Girls Like Us Page 11

  Ronnie Klinzing would remain in the household for several years. In the family’s complex equation of affection and need, hurt and compensation, Andrea now had, through her young lover, both a means of revenge against an emotionally unfaithful husband and a carnal reward for being the sole truly present parent. The musicales, sumptuous dinners, civil rights activism; the visits by the crazy uncles—Uncle Peter, Sam Cooke’s early manager, would lead everyone in camp songs like “Down by the Riverside” and once took a whipped-cream-topped pie off the dinner table and smashed it in his face to get a laugh—all of this continued. But underneath this wholesome joie de vivre, Carly has said, the household vibrated “an atmosphere of erotica,” a “sexual haze…so thick you could cut it.”

  It was another girl at Riverdale—Ellen Wise—to whom Carly drew close as third form turned to fourth form (Riverdale used the English nomenclature for junior high to high school matriculation), who most mirrored her feeling of being the neglected sibling. Small, blond Ellen, the daughter of worldly parents—a very wealthy father and a beautiful actress-turned-arts-benefactor mother—had a brother who was charismatic and manic depressive. He was the focal point of the family, leaving her emotionally marooned, just as Carly’s glamorous sisters, her father’s remoteness and illness, and, now, the riveting issue of Ronnie left Carly feeling sidelined. “I was aware that it felt chilly in the family for Carly—she felt neglected; I felt pain for her,” Ellen Wise Questel says. Ellen was tiny and Carly was tall, “so when we’d walk arm in arm, we looked like Mutt and Jeff, but we were very, very close—soul mates, best friends the way teenage girls need to have best friends. Those were not easy years for us.

  “We were both a little adventurous in those years, in terms of our interest in boys—we were precocious. I remember Carly always being called sexy.” (Carly would later say, “People always said I had a kind of raw sexuality. Maybe it was my big mouth; maybe it was my long legs.”) The school had a dress-code enforcer, a Southern woman named Mrs. Rorbach who called everyone “honey chile” and stood by the school bus door and made all the girls close their eyes to see if they’d snuck on any verboten eyeliner or mascara. Mrs. Rorbach would often point to Carly’s straight skirt and say, “Now, this is too tight, honey chile.” “Carly wasn’t at all inhibited about her clothing,” Ellen says.

  Carly was one of the first in her crowd to get birth control—to have it offered to her, by her mother. In 1958 and 1959, the fourth form girls at Riverdale Country Day School, who were otherwise so privileged—with their after-school trips to Bonwit’s (which had a malt shop in its juniors department just for them and their fellow private-school girls); with their parents dashing out at night to benefits and Broadway openings—weren’t any more liberated than the Madison High girls in Brooklyn or the Aden Bowman girls in Saskatoon. Officially, at least, “sex was an absolute taboo; it could ruin a girl’s reputation. ‘Going all the way’ was talked about, but nobody was very open about it and it wasn’t clear who did what and who didn’t,” says Ellen. Jessica recalls, “Mrs. Simon had gotten Carly a diaphragm—it was a big thing to have a diaphragm in high school—and Carly could give you the name of a gynecologist [who would fit a girl with a diaphragm], if you were one of the few girls in the class who were having relationships. Carly’s mother was so ahead of her time: wanting to help prevent pregnancy, rather than ignore the risk. Mrs. Simon’s progressive attitude helped Carly help the girls whose mothers were more ‘pristine’ about [sex].” Andrea was, so to speak, Carly’s friends’ very own Margaret Sanger.

  During her sophomore year, Carly acquired her first real boyfriend, a senior named Tim Ratner. Their romance bloomed during Riverdale’s production of Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (featuring “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm”), in which he was the male lead and she, a chorus soloist. “She was beautiful in her own quirky way,” Tim Ratner recalls. “And she had a great, self-deprecating sense of humor—she could make fun of herself.” Tim had been flirting with a “beautiful blond senior” in the play, he recalls, “and I was also occasionally distracted by the other pretty girl in the show.” But Carly, employing her lessons from Andrea, fastened on Tim, and Ellen recalls that “an incredible passionate young romance” ensued. “It was a romantic play, so it was an era of heady romance—of newness—for us.” The girls had moved from their Shetlands-and-Oxford-shirts to a more sophisticated look featuring dance clothes from Capezio and flats from Pappagallo. All of a sudden, awkward Carly became “Betty in Archie and Veronica—the popular girl,” Jessica laughs, adding that the next year Carly would be a cheerleader, chanting “Maroon and white! Fight! Fight!” for the football team. “Tim and Carly were a campus couple. Here was Timmy, so popular and handsome—tall, athletic, ruddy complexion, aquiline nose, great smile—and Carly, the best singer in the lower school. It was our own version of a People magazine story about two stars in a film who fall in love making a movie.”

