Girls Like Us Read online

  Real-life personifications of the song—young women criticizing marriage, ending their marriages, and writing about it—were popping up all over New York now. Women’s liberation had been the work of female civil rights and antiwar activists in collectives in Berkeley, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, for three years, but now it was fully entrenched in the young mainstream intelligentsia. Women in the media, arts, and academe—Carly’s crowd—had come to view society and their personal histories through this powerful new lens that was supplanting all others. The movement relied on the intimate sharing of experiences: “consciousness raising.” As they pooled their stories about, among other facets of their lives, love (with a new, tough analysis replacing yesterday’s commiseration), women came to view men’s put-up-or-shut-up rules of romance in the same way that newly unionized nineteenth-century factory workers viewed “If you don’t come in Sunday, then don’t come in Monday” signs: Two can play that game, baby.

  This movement was about to get its own national publication. Right at this moment, as Carly and Steve Harris were stepping onto the curb at Santa Monica and Doheny, back in New York, a memo marked “Confidential: Some notes on a new magazine” was being circulated among New York magazine writer Gloria Steinem and a half-dozen other women; for its title, Sister and Everywoman vied with the odd-sounding Ms. And in law firms around the country, handfuls of attorneys were reframing as offensive and unjust practices that just a year before were regarded as unremarkably normal: separate newspaper job listings for men and women, rape victims’ need for corroborating witnesses, banks’ refusal to give women credit cards.

  This new idea that was taking hold in the media and being argued in the courts—that young women had integrity—was having its echo in music. Carole King and Joni Mitchell had just arrived at the pinnacles of their careers, at twenty-nine and twenty-seven years of age, respectively. They were months away from achieving, for the former, commercial success unequaled in the recording industry; for the latter, respect unparalleled among her musician peers—by way of very different albums, Tapestry and Blue, that had this in common: neither had one false note in it. These triumphs would be clouded with pain. Carole’s marriage to the one husband her friends would later wistfully call “the normal one” would end, leading her to a next marriage, in which the consequences of her husband’s insecurity were infinitely more destructive. As for Joni, her “living on nerves and feelings,” as she’d later describe in a lyric on Court and Spark, would lead to a bottoming out, in the course of which she would issue a self-harming cry for help (she has referred to it as a “suicide attempt”) after being rejected by a famous boyfriend.

  Carole and Joni were in many ways opposites. Carole was Everywoman; Joni, the Bohemian. Carole was a craftsman, a tunesmith; Joni, a poet, an artist. Carole was a comforting, accessible friend; Joni, the object of women’s awe and men’s infatuation. Carole (now pregnant with her third child) was maternal; she lived by adding. Joni was solitary; she lived by relinquishing. Carole’s songs celebrated easy-to-grasp feelings in an optimistic spirit by way of clear, infectiously rhythmic expression. Joni’s songs described complex needs and emotional states; they did not skirt pessimism; and—like the astonishingly original Laura Nyro, the only other female singer-songwriter Joni respected—she had begun to use her voice like a jazz instrument, with abrupt shifts of tempo, octave, mood, and volume.

  But Carole and Joni were also alike: both were raised in lower-middle-class households. Neither was a sister (Joni, literally; Carole, functionally), and neither had a sister; the idea of confiding in women—that brand-new coin of the realm—was not second nature to them, nor was the inclination (Joni’s “exposed nerve endings” and confessional songs notwithstanding) to bare their souls to friends. They shared a vague distrust of the chattering classes’ “talking cure” and, in different ways, were self-directed. Both were instilled with traditional morality and had paid the price for defying it: Carole, bearing her first child at barely past seventeen; Joni, giving up a baby at twenty-one. Both were naturally ambitious; neither had sought to submerge her talent in a traditional female role.

  As if each of these three women’s lives represented one-third of a larger story—each, so to speak, a single-hued transparent gel, which when superimposed resulted in a full-color picture—Carly Simon’s experience and work filled in the breaches of Joni’s and Carole’s, for she represented vulnerabilities the other two did not have. When woven together, the strands of their three separate lives, identities, and songs tell the rich composite story of a whole generation of women born middle-class in the early to middle 1940s and coming of age in the middle to late 1960s.

  Unlike Carole and Joni, Carly came from a big family awash in estrogen. Carly, her two older sisters, and their sometimes-sisterlike mother (Andrea Simon loved not just to gossip with her daughters but also to flirt with their boyfriends) filled the house with grandiose female dramas and set up Carly’s lifetime comfort with and appreciation of female friends. “More than Joni and Carole, Carly is a woman’s woman—the notes and gifts, the concern, the phone calls,” says Betsy Asher, then wife of James Taylor’s manager, Peter Asher, and a woman who was the chief hostess (and secret keeper) to L.A.’s rock world. But the solicitousness wasn’t mere etiquette. A lifelong analysand in a therapy-worshiping subculture, Carly believed in the value of intimate confession (and she listened raptly as others poured their hearts out), and she confided with great, incautious gusto. “Carly doesn’t have a privacy barometer—it all comes out,” says Jessica Hoffmann Davis. “Carly doesn’t bring her defenses forward from one moment to the next; she doesn’t give herself that buffer, that solace,” Mia Farrow agrees. Ellen Wise Questel (Carly’s friend who in 1971 was Ellen Wise Salvadori now goes by her remarried name, Questel)* explains, “A mystic once said, ‘You have two eyes; one says yes to the world, the other says no. You need to see with both of them.’ Carly sees more with the eye that says yes, and that makes her so vulnerable. She belongs in another century, the era of grand feelings and penned love letters. Carly would be perfect in a Tolstoy novel.” Stuck in New York (eight months pregnant) on the night of Carly’s Troubadour opening, Ellen mentally replayed a defining moment from their teen years: “Carly’s sitting on the school steps with her guitar, playing ‘When I Fall in Love,’ and she’s singing the ‘…it will be for-ev-er…’ with such passion.” Neither Carly nor Ellen could know that, through an introduction tonight, the prophecy of that lyric—the inability to stop loving someone even after one can and wants to—would be set in motion in Carly’s life.

  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 clear—sometimes 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 table—a 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, ‘How 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 to
gether. 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 James—the two had met before, and James looked like he’d enjoyed the show—and 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’s—“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 covers—demure pregnant glow; soft-porn heat; writhing sensuality—would reassure her wary cohort that domesticity could be reinvented (well, sort of…), 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 femaleness—the river—which 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 process—because, yes, songs are like tattoos—they 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 America—a frantically conventional, security-mad postwar nation, without rock ’n’ roll or civil rights, and with an anxiously propagandized, stultifying image of women—and 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 transition—a 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.

  PART TWO

  “i’m home again, in my old narrow bed”

  CHAPTER ONE

  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 redbricks—their 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 jargon—Babs; Chum; Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle; Pow! Right in the kisser!—that set the tone for the epistolary etiquette—