Girls Like Us Read online

  So the Co-Sines remained amateur, and Carole got through her last year at Madison with a big role in the group-written Senior SING! musical. Its plot had the class of 1958 escaping their humdrum lives to live in so-near-yet-so-far Greenwich Village.

  One young borough man who was spending his days in Greenwich Village coffeehouses during this time was a quietly passionate but frustrated nineteen-year-old Brooklyn Tech graduate named Gerald Goffin. Gerry had had a complicated, partly traumatic childhood. His conservative Jewish parents had divorced when he was young, and he had lived with his salesman father, Jack, for five years, while his younger brother, Alvin, remained with their mother, Anne. Sometimes Jack, an untrustworthy man and a womanizer, would disappear for weeks at a time, leaving a bewildered and insecure Gerry in the care of relatives. Gerry eventually returned home to his mother, but home was a depressing place—a cramped Jamaica, Queens, apartment that was shared with Gerry’s stern, old-world Orthodox grandfather, a furrier, who put Gerry to work doing scut work on the fur pelts in the basement.

  He escaped those confines by spending a year at another regimented place, Annapolis. Needing to earn his college tuition, he’d joined the Marine Corps National Guard, had scored 158 out of a top score of 160 on the academy entrance test, and had gained admission. But he was expelled for demerits. He was now back in the cramped apartment with his mother, grandfather, and brother, commuting to Queens College, and attending Marine Corps Reserves meetings. Greatly gifted at math, he’d been pushed by his mother to declare a chemistry major, though he dreamed of being a playwright.

  To escape from all of these strictures, and failure, he took to sitting in Village coffeehouses—the only racially integrated part of the city. He had a fascination with African Americans—like many over-monitored, life-cramped white kids, especially in areas where progressive politics was the norm, he romanticized that population as a vicarious key to his own liberation. He appreciated a nervy, soulful life to which he felt drawn and yet unequal. “I wasn’t really a beatnik, but I read a lot about beatniks,” he says. Gerry was a voyeur of sorts—and he made a good one, being so inarticulate as to be almost monosyllabic. Yet beneath a personality that could erupt in temper, he observed deeply, and he was empathic—he had a talent for absorbing someone’s essence. That inarticulate intensity—together with his lean, dark good looks—made him appealing to girls.

  Still, for a nineteen-year-old would-be rebel, he possessed surprisingly conventional taste in music. He didn’t listen to folk, rock ’n’ roll, or R&B, or even jazz. Rather, after his father had taken him as a young teenager to a Rodgers and Hammerstein play, he used those literate scores—Carousel, Oklahoma!, South Pacific—as his standard. These, of course, were also the foundation of Carole’s musical curriculum. Gerry loved these songs—he could hum them and feel them, but he could not play them. When Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim’s West Side Story opened in September 1957, a startlingly high new bar was set—musical theater could now romanticize issues (intergroup love affairs; the anger of disenfranchised populations) so fresh they were almost more incipient than current. Gerry was moved to imitate the breakthrough musical. He started writing a serious, urban musical, which he named Babes in the Woods, about Beat generation dreamers in Greenwich Village.

  While this boy she didn’t know was writing hipster dialogue on tabletops at Bleecker and MacDougal, Carole was writing a more conventional—but uplifting—essay, “You’re a Senior,” for the Class of 1958 Madison yearbook. She described the excitement of making one’s mark on the future, in musical terms: “The baton rises…You wait apprehensively. There it is—the downbeat. You’re a senior…your note is different from any other: you are an individual.”

  After graduating in June 1958, at age sixteen (because of advanced placement early on, Carole, Barbara, Camille, and Joel all graduated young), Carole now tried in earnest for a record contract, not with the Co-Sines but on her own. Over the summer and at the beginning of her first semester at Queens College, she regularly rode in to visit the publishers and producers who had offices in the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, and at nearby 1650 Broadway, both edifices comprising the revived latter-day counterpart to Tin Pan Alley, that long-demolished block of brownstones on West Twenty-eighth Street where, during the first two decades of the century, tunesmiths had hawked their catchy songs to player piano roll and sheet music publishers.

