To record “The Loco-Motion,” they looked around for a black girl singer who had a voice that sounded as much like Dee Dee Sharp’s as possible. They found one—except she wasn’t exactly a singer; she was a girl in the neighborhood who had done a bit of backup singing for Carole and Gerry, and whom Carole had recently hired to be Lou Lou’s babysitter. Her name was Eva Boyd, and she was nineteen, one year younger than Carole. In the recording studio, Eva Boyd was renamed “Little Eva,” and Carole sang background harmonies with her babysitter on the tight, powered song. In weeks—in August 1962—the song reached #1.
Eva Boyd had come into Carole and Gerry’s life by way of another nineteen-year-old singer and new mother who lived in Brooklyn, Jeanie (her real name: Earl-Jean) McCrea Reavis. Eva had been visiting her brother in Coney Island one day, and her brother happened to live a couple of doors down from Jeanie and her young husband. Eva and Jeanie became friends, and fledgling-singer Jeanie encouraged Eva to try to sing as well. Jeanie knew that Carole and Gerry needed a babysitter because she was a new member of the Cookies, a black girl group that did a lot of Aldon session work. The Cookies had an illustrious history; they had predated even the Chantels. The original Cookies had had a record contract as far back as 1954, had won the highly competitive Apollo Amateur Night in 1955, and were then signed by one of Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler’s top A&R men, Jesse Stone, to Atlantic.
On Atlantic, Jeanie’s older sister, Darlene McCrea, and Margie Hendrix and Pat Lyles had a top R&B hit, but something more important happened: Ray Charles saw them and transformed them into his Raelettes, with Margie Hendrix becoming his call-and-response queen (belting out “What kind of man are you?” “Bay-beeee, oh bay-beeee,” and “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more”), as well as his partner in heroin addiction and his lover. In a certain status hierarchy, which would encompass the aspirations of Leiber and Stoller—and Gerry Goffin—the Raelettes were female R&B royalty. So too by extension were the reconstituted Cookies, one of whom was Darlene McCrea’s younger sister, Jeanie.
Jeanie McCrea was born in Brooklyn, but the McCrea family had moved back down to North Carolina when she was two. When Jeanie, her sister, Darlene, and their mother—lured by the better factory jobs and the lack of Jim Crow—returned to Brooklyn when Jeanie was a young teenager, they settled in Coney Island. “We were one of only four black families on our block,” Jeanie recalls, among “a mixture of Jewish and Christian—mostly Italian—families. We were used to being the minority. But we all played together, the black kids and the Jewish and Italian kids. The kids’ parents may not have visited each other, and my parents warned me not to be a ‘nuisance’ around the white families—‘Don’t be running in and out of people’s houses’—but we kids got along fine.” Jeanie attended Lincoln High, one of a handful of African American students there in the late 1950s, during which time President Eisenhower expressed a then-prevalent mood about the rights of Negroes in the segregated South by declining Martin Luther King’s call for civil rights legislation with the remark, “You can’t legislate morality.”
Jeanie’s mother died; she spent the end of her Lincoln High days living alone with Darlene. Jeanie was painfully shy, and although Darlene and Darlene’s friend and fellow Cookie Dorothy Jones thought Jeanie had a fine singing voice—and she did sing in church—Jeanie didn’t think her voice was good at all. In fact, she was so self-conscious that another friend, Margaret Williams, “had to hold my hand in glee club at Lincoln, just to give me confidence,” Jeanie recalls. Right after graduating Lincoln, Jeanie chose marriage as a way to assert her adulthood. As soon as she turned eighteen, in 1960—“the day that I could sign the papers by myself”—Jeanie married a fellow North-Carolina-to-Brooklyn transplant, nineteen-year-old Grandison Reavis, known as Grant, a construction worker. Jeanie was excited when John Kennedy won the presidency. During the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, black voters, who had traditionally eschewed the Democratic Party because of the segregationist Southern Democrats and stuck with the party of Lincoln, turned to Kennedy when the candidate’s brother Bobby Kennedy supported, with ummistakable sincerity—and implored his brother to support—efforts to get Dr. King released from his Georgia jail cell. To Jeanie McCrea Reavis, as for Carole King, Kennedy’s election felt like a new day for America.
