Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Friends of Carole’s and Gerry’s worried about Aronowitz’s influence on Gerry. Though Aronowitz had always claimed that he never gave Gerry LSD, Barry Mann, for one, believes that Aronowitz not only plied the already erratic and vulnerable Gerry with the hallucinogen, but that some of the acid he supplied may have been laced with dangerous substances, like PCP. “Gerry got very involved with Al Aronowitz,” says Mann. “With the acid, he prodded him on: ‘Expand your mind.’ I hated Aronowitz. There are intelligent people who don’t use their intelligence for good, just for evil. That’s Al Aronowitz.” Others disagree. Jerry Wexler says, “Al Aronowitz was a brilliant guy” who never received credit for his musical matchmaking or his journalism. Still another who was very close to Carole and Gerry at a slightly later time contends that skilled chemist Gerry may have even been making his own LSD for a while. However he was introduced to hallucinogens, “Gerry,” says Cynthia Weil, “is an example of what that stupid drug culture can do to somebody who is a very fragile psychological soul.”

  Carole, Gerry, and Al Aronowitz formed a partnership, Tomorrow Records, to try to write and produce Beatles-and Dylan-sounding music from talent that Aronowitz would scout for them. Aronowitz scoured north Jersey for a promising act, and he found one in a young group that played at high school and CYO dances and called itself the Myddle Class. It featured a brilliant guitarist, Rick Philp (who would, within a few years, be beaten to death by a psychotic roommate), and a gifted singer and writer, Dave Palmer. But the group’s star, by virtue of his calm, thoughtful air and arresting handsomeness, was its only moderately talented Fender bass guitar player, a lanky boy from a well-off Jewish family in the town of Mountainside, New Jersey: Charlie Larkey. Charlie was eighteen in 1965 when, as he recalls, “Al came to see us and wanted to be our manager. He said he would bring us to his new partners, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.” To Charlie, who was five years younger than Carole, the names Goffin and King rang no bells. “I was familiar with their songs on the radio, but I couldn’t tell you who wrote them,” he says.

  The Myddle Class (faux-medieval vowels were in vogue: the Byrds, the Cyrkle) had originally called themselves the King Bees, after an old blues song, “I’m a King Bee,” which the Rolling Stones had covered. But there was another group called the King Bees—also from upper-middle-class families, working a similar tri-state circuit. Those King Bees included drummer Joel O’Brien, from Great Neck, whose mother was an actress and whose father was a well-known disc jockey, and a Larchmont boy named Danny Kortchmar—the same Danny Kortchmar who happened to be James Taylor’s summers-on-the-Vineyard best friend. “They got their record out first, so we had to change our name,” Charlie says. But the meeting of Charlie and Danny was the crucial beginning of a nexus, pinioned by Danny. As his best friend, James Taylor, once remarked, using Danny’s nickname, “Kootch is like Wompater in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle”—Wompater being the character who unintentionally got everyone else together.

  The circle would include the cultured, hipster-like Joel, who was obsessed with Jean Renoir and Charlie Parker, and whose younger brother was on his way to becoming an art critic; Joel’s gentle, intelligent childhood-sweetheart-turned-wife, Connie Falk O’Brien; Connie and Joel’s best friend from Great Neck, the antic, emotional would-be painter Richard Corey, the son of humorist and social critic Professor Irwin Corey; and Richard’s older sister, Margaret, a tiny, charismatic Carnegie Tech drama student. A photo of Margaret that Richard had magneted to the refrigerator of his Village apartment—“looking very dramatic, in a great, tight dress; her hair pulled back in a chignon,” as Connie O’Brien Sopic remembers it—had led James Taylor, when visiting Richard one day, to be struck by her sad-eyed, imperious beauty. James demanded of Richard: “Who is that girl? I have to meet her.” Radiating from her face was James’s mother Trudy Taylor’s hauteur and strength, Jewish rather than high-WASP version.

  The group also included Danny Kortchmar’s close friend from Mamaroneck, Stephanie Magrino, a petite brunette who’d graduated high school early and moved into Manhattan to attend the School of Visual Arts; and, later, John Fischbach, the tall, lanky scion of Madison Avenue’s Fischbach art gallery, who’d been a Riverdale schoolmate of Carly’s and was a novice record producer. Rounding out the cadre would be the fiercely witty Abigail (née Gale) Haness: like Carole, a lower-middle-class Brooklyn girl and community-college dropout, now go-go dancing on Murray the K’s TV show, on which Charlie Larkey played bass guitar.

