Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Others were less charmed. The Eagles (for whom Rick made some garments) viewed him as a hothead. As for Lou Adler, he tersely allowed, “Rick Evers doesn’t have one redeeming quality.” Carole’s friends couldn’t stand him. Rick would get angry for no reason—when, say, he didn’t get “respect” from someone at a party who was talking to Carole, making him feel excluded. Because Rick’s temper was so hair-trigger, “he would make Carole seem stupid by her having to constantly defuse those situations he was creating,” a friend says. “His attitude was: she’s just my bitch. The relationship seemed to go against everything you knew about her. In social situations, they’d often leave early to avoid further discord”—and so that Carole could avoid feeling that he (or she, or their relationship) was being judged by the people who’d long known her. But from Rick’s point of view, “it was hard for him,” Cassie says, “to be such a leader in his world and try to fit into Carole’s world. He only got mad at someone if they attacked his honor.” When he talked about Indian spirituality, the people in Carole’s circle were unimpressed, even condescending. “He would try to get that stuff to fly, but as soon as he opened his mouth, his foot would get in his tongue’s way,” one says.

  It was obviously awkward for Carole’s colleagues and friends to so strongly dislike someone she was clearly madly in love with, and her need to be out of their view may have led to what, in December 1976, the Los Angeles Times called a “surprise move”: Carole left Lou Adler’s Ode label and signed with Capitol Records. Tapestry now stood at 13.5 million units sold worldwide (combined sales of all her eight solo albums was a global 20 million) and was no longer just the best-selling rock album in history but was now, as the Times noted, “the biggest selling album” of any genre “in the history of the industry.” “We are most honored to welcome Carole King to our organization,” said Bhaskar Menon, the president and CEO of Capitol, never imagining that all Carole had spent her life achieving might dissipate by way of one personal decision: Carole would make her albums with Rick now; they would cowrite songs, he would play guitar on her records, and more. Indeed, on the double-fold interior of her next album, Simple Things (recorded in spring 1977), the higher photo was not of Carole but of Rick, gazing beatifically skyward amid an illustration of galloping horses, as if this hagiographed man is a glorious stallion himself. Lower down and larger, as if she is the dreamer beneath the dream, is a very unflattering photograph of Carole, who looks as homely as he looks beautiful. Yet she’s smiling proudly. The effect is discomfiting: an ethnic girl mooning over, as one observer thought of Rick, “the quintessential Hollywood-pretty, blond mountain boy” she has landed.

  Rick cowrote the title song, “Simple Things” (which the L.A. Times’s Robert Hilburn found “engaging, lilting, and warmly innocent”): a bells-laden, rousingly produced paean to childlike naturalness. But much of the album reflects a woman who feels fully let loose from her past; her newly edgy, deeply felt personal life is finally filling the boots of those dark, bluesy, careworn gospel chords she wrote for Aretha. The album’s loveliest cut, “In the Name of Love” (written wholly by Carole) is dedicated to Willa Mae Phillips, who had recently died and “whose loving energy throughout the years,” Carole wrote in the liner notes, “allowed space through which the music could flow.” Carole’s ex-husband Charlie and John Fischbach had been pallbearers at Willa Mae’s funeral. Had Willa Mae been alive when Carole met Rick Evers, it’s easy to imagine the kind of talking-to this maternal figure would have forced on Carole.

  Early in the summer of 1977 Carole moved with Rick to Idaho. She trundled three-year-old Levi, five-year-old Molly, and a reluctant Sherry, fourteen (who would be enrolled in Boise High School in the fall). Louise, almost seventeen and a half, stayed behind in the Canyon house. She had a boyfriend across the street; she was already beginning to carve out her life as a young adult, as early as her mother had carved out her own adulthood.*

  They—that is, Carole—bought a small ranch on a spread of land in an idyllic valley by a stream called Robie Creek. Carole got an Appaloosa named Whiskey so she could ride with Rick every day; and some of the people Cassie had referred to as Rick’s followers (Cassie and her boyfriend included) moved into buildings on the property, where Carole and Rick were having a triple-decker dream house built. (It turned out to be a kind of hippie-dippy abode, with little insulation, with astrological signs carved into the wooden door frames, and with egg crates apparently providing primitive soundproofing for the basement music room, but it had a stairway built by a master craftsman.) Financed by Carole and led by Rick, the ranch was a kind of commune. There were meetings around the campfire, fishing in the rivers, and many hours spent soaking in the natural hot-spring pools—Levi and Molly anchored between Carole and Rick.

