Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Carole and Rick approached their shared battle from opposite political perspectives: she, the left; he, the right. He was the survivalist, angry at and deeply distrustful of the federal government, seeking privacy and freedom at all costs. She soon melded the anger about privacy and property rights that she’d originally picked up from him with the environmentalist and communitarian perspective that was more her style. The battle with the U.S. Forest Service led her to research, discover, and become appalled at that agency’s plans to build roads throughout Idaho’s 20 million acres of wilderness so that logging companies could cut down and profit from the unprotected trees. (Idaho and Montana were the only states at the time that didn’t have wilderness protection laws, and, in pro-business Reagan America, they weren’t likely to get them.) A participant in the legal fight remembers their different miens: “Teepee Rick showed up in federal court for depositions with a buck knife on his belt, trying to be threatening.” Carole, who the participant remembers as being “pretty hard-nosed,” nonetheless retained humility, and humor. When a court worker (who knew Carole was some kind of female music star but didn’t know which one) asked her to sing a few bars of “You’re So Vain,” Carole obligingly delivered a rendition of Carly’s song.

  During the seven years that the case bumped along, in and out of courts, “Carole was very unhappy; she was in a deep, deep depression,” a confidante says. “Did she have good times with Sorensen? Yes, sure, she did—she has all the frailties of any woman and maybe more so. I think she was desperate to find somebody who would love her for herself,” and the reclusive Sorensen, who (unlike Rick Evers) had no interest in her connections to the music industry, must have appeased her fear of being used.

  Living with this wary warrior at their Robinson Bar Ranch, Carole lost touch with her Tapestry friends like Stephanie Fischbach, and she was doubly isolated from her Brill Building friends. Cynthia Weil understood that “obviously Carole wanted to be in Idaho and [Sorensen] wanted her to be there, and he didn’t like us very much.” After their closeness in New York and their benign distance from each other from 1967 on, this Rick One/Rick Two period (as Cynthia would come to view the years from the late 1970s to the late 1980s) seemed a chasm, despite their occasional bouts of writing together. “I just felt that Carole and I were so different, I had no insight into what her direction was. I didn’t understand” her life and “I thought, Who am I to tell her anything? I’m probably living a life that she wouldn’t want.” Besides, “I think when Carole falls in love with somebody, she can’t see quite clearly, and I can understand that—it happens to the best of us. So I just backed off. But Carole knew if she wanted me, I’d be there.”

  Actually, Carole had, on her own, come to the same conclusion—that she hadn’t been seeing clearly: at least in terms of her approach to city-vs.-wilderness. “I jumped; I cast off everything; I ran away from this town,” she admitted to the Los Angeles Times’s Charles Champlin at the dawn of 1984, with the failure of her fourteenth original album, Speeding Time, fresh behind her. “I have a way of not doing anything in the middle when there is an extreme available. And I realized I’d thrown away good things with bad—the energy and the people who were doing good things. I have to admit it; I write better in the city, but the rest of your life suffers.” Over the next three years, though she made forays into New York and L.A., performing in an off-Broadway play in 1987 and acting in and writing the score for a minor movie, Murphy’s Romance (starring Sally Field and James Garner), in 1986, most of her time was spent in Idaho with Rick. It was hard not to think she was out to pasture, amid the horses and cows in her pine-ringed mountain fortress. In 1987 she and Gerry were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and a year later they received the National Academy of Songwriters Lifetime Achievement Award. That was what happened when you started writing as a teenager, became a seasoned pro before you could vote, and a superstar in your twenties, then slowly dissolved over ten years: a lifetime achievement award at age forty-six. Carole was determined to not be “honored” into irrelevance.

  In the meantime, she was developing a second career as an environmental activist.