Jeanie gave birth to a baby boy, Grandison Jr., and when Jeanie’s sister, Darlene, left the Cookies to join the Raelettes, Darlene—and Margaret Williams, who was also now a Cookie—talked Jeanie into joining the group. Jeanie pushed past her shyness, found her pipes, and did so. The Cookies played at Aldon sessions; the men at Aldon found her a welcome addition. “Jeanie was,” remembers Al Kasha, “especially pretty.” Carole and Gerry wrote a song for the Cookies, “Chains”; between Jeanie’s resonant alto, Carole’s gospel-plus-Tin-Pan-Alley melody, and Gerry’s lyrics combining, as they did, Broadway and black talk (“Chains…My baby’s got me locked up in chains / But they ain’t the kind that you can see”), the song was not only a hit but was seized upon by a then-unknown singer-guitarist in England named John Lennon. (The Beatles later recorded it.)
Carole was pregnant again (“Carole seemed to always be pregnant,” Cynthia Weil says). In fact, she was so pregnant when she and Gerry attended the BMI Awards (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was honored as the Song of the Year of 1961), her acute physical condition, coupled with the very apt meaning of the words of the song she had won for, provided mirth at the festivities. Jerry Wexler watched Carole’s father proudly hugging Gerry, while Carole beamed. Remembering the threatening letters Sidney Klein had written him in the summer of 1959, Wexler smiled to himself at how a son-in-law’s success could turn a father’s disapproving fury into “schepen nachas”: a proud, good feeling in the pit of one’s stomach. However, though Sidney Klein did not know this, his original suspicion of Gerry Goffin as an unreliable suitor was not without merit.
Carole’s desire to please Gerry was evident to their friends. A demo she’d made of a song she and Gerry originally wrote for Bobby Vee, “It Might As Well Rain Until September,” was released as a single. It was Carole’s own, solo vocal, and it rose to #22. But having his wife as a recording artist displeased Gerry. According to Jack Keller, “Gerry told her, ‘That’s it—no more records.’”
By now, Gerry had redeemed himself after the cheerful inanity of “The Loco-Motion” with one of the most beautiful songs he and Carole ever wrote—and for the Drifters, to boot. Carole had conceived the elegiac melody in the car one day. The title that the over-busy young songwriter, mother, and wife chose for it was “My Secret Place,” signifying an elusive privacy; but Gerry, as homage to his beloved West Side Story, renamed it “Up on the Roof.” The song employs harmonic twists as the narrator scales the stairs to his tenement’s tarred top, which is also his emotional balm, his protection, and (“the only place I know / where you just have to wish to make it so”) the launch-site of his fantasies. This couple who in their own lives had resolved the issues of commitment, parenthood, and vocation with such sweeping prematurity now wrote a love song to irresolution: to aching, pining, dreaming. From their anguish-free life they romanticized the flight from anguish—which of course is another way of romanticizing anguish. “Up on the Roof” is Gerry Goffin’s favorite of the songs he has written, perhaps because it taught him a way out. If he craved some risky melodrama to come along and rescue him from his crushingly old-too-soon life, then he would “just have to wish to make it so.” Maybe it was just that simple.
“Up on the Roof” reached #5 in February 1963; Sherry Goffin was born a month later. When Carole went into labor, Cynthia Weil—ever her best friend and chief songwriting rival—was happy. Only seventy-two hours of being forcibly removed from the vicinity of a piano would slow Carole down and enable Cynthia to get a jump on her, Cynthia says, only half-jokingly. (Carole’s next hit with Gerry, “One Fine Day,” for the Chiffons, reached #5 three months after she delivered. The melody of the song—like that of a hit
she would write a year later, “Oh No Not My Baby,” for Maxine Brown—is plaintive and rapturous, a cut above standard pop fare.) Also soon after Sherry’s birth, Carole and Gerry wrote what would be the Cookies’ biggest hit, “Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby),” on which Jeanie McCrea uttered a memorable warning—“So, girl, you better shut your mouth!” coining an enduring bit of jargon. This was the season—late summer 1963—of the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang in the air in the space between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument during what The New York Times called “the greatest assembly for a redress of grievances that this capital has ever seen”; and the year that, by some activists’ counts, 930 separate civil rights demonstrations took place in 115 cities in the South. The ideals of the movement were effortlessly in place in the smoky, laughter- and argument-filled Goffin-King-Cookies sessions. “Our music world was a little world of its own—everyone was like family,” Jeanie recalls. “We related to one another as people; there were no racial issues.” Jeanie observed Carole and Gerry’s arguments, “but they were good arguments; they made the song work,” and she also saw how “frustrated Gerry would get, trying to express what he wanted to hear in the music.”
