Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  But this “free” life wasn’t entirely free. She and Gerry still had their Velcro-like relationship. He had moved to L.A., too, ostensibly for the same musical fresh start, but also because he couldn’t really let go of Carole. Her years of adoration and their seemingly irreplaceable writing fit were, as his friend Jack Keller pointed out, the binding his fragile psyche had depended on; he homed in on her, reflexively.

  Gerry rented a house in Beverly Glen Canyon, and his new girlfriend moved in. She was none other than Sue Palmer, Carole’s recent best friend. “It was awkward for Carole to be around Gerry and Sue while Charlie wasn’t there, and the awkwardness reflected the times,” Stephanie says. “We acted differently, but we still had our old emotions.” Carole had been trying to persuade Charlie to move to L.A., but he was resisting. More than the move itself, he was resisting commitment. Stephanie was encountering similar resistance from her boyfriend, John Fischbach, with whom she now sometimes lived, in another Canyon house. John had parlayed a relationship with his University of Colorado friends, the group Lothar and the Hand People, into a position managing the group, and now his ambitions ran even higher: with family money, he was building his own recording studio. “The guys wanted to have their girls, but they wanted to be free, too,” Stephanie says. It was coming to be understood—not just in Laurel Canyon, but everywhere—that the new values benefited young men more than young women. In most cases, girls in love might want to feel free, but their lovers wanted to be free.

  Carole’s emotional Achilles’ heel—men—became evident one day when she briefly returned to New York; she saw Charlie and it didn’t go well. After she left his side to spend a weekend with her mother, she started sobbing uncontrollably.

  How could you learn to be the new woman you were pretending to be?

  Returning to Laurel Canyon after the trip back east, Carole got a lesson by way of a new collaborator, Toni Stern. Strikingly pretty, with a mane of golden, frizzy hair, twenty-three-year-old Toni “was a total bohemian—she lived alone; she didn’t take crap from anyone; she did what she wanted to do,” says Danny Kortchmar. “She was tall and lanky and all the guys wanted her.” Toni had grown up on the Sunset Strip; her mother was a nightclub manager. “As a teenager, I used to get into Sneaky Pete’s, the Whisky a Go Go, and PJ’s,” Toni recalls. “I thought of myself as a mixture of Eloise and Inside Daisy Clover.” Toni had rolled into a relationship with tall, handsome, and slightly older producer Bert Schneider. A few years earlier, Schneider had been a wealthy and very conventional guy. Now, given the presto!-change-o! times, he was a sexy, long-haired, drug-savvy groover king in the New Hollywood, soon to produce Easy Rider and, eventually, the anti–Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds. Schneider paid the rent on Toni’s Laurel Canyon cottage, seeing her when they both chose, and otherwise leaving her to her freedom.*

  Just before Carole moved to L.A., Toni had visited Paris, where a film director suggested she try writing song lyrics. She wrote some and mailed them to Bert, who liked them—and who had a partnership with Lou Adler. Schneider arranged for Toni to meet Carole at the Screen Gems apartment on Sunset. At issue: in Carole’s and Gerry’s divorce a “baby” was being split. Carole got custody of the melody to a song (“As We Go Along”), while Gerry got the words. Finding a new lyric for the song (which ultimately went nowhere) was the occasion for the meeting between the two women.

  Toni recalls: “One of the first things Carole did was hand me a bunch of Motown albums—Marvin Gaye was one—and say, ‘Listen to these; these are real songs.’” The two began to write together—at Screen Gems, then at Toni’s cottage on Kirkwood, or at Carole’s house, just up the block. Opposites, they played off each other. “There was a practicality in Carole that was comforting—I would hand her a whole lyric, neatly written out, and she would sit down and we’d have a song within hours,” says Toni. “Working with her made me feel validated, like I wasn’t a wild child.” For her part, Carole was faced with a young woman who trod with a lighter step than she had ever tried. “I’m sure there was a California quality in me that appealed to Carole,” Toni says. “She was moving from a familial, middle-class lifestyle to Laurel Canyon, where she started to let her hair down, literally and figuratively. We worked off our contrasts.” Toni’s sophisticated take on love dropped a touch of vinegar into Carole’s melodic wholeheartedness. Among the three songs they wrote together in early 1968 was the jazz-flavored, acerbically worded “Now That Everything’s Been Said,” about a woman whose boyfriend has left her, with no warning signs, “to work it out, all on my own.”

