B005S8O7YE EBOK (11 page)

Donnie chose Gerry’s and my song for the Shirelles. The next hurdle was playing it for the people at Scepter Records. Their office was in the same building. As soon as Donnie hung up with Scepter, he gave me the go-ahead. Bypassing the elevator, I ran up the stairs with Gerry’s handwritten lyric and played the song for Scepter’s owner, Florence Greenberg, and Luther Dixon, the cowriter and producer of “Tonight’s the Night.” Florence and Luther liked
the song and wanted to record it with the Shirelles right away, so I recorded the demo right there in their studio. It was a rudimentary presentation in which I sang the song live over my piano accompaniment and tried to sound like the Shirelles’ lead singer, Shirley Owens. One of the other Shirelles—Doris Coley, Beverly Lee, or Micki Harris—told me later that when Shirley recorded the lead vocal, she was trying to sound like me sounding like her.

Within ten weeks after it was released on November 21, 1960,
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow”
climbed to #1 on
Billboard
’s popular music chart and stayed in the top 10 for seven weeks.

A lot of people think I wrote the lyrics for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” because they express so eloquently the emotions of a teenage girl worried that her boyfriend won’t love her anymore once she gives him her most precious one-time-only prize. Those lyrics were written by Gerry, whose understanding of human nature transcended gender. My contribution to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” included writing the melody, playing piano in the studio, and arranging the string parts. Though I had previously written choral parts, I had never composed a string arrangement. But when Gerry suggested we use strings I was fearless in volunteering. I knew how to write and read music. I would work out the parts on the piano and refer to an arranger’s handbook for transposition and range.

As I worked on the arrangement, Gerry sang ideas to me in a voice that many people considered unmusical, but I never did. Like a translator with a unique understanding of an arcane language, I was able to interpret the ideas Gerry was trying to get across. We had listened to hit records by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for artists ranging from Wilbert Harrison (
“Kansas City”
) to the Coasters. We had also found inspiration in the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Aaron Copland. One of the most unusual arrangements we had ever heard was composed
by Stanley Applebaum for Leiber and Stoller’s production of “There Goes My Baby.” Who but Leiber and Stoller would have thought to combine the voice of Ben E. King with cellos and timpani? That was visionary.

We, too, tried to be visionary. With
“There Goes My Baby”
as our model, I incorporated Gerry’s ideas and my melodic lines into an arrangement meant to complement the voices of the Shirelles. I tried to make my charts look as professional as the ones I’d seen on the music stands at Don Costa’s sessions by hand-copying the part for each instrument separately on music staff paper with a steel ruler and India ink. I wish I’d known that an arranger had only to scratch out a score in pencil and a team of copyists would work overnight to make the charts look the way they did on the music stands. After many hours handwriting more than fifteen charts, I was bleary-eyed. I looked at the clock. It was 4:45 a.m. I looked in on Louise and then went to bed.

The alarm rang entirely too soon. I dragged myself out of bed, brought Louise to my grandmother’s, then took the BMT up to Scepter. Recording the rhythm track took less than an hour. Then the string players arrived. The first time I heard the cellos play the rhythmic figure at the beginning of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” I was euphoric. To this day I can think of no greater musical joy than to hear a song or an arrangement come to life with instruments and voices. Some composers literally hear the sounds in their head as they write; Don Costa reportedly was such a composer. I had to wait until a session to hear what I wrote. As the musicians began to play the parts I had written for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” I became giddy with excitement. My little black dots and squiggles on the page were coming out as beautiful music. The experience exceeded my wildest expectations.

I was eighteen.

The first time we heard “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” on the
radio we were in our 1956 Mercury Monterey. We didn’t care that the speakers were low-fidelity. We knew how it was supposed to sound. The following week, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” leaped onto the charts with what the industry called a bullet. Gerry and I had set a million as the number of singles sold that would trigger him quitting his day job. The day Donnie learned that the record had reached the million mark, he insisted on conveying the information personally to Gerry. He had his driver pick me up and then we drove to Gerry’s workplace in Brooklyn. Upon hearing the news, Gerry walked away from his job and, as he said many years later, he hasn’t had a real job since.

