Read Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation Online
Authors: Sheila Weller
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (4 page)
In contrast to Carole's and especially Joni's family, Carly's was extremely modern about sex. Sex was a
wonderful
thing, Andrea Simon made clearâsometimes a bit too abundantly. But if sex had not carried for Carly the price it had for Carole or the consequences represented in Joni's youth, the conflict Carly felt between love and ambition (which Carole and Joni did
not
share) was equally limiting. There was also the matter of her charismatic older sisters;
they
were the ones who were supposed to be stars,
not she.
This single of hers, this solo album, this Troubadour gig: if something came of it, it would destroy the God-given hierarchy in Carly's family.
The Troubadour busboys were setting a red rose in a bud vase on every tableâa gift from Carly to her audience. Tonight she'd be wooing the L.A. rock community (many, recently transplanted New Yorkers), which was like the cool kids' table in the school cafeteria. Carole and Joni were the popular girls on that bench, and here
she
was, the interloper: about to wander over with her tray in her hands to see if she could join them. “Carly was completely unnerved when we got to the dressing room, like, âHow can I get out of this?'” Steve Harris recalls. He was getting a crash introduction to her intense neuroticism, which made even those who loved her describe her as a little “crazy.”
Carly asked Steve if she could take a short walk in the alley to clear her head. He wouldn't let her go by herself, so down the stairs they loped together. Carly would have to dare herself to get on that stage. But she was good that way, always daring her heart to be broken to pieces; rarely shirking from the sexually exhibitionist gesture other women wouldn't
think
of undertaking. As they circled the block, Steve saw the huge effort Carly was making to calm herself. He vowed to think of some reward once the show was over.
Carole King and Joni Mitchell had someone in common: James Taylor. Taylor was now, officially (courtesy of last month's
Time
magazine cover), the biggest male rock hero in the country and the touted culture-changing avatar of a new intimate, thoughtful ballad style that was muscling loud rock offstage. James was a deeply close musical friend of Carole and, until recently, Joni's lover.
Everyone thought Joni and James had split up. But here they were, gliding into the Troubadour together. Carly loved James's music. In a bit of faux diva-ness intended to stanch this feared engagement, she'd insisted that Steve find her a drummer who sounded “just like” Taylor's drummer, Russ Kunkel, or else she wouldn't perform. (Steve booked in-demand Kunkel himself so she'd have no out.) Now Russ walked into Carly's dressing room, excitedly reporting that James Taylor would be watching her. “Why'd you have to tell me that?” Carly wailed.
But when she took the stage, the microphone saved her. It kept sliding. Her constant need to steady it as she sang made her forget her terror, and she delivered, as the critics would rave, a star-is-born performance.
After Cat Stevens finished his set, Steve Harris strode over to Jamesâthe two had met before, and James looked like he'd enjoyed the showâand invited him “to come up and say hello to Carly.” James, who'd played the Troub, had been in its dressing room before, scoring his preperformance hit of smack (encased in knotted balloons, in case you had to swallow it) from a young dealer who happened to be a Beverly Hills doctor's son and who always had the best stuff. Joni came along, close by James's side. In a bit of quick thinking, Steve said to Joni: “Cat's over there,” steering Joni to Stevens's dressing room as James entered Carly'sâ“looking like a country boy,” Steve recalls. “Carly could barely contain her excitement.”
When Steve left the room, Carly was seated on the couch; James, at her feet on the floor with his legs crossed. “They were deep in conversation,” Steve recalls. “I could see the intensity between them.”
Over the next eight months Carly Simon would spin off on romances with an array of rock and movie stars, while writing and recording two hit albums, the second delivering a monster hit that is generally considered the first, and most defiant, feminist rock song of the mainstream second-wave feminist era. (The song also sparked a still-in-play guessing game about who its subject was.) But through that whirlwind, the face of the man she met that night would beckon, as if the old saying
A woman loves only one man in her life
had crankily invaded her psyche to thwart the enormous distance she and other young women were hurtling from it. As Timothy White put it in
Rolling Stone:
“Carly was the brainy beauty, the ultimate catch. But while everyone was chasing [her], she was running after the one guy who just kept on walking.”
Carly's marriage to James Taylor in November 1972, and the family they would create, would be a kind of skeptical urban woman's test case. At a moment in time when marriage was grandly suspect and wanting a baby was something smart women were embarrassed to admit, Carly would be among those who, in doing both, bore the burden to
not
be backsliding. But, having married in an era when the tortured boy was the only one worth having, yet before codependency entered the lexicon, Carly would learn the difficulty of making a family man of an addict. And, like countless women crowding suddenly numerous female therapists' offices, she would, against her better judgment, feel the need to downplay her success around her husband. In that season of feminism's deepest, most glamorous reach, Carly's next three album coversâdemure pregnant glow; soft-porn heat; writhing sensualityâwould reassure her wary cohort that domesticity
could
be reinvented (well, sort ofâ¦), even beyond her own family's secretly decadent model. Her marriage would wind down during a stridently idealistic time when a movie starring her Sarah Lawrence classmate Jill Clayburgh would complete the thought her own first song had helped push into the zeitgeist eight years earlier:
Escaping a flawed marriage = liberation.
