Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (26 page)

When Carole knocked on Barry Friedman's door one day, Danny was thrilled and surprised to see her. Carole King! The Brill Building pro and suburban mom, in funky Laurel Canyon! Danny says, “I said, ‘Jam with us, man! You play the piano and we'll groove!' She said that no one had ever asked her to jam before.”

Then, just after New Year's 1968, Stephanie Magrino flew out to San Francisco to visit friends. On impulse she stopped off in L.A. and crashed with Danny and Joyce. Reveling in the warm January weather, she decided to stay. Carole came over one morning while Stephanie was making breakfast, and Danny, who knew Carole had stolen time with Charlie during Stephanie and Charlie's time as a couple, suggested she cook Carole
one
skimpy egg, as punishment. Stephanie did, but what was supposed to have been a touché led to everyone collapsing in hilarity. Despite their past competition for the absent Charlie, Stephanie says, “We felt a kinship right away,” and, over several days, they came to view each other as sisters.

In late-night talks after Carole put the girls to sleep, Stephanie ran down her biography to Carole—she had left home early, fleeing a harshly critical mother—and Carole in turn described the challenges of life with Gerry. “Just sharing our stories gave us the strength to see our lives more clearly; Carole and I buoyed each other,” Stephanie says. The difference in age (five years) and accomplishment was a boon to their friendship. Carole had come to L.A. to break from the world she knew, that peculiar hothouse of same-aged, married songwriting couples like Cynthia and Barry.

Stephanie moved in with Carole. “Here we were—young, free, independent women who'd come out to California, where it was sunny, ‘peace and love' all around. We weren't limited to the preconceived notions our parents had for us. Carole's mind-set was: She was coming into her own. She wasn't in her father's house and she wasn't in her husband's house. She was her own woman. But she was still a little apprehensive.”

Carole flew back to New York and convinced her indispensable nanny, Willa Mae Phillips, to move to L.A. as well. Willa Mae came out, living with Carole during the week, then repairing to her own rented apartment on weekends. Stephanie says, “Willa Mae had no children of her own and, oh, did she mother us: me, Carole, Louise, and Sherry. She made us make up when we fought. I have a sister named Carol; Willa Mae would say, ‘
That
Carol isn't your sister;
this
Carole is your
real
sister!'”

Stephanie and Carole hit the produce stalls at Farmer's Market; they took yoga classes together; they'd get their sushi fix at a little Japantown restaurant named Haruna. And they shared their single-woman adventures. To Stephanie, Paul Rothchild was just the best kisser ever. And though Carole was still in love with Charlie, if he wasn't there—well, he wasn't there. One day she picked up a handsome, strange hippie hitchhiking near the Canyon Country Store. He had long, black, curly hair and he looked like a yogi. Carole and Stephanie took to calling him Weird Harold behind his back. And then as quickly as Weird Harold materialized, he was gone—that was cool, too. Living in California, and especially in Laurel Canyon, Carole said, around that time, “enabled me to take things as they come a lot more, without going into the type of thing that many New Yorkers will do, and as I used to do: intellectualizing everything, saying, ‘Why did I do this?' and ‘I wonder what he meant by that?' You just don't get into that out here.” “But I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now,” the Byrds had sung, interpreting Dylan's “My Back Pages” with quavering emotion. Like the song's narrator, Carole was dusting off the premature responsibility she'd rolled into at seventeen. Men had always had the option, even if behind their wives' backs. Now, over the next years—when, within the grand bacchanal of the new culture, staying monogamous to one's first love seemed almost life-denyingly monastic—young women with children were doing so, too.

But this “free” life wasn't
entirely
free. She and Gerry still had their Velcro-like relationship. He had moved to L.A., too, ostensibly for the same musical fresh start, but also because he couldn't really let go of Carole. Her years of adoration and their seemingly irreplaceable writing fit were, as his friend Jack Keller pointed out, the binding his fragile psyche had depended on; he homed in on her, reflexively.

