Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (15 page)

As for Carole and Gerry, the men in and around Aldon saw an unmistakable dynamic between them. Jack Keller, who wrote songs with Gerry two days a week for six years, put it bluntly and forcefully: “Carole was madly in love with Gerry—just
totally
in love with him. It was obvious. There was no doubt. And Gerry? Gerry was probably not so sure. He was, in my opinion, immature and young.” Says Al Kasha, “I don't want to put Carole down, but she was the unpretty girl and Gerry, back then, was very handsome. Carole was madly in love with him; you could see it. But to Gerry, Carole was the girl he got pregnant.” Kasha also noticed something else: “Gerry seemed to venerate black women. If you look at the titles of the songs he wrote—‘What a Sweet Thing That Was,' ‘Don't Say Nothin' Bad (About My Baby)'—they were black titles; they were a black woman speaking.”

While “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was still riding the charts, in February 1961, Carole and Gerry got their first song recorded by the Drifters, “Some Kind of Wonderful.” After that came another placement, “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” with the group whose strings-suffused majesty they had “stolen” (as Gerry put it) so profitably. Both songs were elegiac, lightly soulful love ballads. Mike Stoller remembers that “Carole and Gerry would come up and play songs for us for the Drifters. I thought Carole was extremely talented, and I was taken by how young she was. I liked the way she played her songs, and I
loved
the way she sang them.”

In the sessions, Carole would unself-consciously exert control—her enthusiasm and confidence simply took over. Just as she had with the Co-Sines and just as she had with the cellos on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” she'd proffer her arrangement, instruct in key and phrasing, play drums or piano, and sing backup. “Carole used to hang in there with us tough,” Drifter Charlie Thomas told author Ken Emerson, in
Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era,
with bemused admiration. “She used to pound down. She wasn't no hard woman—a girl at her age!—but, Jesus, this woman couldn't sing at
all,
and she's going to give
me
the key? But she played the piano, and it was amazing the songs that she'd give us.” Brooks Arthur, who was the production engineer on Carole and Gerry's demos, also remembers Carole's “commanding” confidence. “She was very, very strong in her opinions—she always had a grand vision in her head of a song; she didn't have to use words; within the piano playing she was spelling the arrangements out for whoever would cover her songs. And when she sat down at the piano, it was drop-dead great. Oh, my God—everything sounded like a hit!”

Still, for all Carole's natural assertiveness with singers and musicians—and for all the admiration it inspired—it was Gerry's will and his temper that dominated their sessions together. “Gerry was the boss—the husband: that was clear,” said Jack Keller. “They were both very excitable about writing, and it was fun. We were, all of us, intense: me, Barry Mann—we were very intense, very cocky. Howie Greenfield was the kind of guy who would lock the door so Neil couldn't get out until he got that hit. Gerry with Carole, it was the same thing, only Gerry would go in the room with Carole and you could hear Gerry
screaming
at her: ‘What's the
matter
?! Are you
crazy
?! Can't you
hear
that chord?!' We would fall on the floor, laughing.” Barry Mann says, “It was very frustrating for Gerry to get across to Carole what he wanted to say in a song. He'd try to express himself”—Mann, flailing his hands, pantomimes an agonized attempt to make a point. “He really had a
vision
of a song,” but he couldn't play an instrument or read music, so “it would be, ‘No, no!
That
chord!' He would get angry—at Carole.”

With Gerry the intense partner, Carole was viewed as the lighter. Says Al Kasha, “Carole was more commercial, she wanted hits, and she was so fluent it was scary. Gerry was very deep—almost monosyllabic, but brilliant. He was a very slow writer. Sometimes you write through your head, quickly, or you write through your heart. Everything that Gerry ever wrote, he wrote through his heart; they were feeling-full lines. Richard Rodgers said if melodies don't come fast, they're not going to be good—they have to come intuitively. But lyrics, you have to take time with. Oscar Hammerstein spent a month on the lyrics of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,' and Richard Rodgers wrote the melody in minutes. Hammerstein was Gerry and Rodgers was Carole.” Carole's straightforward tradecraft and lack of angst left her open to being somewhat underestimated by others—as well as underestimated
and
taken for granted by Gerry.