  “Carole would come in by herself, this very cute little girl in bobby sox and schoolbooks under her arm,” recalls Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun’s partner at Atlantic. “She would bring a demo, or she’d sit down at the piano and play. I loved her voice, and I thought her music was very unusual, very soul-inspired. The fact that she had classical training enabled her to play popular music very well, bordering on blues and jazz, but not quite—it was her own mixture. She had a sense of purpose, but she also seemed a little intimidated. One time she was playing a record she’d made and it kept skipping. Something was wrong with its manufacture. She got so upset she started crying.”

  Wexler, at 1619 Broadway, worked with fellow R&B purist Ahmet Ertegun. In music appreciators’ style, they hunted out talent in obscure clubs and far-off roadhouses, then presented those acts in such a way that commercial concerns didn’t overpower their authenticity. A block north, at 1650 Broadway, the brand-new Aldon Music was alive with a different brand of ambition. Aldon aimed to crank out commercial hits for the burgeoning teenage audience. It was the joint enterprise of an odd couple. Al Nevins (the “Al” in the Aldon) was a hit parade writer who’d made the transition to the new pop—he’d written the Platter’s “Twilight Time.” He was a polished, mature insider. Donny Kirshner (the “don” in Aldon) was the high-strung young upstart, but he had a golden gut, as well as the idea of running his place like a racetrack, filled with talented writers kept hungry and roaring by being forced into daily competition with one another.

  Like so many in the music business, Kirshner was working-class Jewish. His father was a Bronx tailor, just as Wexler’s father had been a Bronx butcher. But, atypically, Kirshner was conventional. He would eschew drugs all his life and stay married to his high school sweetheart for half a century. He was a proud square (“I was a devout coward, a very cautious guy who didn’t want any aggravation,” he says) in an industry of real and faux hipsters, but his nasal voice, unrepentant domestic stability, and neurotic demeanor were offset by a disarming physical confidence: he was six feet two, and his basketball talent had won him the only athletic scholarship that Seton Hall, a Catholic college, had ever awarded to a Jewish student. When you weren’t mad at Kirshner for overworking or hocking you, you could rely on him, as you could on few others.

  After trying to write songs for the singers, such as Frankie Laine, whom he’d waited on during his days as a Catskills resort waiter (a common career path for pop music professionals of the era), Kirshner had landed his first break with a bit of serendipity. Two and a half years earlier, on a freezing winter day, he’d run into a budding singer he knew named Natalie Quirsky in a Bronx candy store, and she almost bodily dragged him upstairs (“Have I got a talent for you!”) to her fifth-floor walk-up to see a friend. The slightly built, pale Italian boy, bent over a mop, guarding against the cold in a wool cap and scarf, cleaning Natalie’s apartment in exchange for the use of her piano, was unprepossessing. But as soon as Kirshner heard him sing, he decided to drop everything he was trying to do and become his manager. The boy’s name was Walden Robert Cassotto. Renaming himself Bobby Darin, he virtually moved in with Donny, and the two set off to conquer the music world, for a long time getting no further than writing jingles for Orange Furniture Store in New Jersey and being kicked out of the Franconero home in nearby Bellville by hot-tempered George Franconero, who didn’t approve of Darin’s infatuation with his daughter Concetta, who was Kirshner’s friend from his Seton Hall days. By 1958, Concetta Franconero, now known as Connie Francis, had a #1 hit in “Who’s Sorry Now?” and Bobby Darin and Donny Kirs
hner were preparing for Bobby to record a song called “Splish Splash” (this was the era of the shameless novelty song). That’s when Kirshner talked Al Nevins into going into business with him.

  No sooner were the white tile letters ALDON MUSIC affixed to the black felt under the glass near the top of the alphabetical directory on 1650 Broadway’s lobby wall than “two little nebbishy kids come to see me,” Kirshner recalls. They were Carole’s friend Neil Sedaka and his songwriting partner, Howie Greenfield. Kirshner sat Neil and Howie down at Aldon’s piano and got an infectious earful. Later, Kirshner took the song the two had played—an upbeat ditty called “Stupid Cupid”—to his friend Connie Francis, who promptly made a Top 10 hit of it. Donny signed up Neil and Howie, gave them a cubicle with a piano, and started casting around for other hungry young writing teams.

