Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (46 page)

• • •

Since personal breakthroughs can reflect a shared mood, and since a feeling “in the air” can ballast individual psyches, it was probably not an accident that Joni was writing the songs for
Blue
and Carole was writing the songs for
Tapestry
while a demo tape of songs written and sung by Carly Simon was finally being heard by a record executive. He would take her out of the shadows and catapult her toward musical stardom at the very same moment, the summer of 1970, that the new movement, feminism or women's liberation, was being lobbed into the public sphere. “We were already feeling like pioneers—with birth control, with psychedelics; we were already feeling empowered,” says Leah Kunkel, of women her age on the music scene.

Almost every national magazine had published an article on feminism by the summer of 1970. The women of
Newsweek
had successfully sued the magazine for job discrimination;
Ladies' Home Journal
(following a women's sit-in in the offices of its male editor) had an eight-page supplement on the movement; and feminist academic Kate Millett was on the cover of
Time.
Then, on August 26, on the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States, tens of thousands of marchers—many, long-haired young women in blue jeans and T-shirts—thronged Fifth Avenue with banners, and at a city hall rally Gloria Steinem—a political writer for
New York
magazine in her midthirties who had embraced the civil rights and farm workers' movements and was now finding her cause in feminism and would soon become its enduring national figurehead—was speaking out on behalf of community-controlled child care, job and education equality, and abortion on demand. (Steinem's zeal on that last issue was fired by the fact that, at recent New York state legislative hearings, fourteen out of fifteen “experts” on women and abortion had been male.) The movement—like all those earlier cultural whipsaws: the birth of rock 'n' roll, John Kennedy's election, psychedelia and the counterculture—was overnight
and
overdue: certainly the latter in an era when married teachers were routinely fired when they were pregnant (and so many working married women
were
teachers), when some women had to actually show banks doctors' certifications of sterilization to obtain their own mortgages, when Radcliffe magna cum laudes could only be researchers while male state college grads were reporters, when female assistant district attorneys had to give permission notes from their husbands to work on homicide cases.

The movement had germinated in 1964, when Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden's estranged wife and fellow SDS-er, and minister's daughter and SNCC volunteer Mary King asked (in the tentatively named document “A Kind of Memo”) why, if women were so active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, they were being treated as second-class
within
those movements. As it mushroomed underground, especially after 1967, the cause was advanced by a new vocabulary: NOW member Jo Ann Evans-Gardner pushed for the resuscitation of the fourteenth-century English term “Ms.” to replace “Mrs.”/“Miss,” so the first thing you always knew about a woman (though not a man) was
no longer
whether she was married; and kindergarten teacher Anne Forer named the process of women's-experience-sharing “conciousness raising.” Either Iowan Carol Hanisch or former child actress Robin Morgan (accounts vary) came up with “The personal is political”;
New Yorker
rock critic Ellen Willis injected “sexist” and “sexism” into the national conversation; activist Kathie Amatniek bestowed “male chauvinism” on a public that had never even heard of the French-origined noun, and also coined the anthem “Sisterhood is powerful!”

The movement was the biggest achievement of the women of Carole's, Joni's, and Carly's generation, and all the heady new freedoms for women that had nourished and preceded it now suddenly seemed to have been leading, inevitably,
to
it: both as epitome
and
corrective.

• • •

A year earlier, Joni had traveled to Canada with Ronee Blakley, looking for land to build a house on, but she had deferred the decision. Now was the right time. Joni bought acreage in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, and helped build a stone house in the woods, overlooking Half Moon Bay. It was here that she would write the songs for her next album,
For the Roses.
Five of the songs were about James. “For the Roses” takes musing account of his celebrity: she remembers how it was at the beginning; he'd slump in that way he had that, Kootch had said, made
every
woman fall in love with him. In “See You Sometime” she describes James as famous and in demand, but reminds him that
she
had fame first (“I tasted mine”);
he
had been awed by
her.
Now, in the Canadian woods, she was “spring[ing] from the boulders like a mama lion”; still—damn it!—despite all that flamboyantly exercised strength and independence, his rejection could still get to her. These two songs walk the fine line between the slightly bitter gloat (at having chosen the purer path: solitude) and the regret despite one's better judgment of someone who parted with a difficult lover whom the world is
now
informing her she'd undervalued.

But there
was
a reason that being with James was uncomfortable, and “Lesson in Survival” explains it. In the song she complains about how James's “friends
*
protect you [and] scrutinize me” as she sank into the “damn timid” pose that was “not at all the spirit that's inside of me.” “Blonde in the Bleachers” gives his fame the same who-wants-it? treatment that “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” darkly gives his addiction. With these five songs, protesting too much was Joni's best revenge; she was getting James out of her system by using him in her art—a defense she favored and urged upon others. (When, one day, Leah Kunkel told Joni that things were “not good” with her and Russ—he was philandering—Joni immediately replied, “At least you can use it for material.”)

“Let the Wind Carry Me” describes her ongoing struggle with her judgmental mother for permission for the freedom of “the road” and “the wind” that she craves. “Mama let go now” she pleads. In “Woman of Heart and Mind,” she uses herself (and her secret relinquishment of the baby) to issue feminism's essential statement,
a woman is whole by herself.
It's the next in a row of archetypes we'd seen evolve from the traditional (“Michael from Mountains”) to the self-liberated (“Cactus Tree” and “Chelsea Morning”) to the communal countercultural (“Ladies of the Canyon,” “Woodstock,” “My Old Man”). Now, nearing thirty, Joni feels whole. The lovers who've come and gone: they
matter less.