• • •

At the time, rhythmic, infectious songs that also invented new dances were deemed to have instant hit potential, thanks to the success of the dance craze known as the Twist. Based on a song of that name, the Twist was conceived in an Atlanta roadhouse in late 1958, courtesy of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, but popularized by Chubby Checker. By early 1962, it had become the symbol of the “with-it” style of the young upper middle class. Couples in their twenties and early thirties—mover-and-shaker men affecting the rakish air of Sinatra's Rat Pack and the Kennedy brothers; their pretty wives in Courrèges-inspired chemise dresses, with teased-crowned flips mounding up behind matching headbands—were Twisting up a storm at Washington and New York parties and at nightclubs like Manhattan's Peppermint Lounge. The song was hokey even by Top 40 standards. Checker—born Ernest Evans—just repeated the same phrase over and over, in his pleasantly raspy voice. And the dance—elbows out; feet, boxer-stationary on the floor; upper torso and lower torso rhythmically gyrating in opposite directions—wasn't sensual.

But the dance wasn't the point. Rather, the “craze,” as it was called, was a pretext for the expression of a rock 'n' roll–born desire. Establishment young marrieds wanted to do something new instead of graduating from youth to some pre-positioned Real Adulthood like their counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s had done. (“What's it
like,
being married?” a friend of the young newlywed Diane Arbus had asked, in awe, in 1941; even for Ethical Culture girls, going from girl to wife had then signaled a piously regarded instant transformation to maturity.) They wanted to take a little of their youth
with
them—to hold on to their freshly obtained rhythms and prerogatives even after they started families, joined country clubs, and entered the halls of power. The Twisting young wives who basked in the Kennedy glow—and the even-younger women who couldn't help but feel drizzled by the stardust sparked by Jack and Jackie's immediate smashing of the template of First Couple dowdiness (Ike and Mamie, Bess and Harry, Eleanor and FDR)—had married right after college and were busy producing their 2.5 children. Their husbands were ambitious and often idealistic, and the women's standards, intelligence, and politics were also expressed in their husbands' vocations; it was understood that the man was achieving for both of them. The women “were holding it all together,” as the narrator in Lois Gould's
Such Good Friends,
a novel that reflected this cohort a decade later, put it. They were running the family, acquiring and burnishing social connections, creating a
chic
(that brand-new Jackie word) couple front: Marimekko instead of chintz; fondue pots, not pressure cookers. They were too young for “the problem that has no name” that an older woman, magazine writer Betty Friedan, was now writing a book about—working daily in the New York Public Library, to get away from her children—and they would eventually be the early ones to work, through Friedan's NOW, to change things.

Early marriage and motherhood remained glamorous and appealing. Indeed, many within this cohort of women—which Barbara Raskin would bring to life in her 1987 novel,
Hot Flashes
—would, decades and divorces after the fact, still regard their time of being wives and mothers of young children, during the Kennedy/civil rights years, as their peak experience and the capstone of their identity. The Twist trumpeted the early years of this glamorized youthful domesticity.

Hot on the heels of the Twist came namesake dance songs like Dee Dee Sharp's “Mashed Potato Time,” which landed on the charts in 1962. At Aldon, the race was on to create the next dance craze, spurred by Donny's frantic dictate, “We gotta get a smash! We gotta get a smash!” Carole and Gerry came up with “The Loco-Motion.” “Everybody's doin' a brand-new dance now / Come on, baby, do the Loco-Motion”: These were the kinds of cheerfully inane lyrics Gerry hated to write. Nevertheless, “The Loco-Motion” was pop-perfect, and the Goffins found its saxophone-powered sound in their usual way, with Gerry the dependent visionary and Carole the trusty facilitator. Gerry heard a compelling sax riff while they were watching Bobby Darin at the Copa, and he asked Carole to re-create it. She did so, and they plugged the sound into the demo.