But Carly and others would learn that it wasn't that simple. If only feminist fortune cookie sentences could, as ordered, change the heart. They couldn't.
Carly would “come around again,” marrying a man whose solicitude corrected his predecessor's distance, only to face serial monogamy's irony: behind every solved problem lies a fresh one you hadn't anticipated. Crises would come to this woman of the charmed childhood. In the wake of her unique mother's death, she would write a universal song about the mother-daughter bond, reemploying her favored symbol of femalenessâthe riverâwhich also inspired Joni. She would become one of the one in eight American women to be diagnosed each year with breast cancer; she'd undergo a mastectomy. Depression would leave her challenged to learn to trim the sails of her neediness, “to travel alone and lightly.” She would encounter, with Joni and Carole, the loophole in the Constitution of their egalitarian generation: Women get “older”; men are “ageless.”
But she was good at dares. She would have one of her biggest-selling albums in late middle age, a feat simultaneously shared by Carole in the wake of a season of veneration for Joni (with one music executive declaring, “Joni Mitchell is simply one of the most important and influential songwriters in the history of popular music”). Carly would now be taking her cues from her “wise woman at the end of the bar,” and all three would by now have coursed along the winding, glamorous, but, as Carole had put it, definitely “rutted” road of the prime of their lives. And in the processâbecause, yes, songs
are
like tattoosâthey would write, in music, a history of how that life really was, for them and so many girls like them.
After James Taylor left Carly Simon's dressing room (and exited the club with girlfriend Joni), Carly walked onto the Troubadour fire escape with her guitar and serenaded the fans who'd gathered on the sidewalk. A stone's throw northeast, up the hill in Laurel Canyon, Carole was at home with her husband and children on Appian Way, near Joni's place on Lookout Mountain. This year, 1971, the media would soon essentially declare, was both the Year of the Woman and the Year of Women in Music. Under those banner headlines stood a generation of females who'd been little girls in one Americaâa frantically conventional, security-mad postwar nation, without rock 'n' roll or civil rights, and with an anxiously propagandized, stultifying image of womenâand who'd created their own Dionysian counter-reality, which was now yielding an even more revolutionary chapter.
Carole King's, Joni Mitchell's, and Carly Simon's songs were born of and were narrating that transitionâa course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the
limits
of change, which they, and their female listeners, had been riding.
Here is the story of their lives, and of that journey, from the beginning.
“i'm home again, in my old narrow bed”
carole
Carol Klein was born in Manhattan on February 9, 1942 (somewhere, early on, she added the
e
to her first name) but lived almost her entire youth in the borough to which her parents would soon move: Brooklyn. “You know the
New Yorker
magazine map, where the whole country drops off after Manhattan? That's what we were with Brooklyn,” says Camille Cacciatore Savitz whose family, like Carole's, moved to the end-of-the-alphabet avenues of Sheepshead Bay at the cusp of the 1950s. The neighborhood was still semirural then, with fields abutting houses and the occasional goat in an adjacent backyard, tied up so as not to get to the neighbors' clotheslines. In short order, the grid of streets filled up with rows of semidetached redbricksâtheir sidewalk-to-second-floor staircases as steep as rescue chutes, in order to make room for ground-floor garages. Predating these inelegant buildings was the Kleins' brick, two-family house (another family lived upstairs), with its small front lawn and backyard. From there Carole walked to P.S. 206 every day, in Harry S. Truman's America: “a little Howdy Doody girl, with blue eyes and freckles and a smile on her face and a ponytail,” her best friend from those years, Barbara Grossman Karyo, recalls. She was already taking piano lessons, sitting down with a teacher to play scales the year that “Tenderly,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” were heard on the radio and Victrola. The mainstay of her piano education, however, was classical (the Russian romantics, her favorites) and the Broadway songbooks of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. She
loved
Richard Rodgers.
Barbara and Carole's friendship started the way many friendships started back then: “in line.” Both were small, so they were placed next to each other at the front of the organ-pipe-like rows of girls that assembled in the schoolyard each morning. Reticent Barbara admired feisty Carole, who got in trouble for chewing gum and passing notes.
