearned to pursue. In a moment of passionate political protest and kaleidoscopically dazzling cultural change, sex and independence were now part of a young woman's quest: a beatific road to character.

Charlie and Stephanie broke up, and Charlie and Carole got back together. Then Charlie broke up with Carole again.

• • •

In late 1967 Carole officially separated from Gerry and set out to reinvent herself. Alone, without much more than an introduction to Mamas and Papas producer Lou Adler to write songs for the Monkees movie
Head,
she took seven-year-old Louise and four-year-old Sherry and moved across the country to a city she did not know: Los Angeles. She was seeking “a new identity,” she would say. The music business was relocating there. Many of its bellwether artists perched in Laurel Canyon, a bosky tangle of steep, winding, gladed West Hollywood streets shooting off at Crescent Heights above Sunset. Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds lived there (David Crosby had a house in Beverly Glen Canyon, to the west); Cass Elliot, who was becoming, in the words of Graham Nash, “the Gertrude Stein of the Canyon,” had a home on Woodrow Wilson Drive. ( John and Michelle Phillips had just moved into Jeanette MacDonald's elegant mansion in Bel Air. The first Rich Hippies and the first rock stars to “go Hollywood,” they gave huge and frequent parties, drawing everyone from Marlon Brando to Warren Beatty to, of all people, Zsa Zsa Gabor. They kept peacocks in their backyards, and they dismayed their proper neighbors by wafting around the gated streets in glittery robes fit for Moroccan royalty. When the Phillipses sold the house to an unknown man with a reassuringly stuffy-sounding first name—Sylvester—their neighbors were relieved…until that new neighbor, Sylvester—Sly—Stone, moved in: a
black
rich hippie who, when he couldn't find his house key, got impatient and
shot
the door open.)

Record producer Paul Rothchild resided on Ridpath, a narrow ledge of road accessed by one of the Canyon's main streets, Kirkwood. Rothchild was a glamorous figure—he drove a Porsche and wore a velvet Borsalino hat—“these were the things that denoted one's station in the canyon,” Jackson Browne would later say, of the man who housed and mentored him—and a dozen other talented virtual runaways from Sunny Hills High in Orange County—in the finer points of French art songs. Browne, the almost-too-beautiful boy with the Prince Valiant hair, was a few years from coming into his own. Rothchild was the producer of the Doors, who had had the summer's most explosive hit, “Light My Fire,” anointing Jim Morrison—recently the pudgy-faced UCLA film student son of an army officer—as a satanically poetic rock god.
*
Rothchild's house and the adjacent houses—of hipster-like manager Billy James and record producer Barry Friedman—were an enchanted commune of crash pads for the enchanted almost-famous.

Carole moved into a nearby house on a street with an appropriate name for the break with the past on which she was embarking: Wonderland Avenue. She let her hair, which she'd previously teased and sprayed, grow free—the natural ripples she'd long despaired of she now appreciated. She took to wearing long, clingy, scoop-necked “granny dresses.” With her neighbor Fred Hoffman, a Canyon wild child who would later become an art historian, she started attending yoga classes downtown at the Integral Yoga Institute. She'd get on the mat in the incense-perfused room and savor the physical grace and the spiritual peace as Swami Satchidananda's image beamed down from the wall in approval. She stopped eating red meat (though she still smoked) and started to cook vegetarian. She enrolled Lou Lou and Sherry in the Laurel Canyon School, and drove them there and back daily, inhaling the menthol of the eucalypti through the open car window. She and Fred and another neighbor, Michael Schwartz, a regular on a TV dance show, played volleyball down the street, calling themselves the Wonderland Wonders. She bought last-minute grocery items at the Canyon Country Store, which topped a hillock just off Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and which was festooned with slouching, sexy hippie boys—just as, fifteen years earlier, the same site had been festooned with bearded “nature boys” with names like Gypsy Boots, who'd descend to Beverly Hills for day jobs, digging swimming pools. “Carole found herself when her marriage to Gerry was over,” says Cynthia Weil. “I think Carole was always a hippie at heart, but she'd been living that life in New Jersey because she wanted to please Gerry. She was disconnected from her core there. In California, she began to live who she really was.”

Danny Kortchmar's crowd was moving to California, close on Carole's heels. Abigail Haness came out first. She was involved with a musician named Michael Ney, whom she'd followed out to L.A. when he joined a new band called Clear Light, which Paul Rothchild was producing. After Abigail had told Danny about the band, he contacted Rothchild and was signed as guitarist. So Danny and his wife, Joyce, flew out and moved into the heart of the action: Barry Friedman's house on Ridpath. “People were coming and going all the time: musicians, dope dealers,” Danny says. “Everyone was on the same street, hanging out. In New York it was, ‘Rehearse?
Where?
'
Here
it was, ‘Hey, you need a guitar? Borrow mine!' It was all those now-cliché things—mellow, laid-back, do your own thing. It was hard not to dig it.” “We all came out here to reinvent ourselves,” says Abigail.