Girls Like Us Read online

  To Babs,

  Your loving chum is sad to go

  But we will meet in [P.S.] 14, I know

  —that 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 place—a 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, ‘Did 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”—not 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 mustache—he 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 artifice—which blossomed in Tapestry—is 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 unusual—you 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 parade–topping “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 basement—“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, creative—and tiny—Joel 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): ‘You 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 song—so different from those genially corny white hit parade staples—sounded like nothing these Brooklyn girls had heard before:

  Ear-ear-ear-ear-ear-earth angel. Ea-earth a-an-gel…

  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 Strikes–sponsored Your Hit Parade…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 194
7, 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 Southwest—the 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 black—Dewey 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 Cleveland—who 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’.”

  Rock ’n’ roll in 1954 and early 1955 consisted of white singers trying to sound black (Elvis on “That’s All Right, Mama”) and black singers trying to whiten their sounds (Chuck Berry’s hillbilly “Maybellene,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”; Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”), but most of those songs—while highly danceable—were not emotionally affecting. Instead, being frenetic, they were safely un- sensual. By contrast, the slow, languid “Earth Angel” was sexual. When Alan Freed moved to New York in 1954 and started broadcasting on WINS and presenting his concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount, he featured these songs—variously called street-corner, a cappella, or doo-wop—by the Penguins, the Willows, the Spaniels, the Flamingos, the Platters (with their classic “Twilight Time” and “The Great Pretender”), the Moonglows (who gave the new genre one of its first national hits, “Sincerely”), the local-hero Cleftones (whose “You Baby You” was a proudly borough-born national seller), which had a sweet, pleading urgency.

  Often that pleading urgency was leavened by the humor of the lowest basso “answering” the highest falsetto, the farcelike vocal contrast handily erasing the threatening sexuality. But when that humor was absent, as it was in “Earth Angel,” and all you heard was the poignance (“I’m just a fool…a fool in love with you-ou-ou…”), the result was a high-voiced longing—a linking of vulnerability to carnality—that was highly appealing to girls. “‘Earth Angel’ was the breakthrough for us,” Barbara Grossman Karyo remembers, expressing a widespread feeling among girls about the song, which, after various releases, became a hit in 1955 and 1956. “Slow dancing to ‘Earth Angel’ was the beginning of our sexual awakening.” And so the year before the decade-long battle for civil rights began in the South by way of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, and the year that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was violently murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman (his killers enjoying a kangaroo-court acquittal), white girls were getting in touch with their sexuality with the help of black male voices.

  Two things, however, were absent from this music. One was girls. The tight harmonics of doo-wop were perfected at night on street corners, and it was neither feminine nor safe for girls to be hanging out at night on street corners; they were indoors, minding their younger siblings and washing the family’s dishes. The Royaltones had Ruth McFadden and the Platters had Zola Taylor (whom they recruited from a—rare—all-girl doo-wop group, Shirley Gunter and the Queens), but, in the mid-1950s, that was about it. Still, for the white girls in the audience at the Freed shows, these two young singers modeled a new way of being female: moving their bent arms in and out at waist-level as their hips bobbed so effortlessly it seemed as if they had an extra joint.

  The other thing that was absent was strings. Violins and cellos gave a song a classical feeling and a melodrama that might make it accessible, and, with the right soloist, could lend it pathos. In a few years this formula would be struck upon by an unlikely young pair of composer-producers—“unlikely” because melodrama was the last thing any acquaintance would associate with them. Though Jewish, they considered themselves twelve-bar-blues-writing Negroes at heart: New York–born Mike Stoller and Baltimore-raised Jerry Leiber. Right now Leiber and Stoller were in Los Angeles, the quiet capital of R&B recording, using their wit, their commercial instincts, and their adulation of Negro life to lob a new genre of black music into the Top 40.

