Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Life for Carole now was round-the-clock songwriting and mothering. She and Gerry would often take Lou Lou to Aldon, a major ordeal in the days before strap-on baby carriers and folding, lightweight strollers, when mothers of young children were essentially restricted to their homes and neighborhoods. In her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, the young poet Hettie Cohen, who married the noted young Beat poet LeRoi Jones (later to be known as Amiri Baraka), recounts arduously maneuvering a big, heavy baby carriage up steep loft stairs to get to a poetry reading. Carole, with her heavy stroller, like Hettie with hers, didn’t let the supposedly dominating vocation—and the unwieldy accoutrements—of motherhood keep her from creating. “I didn’t let the fact that I had a child slow me down. I just brought her with me,” Carole would later say. “I [was] like: ‘Okay! Feed the baby and then go to the piano!’” She sat at the piano with Lou Lou on her lap. Lou Lou, it is said, once slammed the piano lid on Carole’s fingers to demand attention from her work-focused mother.

  “I used to walk into Aldon, and the baby would be in a playpen in the middle of the office, and Carole would be at a demo session—it’s just the way it was; we never thought about it,” says Cynthia, adding, “I had no idea why people wanted to have these noisy things anyway; I didn’t get having babies at all.” Donny Kirshner remembers “my secretary was babysitting and diapering” Lou Lou while, in the smoke-filled songwriting cubicles, the young writing teams plunked out and hummed out and argued out a string of three-minute wonders. Being an infant and child in a home of constant, fevered songwriting “was really not an environment where [my parents] could have a family responsibility,” the adult Louise Goffin once bluntly told an interviewer. “I was like a kid with other kids, and it’s been a long road figuring out how grown-ups actually function in the world.”

  “These kids!” Kirshner marvels today. “Nobody in America knew who they were! But look at all this talent—these ethnic Jewish kids from Queens and Brooklyn, coming up with these universal lyrics!” Whether by way of a kibbitzy warmth that harkened to vaudeville or a serious melancholic literacy that suggested Gershwin, many of “the kids’” songs were also subtly Jewish. At a time when elite colleges still listed “Religion:_____” on application forms and enforced anti-Jewish quotas, and when country clubs, fraternities, and sororities rejected applicants on the basis of faith and ethnicity, young Jewish-Americans were incorporating their country’s optimism and fairness into eager-to-please records that contributed to a looming spirit that would soon quash the remnants of institutional anti-Semitism.

  But it was the far greater injustice of racism that the best of these songs really addressed. Being Jewish, the writers had an understanding of discrimination and an inclination toward social justice, and in some cases (Pomus and Shuman’s, Leiber and Stoller’s) a serious immersion in, or (Goffin’s) an earnest infatuation with, the black experience. And they happened to be writing during one of the most dramatic and heroic periods of American history, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was emerging as America’s Gandhi, helping to lead and endure the violent struggles comprising the civil rights movement. The Freedom Rides throughout the South; the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, and over a dozen other cities; the brutal fire-hosings and dog attacks ordered by Birmingham police chief Bull Connor, and the church bombing in that same city that killed four preteenage girls; the violent resistance to the enrollment of a single black student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi; and the murders of voter registration workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in that state’s Neshoba County—all these events transpired during the time that Carole and Gerry were pounding out songs at their Brown Street piano and in their Aldon cubicle. A string of hits the Aldon writers produced—Carole and Gerry’s “Up on the Roof,” sung by the Drifters; Mann and Weil’s “Uptown,” sung by the Crystals; and Jerry Leiber and Phil Spector’s “Spanish Harlem,” sung by the Drifters’ Ben E. King as a solo artist—presented the struggles of people of color, not in the South, but in the place the writers knew and loved, New York, through a kind of pop companion-narrative to the civil rights movement. In this pieced-together canon there’s an oppressed protagonist (“Everyone’s his boss and he’s lost in an angry land”) who’s pushing against almost impossible odds, yet with humanity intact (“It’s growing in the street, right up through the concrete”)—and, finally, trudging to high ground for a spiritual epiphany: “I climb way up to the top of the stairs, and all my cares just drift right into space.” White teenagers in suburban ranch houses may not have been closely watching the struggle in the South, but hints of its essence and grandeur were being laced into their driving-to-school and beach music, and something was rubbing off on them: a taste of the romance of multiethnic urban life and of a concept—“soulfulness”—that was taking hold as a cultural ideal beyond its core group.