  Aronowitz brought the Myddle Class to Gerry and Carole, and they all got down to work, making demos. “The whole time we were working with the Myddle Class, Carole and Gerry were fighting like cats and dogs,” Aronowitz recalled. Given the emotional load Carole was shouldering—Jeanie Reavis and her husband living with Gerry’s baby in the nearby house Carole had helped purchase, and Gerry’s drug use and mood swings—the potential for conflict was rife. Carole took comfort by confiding in her new best friend, Sue Palmer, the wife of Myddle Class singer Dave.

  Against such stressors, Charlie Larkey must have appeared to Carole as quite a vision. He had a privileged kid’s absence of a chip on the shoulder and a suburbanite’s lack of angst. He was handsome in a smart-boy way: rangy, with sensual lips, heavy-lidded eyes, and long, thick hair. Al Aronowitz said, “He was a beautiful kid, and all the girls in high school were after him.” Says Abigail Haness: “Charlie was a hot guy; he had a way about him. He was tall and quiet with dark hair and white skin; he wore tight jeans; he was a dazed and bewildered kid from the suburbs—very sexy.” So appealing was Charlie that when the Myddle Class played a party given by noted magazine photographer Carl Fischer, Fischer picked the young bass guitar player to embody the anti-draft movement on the cover of Esquire. Charlie’s long hair spilled out under a soldier’s helmet and grazed the shoulders of his pea-coat, and his blue eyes gleamed in his sensual face, under the cover line: “You think war is hell? You should see what’s happening on campus.” Young women were supposed to pass newsstands, look at Charlie, and think, I don’t want this cute guy killed in Vietnam! Many of them did just that.

  Meanwhile, stoked by hallucinogens, which he may have been making in a home laboratory, Gerry nursed grandiose visions. During one two-week period, he placed frenetically inspired phone calls to Cynthia and Barry. Gerry “was freaking out, calling us in the middle of the night, on a manic high,” Mann recalls. Others say he spoke of Dylan a lot during this interval, and Brooks Arthur remembers Gerry calling him repeatedly to book a “sixty- or seventy-man recording session, with the players on bleacher seats; I was witnessing Gerry under extreme emotional distress.” “It was a very tough time when Gerry freaked out,” Cynthia recalls. But Carole herself seemed more understanding than alarmed. When someone close to her said, “Carole, you’ve got to get him to a hospital,” Carole replied, “He’s finding himself.” This was a typical reaction of supportive wives of creative men. The crumbling of the superego seemed necessary to access one’s artistic core. Wanting Gerry to break through, Carole cheerled his creative growth and balmed his ego. Similarly, Joan Baez had doted on her then-less-established boyfriend, Bob Dylan, making him breakfast at her Carmel Highlands home, tiptoeing around as he composed, raving about how brilliant he was.

  One night in the middle of his creative fever, Gerry became—there seemed no other word for it—deranged. Cynthia and Barry got a frightening phone call and knew he needed help, but they were in Manhattan and they had no car. They called Donny Kirshner and told him to get to the nearby Goffin house right away.

  Walking in, Kirshner encountered, as he remembers it, “a total disaster, something not-normal—a very dangerous, life-threatening situation,” set in play by Gerry. “A lot of people could have gotten hurt.” Were weapons brandished? “Whatever was available was there.” Kirshner pauses, then—cryptically—clarifies, “Let’s put it this way: it was a situation where, if it wasn’t defused, there wouldn’t have been a Goffin and a King anymore.” (Kirshner says
that there are details of the evening he cannot remember, but he recounts it haltingly, as if not wanting to reveal specifics that are either too painful to recall or might hurt people he’s cared about.)

  Kirshner approached the situation like a hostage negotiator. “A person goes over the brink—whatever it is—and you’ve got to solve it. You say whatever you can to talk a person down from the brink. At first Gerry wasn’t listening to me, or to anyone. Then I went into a spiel to Gerry: ‘There’s too much to lose…’ Whatever I said, Gerry respected it, and Carole was safe. The incendiary situation was neutralized.”