  As in the many communes that had proliferated in the West, gender traditionalism reigned. The women (Carole included) baked bread from scratch and canned fruit for winter. Carole had been a city earth mother in Laurel Canyon, so this grittier version was a logical next step. Especially in the early 1970s (Carole was a kind of late entrant to all of this), traveling deeper and deeper into the vortex of authenticity was the thing to do; whether in matters of spirituality, rustic living, or fealty to gurus, the race went to the most untimidly devoted.

  Carole acted as birthing coach to some of the women in the commune, and during one complicated birth, a registered nurse named Joy James* was called in to assist; she ended up staying a while. Over weeks of tending the communal garden with Carole, Joy waxed lyrical about a community of cabins she managed farther north, in Burgdorf Hot Springs. Especially in winter Burgdorf was a magical place—snowbound, thirty-five miles from the nearest road—where the cabin renters lived in a primitive simplicity (no electricity, no plumbing) that cleansed their souls. Joy invited Carole to visit.

  In August, Carole, her band Navarro, and Rick went on tour. Robert Hilburn attended her Greek Theatre concert, just as he’d attended her first Greek Theatre concert in 1971. But in contrast to his previous rave, his review, headlined “King’s ‘Tapestry’ Wearing Thin,” was harshly critical. Carole’s fans “did their best to make her return…as memorable as her debut there,” he wrote, “[b]ut none of the [fans’] enthusiasm hid the fact that this King performance…was far less regal than the first.” While Hilburn had compliments for some of the tracks from Simple Things, he ratified the complaint that other critics had been making over the last several of Carole’s albums: “Though each [post-Tapestry album] contains some rewards, none has the…artistic thrust to stamp it as the work of a major—as opposed to capable—pop figure.” Having heard this so often now, Carole began “to protect my sanity” by thinking of “Carole King” as an outsider. “I would perform…and critics would say, ‘It was a terrible concert’ and I would say, ‘He’s talking about Carole King, not about me.’”

  By now she was no longer Carole King, or even Carole Klein/King Goffin Larkey.

  Rick had summoned hippie preacher Larry Norton to a clearing in the Boise mountains, where Carole had happily become Carole Evers. When the newlyweds returned to Robie Creek, a sign Sherry painted was draped from the main house’s roof: “Welcome Home!” From that point on, the homestead was called Welcome Home Ranch.

  And it did feel like home to Carole. One day, when the women were canning and gardening and the men were hammering the planks and watering the horses, Carole was seized with the beauty of the commune. “The sight of everyone working together, building things and feeling good—just being friends in the sunshine—was too much for me.” She ran to her piano and composed a joyous song, “Everybody’s Got the Spirit.” Another time Rick wrote a poem about a “sunbird” whose innocent, perfect freedom he—a former jailbird—was emulating. Carole was greatly moved by the words that expressed her husband’s striving and she set them to music. The bird was “enough just be-ing / fulfilled in its own existence.” The two songs would be among those collected in her next album, Welcome Home. Its hosanna-chorused title
song, about the profound transformation her life has taken with Rick, is one of her most vulnerable, earnest statements, and, largely but not solely for that reason, this almost completely overlooked song is one of her most beautiful. “Welcome Home” is a marker of her emotional and geographical journey in 1978: adventurous, open-hearted—and dangerously naïve.