  Those early days at Aldon were so halcyon, sometimes Donny Kirshner couldn’t believe his own life. How did this hard-hocking self-admitted coward from Washington Heights get so lucky? One day in early 1961, for example, he’d just gotten off the bus (he never learned to drive), in South Orange, New Jersey, walked the few blocks home, and picked up the ringing phone. It was his friend Bobby Darin, imploring Kirshner, on behalf of himself and his fiancée, to “get us a rabbi, a priest—anybody who can marry us; we’ll be there by eight,” Kirshner recalls. A week earlier the pair had secretly taken their wedding-license blood tests in the Kirshners’ living room; now, here was beautiful blond Sandra Dee (née Douvain)—local girl turned Hollywood star—“in a gorgeous purple coat-dress,” walking in and reclining on Donny and Sheila’s white Barcalounger, waiting for the clergyman—“and I’m standing there, pinching myself,” Kirshner says.

  As for the life that Carole tumbled into, it was unique. She and Gerry had to become close friends with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil because, as Cynthia says, “nobody else lived like us”—very young, married to their professional partners (with whom they often passionately quarreled), working all the time, and so competitive that when the two couples drove up to the ski house Cynthia and Barry had rented in New Hampshire, they made bets on which couple’s songs would be played more on the radio. Carole and Gerry had discovered an exotic new food that few Americans knew about in 1961 (and most wouldn’t discover for another twenty years), and they turned their colleagues on to it. After sessions, Mike and Jerry and Carole and Gerry, or Carole and Gerry and Cynthia and Barry, would go to a little Japanese restaurant in Times Square and talk arrangements and demos over the odd, tasty delicacy the Goffins ordered for them: raw fish pressed atop thumb-sized rice blocks—sushi.

  Carole and Cynthia’s bond, much more than Gerry and Barry’s, had a two-against-the-world quality. For although the music industry was full of slightly toughened older women in counterintuitive roles ( Jewish women in their forties were frequently managers of male black R&B singers, for example), most very young middle-class women did not behave the way Carole and Cynthia did. It was embarrassingly unfeminine in 1961 to be a piano-banging, moon/June rhyming, argumentative workaholic. The ideal was the whispery-voiced, wry-smiling Jackie or the aloof mascot-coquette. A September 1961 Life magazine, with Jackie on the cover, ran a long pictorial on the new rage, surfing (which would help spark a fascination with hitherto-boondock Southern California that would, a few years later, draw the music industry there), featuring a photo of a pretty girl with a board. It bears a caption that begins with two sentences that were not considered insulting then: “Most girls lack the strength required of good surfers. Some try hard; others mostly decorate the shallows.” Decorating the shallows was exactly what cool girls were supposed to do, and do well, and want to do. In most late-teen, young-adult circles, Carole and Cynthia would be considered uncool.

  Still, if you jumped from the peer to the historical context, Carole and Cynthia were actually filling large—if little-remembered—shoes. The 1920s and 1930s had been a
kind of unacknowledged Golden Age of women tunesmiths. There was Dorothy Fields, with her lyrics for “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “A Fine Romance,” and “The Way You Look Tonight”; Dana Suesse, who wrote “The Night Is Young and You’re So Beautiful” and “You Oughta Be in Pictures”; and Ann Ronell, of “Willow, Weep for Me” and, thumbing its nose at the Depression through Disney cartoon characters, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”

  But for all their historically ballasted success as women songwriters—and their equal if not superior contribution to hit-making with their husbands—Carole and Cynthia reflexively yielded to their men’s egos. Their songs were always listed as being written by “Goffin and King” and “Mann and Weil”—guys’ names first, period. Both loved their men more than their men loved them. Cynthia, who had been writing theater songs for Frank Loesser’s publishing company and who’d then gone to work writing with Teddy Randazzo, had caught sight of Barry Mann—Brooklyn-macho, high-strung, in cowboy boots—when he walked in with Howie Greenfield one day to try to sell a song to Randazzo, and she was so taken by him (“I had to know him”) that she asked the receptionist where he worked, was told “Aldon”—and applied there simply to meet him. “I got signed by Donny,” she admits, “because I was stalking Barry.” (They married just about a year later.)