  On February 10, 1988, Carole finally won her bruising locked-gate case. Idaho’s Supreme Court upheld the district court’s 1986 ruling, declaring her road private. The victory allowed Carole to widen her focus from her—not particularly sympathetic—personal situation (which had fostered the image of, as even one supportive report conceded, “an outsider coming in and locking up a piece of Idaho”) and to come out swinging against the new logging and access-road-building on all the land of her adopted state. As she succinctly put it: “I protected my rights and now I am working to protect everyone’s rights.” “The destruction of wilderness is a form of corporate welfare which is costing taxpayers money, says singer and wilderness advocate Carole King,” an Idaho newspaper wrote, paraphrasing her rousing speech to an audience of one hundred members of the Idaho Conservation League in May of that year. (The Conservation League was outnumbered by pro-loggers in the conservative, timber-industry-dependent state.) “Timber companies want Idaho’s roadless land released from wilderness consideration so they can harvest additional board feet. But before the companies can reach the trees, the U.S. Forest Service has to build expensive roads at public expense, King says.”

  By now an Idahoan at least halfway to her bones, Carole knew that the case had to be made not with liberal-speak but with dollars and cents. Clearing the wilderness was costing people money that could be better spent on schools. She didn’t oppose logging or mining, Carole said, just deficit timber sales and tax write-offs for strip mining, which were returning to the public a mere nine to thirteen cents for every tax-payer dollar spent on the preparation for timber sales. “She was very savvy,” says Rocky Barker, an environmental reporter (and native Idahoan), who saw that “she was on her way to becoming a leading voice in the national wilderness-protection movement. Carole was not a dilettante. She was a true believer and dedicated activist.”

  Barker had first “met” her on the phone, when he’d been hired on the environmental beat of the Idaho Falls Register. An agitated Carole had called the paper from Washington, during the middle of a big Reagan-supported logging initiative. “She said, ‘I’m back here working with Congress to try to convince them to stop spending money on roads that destroy our national forest and are costing more money than the timber brings on the market!’” She was meeting major workers in the wilderness-protection movement, and, in late 1988, joined with Cass Chinsky, a Montana city councilman, and Mike Bader, an ex-Yellowstone ranger, to form the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. Within two years, she would come up with what local environmentalists considered “an extremely unique” view, says Rocky Barker. “She wasn’t calling for stricter provisions against trucks and trail bikes on the unprotected land in Idaho and Montana—she wasn’t calling for turning all of the region into wilderness. She just wanted to ‘leave it as it is,’ which mirrored the view of a majority of Idahoans. They didn’t want more restrictions, but they didn’t want it logged.”

  Carole continued to speak at public hearings (“You combat ignorance by education, and that’s where I can use my role as a famous person,” she said. “While I’m not a walking encyclopedia, I know a lot about this issue”), even amid angry dissent. At one October 1990 hearing, the Idaho Trail Machine Association bused in a large group of motorbikers and snowmobilers to try to drown out Carole with jeers.

  In the same way that living in the mountains had balmed Carole’s post-Tapestry fall from grace and the shock of Rick Evers’s self-destructive death, fighting for the wilderness enabled her to feel close again to her native metropolis. In 1989, when she recorded her next album, she named it (and its title song) City Streets. For its cover she was photographed against a graffiti-streaked brick building: eyes closed, head high, wild haired, an adamant, sensual expression on her face. An internal shot showed her in leggings, long boxy jacket, clunky shoes, and big late-’8
0s hair, slouched inside a funky loft: the costume and setting suggestive of Flashdance, Madonna videos, and the like.

  Four of the album’s ten songs she wrote herself; two she wrote with Gerry, and the rest with various new cowriters. Capitol promised her—and delivered—major promotion. City Streets was her strongest-sounding and strongest-selling album since just before the two disasters she’d lovingly produced with Evers. Hard rock, Broadway, and country influences abound on it, smartly and zestily produced by Carole and her new guitarist and musical partner, Rudy Guess (Rudy’s wife, Lorna, became Carole’s manager and friend). Carole’s voice is lusty and aggressive, 180 degrees from the terse, muted melancholy on Rhymes & Reasons (which may have reflected her ambivalence at the mixed-blessing hugeness of Tapestry). In City Streets, she is a middle-aged, mountain-life-idled superpro who knows there are no more laurels to rest on. “Ain’t That the Way,” which she solely wrote, is an almost-two-decades-later reprise of her beloved themes of connectedness, but with an older and wiser edge. “Whenever you think you’re in control / Everything turns around…”: the lyrics didn’t have to be eloquent; the post-Tapestry critical drumming, the divorce from one man she loved and the drug-fueled death of another, the years of depression—this hidden history was eloquence enough. After writing for years for soul artists but respectfully refraining from using black parlance, she’d earned the right to insert a blues call—“Ain’t that the way…”—between every stanza.

