Finally, we got lucky. It was at United Artists Music Publishing, one block farther east on Seventh Avenue, that we signed our first contract with Murray Deutch, who agreed to pay us each twenty-five dollars a week to write exclusively for them and to own the publishing royalties to all our songs. We got to keep the writers’ share. We were ecstatic. They showed our songs to producers or singers looking for material but we weren’t getting them recorded. Still, this whole deal amounted to some really good money for us, since at the end of the three-year deal, we still hadn’t written a hit song and I was now finishing my second year of college. I remember feeling disappointed but it only served to fan the fire within me that was determined to write hit songs.
We never wrote one in the three years we were there. These were, as it turned out, the last years before the British Invasion and the emergence of the singer-songwriters that would mark the end of the dominance of those buildings and their music.
TWO EVENTS SHAPED MY junior year at NYU: John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which increased my disturbing feeling that danger lurked everywhere and, less than two months later, the arrival of the Beatles, which further solidified the place of music at the center of my life. I was in love with Paul, though John was a close second. I adored the Beatles. Each one had his own distinct sound, and their first album was, for me, perfection. After that, everything could be classified as either pre-Beatles or post-Beatles.
As much as I loved the Beatles, I did not respond in kind to the Stones. Their carnal aliveness was too threatening to the me who felt too self-conscious to embrace my sexuality. And much of the rock ’n’ roll that followed was too hard-edged, too loud, and too angry. Blistering electric guitar solos and screaming lead vocalists assaulted me. I resented not being able to make out the lyrics buried in the deafening tracks. I needed melody, which the Beatles rarely failed to give me.
In the meantime, Sherry met a guy, fell in love, and was getting married. She wasn’t going to write anymore; she was just going to “be with Kenny.” I didn’t get how she could just stop writing songs, but I was happy for her. Still, I had come to rely on, and to look forward to, the immediate feedback of someone sitting next to me, so I never even considered writing on my own. I immediately began a search for a new writing partner.
Three
MY MOTHER WAS A pragmatic woman. “Eli, how many people do you know who write hit songs? Let her at least get a degree to teach school so if it doesn’t work out she has something to fall back on.”
My father agreed emphatically. “Good idea!” he said. It was rare they were in agreement. I had hoped to teach the dramatic arts. When I learned this was not an option in New York high schools, I crammed as many speech courses into my senior year as possible so I could teach in the public school system.
With Sherry out of the picture and United Artists choosing not to renew my contract, I brought a tape of my songs to Emil La Viola, an A&R executive at Screen Gems Music. He liked what he heard and told me he wanted to introduce me to a young staff writer there, Toni Wine, as a possible new writing partner. A few years younger than me, she was attractive, effusive, and dressed with music business flair. Toni was already known for her background singing and was trying to write songs. We hit it off immediately, so much so that Screen Gems signed me to a new three-year contract. Still, I needed to uphold the promise I had made to my parents, so while writing songs with Toni, I got my degree and took a job teaching school.
AT THE END OF my first day at the all-girls Mabel Dean Bacon Vocational High School in Manhattan, I came home proudly clutching my new books, stood in the foyer, and said, “I’m a teacher.” The smile on my parents’ faces reflected not only their pride in me but also their satisfaction at my having taken their advice.
With a lesson plan in one hand and a pad and pencil in the other to write down lyric ideas as I thought of them, I began work as a teacher. Most of my students were reading at third- and fourth-grade levels and there was no point in teaching Shakespeare, so I encouraged them to bring in their favorite song lyrics. We would read them and listen to the records on a small turntable I schlepped to class with me, and that is how we would learn English.
Needless to say, I was the most popular English teacher in the school. The girls that bothered to attend loved my class. I stopped asking the absentees why they’d missed school on a particular day because I didn’t know how to deal with answers like “ ’Cause my father beat up my mother,” or even worse, “beat me up.” These girls were struggling. They were not hoping to go to college. They would be happy if they could learn to be secretaries, hairstylists, or nurse’s aides. It saddened me to know that at their young ages their fates were for the most part sealed, but what could I teach them that could do any good?
One day a girl brought in the Righteous Brothers’ single of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and, as I played it on my portable player, I witnessed the power of music and words to transform and connect, taking me and my entire class to a place where worries all but disappeared. At least I could do that much for the girls.
DONNIE KIRSHNER, THE SELF-NAMED “man with the golden ears,” and then only around thirty, had just sold his company, the monumentally successful Aldon publishing firm, to Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. Along with buying his company, the Columbia board gave Donnie complete control of what was to be Screen Gems Publishing. Donnie convinced all of his Aldon writers, who were less than exuberant about working in a new place for new people, that a close association with a major studio would afford them great new opportunities, like writing songs for movies and television.
Donnie liked me and my songs and, though I was still teaching school, offered to pay me fifty dollars a week in exchange for the exclusive rights to 100 percent of my publishing for the next fifty-six years. In turn, I would receive my writer’s income. At the time it seemed like an amazing gift. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Years later I’d realize how much I gave away.