Gerry rented a house in Beverly Glen Canyon, and his new girlfriend moved in. She was none other than Sue Palmer, Carole's recent best friend. “It was awkward for Carole to be around Gerry and Sue while Charlie wasn't there, and the awkwardness reflected the times,” Stephanie says. “We acted differently, but we still had our old emotions.” Carole had been trying to persuade Charlie to move to L.A., but he was resisting. More than the move itself, he was resisting commitment. Stephanie was encountering similar resistance from her boyfriend, John Fischbach, with whom she now sometimes lived, in another Canyon house. John had parlayed a relationship with his University of Colorado friends, the group Lothar and the Hand People, into a position managing the group, and now his ambitions ran even higher: with family money, he was building his own recording studio. “The guys wanted to have their girls, but they wanted to be free, too,” Stephanie says. It was coming to be understood—not just in Laurel Canyon, but everywhere—that the new values benefited young men more than young women. In most cases, girls in love might want to
feel
free, but their lovers wanted to
be
free.

Carole's emotional Achilles' heel—men—became evident one day when she briefly returned to New York; she saw Charlie and it didn't go well. After she left his side to spend a weekend with her mother, she started sobbing uncontrollably.

How could you learn to be the new woman you were pretending to be?

Returning to Laurel Canyon after the trip back east, Carole got a lesson by way of a new collaborator, Toni Stern. Strikingly pretty, with a mane of golden, frizzy hair, twenty-three-year-old Toni “was a total bohemian—she lived alone; she didn't take crap from anyone; she did what she wanted to do,” says Danny Kortchmar. “She was tall and lanky and
all
the guys wanted her.” Toni had grown up on the Sunset Strip; her mother was a nightclub manager. “As a teenager, I used to get into Sneaky Pete's, the Whisky a Go Go, and PJ's,” Toni recalls. “I thought of myself as a mixture of Eloise and
Inside Daisy Clover.
” Toni had rolled into a relationship with tall, handsome, and slightly older producer Bert Schneider. A few years earlier, Schneider had been a wealthy and very conventional guy. Now, given the presto!-change-o! times, he was a sexy, long-haired, drug-savvy groover king in the New Hollywood, soon to produce
Easy Rider
and, eventually, the anti–Vietnam War documentary
Hearts and Minds.
Schneider paid the rent on Toni's Laurel Canyon cottage, seeing her when they both chose, and otherwise leaving her to her freedom.
*

Just before Carole moved to L.A., Toni had visited Paris, where a film director suggested she try writing song lyrics. She wrote some and mailed them to Bert, who liked them—and who had a partnership with Lou Adler. Schneider arranged for Toni to meet Carole at the Screen Gems apartment on Sunset. At issue: in Carole's and Gerry's divorce a “baby” was being split. Carole got custody of the melody to a song (“As We Go Along”), while Gerry got the words. Finding a new lyric for the song (which ultimately went nowhere) was the occasion for the meeting between the two women.

Toni recalls: “One of the first things Carole did was hand me a bunch of Motown albums—Marvin Gaye was one—and say, ‘Listen to these; these are
real
songs.'” The two began to write together—at Screen Gems, then at Toni's cottage on Kirkwood, or at Carole's house, just up the block. Opposites, they played off each other. “There was a practicality in Carole that was comforting—I would hand her a whole lyric, neatly written out, and she would sit down and we'd have a song within hours,” says Toni. “Working with her made me feel validated, like I
wasn't
a wild child.” For her part, Carole was faced with a young woman who trod with a lighter step than she had ever tried. “I'm sure there was a California quality in me that appealed to Carole,” Toni says. “She was moving from a familial, middle-class lifestyle to Laurel Canyon, where she started to let her hair down, literally and figuratively. We worked off our contrasts.” Toni's sophisticated take on love dropped a touch of vinegar into Carole's melodic wholeheartedness. Among the three songs they wrote together in early 1968 was the jazz-flavored, acerbically worded “Now That Everything's Been Said,” about a woman whose boyfriend has left her, with no warning signs, “to work it out, all on my own.”