  Rolling Stone praised the album’s good intentions and acknowledged the buzz of “comeback” expectation, but then leveled that familiar verdict: “King has yet to re-create the chemistry of her work with producer Lou Adler in Tapestry and its immediate follow-ups in the early Seventies.” The album reached #10 on the adult contemporary chart.

  Carole had formed the group The City, with Danny and Charlie, when she’d left New York for Laurel Canyon and changed her life. Her new album, reinvoking New York, heralded a kind of twenty-two-year-later return. With her youngest child, Levi, about to graduate high school and go off to college, she had more freedom; she acquired an apartment in Manhattan and began testing the waters of living there again. Carole had done children’s theater, playing the mother to Tatum O’Neal’s Goldilocks ( John Lithgow was the father) in a 1984 staging of the fairy-tale-turned-play of that name. At some point around 1990 she did another children’s play. A handsome young actor named John Bennett—he went by the name Johnny B—had a bit part in the production. “And they got together,” says Roy Reynolds. “He was a young, good-looking guy. But he was too young for her.” Nevertheless, she fell for him.

  It felt safe for Carole to have this split life; Rick never left the mountains.

  Except when he did. Trading his animal pelts for inconspicuous blue jeans, one day Rick drove to Boise, then boarded a plane to Salt Lake City and then another to Kennedy Airport.

  The buzzer rang in Carole’s apartment. She was stunned to see him at the door.

  Her fourth marriage was over. As she complained at the time to a confidante, “Every time I divorce another husband, it costs me a million dollars.”

  Carole released her sixteenth original album, Colour of Your Dreams, in 1993. On the cover—and possibly inspired by her relationship with the much-younger Johnny B—she, at fifty-one, stands splay-legged and challengingly pigeon-toed, like a blue-jeaned street kid (the taut-chinned face in an accompanying video suggests she had a face-lift), in front of another graffitied wall, and she uses Guns N’ Roses’s Slash prominently on her rocking “Hold Out for Love.” But those apparent symbols of a concerted youth consciousness aren’t borne out in the music, which reflects a naturalness and comfort, starting with the beautiful, soulful “Lay Down My Life.”

  Reviewing the album for Rolling Stone, Kara Manning put Carole into historical context, stressing her contributions (she “shattered sales records with her transcendent second solo album Tapestry [and] the giddy success of King’s refined collection…paved an open road of possibilities for her and her contemporaries Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, and Carly Simon”) and saluting Carole for pushing her reinvigorated landmark style despite being what one was not supposed to be in pop music: “a woman over forty-five.” Hailing Carole as “one of the spiritual forebears of the softly subversive underground of young female songwriters”—Sheryl Crow, Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman, Natalie Merchant, Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin (who was being produced by Joni’s ex-husband Larry Klein), Melissa Etheridge—who were “trying to break into the boys’ club of the FM band,” Manning wryly noted that, “ironically, King’s battle for renewed recognition is frustrating testament to the bullheadedness of today’s radio programmers—who no doubt grew up owning a well-worn copy of Tapestry.”

  A song from Colour, “Now and Forever” (Carly had written a different song with the same name about Russ Kunkel), became the theme of the movie A League of Their Own. Like Carly, Carole saw that scoring films for congenial peers (Penny Marshall, a Bronx-to-L.A. girl, was to Carole what Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron were to Carly) was a way to extend her reach beyond the age-ceilinged limits of radio. Carole went out on tour for the new album and her 1994 live album, Carole King in Concert, was the result.