  Genie Klein encouraged Carole to audition for the famous, and famously selective, High School of Performing Arts. Carole was accepted, and she braved the long daily commute to and from the uppermost tip of Manhattan. (A later recording colleague would say of Genie, “I think she would have loved to have been an actress and a star” and that, ironically, Carole ended up achieving “many things”—like fame—“that Carole didn’t even value as much as Genie did.” Another later friend says: “Genie was a ‘cope’—a very strong-willed and difficult woman, and she pushed Carole, to make up for what Richard couldn’t be.”) After only a semester at the specialized school, she quit and rejoined her friends at local Madison High, where she resumed her close friendship with Camille—the two of them now fighting off despair about their looks. Camille says, “Carole and I thought everything was wrong with our faces, but we had no idea how to change it. We had no options, no money—where would we even start?” True, they both wore the fashionable cinch-belted straight skirts and blouses with the collars turned up, under which scarves were jauntily knotted to the side of their necks, but their versions were knockoffs of the better-labeled ones worn by Madison High’s style queens, like the pretty, wealthy Nancy Tribush, whose social ease and confidence they coveted. Hair was a problem. “We despaired of our hair,” Camille recalls. “The ideal was the WASPy straight blond hair in a flip or a pageboy. Carole and I would look in the mirror and there was nothing we could do with our curly hair! Our hair had a mind of its own!” Then there was the issue of their facial imperfections. “Do any teenage girls like how they look? Think they’re pretty? We didn’t.”

  But you didn’t need a mirror when you had a piano. When she wasn’t at the Freed shows, Carole was trying out her compositions—her first one was called “Go Steady with Me”—for Joel after school. He’d sit on a stool in her living room while she played and sang, and she’d ask him, as soon as she’d plunked the last note, “So whaddya think? Whaddya think?” “She was very driven to become a success,” Joel remembers. She talked almost exclusively about music to Joel. She never mentioned her parents’ divorce. He was her boyfriend, but he never met her father and didn’t even know she had a brother.

  Sometimes on weekends Carole would go to her friend Leslie Korn’s house for slumber parties, with another group of girls who were, as Leslie puts it, “just on the edge of being goody-goody. We all had ponytails and poodle skirts and fuchsia and chartreuse sweater sets, and whoever didn’t have a boyfriend wanted one, badly.” They were racy enough to sometimes sneak a cigarette and pose for a picture on New Year’s Eve in nothing but their bras and panties, album covers hiding their faces. “And all of us were virgins.” A whole week of this crowd’s telephone talk time was once devoted to the question of whether Sandy, a seriously good athlete, should, on
her bowling date with Danny, throw the game she could easily win. Boys had to win at sports.

  Despite such thinking—so much a part of life for girls that no one noticed—Carole didn’t think twice about asserting herself over boys, not in sports but in that part of her life that mattered to her, pop music. In junior year she formed a doo-wop group specializing in her own compositions and covers of popular white doo-wop hits, like Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop” and the Del Vikings’ “Come Go with Me.” “She was the unquestioned leader, and she ran a tight ship,” doing “lots of the writing and all the arranging,” recalls Joel, whom she’d selected (“more because I was her boyfriend than anything”) as tenor. Camille’s boyfriend Lenny Pullman was made baritone, and Carole chose Iris Lipnik, a policeman’s daughter, as soprano. “Every day after school we would go over to Iris’s apartment and rehearse from three to five p.m.,” Joel remembers. “Carole would write out lead sheets—my lyrics for ‘Go Steady with Me’ were, literally, ‘Doo wot da doo wat da doo wat da doo wat, ooh, ooh, ooh…’ For all Carole’s talent, she couldn’t keep up with the fast rhythm of ‘At the Hop,’ so another friend of ours, Richie Suma, would be brought in, just to play piano on that one song.”

  They named their group the Co-Sines for their advanced math class at Shellbank, and they played local Sweet Sixteen parties, sometimes teaming up with a group from Brighton Beach, the Tokens, to perform at USO halls in the New York area. The Tokens’ lead singer was a talented, enthusiastic cabdriver’s son who had an unrequited crush on Carole. His name was Neil Sedaka. By senior year, Sedaka had arranged for the Co-Sines to audition for Ahmet Ertegun. “Ertegun offered us a contract,” says Joel Zwick. “But because we were minors, our parents had to sign it. One parent held out, and we were all pretty sure it was Carole’s mother, Genie. Which makes sense: Carole was the only real talent among us, and if she got a record contract, that would be the end of school for her.” The other Co-Sines didn’t dream of objecting to Mrs. Klein’s presumed putting the kibosh on their prized Atlantic contract. Emotional and theatrical, “Carole’s mother,” Joel says, “scared the bejesus out of us.”