On the afternoon of April 4, word spread like wildfire through the Canyon: on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed by a Southern white man. “The shooting was such a shock to us—how could this have
happened
?” remembers Stephanie. “There was such sadness, with this underlying feeling of embarrassment—how could this racist violence still be happening in this day and age? Who were these people who were threatened by such goodness? It was heartbreaking for all of us.” For Carole the assassination held special resonance. Her songs with Gerry had done their modest part in running alongside the civil rights moment; the Aldon-sessions world had been, as Jeanie Reavis had said, a little color-blind family; and, by virtue of Carole's daughters' half siblinghood with Jeanie and Gerry's daughter, Carole's own family was what very few families in 1968 were: biracial.

The night of King's assassination, Bobby Kennedy, who had tossed his hat in the ring of the Democratic presidential primary, made a direct, heartfelt plea for calm to the black community—in the most natural of ways, invoking his own brother's murder. Before that tragic evening, Kennedy had been viewed within his party as a kind of political spoiler, angling in, late in the game, on Eugene McCarthy's carefully built antiwar perch and threatening to divide the constituency. Now all of that changed. Kennedy's impromptu remarks forged a bond between the former attorney general and America's urban blacks and rural Hispanics. The spring of 1968 saw Kennedy flower: touring the country, pressing brown and white flesh, visiting crowded ghettos and sun-parched migrant worker camps, sometimes in the company of farmworkers' organizer César Chávez. “Bobby,” as people called him now, was greeted with tremendous emotion, and he returned it: hanks of his longish hair falling over his forehead, face flushed, smiling that abashed, toothy smile of his as ecstatic onlookers tugged at his garments. As March turned to April and April to May, Bobby Kennedy was being transformed into a political messiah. People started to believe that he could take the country's shocked and wounded soul and deliver it, deliver
everyone,
to the same idealistic mirage world that all the young people were singing about and marching for.

By now, Charlie had made plans to move to L.A. “It took me a while to get it together,” he remembers, but he booked a flight for early June. Carole was eager to add a male presence to her four-female household. Then, two days before his flight, the news flashed onto TV screens: a man had stepped up to Bobby Kennedy at L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel, right after his California Democratic primary win, and shot him. He was gravely injured.

“It was unbelievable; we were just in shock,” Charlie remembers. And there he was, about to move to L.A. “I was afraid for a while,” Charlie says. “I thought maybe I shouldn't go. I didn't know if there was going to be a riot, even a war. I felt something cataclysmic was going to happen.”

The day after he was shot—June 6, 1968—Bobby Kennedy succumbed from his injuries. “That period of assassination was so unreal, so dark and heavy for all of us,” Stephanie says. “I remember being huddled with John in our house, stunned, crying, glued to the television. We'd had such high hopes. We had marched for so many things we believed so strongly about. Now it seemed like everyone who had inspired us to think as we did, to
hope
as we did: they were just picked off, one after another.”

The day after the assassination, Charlie Larkey conquered his fears and boarded a plane for Los Angeles, to move into the Wonderland house with Carole, Willa Mae, Louise, and Sherry. Even though he was just twenty-one, his quiet, serious manner served him well as unofficial stepfather to the girls. It felt natural for him—“it was a role I wanted to jump into,” he says.

With Charlie around, jazz was in the air. The cool jazz of Miles Davis and the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and McCoy Tyner rang through the house now, along with Carole's favorites, Aretha and Otis and Stax and Motown. Carole was very happy. But then, in the last days of August 1968, the streets of Chicago exploded after the Democratic National Convention. Thousands of antiwar protestors marched, demonstrated, listened to rally speeches (by Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and others), and—especially the tight, brand-new extremist cadre, the Weather Underground—tumultuously clashed with an overpowering army of tear-gas-and-billy-club-wielding police (under orders of Mayor Richard Daley), yielding hundreds of injuries and arrests. Charlie—who had performed with the Fugs on a flatbed truck at the huge antiwar March on Washington the previous winter, who'd been
Esquire
's poster boy for the antidraft movement, and who, until his recent birthday, had been one of millions of American males eligible to be drafted while unable to vote—stared at the violence on the TV screen and angrily thought: This is going to expose America to what the powers-that-be are capable of. As well as being outraging, it seemed tragic. Bobby Kennedy's murder had, as Tom Wicker had written in
The New York Times,
“added sorrowful emphasis to one of [his own] political themes—the necessity for orderly and just redress of grievances, in place of violent action.” Now there seemed
nothing but
violence, everywhere.