  Carole was commuting to Queens College from home every day in that fall of 1958, but home was now a tract house in Rosedale, Queens, inhabited by a reconfigured family. In a touching act of midlife romance, Genie and Sidney had remarried. (They would eventually divorce a second and final time.) Although Genie insisted that Carole go for her teaching credential, it was music Carole wanted, of course—and at Queens she quickly found other pulsingly ambitious young talents. One was a short, thoughtful boy from Forest Hills named Paul Simon. Paul had an equally music-obsessed friend named Artie Garfunkel, a tall boy whose thick, frizzy hair and serious demeanor called to mind the young classical pianist Van Cliburn. The two had renamed themselves Tom Graph (Artie chose “Graph” for the graph paper on which he charted Top 40 hits) and Jerry Landis (“Landis” was Paul’s girlfriend’s last name), and as Tom and Jerry, they’d had a small hit, “Hey, Schoolgirl.” Now, with Paul, Carole recorded demos of other people’s songs, and played piano and drums on these recordings.

  Meanwhile, Gerry Goffin—also living at home, in the “oppressive” apartment with his mother and grandfather—was back at Queens College as well. By February 1959, he’d completed the book for Babes in the Woods and was starting to write the lyrics. But since he couldn’t write music or play an instrument, he needed a partner for the score’s melodies. “I had been dating another girl,” Gerry remembers, “and I asked her, ‘Do you know anybody who can write music to my play?’” Gerry’s girlfriend knew of the Carole-Paul crowd of songwriters. “And so she told me, ‘Carole Klein, whose work name is Carole King.’”

  Gerry and Carole first got together in the Queens College lounge. It was strictly “a work thing,” Gerry says, but Carole was taken by the wiry, unsmiling, slow-to-talk young man whose dolorous eyes, almost-black curls, and rosebud lips made him look a little like Sal Mineo. During that meeting the two made a deal: she would write the melodies to his Babes in the Woods songs if he wrote lyrics for her pop compositions.

  As Carole quickly started carrying out her part of the deal, Gerry came to realize that his Beat play was “uninformed—a bad play,” he says now—and he shelved it. Instead, this musical dynamo of a girl took over. Under Carole’s energetic tutelage, Gerry switched his radio dial from Broadway music to rock ’n’ roll stations. “And once I listened to it, I liked it,” Gerry says. “She introduced me to Alan Freed.”

  In Carole’s Rosedale living room one day after classes, Carole and Gerry wrote their first song together—Gerry recalls it as “a so-so song called ‘The Kid Brother.’” Sidney was in the house a lot now—the retired fireman had a small insurance business. He distrusted this sullen, too-handsome, twenty-year-old Annapolis reject who was sitting too close on the piano bench to his virginal seventeen-year-old daughter. “Carole’s father was very tough, very right wing,” Gerry recalls.

  After Carole and Gerry polished “The Kid Brother,” they drove into Manhattan and presented the song to Jerry Wexler. Wexler had always been a fan of the charmingly confident and intimidated “saddle-shoed” girl, and now, with this new boy, the effect was doubled. Wexler thought Carole and Gerry were “very earnest,” and he gave them a $25 advance for the song. As they left, Wexler remembers musing, “These terrific kids are going to come up with great songs—songs that are most adaptable to black voices.”

  By now Gerry had broken off with his girlfriend, and Carole and Joel’s relationship had returned to its more natural state as a friendship—and “Carole and I,” Gerry says, “were boyfriend and girlfriend.” They had much in common: parents who’d divorced at a time when few parents did, mothers who wanted them to be something they didn’t want to be, and trauma within their families—Gerry’s father taking him away from his mother and then disappearing for periods of time; Carole’s institutionalized brother. But according to a close friend in whom Carole would later confide, Gerry had actually had much more to bear. His emotional intensity had veered into psychological problems serious enough for his parents to have sought medical treatment for him. By contrast, Carole was a rock. Whatever the burdens of her family, “Carole was not emotional,” Gerry says; she kept her feelings in. Gerry was innately conflicted. He was a family-and religion-bound boy who yearned to be independent; a white Jewish kid infatuated with Negroes; a science student who couldn’t read or play music but wanted to write it; a person with artistic ambition pumping out pop songs.

