Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Almost every national magazine had published an article on feminism by the summer of 1970. The women of Newsweek had successfully sued the magazine for job discrimination; Ladies’ Home Journal (following a women’s sit-in in the offices of its male editor) had an eight-page supplement on the movement; and feminist academic Kate Millett was on the cover of Time. Then, on August 26, on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States, tens of thousands of marchers—many, long-haired young women in blue jeans and T-shirts—thronged Fifth Avenue with banners, and at a city hall rally Gloria Steinem—a political writer for New York magazine in her midthirties who had embraced the civil rights and farm workers’ movements and was now finding her cause in feminism and would soon become its enduring national figurehead—was speaking out on behalf of community-controlled child care, job and education equality, and abortion on demand. (Steinem’s zeal on that last issue was fired by the fact that, at recent New York state legislative hearings, fourteen out of fifteen “experts” on women and abortion had been male.) The movement—like all those earlier cultural whipsaws: the birth of rock ’n’ roll, John Kennedy’s election, psychedelia and the counterculture—was overnight and overdue: certainly the latter in an era when married teachers were routinely fired when they were pregnant (and so many working married women were teachers), when some women had to actually show banks doctors’ certifications of sterilization to obtain their own mortgages, when Radcliffe magna cum laudes could only be researchers while male state college grads were reporters, when female assistant district attorneys had to give permission notes from their husbands to work on homicide cases.

  The movement had germinated in 1964, when Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden’s estranged wife and fellow SDS-er, and minister’s daughter and SNCC volunteer Mary King asked (in the tentatively named document “A Kind of Memo”) why, if women were so active in the civil rights and antiwar movements, they were being treated as second-class within those movements. As it mushroomed underground, especially after 1967, the cause was advanced by a new vocabulary: NOW member Jo Ann Evans-Gardner pushed for the resuscitation of the fourteenth-century English term “Ms.” to replace “Mrs.”/“Miss,” so the first thing you always knew about a woman (though not a man) was no longer whether she was married; and kindergarten teacher Anne Forer named the process of women’s-experience-sharing “conciousness raising.” Either Iowan Carol Hanisch or former child actress Robin Morgan (accounts vary) came up with “The personal is political”; New Yorker rock critic Ellen Willis injected “sexist” and “sexism” into the national conversation; activist Kathie Amatniek bestowed “male chauvinism” on a public that had never even heard of the French-origined noun, and also coined the anthem “Sisterhood is powerful!”

  The movement was the biggest achievement of the women of Carole’s, Joni’s, and Carly’s generation, and all the heady new freedoms for women that had nourished and preceded it now suddenly seemed to have been leading, inevitably, to it: both as epitome and corrective.

  A year earlier, Joni had traveled to Canada with Ronee Blakley, looking for land to build a house on, but she had deferred the decision. Now was the right time. Joni bought acreage in British Columbia, north of Vancouver, and helped build a stone house in the woods, overlooking Half Moon Bay. It was here that she would write the songs for her next album, For the Roses. Five of the songs were about James. “For the Roses” takes musing account of his celebrity: she remembers how it was at the beginning; he’d slump in that way he had that, Kootch had said, made every woman fall in love with him. In “See You Sometime” she describes James as famous and in demand, but reminds him that she had fame first (“I tasted mine”); he had been awed by her. Now, in the Canadian woods, she was “spring[ing] from the boulders like a mama lion”; still—damn it!—despite all that flamboyantly exercised strength and independence, his rejection could still get to her. These two songs walk the fine line between the slightly bitter gloat (at having chosen the purer path: solitude) and the regret despite one’s better judgment of someone who parted with a difficult lover whom the world is now informing her she’d undervalued.

  But there was a reason that being with James was uncomfortable, and “Lesson in Survival” explains it. In the song she complains about how James’s “friends* protect you [and] scrutinize me” as she sank into the “damn timid” pose that was “not at all the spirit that’s inside of me.” “Blonde in the Bleachers” gives his fame the same who-wants-it? treatment that “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” darkly gives his addiction. With these five songs, protesting too much was Joni’s best revenge; she was getting James out of her system by using him in her art—a defense she favored and urged upon others. (When, one day, Leah Kunkel told Joni that things were “not good” with her and Russ—he was philandering—Joni immediately replied, “At least you can use it for material.”)

