Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (52 page)

Carly said that James's indifference to her work “worried” her “terribly”—it seemed to strike a too-familiar nerve. Looking back today on her sister's marriage, Lucy Simon thinks she knows why: “James was so similar to our father in terms of looks and brilliance that I think Carly transferred
to James
the need she felt to prove her worth to our father, who died before she could know he loved her. And,” over the course of the marriage, “she
kept
on trying to prove something to him.” Jake makes a similar assessment: “James was not at all delighted with Carly's creativity. But her dad wasn't, either. In some way she was
looking
for that; that was what she knew. A withholding man was familiar.”

• • •

“You're So Vain” struck like a brick through a window. The star power that early listeners had heard in the song came through to critics and fans alike. Even Ellen Willis, who was to rock criticism what Renata Adler was to film (and whose lower-middle-class background and radical politics had made her resent and distrust Carly's perspective on previous songs), had to admit, in
The New Yorker,
that this was “a great rock 'n' roll song.” Willis likened the lyrics' “inspired sloppiness” to Dylan's, and she loved the “good-natured nastiness” of Carly's delivery. The song's humor made its feminism an easily swallowed pill, but in the long run it was that aspect of the song that would endure: fifteen years later Stephen Holden would credit the “magnificently vulgar pop masterpiece” with “asserting a new balance of power in male-female relationships.”

“You're So Vain” hit #1 as soon after its release as a single could. (“The Right Thing to Do” and “We Have No Secrets” also became hits.)
No Secrets
also hit #1, a rare double jackpot. Carly now had the success that no one would have predicted for her three years earlier. Now, as she neared thirty, it was time to have that little Ben or Sarah. Carly and Arlyne both became pregnant in spring 1973, “when no one else was,” Arlyne says, only slightly exaggerating. In feminist ground zero New York, marriage and motherhood were now considered retro and suspect and, by Me Decade values, the package was unappealingly self-limiting. Carly and Arlyne combed the unpromising maternity clothes racks together, two plumped-up women in a sea of svelte self-actualizers. Carly wrote “Think I'm Gonna Have a Baby” about how
not
-the-thing-to-do it was to be knocked up in I Am Woman 1973. The song would be the centerpiece of her next album,
Hotcakes,
which would show a glowingly pregnant Carly, in a gauzy caftan, sitting by a kitchen window in the town house she and James had bought on East Sixty-second Street.

And as she, who'd been “just a little too free” for so long, settled into domesticity, across the country a woman who'd been just a little too
sensible
for so long was poised for a leap. The estimable Ellen Willis once wrote that the coming-toward-middle-age members of the 1960s generation had trouble eventually grasping 1980s “identity politics” because identity politics glamorized that which you were born as, which was exactly counter to the '60s dream of becoming the
opposite
of what you had been born as. Sometimes this transformation happened by bonding with the Other so deeply you became a “new” person in attitude, passion, geography. The 1960s were over and that romance was fading; still, such a transformation would come—late but very hard—to the woman who everyone thought was the steadiest: Carole.

1972–1984

On a damp twilight in late May 1973, Carole—in a blue and white tunic over jeans, her hair newly short—strode onto the stage in Central Park's Great Lawn and even before she hugged Mayor John Lindsay (who'd proudly introduced her), the more than 70,000 assembled fans let out wild, grateful cheers. “We
love
you, Carole!” “Sing ‘Natural Woman'!” “You've got a friend, Carole!” they shouted. Carole surveyed the small city of euphoric faces and reminded them: “It was supposed to…”—spelling the word, so as not to tempt fate—“R-A-I-N.” Laughter and
more
cheers—yes, despite the forecast, they'd camped out on the moist grass for hours. In the VIP section sat Jack Nicholson—and Joni: living in Bel Air now (and feeling “really
uncomfortable
” wearing Yves St. Laurent pants at a rock concert) and having recently had a brief fling with the ubiquitous Warren Beatty, Joni had been absorbed into young A-list Hollywood, though she still retained her artistic bohemian heart. “This and the Ellsberg trial
*
are the only two events it's proper to be seen at in public,” Nicholson told reporters at the concert.

As Carole sat down at the grand piano (which Genie had fretted might not have been properly tuned) and curled her hands over the keys, the noise receded to cricket-hearing silence. Two years after its release,
Tapestry
officially stood as the biggest-selling rock album in history and was still as well loved now as when it had freshly hit the airwaves, and this was Carole's first hometown performance since the scope of her triumph had seeped into the city's jaded consciousness. As she pounded out the opening chords of “Beautiful,” the audience went crazy—applause and whoops rippling like a great aural wave from the penthouse tops of Fifth Avenue to the penthouse tops of Central Park West. During this and her next nine songs—amplified by a five-piece band (with Charlie on upright bass) and six-man horn section—the fans tossed bouquets, pushed at the stage fencing, and had to be chased down from some of the 200-odd scaffolding frames that held the speakers aloft. Unlike every other concert on this twelve-city tour, tonight's was free, Carole's “small way of giving something back” to the city, she said. It rated reporting (“Carole King Draws 70,000 to Central Park”) on page one of
The New York Times
the next day, side by side with the lead story about hazards for the astronauts on America's first space station and major news in the Watergate scandal: “Prosecution Is Said to Link Haldeman and Ehrlichman to Ellsberg Case Break-In.”