Though Gerry and I remained each other’s primary collaborator, he began using his newly available daytime hours to write with other Aldon writers. One such collaboration with Barry Mann,
“Who Put the Bomp,”
would become a hit single with Barry as the artist. I, too, collaborated with other writers, notably Cynthia Weil and Howie Greenfield. Aldon had become one of the hottest publishers in the business, but none of us stopped long enough to notice how successful the company was. We were too busy competing to be Donnie’s “go-to” songwriters.

I never understood why some of Gerry’s relatives persisted in referring to him as a “bum” even though he had been gainfully employed as a chemist. Quitting his day job only confirmed their opinion of him—until they realized that he was making more money than they were, at which point they took great pride in his success.

Now that we had reasonable financial security, with Gerry collaborating with other writers, I was hoping to lighten my workload and spend more time at home with Louise.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

D
ivision of labor in a family in the early sixties held that it was the man’s responsibility to earn enough income to support his family while his wife handled household chores and child care—then considered “woman’s work.” Gerry was a loving husband and father who never failed to support his family, but he wasn’t much help with chores or children. He might have been more helpful had I asked, but I didn’t know enough to ask. I actually enjoyed two of my jobs (music and child care), and I really didn’t mind folding laundry, ironing, or washing dishes, especially when I could time those tasks to coincide with reruns of
I Love Lucy
. Sometimes I did all three jobs simultaneously. When I held Louise, vacuumed, and commented on a lyric Gerry was working on from the comfort of his armchair, it never occurred to me that I had a right to expect my husband to participate equally in child care and housework. This would have been true even if I hadn’t been earning half of our income.

I found child care at once challenging and joyous. It was challenging to be responsible for a little being with needs to be met
ahead of mine, and utterly delightful to have this bright, beautiful, healthy little girl in my life. I loved learning the things I needed to know as a new mother and rediscovering things Louise learned as if I were learning them for the first time. This was equally true with our second daughter, Sherry Marlene Goffin, who arrived on March 3, 1962. But meeting the needs of
two
little beings made my role as a mother somewhat more complicated. I soon found myself saying things that all parents swear as children that they’ll never say to their children. “Share your toys!” and “Stop that right now!” became part of my daily vocabulary along with “No bickering!” and “Because I said so!”

Propelled by daughter momentum, we acquired so much “stuff” that we were bursting out of our apartment. Gerry’s wish to raise our girls in Manhattan was overridden by practicality. We found a house in a newly platted subdivision in West Orange, New Jersey, took out a mortgage, and moved to the suburbs.

That lighter workload I had envisioned for myself after Gerry quit his day job never materialized. I still had to drive to the city to play songs for artists and producers and sing and play on demos. The commute from New Jersey took at least an hour each way. And while it was possible to bring one child and her gear to the city, it was exponentially more difficult to bring two children and twice the gear.

In simpler times, when extended families lived near each other, older women helped younger women, stay-at-home sisters cared for nieces and nephews, and neighbors looked after each other’s children. In the more mobile early sixties, working mothers had to hire outside help. While we were still living in Brooklyn, several babysitters had come and gone—including one who moved on to a different career. In New Jersey, my need to be in the city with Gerry several times a week made it essential that I find someone
reliable to care for my girls. My prayers were answered when we found Willa Mae Phillips. With no biological children of her own, Willa Mae devoted her maternal energy to my children and remained a beloved member of our family from the time she came to work for us in New Jersey until her death in the mid-seventies. The memory of Willa Mae endures every time we repeat one of her down-home sayings. For example, after the entire family had torn the house apart for twenty minutes searching for car keys, a wristwatch, or a missing schoolbook, Willa Mae, having located the item in an obvious place, would hold it up triumphantly, saying, “If it’d been a snake, it would-a bit you.”