In early fall the Cookies went on tour. Gerry went with them. Carole stayed home with the children. Barbara Grossman Karyo remembers visiting Carole at Brown Street at this time, “and Carole was upset with Gerry,” for reasons she didn’t spell out to her old school friend. What Carole might have been hesitant to say is that she suspected that Gerry was having a love affair with Jeanie McCrea. Jack Keller, sounding cornered when approached on the subject, sputtered: “They were kids—practically teenagers! Gerry was a kid, in the music business. And a guy may go on the road, producing, while his wife is home. You get what I mean? It’s normal. Everybody does it—it’s no big deal. All I know, there was an affair and whatever happened after, I don’t know.” And yet it was what happened after that was notable. For starters, Carole—ever the professional—continued to work with Jeanie, and with Jeanie and Gerry together, even after getting wind that they were romantically involved.
Carole, Gerry, and the Cookies were all back in New York, recording one afternoon toward the end of November. “I don’t even remember what we were recording,” says Jeanie. “But I was with Carole and Gerry at the time, and we were in the middle of the session—and somebody ran in and said, ‘President Kennedy has been shot!’ We all went into a state of shock. I can’t remember who cried and who didn’t, but for all of us, it was like the earth stood still. Everything stopped. We were in suspension. It was like ice thrown at us. There was such sadness. We loved him! He was such a loved president. How could he be dead? How could someone have killed him?”
Further complicating the intense emotions in the recording studio that fateful day was this fact: Jeanie was newly pregnant with Gerry’s baby. There was no way that Gerry Goffin was not going to claim paternity of this love child, born to this beautiful black woman singer. Such parenthood would transform Gerry into what he yearned to be: soulful, rebellious, black by proxy—in some parts of the country, an outlaw.* Gerry loved West Side Story; now he and Jeanie were, symbolically, a version of the musical’s forbidden lovers Tony and Maria, singing “Somewhere.”
Far from being skittish about the baby, both parents were apparently anticipating the birth, even though they were married to others. The fact that Jeanie and Gerry’s baby was welcomed, and perhaps even planned, is confirmed by the “baby” herself. Dawn Reavis Smith says, “I always knew Gerry was my father, and from the time I was five, he always told me I was ‘planned.’ He said, ‘You were wanted, from the beginning.’ Later, when I was going off to college, I talked to my mom about it; she said they [she and Gerry] did plan to have me. I thought, ‘This is opening a can of worms,’ since she was married to my stepfather [Grant Reavis] at the time.” So, Dawn says, she didn’t pursue the subject further with her mother.
As early 1964 turned to middle 1964, Jeanie’s pregnancy grew undeniably apparent.
What a state of affairs for Carole! Into her already eventful twenty-two years (two daughters, eight top hits including—once you added Steve Lawrence’s saccharine rendition of “Go Away Little Girl” in the spring of 1963—four #1 hits) was thrown this stunner: The husband she was madly in love with was proudly having a baby with another woman. “Did Carole feel betrayed?” a woman who learned of the story later rhetorically asks. “Well, wouldn’t you feel betrayed?” Through it all, however, Carole kept her young marriage intact and continued working with Gerry—familiarly playing the prolific melody writer to Gerry’s tortured lyricist. Carole even sat by while Gerry—with another composer, Russ Titelman—wrote a beautiful love song, “I Never Dreamed,” for the Cookies, geared to Jeanie’s voice. What today seems like complacence, even masochism, was then just bad luck with a man. A woman could leave a man who’d strayed and humiliated her, but clergymen, marriage counselors, and advice columnists pragmatically did not recommend it.*
Jeanie gave birth to Gerry’s baby, Dawn, in July 1964, while still married to Grant (they would remain married for years, until his death). Although this complicated turn of events was a secret to most of the record industry, and even to many at Aldon (and has remained unknown to the public), those close to the Goffins knew about it. When a friend from those days mutters, with anger toward Gerry, “Carole was insecure [about her attractiveness] and Gerry didn’t help much,” it’s a good bet that the affair with Jeanie is the backstory. Astonishingly (by today’s values), Carole cowrote with Gerry a song specifically for Jeanie, as a solo artist, “I’m Into Something Good” (which Jeanie recorded and which only later achieved hit status, through Herman’s Hermits). Writing music was what Carole did; writing it with Gerry was what she did. Her talent and work energy had always been her calling card with men, her most comfortable and effective mode of bonding. So, she would stay with Gerry and write songs with him, even songs for Jeanie.