  As for Carole and Gerry, the men in and around Aldon saw an unmistakable dynamic between them. Jack Keller, who wrote songs with Gerry two days a week for six years, put it bluntly and forcefully: “Carole was madly in love with Gerry—just totally in love with him. It was obvious. There was no doubt. And Gerry? Gerry was probably not so sure. He was, in my opinion, immature and young.” Says Al Kasha, “I don’t want to put Carole down, but she was the unpretty girl and Gerry, back then, was very handsome. Carole was madly in love with him; you could see it. But to Gerry, Carole was the girl he got pregnant.” Kasha also noticed something else: “Gerry seemed to venerate black women. If you look at the titles of the songs he wrote—‘What a Sweet Thing That Was,’ ‘Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby)’—they were black titles; they were a black woman speaking.”

  While “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was still riding the charts, in February 1961, Carole and Gerry got their first song recorded by the Drifters, “Some Kind of Wonderful.” After that came another placement, “When My Little Girl Is Smiling,” with the group whose strings-suffused majesty they had “stolen” (as Gerry put it) so profitably. Both songs were elegiac, lightly soulful love ballads. Mike Stoller remembers that “Carole and Gerry would come up and play songs for us for the Drifters. I thought Carole was extremely talented, and I was taken by how young she was. I liked the way she played her songs, and I loved the way she sang them.”

  In the sessions, Carole would unself-consciously exert control—her enthusiasm and confidence simply took over. Just as she had with the Co-Sines and just as she had with the cellos on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” she’d proffer her arrangement, instruct in key and phrasing, play drums or piano, and sing backup. “Carole used to hang in there with us tough,” Drifter Charlie Thomas told author Ken Emerson, in Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, with bemused admiration. “She used to pound down. She wasn’t no hard woman—a girl at her age!—but, Jesus, this woman couldn’t sing at all, and she’s going to give me the key? But she played the piano, and it was amazing the songs that she’d give us.” Brooks Arthur, who was the production engineer on Carole and Gerry’s demos, also remembers Carole’s “commanding” confidence. “She was very, very strong in her opinions—she always had a grand vision in her head of a song; she didn’t have to use words; within the piano playing she was spelling the arrangements out for whoever would cover her songs. And when she sat down at the piano, it was drop-dead great. Oh, my God—everything sounded like a hit!”

  Still, for all Carole’s natural assertiveness with singers and musicians—and for all the admiration it inspired—it was Gerry’s will and his temper that dominated their sessions together. “Gerry was the boss—the husband: that was clear,” said Jack Keller. “They were both very excitable about writing, and it was fun. We were, all of us, intense: me, Barry Mann—we were very intense, very cocky. Howie Greenfield was the kind of guy who would lock the door so Neil couldn’t get out until he got that hit. Gerry with Carole, it was the same thing, only Gerry would go in the room with Carole and you could hear Gerry screaming at her: ‘What’s the matter?! Are you crazy?! Can’t you hear that chord?!’ We would fall on the floor, laughing.” Barry Mann says, “It was very frustrating for Gerry to get across to Carole what he wanted to say in a song. He’d try to express himself”—Mann, flailing his hands, pantomimes an agonized attempt to make a point. “He really had a vision of a song,” but he couldn’t play an instrument or read music, so “it would be, ‘No, no! That chord!’ He would get angry—at Carole.”

  With Gerry the intense partner, Carole was viewed as the lighter. Says Al Kasha, “Carole was more commercial, she wanted hits, and she was so fluent it was scary. Gerry was very deep—almost monosyllabic, but brilliant. He was a very slow writer. Sometimes you write through your head, quickly, or you write through your heart. Everything that Gerry ever wrote, he wrote through his heart; they were feeling-full lines. Richard Rodgers said if melodies don’t come fast, they’re not going to be good—they have to come intuitively. But lyrics, you have to take time with. Oscar Hammerstein spent a month on the lyrics of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,’ and Richard Rodgers wrote the melody in minutes. Hammerstein was Gerry and Rodgers was Carole.” Carole’s straightforward tradecraft and lack of angst left her open to being somewhat underestimated by others—as well as underestimated and taken for granted by Gerry.