  In January 1978, she and Rick went to L.A. to record Welcome Home. The moment was fraught: Rolling Stone had just named Simple Things “The Worst Album of 1977.” To save her plummeting career, Carole had to do the one thing she’d always done so well but which was anathema to Rick: take control of the recording session. L.A. was flush with cocaine, and Rick was flush with Carole’s money, with bombast, and with anger. “He was jealous of Carole—he wanted to be a star—and he was controlling,” says Roy Reynolds, who was with them for much of the trip, serving unofficially as Rick’s minder and Carole’s protector.

  This time, it wasn’t good enough for Rick that his image be inside the album jacket, as it had been on Simple Things. It had to be on the cover. Roy, who already thought that Rick’s preachy lyrics were ruining Carole’s music, tried to explain to his friend that this was Carole’s album, but Rick dug in his heels, and Carole appeased him. As a result, two-thirds of the cover of Welcome Home depicts a dashingly handsome, expensively attired hippie cowboy (Rick), commandingly holding the reins of his Appaloosa. Carole’s head is way down in the lower right corner: under Rick, under the horse’s belly, she’s ducking beneath a wooden fence rail.

  From January to mid-March, when Rick and Carole were commuting from L.A. to the ranch and back (the dream house was finished in February, and the builder etched a note into the wood, near the astrological signs, declaring that he’d built the house “for Carole Evers”), even Rick’s acolytes were worried by his drug-fueled temper. “Rick had an addictive personality and we could see it get out of hand,” says Cassie. “He was powerfully angry. We were all concerned; we were talking. But Rick wasn’t the kind of person where you could say, ‘Hey, knock it off, dude.’ He was definitely steering his own ship. He had a stubborn streak. And he was our leader.”

  Once Carole (who Roy Reynolds viewed as “in some ways one of the most naïve people I’ve ever met, as well as one of the most generous”) realized Rick was on drugs, “she was crying at him, and screaming at him,” Cassie says. “She was frustrated. She was hurt. I can’t imagine how hard it would be, especially in her position. You can’t deal with something like that”—a husband who’s an out-of-control drug abuser—“in private.”

  Rick started taking his anger out on Carole physically. The man who’d “popped” his former fellow inmate Randy Stone in the jaw until Randy saw stars now took his fist to his wife’s mouth. Twice, discreetly, Carole went to the dentist to get a front tooth repaired. Less than “half right and half safe” now, she was reduced to uncontrollable tears on these occasions; then she’d compose herself, gather her strength, and return to Rick. This fatalistic abused wife was not the Carole her friends knew, not the linchpin of the Tapestry family of friends, not the confident, determined woman whose talent dominated. “It got to be an embarrassment to her, the way he was acting on dope,” and the way she was acting in return, Roy Reynolds says. “The whole thing embarrasses, you know?” Powerless to force her to leave Rick, Carole’s friends eased their tremendous worry about her safety by making dark jokes about chipping in and hiring a hit man to get rid of him.

  By March Rick was snorting and shooting every drug he could get his hands on, and “he was begging me to stop him,” Roy says. “I was doing everything I could to get him off the stuff,” including rounding up and hauling off all the drugs and syringes “in a big sack” and dumping them in a Laurel Canyon Boulevard garbage bin. But the intervention proved futile. “Rick was shooting up between his toes because that was the only part of his body left.” Carole had known benign, gentlemanly drug addicts—James Taylor and Joel O’Brien—but the ravages that Rick was going through were horribly new to her. (Some of Rick’s Idaho friends were sadly unsurprised by his unraveling. Given Rick’s emotional set and grandiosity, “he was in way over his head” with a famous wife. “He didn’t have a chance” of coping less chaotically with the stressors and temptations, says Bruce Stanger.)