  Carly had just started taking guitar lessons; she and Jessica traveled to the Manhattan School of Music for them. Although Lucy, now in nursing school, had her ear tuned to the folk music that was suddenly replacing jazz as the cool music, Carly was still mostly in love with the classical music and standards that had long filled the family living room, and she regularly bought $1.50 balcony seats at Broadway theaters to hear it. Jonathan Schwartz, her big-brother figure, was now spinning standards as a disc jockey on WBAI. It was during the run of Girl Crazy, and the first weeks of her romance with Timmy, that Ellen saw Carly sitting on the school steps, playing and singing “When I Fall in Love” with such feeling, especially on the “It will be for-ev-er.” Ellen realized something that decades of being close with Carly has cemented: she was uncommonly, almost dangerously, romantic, this woman who “has read Anna Karenina about ten times.”

  Carly and Tim’s spring and summer romance was full of music, “mainly American standards, which we were getting to love, through the show,” Tim says. “Carly had a wonderful, true alto, even though she’d never taken a singing lesson. She just had natural pipes.” They’d stay up long into the night, call Jonathan Schwartz at the station, and request dedications for each other. Then, wrapped in each other’s arms, they’d listen as Jonathan’s smooth voice announced the dedication and segued into the lush, thoughtful music. They improvised duets of “Blue Skies”; they harmonized over Andre Previn, Eydie Gorme, and Frank Sinatra records. Tim says: “I remember being with her at two in the morning, listening to ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ for the first time.”

  Visiting Carly often at the Stamford house over the summer of 1959, Tim saw the complexity of her home life—the “highly matriarchal atmosphere, the strong older sisters, a mother both very organized and also cut off and not available, a father growing progressively less functional.” Ronnie’s relationship with Andrea was never explicit, “but any observer could tell what it was. There was sadness for Carly. A few years later I’d hear the Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and think it captured the sadness I felt in Carly.”

  Tim went off to Dartmouth in the fall of 1959. Carly began to play the guitar in earnest, finding her voice in the folk music whose popularity had, in a year’s time, swept like a brushfire from college to high school. Now the sounds of “John Henry” were more likely to be heard from guitar-strumming Carly than “When I Fall in Love.” Carly and Ellen and Jessica got deeper into a bohemian look: black turtlenecks and bottle-green skirts. They subwayed down to the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street. Carly loved Odetta. She was the most privileged of white girls, but she wanted to sing like the Alabama-born, L.A.-raised Negro opera-singer-turned-folksinger who had wowed Pete Seeger and inspired the unknown Bob Dylan. (A few years later, Carly and Lucy were playing a coffeehouse. When Carly saw Odetta in the audience, she was so intimidated, she walked off the stage and fainted.)

  In Stamford at the beginning of the summer after Carly’s fifth form year, Richard Simon was being nursed by Jo Hutmacher while Ronnie Klinzing remained w
ith Andrea. During this time, an MIT boy, Paul Sapounakis, who’d had one of the now-common unrequited crushes on Lucy Simon, suggested to his friend Nick Delbanco, who had just finished his freshman year at Harvard, that the two visit the Simon house—“and you,” Paul said, “can date the younger sister.” Delbanco had grown up in a Westchester County suburb of New York after a childhood in London; his parents were Jews who’d fled Germany for London on the eve of the Holocaust. Their name, Italian for “moneylender,” literally described what the family had been until they’d left Italy for Germany in 1630. Nick’s father was a businessman-painter; the household retained a cultured, somber European feeling—heavy woods, sacher tortes, a stunning art collection—and the shortish, intense-featured Nick conveyed an old world gravitas. He had an almost theatrically formal voice; he was dashing. A lover of James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry (the “proud modernists,” as he puts it), he was writing serious fiction and, even as an undergraduate, was thought of within Harvard’s English department as a likely candidate for renown.