  “Let the Wind Carry Me” describes her ongoing struggle with her judgmental mother for permission for the freedom of “the road” and “the wind” that she craves. “Mama let go now” she pleads. In “Woman of Heart and Mind,” she uses herself (and her secret relinquishment of the baby) to issue feminism’s essential statement, a woman is whole by herself. It’s the next in a row of archetypes we’d seen evolve from the traditional (“Michael from Mountains”) to the self-liberated (“Cactus Tree” and “Chelsea Morning”) to the communal countercultural (“Ladies of the Canyon,” “Woodstock,” “My Old Man”). Now, nearing thirty, Joni feels whole. The lovers who’ve come and gone: they matter less.

  For now, at least.

  Carole and Gerry’s relationship had always been a symbiotic melodrama, and Tapestry gave that saga one more—sad—chapter. That Carole was writing her own lyrics now was surprise enough to her ex-husband—“she never wrote a lyric before!” he says—but the merit of those lyrics was the real blow: “I thought [her Tapestry lyrics] were better lyrics than I would have written.” Consequently, “she didn’t need me anymore. It was really crushing”—so crushing that Gerry decided “I was going to quit music.” Turning the clock back eleven years, to his last day at work at Argus Labs before the Shirelles recorded “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” he says, “I went back to school to study to be a chemist.” He and Barbara Behling, who was now his wife, moved back east; he enrolled at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University to pick up where he’d left off at Queens College. Spending about a year there, he “almost got a degree” before going back to songwriting, with some quixotic/heroic intermissions.*

  The massive success of Tapestry was “a double-edged sword for Carole,” a friend says. On the one hand, her leap from songwriter to artist was tremendously gratifying—she was now looked up to by peers who’d once dismissed her. She was also happy for the financial security. Unlike so many other young pop music stars, she’d been a bread-winning mother (with an unstable ex-husband) for twelve years. But the loss of an anonymous personal life was hard on her, and she virtually barricaded herself from her fame. “We just never went out,” Charlie says, adding, “We just kept living our lives; things didn’t change that much at all. We went to movies, and out for Japanese food with John and Stephanie a few nights a week, but that was it.” But his decades-later picture of those times’ breezy ease contrasts with what a friend of Carole’s says: it was hard to be a sudden superstar; the attention was unwanted. During this time when “you literally couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing [Tapestry],” Charlie matriculated from his private classical bass lessons; he auditioned for Daniel Lewis, the director of the USC orchestra, and was accepted. As a bass player in a symphony orchestra, he now had his own musical life, apart from his now extraordinarily successful and famous wife.

  In June, Carole flew to her hometown, New York City, and filled Carnegie Hall to capacity for two performances, finding what The New York Times called a “highly responsive audience” eager to cheer on the local heroine. She introduced Charlie and Danny; through the performance, her patter was diffident an
d she sounded vulnerable. When she told the audience that she was a proud daughter of Brooklyn, they cheered, but that cheering grew downright ecstatic when James Taylor walked out (Carole impishly acknowledged his entrance with a “Well, well, well…”) and duetted with her on “You’ve Got a Friend.” Though they were now considered coequal pioneers of the new soft rock, they had different roles: James was the male idol and Carole—well, Carole was something that pop culture hadn’t seen before: an embodiment of youthful female substance. The next month the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Hilburn led off his review of Carole’s concert at the Greek Theatre with this mash note to her character: “I love Carole King. I really do. Not just for her music—though that is certainly reason enough—but for the uncompromising way she refuses to assume any false airs or to surround herself with any show business pretentiousness.”

