Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (47 page)

That same month, Carole was chosen as one of the
Los Angeles Times
's ten Women of the Year. In his profile for that occasion, Robert Hilburn articulated her significance:

Nothing proved Carole's aversion to stardom more than her nonattendance at the Grammys, which were held in New York in mid-March 1972. Citing her desire to stay home with three-month-old Molly, Carole was a no-show at the most victorious moment in her entire career (and a rare triumph in
any
recording artist's career): a sweep of the three most important awards of 1971. Lou accepted the gramophone statuettes when “It's Too Late” won Record of the Year (Carole's main competitors were George Harrison's “My Sweet Lord” and her own “You've Got a Friend,” sung by James),
Tapestry
won Album of the Year, and “You've Got a Friend” won Song of the Year. Carole also won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Tapestry” and James won Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “You've Got a Friend.” All told, Carole King had dominated all five top categories. Watching the show on TV, Carole felt “joy, happiness, and pride…for her
work,
” says Stephanie, who was with her. “But she always separated her
life
(her children, Charlie, our circle), which was more important,
from
her work.”

With the Grammy sweep for
Tapestry,
Carole had now created for herself an almost unmatchable gold standard. Some critics were sympathetic—“After the mind-boggling success of
Tapestry,
there was no way Carole King could have produced a more successful follow-up, and there's no reason why she should,” prefaced
The New York Times
's Don Heckman before saying, “
Music
doesn't quite match
Tapestry.
” Others were blunter.
Rolling Stone
's Crouse declared that “the songs on…
Music
are not as immediately likeable and the new album doesn't have its predecessor's sure, unified sense of style.” The clock to produce another
Tapestry
had just been set and was ticking.

mid-1970–early 1973

The same year that Carole swept the Grammys and that Joni's
Blue
was released to the awe of her peers, Carly won the Grammy for Best New Artist for her first album,
Carly Simon.
Her career had taken off later than theirs, not only because of her ambivalence about having a career but also because of the zeitgeist. When everyone wanted to be radical and funky, she'd been dismissed as too wealthy and too polished and entrenched in too “straight” and elitely educated a social context (although, as one of her Sarah Lawrence friends puts it, “Carly was always a visceral among cerebrals”). While the focus was on Laurel Canyon—and, before that, San Francisco—Carly was a stone Manhattan chick, not just in geography but in sensibility.

But suddenly the idea of “privilege” was being turned on its head, and “the struggle” (as the steady rotation of political movements had come to be called) was changing from poor vs. rich and hip vs. straight and shaggy vs. slick to something no one had anticipated: female vs. male. In
this
revolution, it was cerebral, psychotherapy-partaking, sister-ensconced New Yorkers from top women's colleges who were leading the way.

It was a season where the gaze shifted from the bucolic neorural—rich-hippie and
Big Chill
communal—to the urban; where the medium was not feelings but ideas; where, even if “upper-middle-class” remained a never-uttered dirty word, it was no longer an unuseful skill set. One began to see a lot of sleek Seven Sisters alumnae—Ali MacGraw (Wellesley), Jane Fonda (Vassar), Erica Jong (Barnard), and, of course, Gloria Steinem (Smith)—sexy in stovepipe pants and ponchos, raising fists at political rallies, tossing off a sarcastic remark, or performing a muckrake onscreen (or off-), debating literary lions now viewed as troglodytes, penning theoretical tracts and erotic novels. Carly Simon had the right look, alumna status, and attitude to match the spirit of the times, as well as an air of mischief—a nice, acidic antidote to the slightly-too-satirizable earnestness of this new idea. She had something else: a sense of sensual entitlement unmediated by any history of guilt. She could radiate something young women knew but which hadn't yet been driven home to a double-standard culture: that a female could be respectable, sensitive, serious, thoughtful—in our supposedly classless society, “classy”—and, at the same time, have a wholly liberated sex life.

• • •

Carly's transformation began in the spring of 1970, when Jake Brackman had an idea: he would find Carly a manager.

Ellen's friend Jennifer Salt had a best friend, fellow actress Janet Margolin, who was married to a mover-shaker nightlife entrepreneur named Jerry Brandt. Brandt owned the discotheque the Electric Circus and was managing and producing the debut record of a troupe of twenty black teenagers, the Voices of East Harlem. Brandt was an aggressive guy and was open to managing new artists. So Jake, with his British girlfriend, Ricky, invited Janet and Jerry over to his apartment—“which was very 1960s Marrakesh Express: Indian fabric on the ceiling, casbah-style, with lots of sequined, mirrored pillows,” as Ellen Wise Questel remembers it—for dinner. After dinner Carly just happened to drop by—this was planned by Jake, of course. She had lost weight; a good twenty pounds were gone since he'd teased her for being chubby at Indian Hill Camp. She looked great, and she sang a few songs. No one could tell by Jerry Brandt's face what kind of an impression Carly was making on him; after he and Janet left, Jake turned to Ricky and wondered aloud, “Did this land or didn't it?” Happily, it
had
landed. Brandt called Carly a day or two later and said, “I'd love to manage you and I'd love to put up money for you to do a demo.” Carly accepted on the spot.