Tall and a little overweight, Donnie was larger than life to me. He had under contract some of the best pop writers on the planet. Still, he was insecure. Though his instincts were serving him perfectly, he would ask whomever he crossed paths with that day: “You got a minute? Can you listen to something?”
And then he would play us something as surefire as “I’m a Believer” and ask anxiously, “Do you think it’s a hit?” “How big do you think it’ll be?” “Will it go to Number One?”
At Screen Gems, Toni and I were given the smallest cubicle to write our songs in. The proven hit makers occupied the bigger rooms, some even with windows. Toni immediately went to the piano, and I sat down next to her with a pad and pencil. When I liked something she was playing, I began to write words. At that time, I could have as easily gone to the piano and she could have picked up the pencil, but somehow I seemed to fall into the lyricist role. This established a pattern in collaborations to come, where the people I chose to write with were far more accomplished than I was on the keyboards, and so I gladly left the composing primarily to them.
Around this time, I changed the spelling of my name from “Carol” to “Carole.” It was only a little e, but I thought it looked prettier, less truncated. It was the first step in what would become a lifetime of trying to enhance little Carol Bayer, who was always trying to be more than she was.
Often we wrote at my parents’ apartment, only a few blocks away. It was more comfortable. The first song we wrote together was called “Ashes to Ashes.”
Our second, “A Groovy Kind of Love,” was recorded by the English group the Mindbenders (originally Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders). Toni, it appears, had taken a chunk of her melody directly from Muzio Clementi’s “Sonatina Opus 36, Number 5.” I had no idea until one of my future collaborators told me, “Oh, I used to play that as a piano exercise.” Fortunately, Clementi had passed more than a century earlier and so was unable to assert any rights.
I was in a taxicab the first tim
e I heard our song on the radio, and I started screaming with delight. My students were beginning to hear it, too, and they were so excited for me. I would run down to the phone booth in the school lobby every Wednesday to call Cashbox, a music industry magazine, and find out where the song was going to chart the following week.
IN THE SUPERMARKET MY mother ran into an acquaintance and began bragging about my song, which was already a huge hit in England. The friend was Paul Simon’s aunt. Together they decided he and I would be a perfect pair, so within a few days the fix-up was on.
When the evening was upon us, my mother was far more excited than I. “Eli, I have a very good feeling about this,” she said, as she’d been saying for days. “He writes songs, she writes songs, it just feels right to me.”
Our doorbell rang at exactly eight o’clock. I was going toward the door when my mother beat me to it. She looked out our peephole, said she didn’t see anyone, and started to walk away.
The doorbell rang again. Again she looked out and saw no one, but this time she also looked down, and there was Paul. In a stage whisper that could be heard throughout the building I heard: “Forget it, Eli. Midgets! That’s what they’ll have. They’ll have midgets.” She walked away, leaving me to open the door.
“Hi, I’m Carole,” I said.
“Paul,” he answered. Maybe he saved his words for his songs.
Simon and Garfunkel had just exploded with their first Number One hit “Sounds of Silence.”
“Ready?” he asked.
Feeling no spark between us, we quickly headed out to the street. I think the highlight of the evening was behind me, because all I remember of our “short” date was an argument about which of us first used the word groovy in a song. He claimed credit for “We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’,” the flip side of their hit. And I countered that “A Groovy Kind of Love” had already been number 2 on the British charts. We didn’t go out again. We’ve seen each other in passing many times since, and neither of us ever acknowledges “the date.”
MY FATHER, HAVING SUFFERED his third heart attack, was in the hospital again when “Groovy” started climbing the American charts. Lying in bed in his little puke-green shared room, he had a nurse paste up the Cashbox Top 100 page with a big red crayon mark circling number 80, where it had entered. He would show all the doctors and nurses when they came on their rounds. He was so proud of his baby.
“A Groovy Kind of Love” was the first song of mine that anyone recorded, and it hit Number One on the Cashbox chart in May 1966. My first record went to Number One! Oh my God!
As “Groovy” climbed the charts, Dad was losing weight and, because his kidneys and liver were shutting down, his now-hollow face had a green-yellow pallor. He had been in and out of the hospital so many times in the past ten years for his attacks and for numerous episodes of heart failure. I wanted to believe that, despite his deteriorating condition, he would yet again recover and come back home. He didn’t.
My beloved father died of congestive heart failure several weeks before “Groovy” went to Number One. I was devastated, but there was no unfinished business between us. We both knew how much we loved each other.
My father left no money, and worse, he had borrowed against his life insurance and never told my mom.
Within what felt like seconds after my father died, my relationship with my mother changed. With Dad gone, I was no longer the daughter she competed with for his love. I became the beautiful, talented daughter she took enormous pride in, and would soon depend on to take care of her.
Four
HAVING A HIT SONG was so easy, I thought. You write it, it gets recorded, and goes to Number One. As their follow-up, the Mindbenders released “Ashes to Ashes,” and it went to number 55. The following week it went to 61. Huh? And then it basically disappeared, as did the Mindbenders.