For now, at least.

• • •

Carole and Gerry's relationship had always been a symbiotic melodrama, and
Tapestry
gave that saga one more—sad—chapter. That Carole was writing her own lyrics now was surprise enough to her ex-husband—“she never wrote a lyric before!” he says—but the
merit
of those lyrics was the real blow: “I thought [her
Tapestry
lyrics] were better lyrics than I would have written.” Consequently, “she didn't need me anymore. It was really crushing”—so crushing that Gerry decided “I was going to quit music.” Turning the clock back eleven years, to his last day at work at Argus Labs before the Shirelles recorded “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” he says, “I went back to school to study to be a chemist.” He and Barbara Behling, who was now his wife, moved back east; he enrolled at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University to pick up where he'd left off at Queens College. Spending about a year there, he “almost got a degree” before going back to songwriting, with some quixotic/heroic intermissions.
*

The massive success of
Tapestry
was “a double-edged sword for Carole,” a friend says. On the one hand, her leap from songwriter to artist was tremendously gratifying—she was now looked up to by peers who'd once dismissed her. She was also happy for the financial security. Unlike so many other young pop music stars, she'd been a bread-winning mother (with an unstable ex-husband) for twelve years. But the loss of an anonymous personal life was hard on her, and she virtually barricaded herself from her fame. “We just never went out,” Charlie says, adding, “We just kept living our lives; things didn't change that much at all. We went to movies, and out for Japanese food with John and Stephanie a few nights a week, but that was it.” But his decades-later picture of those times' breezy ease contrasts with what a friend of Carole's says: it was hard to be a sudden superstar; the attention was unwanted. During this time when “you literally couldn't turn on the radio without hearing [
Tapestry
],” Charlie matriculated from his private classical bass lessons; he auditioned for Daniel Lewis, the director of the USC orchestra, and was accepted. As a bass player in a symphony orchestra, he now had his own musical life, apart from his now extraordinarily successful and famous wife.

In June, Carole flew to her hometown, New York City, and filled Carnegie Hall to capacity for two performances, finding what
The New York Times
called a “highly responsive audience” eager to cheer on the local heroine. She introduced Charlie and Danny; through the performance, her patter was diffident and she sounded vulnerable. When she told the audience that she was a proud daughter of Brooklyn, they cheered, but that cheering grew downright ecstatic when James Taylor walked out (Carole impishly acknowledged his entrance with a “Well, well, well…”) and duetted with her on “You've Got a Friend.” Though they were now considered coequal pioneers of the new soft rock, they had different roles: James was the male idol and Carole—well, Carole was something that pop culture hadn't seen before: an embodiment of youthful female
substance.
The next month the
Los Angeles Times
's Robert Hilburn led off his review of Carole's concert at the Greek Theatre with this mash note to her character: “I love Carole King. I really do. Not just for her music—though that is certainly reason enough—but for the uncompromising way she refuses to assume any false airs or to surround herself with any show business pretentiousness.”

Carole was pregnant during the Greek Theatre concert.
*
She'd given birth to Louise under anesthesia in a Brooklyn hospital with Gerry smoking in the waiting room, his terror about fatherhood met with commiseration by Jack Keller. She'd had Sherry with added angst from the fact that Gerry was enthralled with Jeanie Reavis. Mothers didn't breast-feed in those days, and, in any case, subwaying with infant Louise to 1650 Broadway, and plopping her in the playpen while she hammered out songs, afforded her little opportunity. This time, things would be different, not just because Carole had changed, but because the entire approach to child rearing had. On a December day, with Charlie attending, Stephanie as birthing coach, and John holding the mirror so Carole could see the baby crown, Carole's third daughter was born, by natural childbirth
*
—at
home,
which was newly hippie-fashionable but not yet embraced by middle-class culture. Carole and Charlie wanted an old-fashioned name; they'd debated Molly and Nora. They chose Molly. Carole was thrilled to have Charlie's baby. For Charlie, beholding his daughter was “an amazing, life-changing moment.”

Shortly before Molly's birth, Carole recorded her third album,
Music,
with Charlie, Danny, Joel, Abigail, Ralph, and James joining in again. On the cover, she's photographed smiling (her face, pregnancy-plump), granny-dressed, and shoeless at her grand piano in her Appian Way living room.
Music
was released at the end of 1971 and immediately rose to the top of the charts, reaching #1 on New Year's Day 1972; its buoyant “Sweet Seasons,” written with Toni, became a Top 10 hit. Another tough-Toni/sentimental-Carole collaboration, “It's Going to Take Some Time,” portrays a woman who knows she's messed up a relationship, has to learn to master the art of compromise, and is on to the next. The album's full of homage-paying—“Carry Your Load” channels Laura Nyro; “Brother, Brother,” Marvin Gaye (Carole's soft “oh, brother
of mine,
” suggests she's thinking of her real brother, Richard). In “Surely” Carole attempts blues; she scats in her remake of her and Gerry's “Some Kind of Wonderful” (and, in a whipsaw from the Drifters' original, insets a deliciously melodramatic girl-group refrain by Abigail); she morphs into a piano-bar busker on “Music” (and then turns the floor over to Curtis Amy's bleating, Pharoah Sanders–like tenor sax). The most evocative cut is “Song of Long Ago,” which—with its reverence for human community (“Here is a lamp I've left unlighted / Aren't you someone I should know?”), its yearning, James-inspired melody, and James's
la-lalaaaa
s—sounds like it belongs on
Tapestry.
Such comparisons would become her nemesis.