  The dangerous evening ended with a shaken Carole home in safety, along with their young daughters, and Gerry in the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. He was eventually transferred to a longer-term facility, where he received needed treatment that may have included electro-convulsive therapy.* “When they finally put Gerry in the hospital, I just broke down and cried, I was so relieved,” says Barry Mann. “We felt guilty,” Cynthia says. “It was very, very hard,” she says, to have been somewhat responsible for Gerry’s hospitalization for a mental condition.

  Carole had not been immune to the quiet charms of handsome Charlie Larkey, and with Gerry in the hospital, the songwriter and the bass guitar player had time to get to know each other. “She fell hard for him,” a friend says. The two embarked upon what an observer describes as “this really torrid love affair.” But it wasn’t uncomplicated: Abigail Haness, whom Charlie knew from their work on the Murray the K show, was having a fling with him herself. Charlie was very appealing.

  The Myddle Class played second or third bill at the quintet of three-and-four-bands-a-night clubs on MacDougal Street—the Café Wha? and Cafe Bizarre, the Gaslight, the Au Go Go, and the Night Owl (where Danny Kortchmar, Joel O’Brien, and James Taylor’s new group, the Flying Machine,* held forth). One night Charlie brought his secret, married girlfriend, Carole, into Manhattan to see the reconstituted, renamed group that had, in the recent long ago, won the coin toss to call itself the King Bees. Danny recalls, “When we heard that Charlie had Carole King in the audience, boy, did we feel: Carole King’s a legend! She wrote all those great songs! She was the real thing. I had tremendous respect for her before I even met her.

  “She heard us play and she was very encouraging,” Danny continues. “And of course she immediately loved James. She recognized that he had it.” James and Joel were now shooting heroin, a habit that had them speaking a private junkie language, making Kootch, who wasn’t about to get near a hypodermic needle, feel excluded, hurt, and square. James was crashing at Joel and Connie’s Charles Street apartment, sleeping in a chair in the living room, usually either drugged out, playing his guitar, or both. “Music is a language, and that’s what it was for James. He used to say that songs ‘streamed through’ him,” says Connie. A few years later, James said of this time and the times he was institutionalized that such darkness was “an inseparable part of my personality, as innate and incurable as having a size 10D shoe. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have music to totally engross me. I need it desperately.” Connie adds, “James was always layered, and he was always charismatic. And he was really, really smart—smart in the way that you know you’re smart and you don’t talk about it.”

  When Carole invited Danny/Kootch to play on the demos she and Gerry were producing for Charlie and his group, Danny was “more thrilled than I’d ever been in my life”—and once he got to those sessions he was wildly impressed. He’d never been in a recording studio before, and Carole radiated the same dominating surety that she had exhibited in the Drifters sessions. “Such skill!” Kootch recalls. “She knows so well how to make a record, how to pull the parts together, how to arrange for a rock band. She’d say, ‘Play the chinks here—chink! chink! chink!’ ‘Play this line; one, two, play with me!’ Working with Carole was like going to Harvard.” Yet the veneration was part of the problem: Carole’s studio craft made her register to slightly younger guys like Kootch not as the groovy chick she would have liked to be seen as but as an awesome professional.

  At some point Carole experienced what would be the first of several breakups with Charlie over the course of their ten years together—all of which she took hard. “She was madly in love with him,” says a friend, and she was insecure about her attractiveness. Charlie quickly took up with Danny Kortchmar’s friend Stephanie Magrino, whose tiny frame, large eyes, and cascading dark hair made her very attractive to men; Charlie and Stephanie became a couple, moving into an apartment together in Manhattan’s Yorkville, while, with Gerry back from the mental hospital, Carole returned to her familiar role as the sane helpmeet of the unstable genius. Still, Carole couldn’t quite stay away from Charlie and from the free, young life that seemed possible with him. The distance from 1965 to early 1967—years she had spent in her New Jersey tract house—had been millennial. It was impossible to be a young adult during that time and not feel the world changing—and changing for you, to your rhythms, by your peers, according to your idealism. It was, as the Byrds* sang in Pete Seeger’s song, a “turn, turn, turn” of the culture.