There was no shortage of playmates on our suburban street. Willa Mae didn’t drive—indeed, she emphatically refused to learn—but she could walk the girls to play dates. As Gerry and I crafted songs in our music room, Louise learned to write “L-U-L-U” on a chalkboard while Sherry and her playmates, under Willa Mae’s watchful eye, delighted in the antics of Judy Garland and her funny-looking friends in
The Wizard of Oz
on the big television in the family room.

From earliest childhood Sherry saw the world with the eyes of truth and never hesitated to speak that truth. She could size up a situation, see through complicated explanations, double-talk, and misrepresentation (all euphemisms for the feces of a male bovine), and sum up in one sentence what others might be thinking but didn’t dare say. My appreciation for this admirable quality would be sorely tested when Sherry became a teenager and said things I didn’t want to hear.

“Mom, that haircut’s been out of style for two years!”

Or, “Are you going to wear
that
??”

Writing songs for our daughters was something Gerry and I could do together to show them and the rest of the world how grateful we were for their presence in our lives. It was Sherry’s candor
that inspired Gerry to write a paean called
“Child of Mine,”
on which we collaborated when Sherry was six.

I know you will be honest if you can’t always be kind

Oh yes, sweet darlin’

So glad you are a child of mine

Later I would write the melody to a song called
“Daughter of Light”
for which Gerry wrote these words about Louise:

Daughter of light, you’re a welcome sight

To a weary soul

Seeing you just lifts me out of the cold

Fast-forward to 1974, when I featured my Goffin daughters’ vocal performances on
Really Rosie
, an album on which I collaborated with the noted children’s author Maurice Sendak. Maurice is probably best known for his self-illustrated books
Where The Wild Things Are
and
In The Night Kitchen
. His
Nutshell Library
is a boxed set of four tiny books with poems that I set to music and recorded with Lou Adler.
Really Rosie
holds a special appeal for me first because I had the rare privilege of collaborating with Maurice, second because I acted the roles of Rosie and the narrator in a companion TV special, and third because that album is a permanent record of Sherry and Louise at twelve and fourteen.

I never imagined that in the eighties Louise would move to London and bring her beautiful spirit, musical talent, and successful career to fans on both sides of the Atlantic, or that Sherry would marry a New York–based studio musician and move to a suburban neighborhood where, after several years of driving her children to various activities and finding insufferable the music then designed to appeal to young children, she would create a
collection of CDs that appealed to both children and parents. Sherry would make
SugarBeats.com
such a successful enterprise online that I would be inspired to start my own label, Rockingale Records.

However, before Sugar Beats or Rockingale, there was Dimension Records, started by Al and Donnie. Which brings me to the babysitter who changed careers.

B
efore Willa Mae, while we were still living in Brooklyn, Gerry and I were rehearsing one day in 1961 with the Cookies. I was then pregnant with Sherry. Baby Louise was alternately being fussed over by the women, held by Gerry, or attended to by me. Hearing me say, not for the first time, that I really needed a dependable babysitter, Dorothy recommended a teenager she knew. At seventeen, Eva Narcissus Boyd was whip smart, cheerful, hardworking, and wonderful with Louise. Pop legend has it that Gerry and I heard her singing around the house and said, “Stop! We
must
record that voice!” The truth is, we knew Eva could sing when we hired her. With one of her older sisters covering child care, Eva often sang on our demos.

In 1962, Dee Dee Sharp had a #1 hit called
“Mashed Potato Time”
on a Philadelphia-based label called Cameo-Parkway. Gerry and I wrote
“The Loco-Motion”
with Dee Dee in mind and recorded the demo with Eva singing lead. But Cameo-Parkway was a self-contained hit factory. Dee Dee and her producers didn’t want or need material from outside writers. If Cameo-Parkway’s success hadn’t already been enough motivation, their failure to
consider a song that Donnie’s golden ear had identified as a hit prompted Donnie to establish Dimension Records, on which he would release Aldon songs sung by artists under Aldon’s control, with Aldon writers producing the records. It was Donnie who gave our babysitter her professional name: Little Eva. “The Loco-Motion” was Dimension’s first release on June 8, 1962.