  At the time, rhythmic, infectious songs that also invented new dances were deemed to have instant hit potential, thanks to the success of the dance craze known as the Twist. Based on a song of that name, the Twist was conceived in an Atlanta roadhouse in late 1958, courtesy of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, but popularized by Chubby Checker. By early 1962, it had become the symbol of the “with-it” style of the young upper middle class. Couples in their twenties and early thirties—mover-and-shaker men affecting the rakish air of Sinatra’s Rat Pack and the Kennedy brothers; their pretty wives in Courrèges-inspired chemise dresses, with teased-crowned flips mounding up behind matching headbands—were Twisting up a storm at Washington and New York parties and at nightclubs like Manhattan’s Peppermint Lounge. The song was hokey even by Top 40 standards. Checker—born Ernest Evans—just repeated the same phrase over and over, in his pleasantly raspy voice. And the dance—elbows out; feet, boxer-stationary on the floor; upper torso and lower torso rhythmically gyrating in opposite directions—wasn’t sensual.

  But the dance wasn’t the point. Rather, the “craze,” as it was called, was a pretext for the expression of a rock ’n’ roll–born desire. Establishment young marrieds wanted to do something new instead of graduating from youth to some pre-positioned Real Adulthood like their counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s had done. (“What’s it like, being married?” a friend of the young newlywed Diane Arbus had asked, in awe, in 1941; even for Ethical Culture girls, going from girl to wife had then signaled a piously regarded instant transformation to maturity.) They wanted to take a little of their youth with them—to hold on to their freshly obtained rhythms and prerogatives even after they started families, joined country clubs, and entered the halls of power. The Twisting young wives who basked in the Kennedy glow—and the even-younger women who couldn’t help but feel drizzled by the stardust sparked by Jack and Jackie’s immediate smashing of the template of First Couple dowdiness (Ike and Mamie, Bess and Harry, Eleanor and FDR)—had married right after college and were busy producing their 2.5 children. Their husbands were ambitious and often idealistic, and the women’s standards, intelligence, and politics were also expressed in their husbands’ vocations; it was understood t
hat the man was achieving for both of them. The women “were holding it all together,” as the narrator in Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, a novel that reflected this cohort a decade later, put it. They were running the family, acquiring and burnishing social connections, creating a chic (that brand-new Jackie word) couple front: Marimekko instead of chintz; fondue pots, not pressure cookers. They were too young for “the problem that has no name” that an older woman, magazine writer Betty Friedan, was now writing a book about—working daily in the New York Public Library, to get away from her children—and they would eventually be the early ones to work, through Friedan’s NOW, to change things.

  Early marriage and motherhood remained glamorous and appealing. Indeed, many within this cohort of women—which Barbara Raskin would bring to life in her 1987 novel, Hot Flashes—would, decades and divorces after the fact, still regard their time of being wives and mothers of young children, during the Kennedy/civil rights years, as their peak experience and the capstone of their identity. The Twist trumpeted the early years of this glamorized youthful domesticity.

  Hot on the heels of the Twist came namesake dance songs like Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time,” which landed on the charts in 1962. At Aldon, the race was on to create the next dance craze, spurred by Donny’s frantic dictate, “We gotta get a smash! We gotta get a smash!” Carole and Gerry came up with “The Loco-Motion.” “Everybody’s doin’ a brand-new dance now / Come on, baby, do the Loco-Motion”: These were the kinds of cheerfully inane lyrics Gerry hated to write. Nevertheless, “The Loco-Motion” was pop-perfect, and the Goffins found its saxophone-powered sound in their usual way, with Gerry the dependent visionary and Carole the trusty facilitator. Gerry heard a compelling sax riff while they were watching Bobby Darin at the Copa, and he asked Carole to re-create it. She did so, and they plugged the sound into the demo.