  On the afternoon of April 4, word spread like wildfire through the Canyon: on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed by a Southern white man. “The shooting was such a shock to us—how could this have happened?” remembers Stephanie. “There was such sadness, with this underlying feeling of embarrassment—how could this racist violence still be happening in this day and age? Who were these people who were threatened by such goodness? It was heartbreaking for all of us.” For Carole the assassination held special resonance. Her songs with Gerry had done their modest part in running alongside the civil rights moment; the Aldon-sessions world had been, as Jeanie Reavis had said, a little color-blind family; and, by virtue of Carole’s daughters’ half siblinghood with Jeanie and Gerry’s daughter, Carole’s own family was what very few families in 1968 were: biracial.

  The night of King’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy, who had tossed his hat in the ring of the Democratic presidential primary, made a direct, heartfelt plea for calm to the black community—in the most natural of ways, invoking his own brother’s murder. Before that tragic evening, Kennedy had been viewed within his party as a kind of political spoiler, angling in, late in the game, on Eugene McCarthy’s carefully built antiwar perch and threatening to divide the constituency. Now all of that changed. Kennedy’s impromptu remarks forged a bond between the former attorney general and America’s urban blacks and rural Hispanics. The spring of 1968 saw Kennedy flower: touring the country, pressing brown and white flesh, visiting crowded ghettos and sun-parched migrant worker camps, sometimes in the company of farmworkers’ organizer César Chávez. “Bobby,” as people called him now, was greeted with tremendous emotion, and he returned it: hanks of his longish hair falling over his forehead, face flushed, smiling that abashed, toothy smile of his as ecstatic onlookers tugged at his garments. As March turned to April and April to May, Bobby Kennedy was being transformed into a political messiah. People started to believe that he could take the country’s shocked and wounded soul and deliver it, deliver everyone, to the same idealistic mirage world that all the young people were singing about and marching for.

  By now, Charlie had made plans to move to L.A. “It took me a while to get it together,” he remembers, but he booked a flight for early June. Carole was eager to add a male presence to her four-female household. Then, two days before his flight, the news flashed onto TV screens: a man had stepped up to Bobby Kennedy at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, right after his California Democratic primary win, and shot him. He was gravely injured.

  “It was unbelievable; we were just in shock,” Charlie remembers. And there he was, about to move to L.A. “I was afraid for a while,” Charlie says. “I thought maybe I shouldn’t go. I didn’t know if there was going to be a riot, even a war. I felt something cataclysmic was going to happen.”

  The day after he was shot—June 6, 1968—Bobby Kennedy succumbed from his injuries. “That period of assassination was so unreal, so dark and heavy for all of us,” Stephanie says. “I remember being huddled with John in our house, stunned, crying, glued to the television. We’d had such high hopes. We had marched for so many things we believed so strongly about. Now it seemed like everyone who had inspired us to think as we did, to hope as we did: they were just picked off, one after another.”

  The day after the assassination, Charlie Larkey conquered his fears and boarded a plane for Los Angeles, to mov
e into the Wonderland house with Carole, Willa Mae, Louise, and Sherry. Even though he was just twenty-one, his quiet, serious manner served him well as unofficial stepfather to the girls. It felt natural for him—“it was a role I wanted to jump into,” he says.

  With Charlie around, jazz was in the air. The cool jazz of Miles Davis and the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and McCoy Tyner rang through the house now, along with Carole’s favorites, Aretha and Otis and Stax and Motown. Carole was very happy. But then, in the last days of August 1968, the streets of Chicago exploded after the Democratic National Convention. Thousands of antiwar protestors marched, demonstrated, listened to rally speeches (by Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and others), and—especially the tight, brand-new extremist cadre, the Weather Underground—tumultuously clashed with an overpowering army of tear-gas-and-billy-club-wielding police (under orders of Mayor Richard Daley), yielding hundreds of injuries and arrests. Charlie—who had performed with the Fugs on a flatbed truck at the huge antiwar March on Washington the previous winter, who’d been Esquire’s poster boy for the antidraft movement, and who, until his recent birthday, had been one of millions of American males eligible to be drafted while unable to vote—stared at the violence on the TV screen and angrily thought: This is going to expose America to what the powers-that-be are capable of. As well as being outraging, it seemed tragic. Bobby Kennedy’s murder had, as Tom Wicker had written in The New York Times, “added sorrowful emphasis to one of [his own] political themes—the necessity for orderly and just redress of grievances, in place of violent action.” Now there seemed nothing but violence, everywhere.

  The L.A. émigrés coped with the outrage the only way they knew how—through music. As a tribute to the hometown they’d abandoned but would always love, Carole, Charlie, and Danny created a band called The City, with Carole on piano and vocals, Charlie on bass guitar, and Danny on rhythm guitar. They found a temporary drummer in the excellent Jim Gordon.