MY HEART STARTED TO beat faster one day when I saw Carole King walking down the hallway at Screen Gems. She had very curly hair that fell in ringlets around her face, whereas I was always obsessively styling mine into anything but what it wanted to do naturally. Carole wore no makeup that I could see and dressed in jeans or mid-length flowered dresses. I admired how comfortable she seemed to be with who she was. I summoned up all my courage, introduced myself, and asked her if she would want to write a song with me. She was very polite and even congratulated me on “A Groovy Kind of Love,” but she said she wrote only with her husband, Gerry Goffin. I knew she was telling me the truth so I didn’t feel rejected.
Undaunted, I channeled my mother’s chutzpah once more and asked Neil Sedaka, one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the early Sixties with great records like “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Calendar Girl,” if he would consider writing a song with me. He was very sweet and answered, almost in a melody, “Oh, yes!”—his voice going up half an octave—“I would love to do that.” Wow! A famous recording star just agreed to write with me!
Neil, too, came to apartment 10-A to write on our piano in the living room. He possessed a great joie de vivre and a childlike energy. His lovely wife, Leba, a few years older than Neil, also served as his manager and took care of everything he needed, down to the details of making sure he had enough money for the subway ride home.
My mother loved celebrities, so she was thrilled when Neil would come to her home and play on her piano, which she told him had once belonged to Dave Dreyer, who in 1927 wrote “Me and My Shadow” with Al Jolson. I’m not sure Neil was impressed but she went on to repeat our piano’s history to every other collaborator who ever tinkled our ivories.
There was something incredibly innocent about Neil. Melodies just poured out of him with ease. Every time he’d go to the keyboards and begin to play, I would hear lyrics that fit in perfectly. I would sing them out loud, and he would get all excited and start clapping, saying, “Ooooh, I loooove that!!,” which made me feel confident enough to spill out more words. When he’d sing back anything we were working on, it immediately sounded like a hit, just because Neil Sedaka was singing it and he was a pop idol. His voice was made for pop songs.
Demos are made for publishers to play for the artist or for the record companies who are always looking for new material. When we make these demos, to us they’re Polaroids of what we feel the song should be. Our demos were so good they already sounded like hit records, but often they were not. I had to learn to separate the song from the singer, and to be sure that the song held up even if Neil wasn’t singing it.
The first song we wrote together was called “Cellophane Disguise.” It was about someone who, once you saw through them, was not who you thought they were.
The morning mist is clearing from my window
A shade of doubt has broke the spell you weaved so well
You had me hypnotized
But now at last I see before my eyes
Cellophane Disguise
Cellophane Disguise? I was trying to be poetic with that title, and I failed miserably. I have no idea where those words were coming from. They just sounded right to me when Neil sang them. And he was clapping his hands together. The man who’d sung “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” was jumping up and applauding again. How bad could it be?
Pleased with the ease of writing, we charged on to our second song, called “Teach Me How”:
Teach me not to cry when you say good-bye
Teach me how
to let you go although I know
I’ll always love you
A month later, Neil and I were at a session at Columbia Recording Studios in New York watching Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé—who I had only ever seen on The Ed Sullivan Show—stand together in the recording booth singing our songs in their beautiful rich voices. At that moment, all was right with the world. I was not overweight, Russia was not about to drop the bomb on us, and my “leukemia” was in complete remission.
DONNIE’S PROMISE TO HIS writers came true. Colpix, Columbia’s TV division, had created a show and wanted Donnie to pro
vide the music. The producers cast a group of young guys modeled after the Beatles, handpicking four young musicians and creating a TV show for them that would be accompanied by a record album of all the songs featured in the episodes. The risk was that auditioning individuals and then throwing the best four together in a band provided no guarantee that there would be charisma between them, but of course there was.
Donnie’s instincts were solid. Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Micky Dolenz became the Monkees, and the show was an instant smash in 1966. Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote their first hit, “Last Train to Clarksville,” and Neil Diamond wrote their second and even bigger one, “I’m a Believer.” Every week Donnie made sure the show featured at least two songs by his writers.
The Monkees had been on the air for only a month or two when Donnie called me and Neil Sedaka into his office. “I’m going to give you a golden opportunity,” he said. “I’m going to let you write a song for the Monkees. Give me a great song and I promise you they’ll record it.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “How fantastic.”
Neil was on his feet applauding. “Yes, yes, we will write an unbelievable song!”
We were thrilled, though our excitement was tempered by our awareness that all of Donnie’s writers had been offered the same chance, so now everybody was scrambling to write the best song in the shortest amount of time. Neil and I wrote quickly together. His enthusiasm was contagious. I knew our song would at least sound like a hit, because Neil would be doing the demo.
We went straight from Donnie’s office into Neil’s, and in less than an hour we wrote “When Love Comes Knockin’ at Your Door.” Neil’s demo sounded like Sedaka meets the Beatles. I knew Donnie would love it, and he did.
Left to my own devices, I would always go for the sad ballad of unrequited love, but this was for the fun-loving Monkees and so I wrote:
They're Playing Our Song Page 2