Carole hadn't toured since giving birth to Molly. She'd turned down almost every publication, even declining the cover of
Life
magazine—and her stiff refusal to give interviews during this current tour seemed too curious for the press to miss.
The Washington Post
's Tom Zito noted: “Carole King, who has sold more than 15 million albums in the past three years, would rather not talk about it. ‘Carole is basically a woman with two children and a new baby and she's got a home life,' says…her manager's publicity man. ‘She just feels it's a lot easier if her life isn't reviewed every time she performs,' says manager Lou Adler. ‘She has her private life and she wants to keep it that way.'”

The reason for the diffidence? She loved Charlie deeply, and her fame “was a tremendous burden and challenge for them,” says a close observer. “It was a terrible struggle for her,” trying to uphold the equilibrium of her marriage through the stress of maintaining the level of success to which she had skyrocketed. Carole's getting all the attention unintentionally became “like a smack in the face to Charlie; if she introduced him” during a concert or event “he would thank her for acknowledging him; he would feel she was only doing so to [make him feel important], that her fans didn't care about him.” When people noticed Carole in public “sometimes the timing was all wrong,” the observer continues, “and it was very upsetting to her, especially when Charlie was there.”

It's not that Charlie was temperamental or demanding. He was supportive, but that was the problem. Says John Fischbach, “There was nothing wrong with Charlie Larkey; he was a normal guy. It just would have been very difficult for any man in that situation to be ‘Mr. King'; you pay for that.'” Especially if you're an unproven musician. “Being married to Carole wasn't good for Charlie's career,” says Danny Kortchmar. “He hadn't made his bones”—established respect as a musician—before becoming involved with her. “People thought he was just getting hired because he was married to Carole. And he was overshadowed—Carole was a very strong and determined woman.”

Carole had made two albums since
Music. Rhymes & Reasons
was released at the end of 1972, quickly shot to #2 on the
Billboard
chart, and stayed there for five weeks. Her significance to the culture was expressed through its large, grainy, close-up cover shot: Carole in profile, almost expressionless: her frizzily curly hair and prominent nose filling the cardboard square. She'd become America's sweetheart despite physical attributes she'd once despaired of but which she (along with an evolved public) now embraced.

Like much of
Music, Rhymes & Reasons
has a noncommercial, almost piano-bar feel, and Carole's voice has an undertone of vulnerability, even weariness. Four of the album's songs were cowritten by Toni, and in these Carole, who had
never
lived alone, gains an alter ego in Toni, who, as an adult, had lived
only
that way. From a distance of over three decades, these then somewhat overlooked songs (critics tended to lump them in with Carole's solo compositions as being optimistic friendship songs—they were actually more sophisticated) seem like time capsules of how it felt to be a single woman holding her own in a time and town where sensitivity was valued in the political and spiritual abstract but not practiced in the male-to-female interpersonal. “Come Down Easy” is the breezy plaint of a post-1960s woman for whom “enough space…enough time…pieces of fruit and glasses of wine” are happy compensation for being alone. The heroine of the dolorous waltz “My My She Cries” disappears—what effort it takes to stay balanced, confident, and visible in the brand-new normal of extended female independence. “Peace in the Valley”'s narrator duns herself for gossip (indulging in “talk that kills for fun”) and self-absorption (“I know that man's my brother / and that I'm the selfish one”), indirectly revealing that altruism is the luxury of the securely situated. The infectious “Feeling Sad Tonight” (which Carole set to a counterintuitive, thumping stridence) features an everywoman on a barstool, “always feeling half right and half safe.” “Half right and half safe”: it was that so-well-put sense of marginalization and risk that the innately conventional, always domestically occupied Carole had avoided all her life. “The First Day In August” is a love song Charlie and Carole wrote together—he, the words; she, the melody. “And nothing will come between us,” they vow, against substantial odds.

Carole wrote six of the songs wholly herself, and these are strikingly, if casually, confessional. In the scatting “Bitter With the Sweet,” she grumbles about the invasion on her time and privacy; in “Goodbye Don't Mean I'm Gone” (with twangy country interlude) she unapologetically tells old friends that her inaccessibility isn't swelled-headedness;
*
rather, “It's all I can do to be a mother.” “I Think I Can Hear You” expresses her belief in a deity, likely reflecting her devotion to Swami Satchidananda;
*
“Stand Behind Me” describes her resistance to the “blind[ing]” “dazzlement” of her shocking fame, and her reliance on her loved ones. But it was the more polished “Been to Canaan” (named for both the biblical land and the Connecticut town in which she and Charlie had just bought a farm in order to have a base near their families, which they rarely used), featuring its bounce-as-you're-driving hook “been
so
long…”—that became the album's Top 10 hit. Still, Charlie remembers something about its recording that underscored their no-win situation. Long after the track was cut, “she and I were talking and she said she had been a little disappointed in my bass playing on it but she hadn't said anything [during the session], and [when we talked about it later] I thought: That was the best I could do. I thought it was a good track at the time. I hadn't realized she wasn't completely satisfied with it.” Carole was not only the star and the breadwinner but also her husband's boss—the highly seasoned arranger, pressured to prove that
Tapestry
wasn't a fluke. Choice: Lean on your bass player (dominate your husband) to get the most out of the money track? Or don't push him, don't humiliate him, and risk less of a hit? Men in Carole's position didn't have that problem.