  Much of this movement started in San Francisco. Its psychedelic culture seemed to have popped out of the oven fully baked one magical day, with the same suddenness as the Beatles-borne stealth British Invasion and, before that, the youthfulness and idealism validated by President Kennedy’s election. The Diggers, who dispensed free food in San Francisco, and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, with their cross-country bus rides, are today given credit for the burst of LSD felicity—that sense of living in an ecstatically affectionate, private-joke reality, on a chemically tinged plane above the plodding pathos of the straight world. But the goofy-macho air of (the considerably older) Kesey and his infamous psychedelic Trips Festivals were not what attracted middle-class girls in the Bay Area and, increasingly, all over the country. Rather, they sensed a feminine coloration from the start, beginning with the graphic designs of the suddenly flowering posters for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom rock concerts, for Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Sopwith Camel, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other groups of art students, folkies, ex-Beats, and assorted musicians who had mystically synergized a sensual, LSD-heightened hard rock. Although the graphic artists were all male (Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso), the style was baroquely feminine in the extreme—everything swirled or sinewed. The dancing style, too—which was actually a near-simultaneous import from L.A.*—was sensual and langorous, a welcome replacement for the corny, thumping Twist-era dances that had prevailed for seven years.

  To them, too, San Francisco previewed a Renaissance princess way of being a young woman: the long velvet dresses, the mastery of tarot and astrology, the Tiffany lamps, the thrift shop antiques, the Beardsley prints. This persona would be eventually represented by Joni (after she got out of her miniskirt phase), who was right now stage-pattering about a new kind of poor but classy bohemian maiden to a growing circle of fans in folk clubs from Detroit to Philadelphia, New York to Florida.

  San Francisco’s psychedelia—frivolous on its own—was lent gravitas by the historic bohemia of nearby Carmel and Big Sur and, especially, by the ballooning political consciousness of Berkeley, across the Bay. The university had been animated by a compelling activism, sparked by 1963’s Free Speech Movement, which in turn had been preceded by protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee. And in a pattern that had also flourished on other campuses over the past five years, Berkeley had turned into a glamorous incubator of radicalism. By the sheer weight of the new mood’s seductive embrace and the hurtling events of the times, penny-loafered freshmen had been flipped into ardent politicos with what seemed like a 75 percent conversion rate. The same students who, lavaliered and madras’d, had lofted beer mugs in Larry Blake’s Rathskeller in 1964 were, by 1967, sipping espresso at the small marble tables at the Forum and Café Mediterranean: leafing through Student Nonviolent Coordin
ating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society pamphlets and copies of the Berkeley Barb and the Oracle. Few girls who went through Berkeley as the mid-1960s turned to the late 1960s didn’t have at least one friend who’d started out as an A-student goody-goody and ended up on an FBI list.

  All over the country, young women Carole’s age were shopping at new boutiques, some of which—lodestarred by New York’s Paraphernalia, and its designers Betsey Johnson and Michael Mott—took the Mary Quant look one novel step further (paper dresses, neon dresses), but all of which put forth a look of sexuality-with-innocence. Young women Carole’s age were growing their hair long, shifting the facial emphasis from the mouth, which now went pale and invisible, to the window-of-the-soul eyes, which became in some (like Rudi Gernreich’s model Peggy Moffitt) hauntingly aggressive but mostly (English model Twiggy, American model-of-the-hour Cathee Dahmen, and Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick) Keane-painting waifish and full of wonder. In concert with the widened availability of the new, slightly lowered-dose birth control pill,* this winsomeness—the jaunty miniskirts and boots, the big, wide eyes—repelled adjectives like “cheap” and “tramp,” words that seemed relics of a recent-but-long-ago Dark Age. An act (casual sex among unmarried people) that had always been shameful and tragic now acquired a butterfly-winged lightness. Add to all this the now fully realized version of the sexy intellectual that Carly’s circle at Sarah Lawrence had pioneered. Its archetype was a polished young woman from a family of means, who wore an expensive suede jacket and hoop earrings, with the sides of her shiny long hair gathered at the back of her head by a wooden-chopstick-clasped leather thong. This kind of woman, who was suddenly seen on so many campuses, had dashing, Gauloises-smoking boyfriends (in the plural) in rumpled tweed jackets, professors or freelance hipsters who roosted on the fringes of campus. Girls who had started college when “I’m here to get my MRS degree” was still unembarrassedly quipped in sorority bedrooms now looked at these role models—graduate students, TAs—and saw a sophisticated, intellectual, single-or-not questing womanliness. The message was Why stop now?