  Carole was pregnant during the Greek Theatre concert.* She’d given birth to Louise under anesthesia in a Brooklyn hospital with Gerry smoking in the waiting room, his terror about fatherhood met with commiseration by Jack Keller. She’d had Sherry with added angst from the fact that Gerry was enthralled with Jeanie Reavis. Mothers didn’t breast-feed in those days, and, in any case, subwaying with infant Louise to 1650 Broadway, and plopping her in the playpen while she hammered out songs, afforded her little opportunity. This time, things would be different, not just because Carole had changed, but because the entire approach to child rearing had. On a December day, with Charlie attending, Stephanie as birthing coach, and John holding the mirror so Carole could see the baby crown, Carole’s third daughter was born, by natural childbirth*—at home, which was newly hippie-fashionable but not yet embraced by middle-class culture. Carole and Charlie wanted an old-fashioned name; they’d debated Molly and Nora. They chose Molly. Carole was thrilled to have Charlie’s baby. For Charlie, beholding his daughter was “an amazing, life-changing moment.”

  Shortly before Molly’s birth, Carole recorded her third album, Music, with Charlie, Danny, Joel, Abigail, Ralph, and James joining in again. On the cover, she’s photographed smiling (her face, pregnancy-plump), granny-dressed, and shoeless at her grand piano in her Appian Way living room. Music was released at the end of 1971 and immediately rose to the top of the charts, reaching #1 on New Year’s Day 1972; its buoyant “Sweet Seasons,” written with Toni, became a Top 10 hit. Another tough-Toni/sentimental-Carole collaboration, “It’s Going to Take Some Time,” portrays a woman who knows she’s messed up a relationship, has to learn to master the art of compromise, and is on to the next. The album’s full of homage-paying—“Carry Your Load” channels Laura Nyro; “Brother, Brother,” Marvin Gaye (Carole’s soft “oh, brother of mine,” suggests she’s thinking of her real brother, Richard). In “Surely” Carole attempts blues; she scats in her remake of her and Gerry’s “Some Kind of Wonderful” (and, in a whipsaw from the Drifters’ original, insets a deliciously melodramatic girl-group refrain by Abigail); she morphs into a piano-bar busker on “Music” (and then turns the floor over to Curtis Amy’s bleating, Pharoah Sanders–like tenor sax). The most evocative cut is “Song of Long Ago,” which—with its reverence for human community (“Here is a lamp I’ve left unlighted / Aren’t you someone I should know?”), its yearning, James-inspired melody, and James’s la-lalaaaas—sounds like it belongs on Tapestry. Such comparisons would become her nemesis.

  That same month, Carole was chosen as one of the Los Angeles Times’s ten Women of the Year. In his profile for that occasion, Robert Hilburn articulated her significance:

  Slowly but surely, the creative/influential center of contemporary pop music has shifted during recent months from the loud desperation and exaggeration of such performers as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix to a more reflective, more reassuring gentleness. One of the main reasons is Carole King…

  For a generation that has been trying to recover some of the balance shattered during the troubled, riot-torn, confrontation-bent late 1960s, such performers as Miss King and James Taylor have provided direction. They’ve tried to refocus attention on such simple, classical values as friendship, loved ones and the home…

  Just as their music is different from much of the music of the late 1960s, the lifestyles of Miss King and Taylor (who are as close personally as their music is close in style and outlook) are also different from the stereotypes of rock musicians that have been built up in recent years. Miss King and Taylor neither wear flamboyant clothes nor take pride in outrageous, shocking behavior. They are, in addition, almost reluctant heroes, valuing their privacy almost as much as their artistic success.

  “I don’t want to be a star with a capital S,” Miss King said.

  Nothing proved Carole’s aversion to stardom more than her nonattendance at the Grammys, which were held in New York in mid-March 1972. Citing her desire to stay home with three-month-old Molly, Carole was a no-show at the most victorious moment in her entire career (and a rare triumph in any recording artist’s career): a sweep of the three most important awards of 1971. Lou accepted the gramophone statuettes when “It’s Too Late” won Record of the Year (Carole’s main competitors were George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” and her own “You’ve Got a Friend,” sung by James), Tapestry won Album of the Year, and “You’ve Got a Friend” won Song of the Year. Carole also won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Tapestry” and James won Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for “You’ve Got a Friend.” All told, Carole King had dominated all five top categories. Watching the show on TV, Carole felt “joy, happiness, and pride…for her work,” says Stephanie, who was with her. “But she always separated her life (her children, Charlie, our circle), which was more important, from her work.”