  Nick Delbanco entered the Simon house with Paul Sapounakis and took in the scene: the “stony-faced” infirm Richard Simon, sitting (as Nick would later put it, in an essay in his Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France, in which he pseudonymed Carly as “Dianne”) “in an armchair…wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, hands folded in his lap.” The evening family recital, around the grand piano, was about to begin. Like other family visitors, Nick watched, that night and subsequent nights, the performing Simon girls “offe[r] show tunes, operetta, opera, folksongs, torch songs, the blues. The three girls took turns…joined in duets and trios; their brother photographed them all. Then a guest would play Chopin or Lizst and [Carly] would return to my side,” eliciting praise. “She was perfect, better than ever, the best. Play ‘John Henry’ again, I would ask her, or ‘Danny Boy.’” She obliged, in her “deep, strong, throaty voice” with “erotic abandon.”

  Carly unfurled her ample insecurities at Nick—“She had the remnants of a stammer and a forthright anxiety,” he would later write. “She said that her family left her feeling insecure, unloved, and that her comic antics were a ploy to gain attention…. She had clamored for applause…to make her father smile at her.” Her father’s infirmity felt like a “reproach to her.”

  On July 30, Richard Simon suffered a fatal heart attack. “I showed up at Carly’s father’s funeral, and that’s the first time she took me seriously,” recalls Delbanco. “It was a dark and complicated time for her.” Soon enough Carly and Nick were locking themselves into attic rooms in the secret-filled house.

  Lucy Simon sees their father’s death as being pivotal for Carly. “My relationship to our father was very stable; I always felt loved; there was nothing I had to prove to him. Carly didn’t have the comfort of that kind of relationship with him.” It was the start of decades of unfinished business.

  But the comforting attention of Nick Delbanco enabled Carly to avoid confronting it. Her romance with Nick continued when she entered Riverdale’s sixth form and he went back to Harvard for his sophomore year. Even though Carly had to bend at the knees when she stood next to Nick to hide the fact that she was considerably taller, her friends thought it terribly glamorous that she was going with this debonair Harvard novelist. Actually, all the girls had artistic boyfriends—Jessica’s, a sensitive, poetic would-be jazz musician (her mother referred to him as “Heathcliff”); Ellen’s, every Riverdale girl’s crush—handsome Vieri Salvadori, half Jewish, half Italian, on his way to becoming an art critic. Carly’s once-difficult-to-tame hair was now long and lustrous; she tossed it, boho-vampishly, behind her right ear; it flowed down her shoulder. Next to her senior class yearbook photo—a sexy, wide-smiling sideways shot—is written: “There are always crowds around Carly: admiring younger girls, distressed seniors, and bewitched lads. They know she is sincere, that her emotions are free, and that she can feel and appreciate more deeply than many. Carly cares.” It would prove to be an enduringly accurate description.

  Fueled by the pain of her father’s death and the blush of new romance with an intense young writer, Carly threw herself into folk music—Odetta, Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Cynthia Gooding. She wrote songs, once attaching the Robert Burns poem “Ye Flowery Banks” to the ever-romantic melody of “Greensleeves,” another time writing with Jessica a faux–Child Ballad with phallic lyrics. “We loved the ‘bonnie, bonnie banks’ songs and the ‘turtle dove’ songs,” says Jessica. “Not for us fair maidens” AM rock ’n’ roll.

  For her application to Sarah Lawrence, Carly and Jessica composed an essay about a book that “changed my life”: Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. The only thing was, neither girl had read the novel. They laughed until they wept as they wrote, “Moll faced adversity with the kind of courage I’d like to have in my life” and “In Moll I find the inspiration to be a confident woman.” It was a grand put-on.