Still, what must it have been like to have your colleagues watch you being cuckolded? In Superior Women, her The Group–type effort about five women who come of age in the early 1940s, the novelist Alice Adams (whose finest work, Listening to Billie, virtually defined midcentury American female bohemia) creates a character named Janet Cohen, a smart, feisty Brooklyn girl married to, and very supportive of, a charismatic playwright named Adam Marr. One night, at a dinner party the couple are hosting after he becomes famous, Marr sadistically lets it be known to the highly discomfited guests that the woman he is infatuated with, and with whom he is forming some significant liaison, is not his wife, Janet, but rather one of the guests, a shy, beautiful black model named Sheila. As Janet’s friends ache on behalf of their humiliated friend, “Adam is looking at [Sheila]…with the most evident delight, with obvious lust, and absolute admiration, and his look is observed by all his guests, none of whom quite dares to look back at Janet,” who is trying to maintain her dignity with her steely pragmatism. Janet would seem a stand-in for Carole in 1964.
Before year’s end, Carole and Gerry moved to a tract ranch house in West Orange, New Jersey, one town away from Donny. Cynthia and Barry and Carole and Gerry had recently confronted Donny for better contracts. Kirshner had, without telling them first, sold Aldon—and their contracts—to Columbia/Screen Gems (for the even-then low sum of $3 million) and become head of its music division. But while Cynthia and Barry had made a stand against Donny, Carole and Gerry had not. There was some inexplicable pull between the young couple and the song publisher; the successful Goffins could certainly live without Kirshner and yet not only did they remain in his stable, they put themselves in his geographical locus. Their instinctive need to live near Donny would eventually prove providential.
Also moving to New Jersey at this time were Jeanie and Grant Reavis and their children—or rather, their son and Jeanie’s baby daughter with Gerry. Carole and Gerry purchased a house for the family. “They had a lot
of money and the Reavises were poor; it was a simple decision for them,” says Gerry’s next wife, Barbara Behling Goffin, who heard the story from Gerry later. “Carole’s attitude was, Gerry was responsible for the baby, so they would do this,” says a close friend of hers.*
Carole’s tolerance of Gerry’s love child and her financial generosity to the baby’s mother were not immediately karmically rewarded. The rest of 1964 found her struggling to write decent songs with Gerry, even though Aldon had clearly crested. Its girl groups were being out-shone by Motown’s Supremes, Marvelettes, and Martha and the Vandellas. And Berry Gordy deftly read the nation’s mood, in which the idealization of racial harmony and the love affair with soul music were best served up with tear-wiping buoyance—and with a rhythm section that matched, like the beat of an implanted heart, the bounce of freeway driving and the pulse of young bodies on a dance floor. The services of all those earnest young Alan Freed Show alums were needed no more. As author Ken Emerson puts it, “Berry Gordy’s ‘Sound of Young America’…proved that black artists did not need white writers to reach a broad pop audience.” Writing now for a desultory roster consisting of Columbia/Screen Gems TV teen idols Paul Petersen and Shelley Fabares, Carole would remain the unfussy pro while Gerry’s mood would darken. At Brown Street Gerry had repeatedly lamented to Jack Keller, “I can’t keep writing songs for Bobby Vee; I don’t want to do this in five years.” His complaint would now grow more desperate. Two events in late 1964—the Beatles’ arrival in New York and Bob Dylan’s revolutionary supplantation of pop lyrics with poetry—would push Gerry to the brink, putting Carole in danger.
Girls Like Us Page 13