To record “The Loco-Motion,” they looked around for a black girl singer who had a voice that sounded as much like Dee Dee Sharp's as possible. They found one—except she wasn't exactly a singer; she was a girl in the neighborhood who had done a bit of backup singing for Carole and Gerry, and whom Carole had recently hired to be Lou Lou's babysitter. Her name was Eva Boyd, and she was nineteen, one year younger than Carole. In the recording studio, Eva Boyd was renamed “Little Eva,” and Carole sang background harmonies with her babysitter on the tight, powered song. In weeks—in August 1962—the song reached #1.

Eva Boyd had come into Carole and Gerry's life by way of another nineteen-year-old singer and new mother who lived in Brooklyn, Jeanie (her real name: Earl-Jean) McCrea Reavis. Eva had been visiting her brother in Coney Island one day, and her brother happened to live a couple of doors down from Jeanie and her young husband. Eva and Jeanie became friends, and fledgling-singer Jeanie encouraged Eva to try to sing as well. Jeanie knew that Carole and Gerry needed a babysitter because she was a new member of the Cookies, a black girl group that did a lot of Aldon session work. The Cookies had an illustrious history; they had predated even the Chantels. The original Cookies had had a record contract as far back as 1954, had won the highly competitive Apollo Amateur Night in 1955, and were then signed by one of Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler's top A&R men, Jesse Stone, to Atlantic.

On Atlantic, Jeanie's older sister, Darlene McCrea, and Margie Hendrix and Pat Lyles had a top R&B hit, but something more important happened: Ray Charles saw them and transformed them into his Raelettes, with Margie Hendrix becoming his call-and-response queen (belting out “What kind of man are you?” “Bay-beeee, oh bay-beeee,” and “Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more”), as well as his partner in heroin addiction and his lover. In a certain status hierarchy, which would encompass the aspirations of Leiber and Stoller—and Gerry Goffin—the Raelettes were female R&B royalty. So too by extension were the reconstituted Cookies, one of whom was Darlene McCrea's younger sister, Jeanie.

Jeanie McCrea was born in Brooklyn, but the McCrea family had moved back down to North Carolina when she was two. When Jeanie, her sister, Darlene, and their mother—lured by the better factory jobs and the lack of Jim Crow—returned to Brooklyn when Jeanie was a young teenager, they settled in Coney Island. “We were one of only four black families on our block,” Jeanie recalls, among “a mixture of Jewish and Christian—mostly Italian—families. We were used to being the minority. But we all played together, the black kids and the Jewish and Italian kids. The kids' parents may not have visited each other, and my parents warned me not to be a ‘nuisance' around the white families—‘Don't be running in and out of people's houses'—but we
kids
got along fine.” Jeanie attended Lincoln High, one of a handful of African American students there in the late 1950s, during which time President Eisenhower expressed a then-prevalent mood about the rights of Negroes in the segregated South by declining Martin Luther King's call for civil rights legislation with the remark, “You can't legislate morality.”

Jeanie's mother died; she spent the end of her Lincoln High days living alone with Darlene. Jeanie was painfully shy, and although Darlene and Darlene's friend and fellow Cookie Dorothy Jones thought Jeanie had a fine singing voice—and she did sing in church—Jeanie didn't think her voice was good at all. In fact, she was so self-conscious that another friend, Margaret Williams, “had to hold my hand in glee club at Lincoln, just to give me confidence,” Jeanie recalls. Right after graduating Lincoln, Jeanie chose marriage as a way to assert her adulthood. As soon as she turned eighteen, in 1960—“the day that I could sign the papers by myself”—Jeanie married a fellow North-Carolina-to-Brooklyn transplant, nineteen-year-old Grandison Reavis, known as Grant, a construction worker. Jeanie was excited when John Kennedy won the presidency. During the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, black voters, who had traditionally eschewed the Democratic Party because of the segregationist Southern Democrats and stuck with the party of Lincoln, turned to Kennedy when the candidate's brother Bobby Kennedy supported, with ummistakable sincerity—and implored his brother to support—efforts to get Dr. King released from his Georgia jail cell. To Jeanie McCrea Reavis, as for Carole King, Kennedy's election felt like a new day for America.