After
Rhymes & Reasons,
Carole tacked from the ruminatively personal to the sociopolitical.
Fantasy
is a pop opera explicitly remining those issues (race, poverty, longing) that she and Gerry had had to tiptoe around ten years earlier. Carole wrote all the songs herself and sings in the personae of society's underdogs: a black man struggling for pride, a welfare mother fighting for dignity, a deflated white housewife, a young pregnant woman whose man has fled, a barrio Hispanic, and so on.
Fantasy
was a “concept” album, the tracks bleeding into one another much in the manner of Marvin Gaye's brilliant
What's Going On,
of two years earlier, and with a sound that echoed (the insuperably humane) Curtis Mayfield's recent
Superfly
soundtrack. The fluid-track sound would also prefigure the looming pop music trend: disco.
*

The album, with its one hit, the peppery Spanish-language “Corazón,” was released in June 1973 and promptly went gold. But artistically it didn't touch the
Tapestry
bar, and her once greatest champion seemed the most keenly disappointed: the
L.A. Times
's Robert Hilburn would eventually write that her two post-
Tapestry
albums, “while…polished and nicely crafted, sounded so much alike to most critics and fans they could barely suppress the yawns when talking about them.”
The New York Times
's Lorraine Alterman called Carole's attempts to highlight the plight of disadvantaged women laudably feminist but warned of the dangers of inflated expectation (
Fantasy
had been pre-touted as a “masterpiece”). “Though her more ardent followers think of her as a genius,” Alterman wrote, “King is really a skilled writer of popular songs, but”—unlike Joni, Alterman made clear—“she doesn't possess that bold leap of the imagination that transforms craft into art.” The
Chicago Tribune
's Lynn Van Matre's irritated reaction to
Fantasy
seemed to bear out Alterman's warning about the dangers of oversell: Carole's voice, Van Matre griped, was “slightly appealing rather than good,” “thin,” “occasionally even whiny,” and her lyrics were “often cliché.”

Turning her thoughts to a next album in 1974, Carole came to terms with her stretched limits: she had written all of
Fantasy
by herself, had just finished an exhausting tour, and she and Charlie just found out they were going to be parents again. She needed a cowriter to relieve some of the pressure. She turned to ex–Myddle Class member Dave Palmer, whose ex-wife Sue had been her best friend in New Jersey and then Gerry's girlfriend in California. Dave had been the vocalist for a new band led by two edgy ex-Bard students, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who named their group for the dildo in William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch:
Steely Dan. Dave sent Carole and Charlie a prerelease copy of the Dan's
Can't Buy a Thrill,
and Carole knew it would be huge.

When Dave lost his job with the Dan (it was decided that Fagen's own angst-filled voice best expressed his and Becker's compositions), Carole contacted Dave about collaborating. One of the first lyrics he sent her was a smartly internally rhymed piece about a person coaxing a saxophonist, “Jazzman, take my blues away,” which Carole set to an urgent, rocking melody. “Jazzman” would hit #1 and become the second-biggest single she ever recorded (“It's Too Late” being the first). Dave and Carole ended up writing the whole album, which would be titled
Wrap Around Joy,
together. Midway through, Carole paused to have her baby—a boy!—joyfully welcomed by Charlie and her family of daughters. They named him Levi for Charlie's great-uncle (though the Four Tops' lead singer, Levi Stubbs, constituted additional inspiration for selecting the name).

In addition to the hugely successful “Jazzman” (which earned Carole another Grammy nomination),
Wrap Around Joy
yielded a second hit in “Nightingale,” on which Carole's daughters Louise and Sherry sang backup. But the fact that none of these songs were wholly written by Carole (or with a collaborator—Gerry or Toni—with whom she'd had a deep, prior fit) put it somewhat at a remove from the soul-baring arc of
Tapestry
and its two offshoots. (The exception: “Change in Mind, Change of Heart,” featuring graceful, contemplative lyrics and Carole's wistful delivery and gospel piano chords.) Carole seemed to have been consciously trying to create a crowd pleaser, and by some accounts she succeeded. “I know you're going to be skeptical,” Robert Hilburn backhand-complimented, “but Carole King really does finally have another album you're going to like…her most fully satisfying work since
Tapestry.
” But
Rolling Stone
's Jon Landau, whose startled enthrallment with
Tapestry
had started it all, ended his trying-to-love-it review by putting his finger on Carole's gathering dilemma: “King…[is] forced to live in [
Tapestry
's] oppressive shadow.”