  By now something else, significant to Carole’s second career as an environmental activist, had happened: the Reagan era was over, and Bill Clinton was in the White House. (Carole had performed at his Arkansas inaugural ball.) Environmentalists rejoiced. “It felt like our generation had taken charge,” says Rocky Barker. Carole started working with Brock Evans, the longtime Sierra Club leader who’d gone on to become the National Audubon Society’s lobbying director. Her Alliance for the Wild Rockies was now—quite radically—calling for protecting 16 million acres (“That was twice as much as anybody, even in the environmental community, had suggested,” says Barker) of wilderness in Idaho, Montana, and parts of Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington. In May 1994, Carole testified for the plan, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) at a hearing called by U.S. House of Representatives subcommittees.

  Foes came out of the woodwork to assail her. Montana Republican senator Conrad Burns called her “a washed-up rock-and-roll singer.” “This millionaire recording star has absolutely no sensitivity to the working men and women of the state of Idaho that she now so proudly calls her residence,” sneered Idaho Republican senator Larry Craig, who would—thirteen years later, in 2007—find himself sneered at (and then some) after his Minneapolis men’s room arrest.

  But one man was listening: Bill Clinton. Carole King and Bill Clinton became friends. At the beginning of his second term, Clinton, while not formally taking a position on NREPA, was said to have been sufficiently inspired by it to use his power of “administrative rule” to partially protect all roadless areas.* “I would argue that Carole King is the earth mother of the roadless area initiative,” Barker says. Michael Garrity, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director, adds that, from the 1980s to the present, “Carole King has always been our hardest-working, most effective lobbyist.”

  In April 1997 Carole took a Grand Canyon river trip with elderly conservationist Martin Litton and Ric Bailey, of the Oregon Hells Canyon Preservation Council. As the canyons loomed on either side of the ribbon of rapids they were navigating, a dream came into focus: a superorganization that would bring the now-hundreds of environmental groups into one fold. Five months later Carole and Ric Bailey assembled dozens of environmental leaders in the White Cloud foothills behind her Robinson Bar Ranch. The White Cloud Council was born, with the mandate “to protect what is wild and to restore what should be [wild]” through “big dreams” and “bold plans.” Carole remains one of a half dozen leaders of the thriving group today.

  If only love could come, and stay, as easily as work.

  At some point in the mid-to late 1990s Cynthia heard from Carole. “She was in distress. Another relationship”—with Johnny B—had ended, Cynthia recalls. “It was the first time she called and said, ‘Can I
come and spend time with you?’ So Barry and I said, ‘Please, stay with us.’” Cynthia had met Johnny B once, “and he didn’t impress me.” She knew that Carole understood that their great age difference made a breakup inevitable. “There’s a realistic part of Carole, and I think she always knew this guy should be with someone who could give him children.” Still, she’d gotten “very invested” in the relationship “and she cared for him deeply. When the breakup came, there was just a lot of pain.”

  Carole stayed with Cynthia and Barry for several weeks, during which time Cynthia had the idea of fixing her up with a screenwriter-director friend of theirs, Phil Alden Robinson. Alden Robinson, who was eight years younger than Carole and bore a casual resemblance to Steven Spielberg, was born in Long Beach, California, grew up in far upstate New York, attended Union College in Schenectady, began a TV and radio broadcasting career, and then spent the Vietnam War as a member of the motion picture unit of the air force. After his discharge from the air force, Alden Robinson moved west and broke into screenwriting in the early 1980s, writing the television drama Trapper John, M.D. and the screenplays for the movies All of Me (which starred Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin), Rhinestone (which starred Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone), and, most famously, Kevin Costner’s baseball epic, Field of Dreams, which Alden Robinson also directed. Cynthia thought Phil “so smart and so funny that, though he’s not traditionally handsome, he becomes handsome because of his mind and his sensitivity.”