Brandt had folk guitarist David Bromberg produce Carly's demo, which consisted of five songs, the featured one of which was a Carly composition: “Please Take Me Home (to Bed) with You.” Brandt brought the record to Clive Davis, who—having signed Janis Joplin to Columbia, and having presided over Columbia when the Byrds were on the label—was considered, as one A&R man puts it, “the ears of all time.” Davis listened briefly and thought he was hearing a Barbra Streisand type. “Clive practically threw it across the room and told Jerry, ‘What do I want with another Jewish New York girl!?'” Carly says Jerry told her. Brandt brought the demo to Jac Holzman, founder and president of Elektra Records. Jac had discovered Judy Collins and overseen Collins's version of Joni's “Both Sides, Now”; he'd signed the Doors, lighting the fire of Morrison's megalomaniacal grandeur. Holzman recalls, “Jerry said, ‘Look, I think this girl is rather unusual. Her name is Carly Simon. I asked, ‘Is she one of the Simon Sisters?' One of my favorite songs was a little lullaby called ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod.'”

Still, Holzman was preoccupied with his imminent trip to Expo '70 in Japan. “Almost as an afterthought,” he recalls, he dropped the tape in his suitcase. Sleepless in a hotel outside of Osaka at four a.m., he dug out the tape and popped it into his cassette player. The tart strains of Carly singing “Please Take Me Home (to Bed) with You” made him sit up straight. He thought: She's wonderful. Her voice had “a toughness and sinewyness.” When he got to Tokyo, he called Jerry Brandt and told him he wanted to work with Carly.

Back in New York, Holzman played the tape for his employees. “Nobody was very impressed,” he recalls, “but it was my record company, so I didn't pay any attention.”

One day at the end of summer 1970 Carly took the elevator to the top of the new Gulf + Western building on Columbus Circle and tried not to get phobic when she realized that the building was swaying (as intended by design). Holzman, who had grown up on Madison Avenue and whose family had attended the Park Avenue Synagogue, recognized that he and the singer “were from similar backgrounds—haute Jewish New York,” as he puts it—which made it easier to relate, “although she was certainly more Brahmin. Those people can be pretty snooty, but Carly wasn't.” Thus, the social-class issue that had been a minus to Albert Grossman, the members of Elephant's Memory, and even to Danny Armstrong was a plus to Holzman. There had always been a niche for the sophisticated, urbane—almost “society”—girl in the world of popular music. Kay Swift, the classically trained musician who wrote “Can't We Be Friends?” and the score of Broadway's
Fine and Dandy,
who'd married a Warburg and had a love affair with George Gershwin, had filled it in the Depression era; Helen Forrest, the impeccable interpreter of Big Band lyrics, who sang with Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Harry James, had filled it in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Holzman wanted Carly to record the songs of Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and Donovan. He didn't see her as a writer. Carly set out to prove Holzman wrong. “I wanted to be a writer more than anything else.” By now she was “already in love with James Taylor from a distance—that whole sound,” she's said. James's drummer on
Sweet Baby James,
Russ Kunkel, was “a kind of demigod to me,” and “in my mind I fashioned myself like a Carole King. [So] I just went about my business, writing my own songs,” ultimately convincing Holzman that they were worth recording.

The songs she was writing reflected her playfulness, vulnerability, and romanticism. In “Alone”—whose jaunty melody suggests those living room musicales with her show-biz uncles—she's reassuring a lover, “It's not to leave you that I'm goin'”; rather, she wants to revel in the “ache” of solitude and memory, an odd need that her sensual voice makes believable, with asymmetrical phrasing and unexpected harmony. “Reunions,” with its stately Broadway-revue-like melody, is one of the most undiluted of those upper-middle-class slices of life that would become her trademark, which some listeners would gratefully relate to (“To be sad in your beautiful house, with your mother reading
The New York Times
and your father coming home late—Carly made that an okay story to tell; it was okay to be smart, to be witty,” says her friend Jessica Hoffman Davis) but which many critics would forever resent and mock her for. Her elegant lyrics about the tension between a group of old friends—“wind blows through thin smiles / Someone made a wrong turn / missed a joke by miles”—redeems it for even the staunchest reverse-snobs. Another wistful art song, “The Best Thing,” regretfully mulls the loss of a man of a different background: “I was his foreigner and he was mine.”