  Put-on or not, Carly was accepted at Sarah Lawrence. One night at the Stamford house just before Carly started packing for the dorm at the nearby campus, Uncle Peter watched Carly and Lucy harmonizing on a folk song and said, “You two should form a group.” The thought registered more strongly with Lucy than Carly. It would soon be Lucy, the secure older sister, who would drag Carly, the younger one frenetically proving herself, into the modest beginning of a career that would—for a deceptively long stretch of time—seem mostly unpromising.

  PART THREE

  “and the sun poured in like butterscotch”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  carole

  1961–1964

  By John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—January 20, 1961—Carole King was close to slipping the bonds of adolescence. At two weeks shy of nineteen years old, she was a wife, a mother, and she had written the #1 pop song. On the bright, cold day that the handsome new president announced, “Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans,” Carole was changing eleven-month-old Lou Lou’s diapers at Brown Street and was probably refining the chord changes of what would be—in eight months—her and Gerry’s second #1 hit, the bouncy and catchy (if significantly less weighty) “Take Good Care of My Baby.”

  The Bobby Vee hit had started with the rudimentary melody that Carole had taken back from Cynthia Weil that April 1960 night because Gerry had not wanted Carole to write with another partner. But the song had really developed when the two new parents started working at 1650 Broadway (Gerry had just quit his job at Argus Chemicals), cramped in what Carole would later recall as a “little cubbyhole with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair, if you were lucky,” where “you’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubbyhole composing some song exactly like yours.” On any given day in the early 1960s, a tour through the cacophonous halls of Aldon would yield Carole and Gerry (perhaps working up “One Fine Day” or “Oh No Not My Baby”) mere yards away from Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield (maybe knocking out “Calendar Girl” or “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”), close by Cynthia Weil and her husband, fellow Madison High alum Barry Mann (who might be composing “On Broadway”—or “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” for the Righteous Brothers, which became the song most played on the radio of the next four decades, outplaying even the Beatles). Rounding out the group was Doc Pomus (his real name was Jerome Felder), a disabled polio survivor who, though white and Jewish, had been a blues and R&B singer. Pomus now wrote melodies with the much younger Mort Shuman, a Lincoln High alumnus, including “A Teenager in Love,” “Save the Last Dance for Me,” and “This Magic Moment.” Eventually a third young married couple, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, joined the stable, specializing in songs for the young Phil Spector’s “wall-of-sound” girl groups, the Crystals and especially the Ronettes, who, in the mid-1960s, kicked the Shirelles’ and the Chantels’ decorousness up a good notch with their pale-lipsticked, thick-eyelinered, teased-haired, sob-in-the-throat foxiness. Greenwich and Barry wrot
e “Be My Baby” and “Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home).”

  “The pressure was really terrific,” Carole has said, “because Donny would play one songwriter against another. He’d say, ‘We need a smash hit!’ and we’d all go back and write a song and the next day we’d each audition [for example] for Bobby Vee’s producer.” Al Kasha, who, as Jackie Wilson’s A&R man, observed the process closely, says, “Kirshner would pit writers against each other, so you were constantly writing. He’d say, ‘The Drifters are up for a date’ or ‘Bobby Vee is up for a date’—and they’d all be writing, day and night, trying to outdo each other.”

  Cynthia Weil remembers that a frequent gambit was to try to ambush Donny at his office door when he came out to go to the men’s room (“Sooner or later he’d have to go,” she reasoned), the better to find out who he was cooking up a deal with—what group to try to write a hit for. Donny “created this family of competitive siblings who all wanted to please him, and the way to please him was to write hit songs,” Cynthia has said. “We were always, ‘Donny, d’you like this? Donny, d’you like this?’” “I wasn’t much older than they were, but they were like my kids,” Donny says. “I was their father, mother, psychiatrist.”

  Between late-1950s early rock ’n’ roll (Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis before the army) and the British Invasion and ascent of Bob Dylan, the songwriters Kirshner had collected essentially wrote the pop soundtrack for young America, yielding some 200 chart hits in a five-year period. Carole had a signature style now. As she would later describe it, “I loved taking simple melodies [influenced by] classical [compositions] and Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein—taking those melodic influences and putting [them] in the context of rhythm and blues’s styling, phrasing, and rhythm.”