  With the Grammy sweep for Tapestry, Carole had now created for herself an almost unmatchable gold standard. Some critics were sympathetic—“After the mind-boggling success of Tapestry, there was no way Carole King could have produced a more successful follow-up, and there’s no reason why she should,” prefaced The New York Times’s Don Heckman before saying, “Music doesn’t quite match Tapestry.” Others were blunter. Rolling Stone’s Crouse declared that “the songs on…Music are not as immediately likeable and the new album doesn’t have its predecessor’s sure, unified sense of style.” The clock to produce another Tapestry had just been set and was ticking.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  carly

  mid-1970–early 1973

  The same year that Carole swept the Grammys and that Joni’s Blue was released to the awe of her peers, Carly won the Grammy for Best New Artist for her first album, Carly Simon. Her career had taken off later than theirs, not only because of her ambivalence about having a career but also because of the zeitgeist. When everyone wanted to be radical and funky, she’d been dismissed as too wealthy and too polished and entrenched in too “straight” and elitely educated a social context (although, as one of her Sarah Lawrence friends puts it, “Carly was always a visceral among cerebrals”). While the focus was on Laurel Canyon—and, before that, San Francisco—Carly was a stone Manhattan chick, not just in geography but in sensibility.

  But suddenly the idea of “privilege” was being turned on its head, and “the struggle” (as the steady rotation of political movements had come to be called) was changing from poor vs. rich and hip vs. straight and shaggy vs. slick to something no one had anticipated: female vs. male. In this revolution, it was cerebral, psychotherapy-partaking, sister-ensconced New Yorkers from top women’s colleges who were leading the way.

  It was a season where the gaze shifted from the bucolic neorural—rich-hippie and Big Chill communal—to the urban; where the medium was not feelings but ideas; where, even if “upper-middle-class” remained a never-uttered dirty word, it was no longer an unuseful skill set. One began to see a lot of sleek Seven Sisters alumnae—Ali MacGraw (Wellesley), Jane Fonda (Vassar), Erica Jong (Barnard), and, of course, Gloria Steinem (Smith)—sexy in stovepipe pants and ponchos, raising fists at political rallies, tossing off a sarcastic remark, or p
erforming a muckrake onscreen (or off-), debating literary lions now viewed as troglodytes, penning theoretical tracts and erotic novels. Carly Simon had the right look, alumna status, and attitude to match the spirit of the times, as well as an air of mischief—a nice, acidic antidote to the slightly-too-satirizable earnestness of this new idea. She had something else: a sense of sensual entitlement unmediated by any history of guilt. She could radiate something young women knew but which hadn’t yet been driven home to a double-standard culture: that a female could be respectable, sensitive, serious, thoughtful—in our supposedly classless society, “classy”—and, at the same time, have a wholly liberated sex life.

  Carly’s transformation began in the spring of 1970, when Jake Brackman had an idea: he would find Carly a manager.

  Ellen’s friend Jennifer Salt had a best friend, fellow actress Janet Margolin, who was married to a mover-shaker nightlife entrepreneur named Jerry Brandt. Brandt owned the discotheque the Electric Circus and was managing and producing the debut record of a troupe of twenty black teenagers, the Voices of East Harlem. Brandt was an aggressive guy and was open to managing new artists. So Jake, with his British girlfriend, Ricky, invited Janet and Jerry over to his apartment—“which was very 1960s Marrakesh Express: Indian fabric on the ceiling, casbah-style, with lots of sequined, mirrored pillows,” as Ellen Wise Questel remembers it—for dinner. After dinner Carly just happened to drop by—this was planned by Jake, of course. She had lost weight; a good twenty pounds were gone since he’d teased her for being chubby at Indian Hill Camp. She looked great, and she sang a few songs. No one could tell by Jerry Brandt’s face what kind of an impression Carly was making on him; after he and Janet left, Jake turned to Ricky and wondered aloud, “Did this land or didn’t it?” Happily, it had landed. Brandt called Carly a day or two later and said, “I’d love to manage you and I’d love to put up money for you to do a demo.” Carly accepted on the spot.