But of those songs Carly brought to Jac, the one he was most riveted by was “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be,” which she'd written with Jake. “All the other songs had some aspect of conventionality, which you expect in a song,” Jac says, “but this was different.” Jac's staff said the title was too wordy and the song too stuffed with emotional activity—the parents' bad marriage; the friends' unhappy lives; the boyfriend's enthusiasm for marriage but controlling nature; the woman's initial resistance and ultimate capitulation—to be released as a hit single. “Everyone [at Elektra] argued that it was too complex, blah blah blah—‘it's not going to be played on Top 40 radio,' and all that was true at the time,” Holzman says. “Still, that didn't mean it couldn't be a first.”

Jac knew
this
was the single; it was a “signature song; it conveyed who Carly was.” “That song was so much
me,
” Carly has said. Not only did it draw on her childhood, it described her last few years: she had moved on from three men she might have married—choosing to break off a pre-engagement with Nick Delbanco and a tacit engagement to Danny Armstrong, and suffering Willie Donaldson's severance of their engagement—while her sister and best friends had married and were having children. She was never dishonest about her sexuality (when she moved into her own apartment, “I still had a hard time sleeping alone,” she has said, “so I never did, and since it was 1969, there was no reason to”) and her datebook was full. Through Jake, she'd met and had a fling with Jack Nicholson and then with Bob Rafelson (the star and director, respectively, of
The King of Marvin Gardens,
which Jake had written) and was now dating Rafelson's brother Don, while still carrying a torch for Danny Armstrong. (Having many lovers didn't harden Carly's heart, her friends would note; it only multiplied the times it could break.)

And all of this was representative. In a brand-new poll of college women, 10 percent more respondents called marriage “obsolete” than had described it that way the year before. Such skepticism had started as idealistic nose thumbing at what the
state
demanded two lovers do, an idea Joni had expressed in “My Old Man.” But now feminism had added a new component: it was no longer that two lovers didn't need a “piece of paper from the city hall”; more than “city hall” being suspect, your old man was.
He,
not “the state,” was going to “cage [you] on [his] shelf.” Men had long quipped that marriage overdomesticated them; now
women
did. “
I
want a ‘wife'!” Judy Syfers had just written, in a common-sensically funny, much-talked-about essay in the premiere issue of
Ms.

Carly and Jake's critique of marriage was a musical version of what women in their circle were doing in prose—and in life. Sally Kempton, Carly's Sarah Lawrence classmate, had just published a long buzz-magnet of an autobiographical essay, “Cutting Loose,” in
Esquire,
where Jake's film criticism appeared; it eventually led to her divorce from her producer husband. Jonathan Schwartz's wife, Sara Davidson, had covered the women's movement for
Life
magazine; she'd describe her marriage's dissolution in
Loose Change.
Susan Braudy, a
Newsweek
deskmate of Carly's cousin Jeanie Seligmann (and the author of the James Taylor profile in
The New York Times Magazine
) was documenting her separation from her husband in
Between Marriage and Divorce.

The average age of first marriage for U.S. women had been going up a little every year since 1965—the year that Joni had delivered her Second Fret stage patter about women living alone in tasteful lairs—and the increase would proceed unabated.
*

Still, for all Carly's enthusiastically exercised freedom, she'd absorbed lessons from her shrewd coquette mother on how important it was to hold a man's attention. Danny had felt she was “pressured” to have an “orderly” married life like Lucy's, and she had always felt that pressure herself. As she put it while promoting her record, “We were all brought up playing with bride dolls and taught to believe that having children was
it.
” More, she had valued both Danny's and Nick's careers over her own, as they had
expected
her to.

The tension in Carly's song (the narrator has fears that won't go away but are too threatening to act on) seemed to match the New York–locused, early-mainstream feminist moment.
**
Writer and film critic Karen Durbin recalls how she felt, in 1968, when her
New Yorker
colleague, Redstockings cofounder Ellen Willis, started talking about women's liberation.” It was “a subject I found so seismic that I kept my hands under the desk so she wouldn't see them shaking while I casually protested that it really wasn't my thing.” By early 1971, that sense of being threatened but compelled was widespread: any woman who picked up Susan Sontag's essay on feminism in
The Paris Review
or Vivian Gornick's in
The Village Voice
feared that once she read it she could never turn back. (In “Click! The Housewife's Moment of Truth” in the preview issue of
Ms.
, Jane O'Reilly coined a word for that moment of can't-turn-back epiphany—the feminist “click!”) But read on she would. Shoving doubts under the rug (as Carly's song's narrator does) was like keeping shaking hands under a desk: a stopgap measure that
both
women knew would merely delay a life-changing confrontation.