Carole graduated from grammar school in 1952, when great American literature was still consumed (Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, and Bernard Malamud had brand-new offerings); when everyone flocked to Gene Kelly musicals; when the highly regionalized country (interstate highways would be the project of the
next
president, Eisenhower) was just beginning to be united by way of Dave Garroway's
Today
show, which could be seen on rabbit-eared black-and-white television sets. Ten-year-old girls read comic books about Little Lulu and Sluggo and Archie and Veronica, where the characters spouted freshly postwar jargonâ
Babs; Chum; Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle; Pow! Right in the kisser!
âthat set the tone for the epistolary etiquetteâ
To Babs,
Your loving chum is sad to go
But we will meet in
[
P.S.
]
14, I know
âthat Carole imparted in Barbara's yearbook.
At Shellbank Junior High, Camille Cacciatore joined Carole and Barbara's best-friendship. Each of the girls had a distinction that made her feel “different.” Camille was one of the rare non-Jewish children in the neighborhood. Barbara had lost a father not to the war but to a disease, encephalitis. Carole had
two
emotional melodramas to weather, and in the face of what might have been grief, insecurity, and even guilt, she turned to music as release and comfort.
Carole had a little brother, Richard, who was born deaf and severely mentally retarded. Genie and Sidney Klein sent him to live at the nearby Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, an institution of last resort for families with mentally disabled children. Sometimes Richard was home for a weekend. “And when he was,” recalls Camille, “the house was always filled with pandemonium.” It was clearly unworkable for the boy to live at home, but Willowbrook was a frightening placeâa silent, 350-acre campus of hidden-away children. Even fifteen years before a television exposé uncovered scandalous abuse and neglect (young patients sleeping in cages in their own feces, among other horrors), there was enough suspicion of ill treatment for parents to do their own investigating. One day Camille came along with the Klein family to visit Richard. She remembers “being in a little room with Genie, Sidney, Carole, and Carole's brother. Genie was talking to her son very emotionally, asking him, âDid anyone on the staff hurt you?' She lifted his shirt up, as if she was looking for welts. She was crying.”
But Carole, Camille says, seemed girded. “She didn't cry. She didn't talk about it”ânot about the day, the institution, or her brother. Still, years later she would put those feelings into her tender “Brother, Brother,” about a fortunate person's sympathy toward a luckless sibling cut off from the world: “And though you didn't always talk to me / there wasn't much my lovin' eyes could not see.”
Carole's parents' divorce, so novel in that traditional world, had, to her friends, a haunting irresolution to it. “I remember once, when Carole and I were about eleven, Sidney came to the house to pick up Carole for his visitation time with her, and I saw this wistful, romantic scene at the door: Carole's divorced parents hugging and kissing,” Camille says. “It was as if they really loved each other but couldn't figure out how to make it work.” On the surface, the elder Kleins were as ordinary as other Brooklyn parents; their working lives rendered them not at all bohemian, and with their (in Barbara's memory) “shabby, dingy house,” they'd never be called glamorous. Still, there was something romantic about them, in the eyes of their daughter's young friends. Camille recalls Sidney Klein as “a tall, gorgeous man with a mustacheâhe looked a little like Clark Gable. Sidney was
vital.
He wasn't one of those disappearing-into-the-woodwork fathers, of which there were plenty. At a cottage they took every summer on Lake Waubeeka in Danbury, Connecticut, he even took me for a ride on a motor scooter. It scared and thrilled me.” Barbara recalls Genie Klein as “a beautiful, fragile, ethereal, flighty, slightly
eccentric
woman, with perfect diction. She wasn't like the other mothers.” Later friends have noted that Carole's eschewal of artificeâwhich blossomed in
Tapestry
âis in marked contrast to her mother. “She seemed to be her own person very early,” says Camille. Leslie Korn Rogowsky, a friend from their teen years, adds, “She had a sense of who she was and what she wanted to do; that was unusualâyou
felt
it.”
The children of city utility and service workers (Barbara's father worked for the gas company and Camille's for the transit authority, while Carole's dad was a fireman), the three friends were thrifty: babysitting for fifty cents an hour; stopping for five-cent pickles and dime knishes on the way home from Shellbank; occasionally splurging on lunch at the Chinese restaurant, ninety-nine cents for a four-course meal, leaving a tip of pennies. But beyond humble Brooklyn, there shimmered an elegant media ideal of womanhood. Broken only by the pluckiness of Debbie Reynolds, a serene, pedestaled femininity was radiated by the young actress Grace Kelly, by the older actress Loretta Young (thrusting open the French door on her weekly TV show), by models Jean Patchett and Suzy Parker, and by the soft-portraitured Breck Girls in
Life
magazine. Advertisements and commercials of women in cocktail dresses kissing their kitchen appliances drove home a schizophrenic mandate: Lure men with elegant wiles and
then
become a cheerfully addled serial procreator. Carole wrote in Barbara's ninth-grade autograph book:
May your blessings be many, may your troubles be few.