  On March 19, a drugged-up, stormingly jealous and angry Rick grabbed Carole and tried to hurl her through the glass door of her home. Roy interceded, alarmed. “I took Carole and put her on a plane, the next day, to Hawaii,” Roy says. Carole’s friends were greatly relieved. The day after she flew to the islands—on March 21, 1978—Rick went to a Beverly Hills apartment (perhaps a dealer’s or a drug buddy’s) and shot himself up. Speed, coke, heroin: “Everything you could possibly think of was found in his blood,” says Roy, who was called by the police to identify the body. It was never determined if the death was a suicide (there was no note), an accidental overdose (this is Roy’s belief), or if some angry dealer “popped him—gave him bad dope or too much dope because Rick owed the guy money.” Roy had Rick cremated, in accordance with his wishes, and he sprinkled his ashes at Robie Creek.

  Released in May, Welcome Home was a memorial to Rick Evers. Family-album-style photos of Carole and Rick, with Molly and Levi, filled a four-page inset, and Carole wrote a eulogy in the liner notes. Rick, she wrote, “often stretched beyond what some of us could understand. He didn’t always do ‘sensible’ things. He often got angry and frustrated about things that many of us couldn’t see.” But, she made clear, there was another facet. “He had more love to give than anyone I’ve ever known.” This side of Carole’s troubled man was one her friends did not see, but then, love is as much a locked box of esoteric intimacy that dissolves when it meets air as listening to a song is.

  Carole’s friends assumed that this would be the end of the Idaho mountain men in her life. They were dead wrong.

  Carole returned to Robie Creek, but amid the painful memories (and Rick’s ashes), she knew she couldn’t stay there. So she took Joy James up on her offer to see the former gold mining ghost town at Burgdorf Hot Springs. She, Molly, and Levi stayed in one of the tiny nineteenth-century log cabins near the large hot springs pool, surrounded by a meadow full of calving elks ringed by the tall pines of a national forest. “Carole had an epiphany there,” says Joy James. She wanted to “winter in”: to be snowbound in acerbic simplicity. This rite would be boot camp, meditation lodge, escape from her now-loathed L.A.—and, perhaps, since she may have felt her fame had exacerbated Rick’s volatile frustration, penance. A barter was arranged: Carole could have a cabin in return for agreeing to watch the place when Joy was out—to check on guests and order helicopter rescue from the forest service in life-threatening situations. “Molly and Levi were so excited when Carole told them,” Joy recalls. “They said, ‘You mean we get to spend the whole winter making snowmen?!’”

  A man Joy knew was crashing on her cabin floor during Carole’s summer stay. His name was Rick Sorensen, but everyone called him Teepee Rick because he was a kind of survivalist. Teepee Rick was a big, strapping, rough-hewn thirty-two-year-old whose face and stringy long hair made people think he looked like Jesus. He was originally from the Chicago area and had taught school in Hailey (near Sun Valley), but his civilized ways were long gone. For seven years, he’d been living in a teepee in the mountains, surviving by what he killed. A bear he’d shot between the eyes became his tent rug; the buffalo he killed provided the meals he cooked over fire kindled in wood he chopped; even the elk hide of his fringed buckskins was procured through his old-fashioned muzzle loader. Teepee Rick hated the federal government and he hated the forest service. “He was an alpha male, a warrior, quite a dominating man,” says Joy—so much so, that she didn’t like having sustained time with him (it always led to confrontation), but she’d let him crash on her cabin floor for these few days and hunt in the adjacent woods.

  When Carole saw Teepee Rick outside Joy’s window, she excitedly asked to meet him. Joy made the introducti
ons, and, as she recalls: “It was just like a lightning bolt. Everyone else [in the cabin] wanted to stand back because it was so profound—it was electric.” Though no last names were exchanged, Teepee Rick may have known who she was—“Gossip travels in the backcountry air faster than by telephone,” Joy says, “but, trust me, he didn’t care [that a famous woman was in the area] because he had a beautiful lady, named Chris, who he was living with. But there was just such chemistry between [him and Carole].”

  A few hours later, everyone was in the hot pool and one by one they left to go back to their cabins. According to what Carole told Joy, as Carole stood to leave, Teepee Rick grabbed her ankle and—me-Tarzan-you-Jane-style—demanded, “Where are you going?”