  Early in the relationship, Carole introduced Gerry to Joel Zwick. When Joel met his replacement, he sensed that “she was the brains behind the operation” with Gerry. “Later, I even had the feeling that she might have attributed to Gerry lyrics that she had written.” While neither part of this assumption proved true (Gerry would soon dominate their songwriting sessions and come to be considered one of the best lyric writers in popular music), a larger point is implied: Carole had made her talent and ambition a central part of her appeal to men. These qualities were to her what beauty was to other girls. She enveloped Gerry with her musical energy, and her drive gave direction to his previously aimless writing. Joel’s assessment was correct in another sense, too: in years to come, Carole—emotionally the stronger of the two—would protect Gerry.

  As spring turned to summer and Carole continued seeing Gerry, Sidney Klein decided to take his disapproval public. How better to keep his daughter from an untrustworthy suitor than to impose a sanction in the sphere of her life that mattered most? Jerry Wexler opened his mail one day in the summer of 1959 and found a threatening letter from Sidney Klein. “He wanted to put the trade on notice: nobody was to do any business with songs involving Gerry Goffin and Klein’s minor daughter, or else there would be a restraining order,” Wexler recalls. “In no uncertain terms: ‘You will not do any business with this young man!’ However, as far as I could see, the letter had no legal force—it didn’t come from a judge. It was just a parent trying to impose his will on his daughter, so I paid no attention to it.”

  Sidney’s hunch proved accurate. At just about the time he shot off that letter, Carole discovered she was pregnant. (She and Gerry had assumed, Carole years later told a friend, that they were safe if they had sex during her period.) Nervously, Carole and Gerry confronted her parents with the news. “Carole’s parents asked me, Did I want Carole to get an abortion?” Gerry says. “And we both agreed we didn’t want an abortion. I said I wanted to marry Carole.” But Gerry also says, of why he married so young, “I wanted to get out of the apartment with my grandfather.” And—speaking several months before his death in April 2005—melodist Jack Keller (soon to begin writing with Gerry twice a week), remembered that Gerry felt Carole’s pregnancy had sealed his fate. “When she said, ‘I’m pregnant,’ that was it. He was a regular Jewish guy from Brooklyn—she’s pregnant, you get married.”

  A traditional wedding was planned for as soon as possible, just before Labor Day, Camille recalls. “I must have told Carole a hundred times, ‘I can’t believe your father is being so nice and giving you this big wedding! My father would kill me—my sweet little mother would kill me!—if I said I was pregnant.’ And Carole told me, many times: ‘What if one day my child does the math and figures it out?!’ That worried he
r so much—that her child would find out she’d been pregnant when she got married.”

  The wedding was held on August 30 at a social hall on Long Island, with a Reform rabbi officiating, and it was attended, Gerry recalls, “by a lot of firemen and a lot of teachers.” Seventeen-and-a-half-year-old Carole, in white, walked down the aisle on Sidney’s arm. They took their vows under the chuppah. Gerry smashed the glass; bride and groom were raised aloft in their chairs by the guests; and during his dancing of the traditional Russian dance, “Sidney crossed his arms across his chest,” Camille recalls, “and he was leaping and crouching so much, my mother thought he’d have a heart attack.”

  Finishing college was out of the question now. After settling into a small apartment on Brown Street in Sheepshead Bay, Gerry got an assistant chemist’s job at Argus Chemicals in nearby Red Hook, while Carole became a secretary at an office in Manhattan. “I made $5,000 a year and she made $5,000 a year, and that was enough for us to go out for a turkey dinner in the neighborhood after work, before coming home and writing,” Gerry says. Every night they wrote—Carole at the piano, Gerry standing next to her, the ashtray overflowing. “Nobody knew not to smoke while you were pregnant then,” says Camille, who visited them. Sometimes they had backyard barbecues with fellow Brooklyn music world couples like Brooks and Marilyn Arthur. “Burgers—they couldn’t afford steaks,” says Marilyn. “We were all broke,” Brooks adds. “We chipped in and brought the Hebrew Nationals, burgers, and potato salad.”