May your boyfriends be many, and your children, too.
But don't come crying when your hair is in curls.
I told you to try for only girls.
As “extremely theatrical” (that's the expression many use) as Genie Klein was, neither she nor Sidney seemed to Carole's childhood friends to be particularly musical. Carole was the only one they saw at the piano, and she showed talent immediately. In a competitive field of musically gifted students, Carole won the Shellbank talent show and requested as her prize a baritone ukulele. Soon after, she appeared on the national TV talent show, Ted Mack's
Original Amateur Hour,
strumming that uke through a rousing rendition of the hit paradeâtopping “Shrimp Boats.” Carole avidly listened to what she'd later call that “Patti Page era” music. “I used to listen to the radio and tear every song apart and try to figure out why it was what it was, even if it wasn't a hit,” she has said.
Carole gave parties in her family's basementâ“and they were packed,” remembers Barbara, especially during rounds of Spin the Bottle. Carole's date was her boyfriend, whom she met in Shellbank's advanced math class: smart, creativeâand tinyâJoel Zwick. “I was the most unthreatening boyfriend you can imagine,” says Zwick (who went on to become a successful director; among his credits are the TV sitcom
Laverne & Shirley
and the film
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
). “I don't think I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet or cleared five feet until I graduated high school. Genie Klein had such a dramatic way and she was so protective of Carole, she was intimidating. But I was too harmless for her to worry about. In fact, my nickname was Only Joel, as in (when the girls were having a pajama party and I'd ring the bell): âYou can open it; it's
only Joel.
'”
“Eventually, these parties Carole and other kids gave had lots of touchy-feely going on,” Barbara remembers. To “get felt up” in the ninth grade was a first step to three or four years of fending off the pull of sex, a tension made all the more fraught by the new sleeper hit by an L.A. group, the Penguins, to which everyone was slow-dancing. The sensual, pleading songâso different from those genially corny white hit parade staplesâsounded like nothing these Brooklyn girls had heard before:
Ear-ear-ear-ear-ear-earth angel. Ea-earth a-an-gelâ¦
Will you be mi-ine?
“On Monday there was this other music; on Tuesday there was rock 'n' roll.” That's how The Band's Robbie Robertson once described the seemingly overnight mid-1954 shift in popular music. One day middle-aged white writers were cranking out saccharine pop songs like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” “Mr. Sandman,” and the trusty “Shrimp Boats,” which were presented, by way of live skits, on TV's Lucky Strikesâsponsored
Your Hit Parade
â¦and the next day the world changed. White teens started listening to, and demanding, an alternative: black music. (This overnight change can also be illustrated by the fact that in January 1954 an unknown Elvis Presley was recording Joni James covers; just a few months later, his raw, plaintive “That's All Right, Mama” was making good on his producer Sam Phillips's dream of finding “a white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel.”)
So unquestionedly segregated was the popular record industry after World War II that, as late as 1953, no less a suave hipster than Ahmet Ertegun (the son of Turkey's ambassador to the United States who became a blues fanatic and founded Atlantic Records in 1947, recording, among others, Big Joe Turner and Ray Charles) didn't think to market his beloved Negro groups to white audiences. These groups played a genre of music that the industry was newly calling “rhythm and blues.” (The term had actually been coined in 1949 when Jerry Wexler, then a
Billboard
writer and soon to be Ertegun's partner, wrote a
Saturday Review of Literature
essay decrying the then-standard term “race music” as not only insensitive but also, since it implied only
one
race, inaccurate. Wexler's term “rhythm and blues,” or R&B, finally gained traction in the early 1950s.)
Instead, the crossover demand came from white teenagers. By early 1954 A&R men in New York were hearing about “cat music”: records by black performers, made for black customers, which were secretly being purchased by white teenagers in the South and Southwestâthe newly available transistor radio having enabled teens to listen to music out of their parents' earshot. A disparate smattering of R&B-loving white deejays, who in some sense “passed” for blackâDewey Phillips, out of Memphis; Greek-American Johnny Otis (a musician as well as the host of a TV music-variety show), out of Los Angeles; and Alan Freed, out of Clevelandâwho had previously been serving black audiences, turned on the tap for these soul-starved white kids. In the culture-jolting synthesis that emerged, blacks did the innovating while whites got the credit. Though Bill Haley and the Comets' 1955 “Rock Around the Clock” officially put the new genre on the map, that jitterbug-paced hit by the white rockabilly performer had none of the fluidity of Jackie Brenston's 1951 “Rocket 88,” which most scholars date as the
real
first rock 'n' roll song. And although Alan Freed got the credit for coining the term “rock 'n' roll,” he appropriated Delta blues singer Wynonie Harris's sex euphemism “good rockin'.”