  Carole’s determination was the guiding force, says Danny. “Her attitude was: ‘We’re gonna write a song today, now!’ while the rest of us were, ‘Uh, do I…feel like it?’ She would sit down and—BAM!”—a song or arrangement emerged. The City found a welcoming listener in Lou Adler, a star within L.A.’s lustrous hip-istocracy. “Lou Adler was the coolest guy I ever met,” Danny says. “His laconic style, his insouciance, his not taking it too seriously. He was a great dresser, and he was living with [Mod Squad’s] Peggy Lipton.” (Later he would have a love affair, and a baby—the first of his eventual seven sons, by various women—with Britt Ekland.)

  The four of them—Charlie on bass, Danny on guitar, Carole pumping the piano, Jim Gordon on drums—put a sophisticated gloss on a raft of new Carole-Gerry songs, three Carole-Toni songs, and two songs Carole wrote with Dave Palmer. Later critics would cite her trademark “hook ’n’ riff heavy arrangements,” evident on this album.

  During the sessions that led to The City’s album, Now That Everything’s Been Said, “Carole would sing or play parts to Charlie and [me],” Danny has said, “and once we got it right, we could hear how great this record was going to be.” At the demo sessions a young organ player, Ralph Schuckett, had been enlisted to help. Schuckett was so excited he was nervous. Here was “Carole King, the famous Brill Building hit maker,” as Danny had hyped her—her songs had been Ralph’s “favorite songs in elementary school and junior high”—sitting at the piano, writing the chord charts when Ralph walked in. “She said, ‘You must be Ralph,’ and introduced herself to me with that wonderful smile, intent on putting me at ease.” This would be a template for her integration into a younger group of L.A. musicians. Many of them would view her, barely past twenty-five, as a legend of a bygone era that had dovetailed with their early adolescence; she would disarm them with her warmth and approachability, earning a role for herself. That role would have a name: earth mother.

  The album cover shows three characters—Charlie (with his huge, sad eyes; long-limbed, in paisley shirt); hipster Danny, in banded broad-brimmed hat; and an intense and earthy-looking Carole in a white Indian shirt—squatting on the grass in front of an old car. In a breakthrough for her, Carole sang solo on almost every one of the twelve tracks. But the album’s most compelling cut was “A Man Without a Dream,” with Danny singing Gerry’s lyrics (“It was such a good song,” Danny says, “even my singing couldn’t diminish its power”) and with Carole’s melody echoing the infectious plaintiveness of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

  Now That Everything’s Been Said was the first album Danny had ever played on, so it seemed like a big accomplishment. But meanwhile, over in England, Danny’s friend James Taylor was one-upping him.

  James, nineteen, had crossed the ocean some months earlier with the idea of being a “street musician” in London. As shambly as he seemed, he left behind a local reputation, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as a young “remarkable virtuoso folk guitarist and singer,” says novelist Russell Banks, who had played big brother to the tormented young James. Once in London, James dug into his jeans pockets and pulled out an address that Danny had given him: that of singer and Beatles intimate Peter Asher. Danny had met Peter several years earlier, when Danny’s King Bees were touring with Peter and Gordon, Peter’s duo with Gordon Waller. Toward the end of the duo’s pop reign, they’d played L.A., and Peter had stayed with newly arrived Danny and Joyce at their Canyon home; Peter offered to reciprocate, should Kootch ever find himself in London. Now Peter beheld, at the front door of his London maisonette, not Kootch, but Kootch’s friend—a handsome, rangy young man bearing a demo tape. Peter’s wife, Betsy, coming out of the bathroom in flannel bathrobe and hair rollers, was struck by the young stranger’s paradoxes. “He was like a big, goofy guy, but he was all Southern grace and charm.” Peter played James’s tape and—Betsy recalls—“both of us immediately knew how gifted James was; it was obvious.” “I heard great music, great talent,” Peter says.

  Peter agreed to bring James to Paul McCartney, his friend and once near-brother-in-law (Paul had been engaged to Peter’s sister, actress Jane Asher). James Taylor would be the first non-Beatle produced on Apple Records, and Peter soon came to know James as “a mass of contradictions: a thoroughly shy, self-effacing person and an extremely straightforward person. He was very smart, but,” as he would learn later, “he was also a junkie.”

  Peter not only obtained an Apple deal for James; he and Betsy put him up. The willowy Betsy Doster Asher, the daughter of a Kentucky Secret Service officer, was affecting a British accent and eagerly growing into her new status-by-marriage as part of a family—the Ashers—so cultured, they’d awed the lowly pre-fame Beatles. Peter’s psychiatrist father and oboe professor mother had opened working-class Paul McCartney’s eyes to the finer things in life when, four years earlier, he’d come courting Jane and had moved in. But, in truth, if Betsy had been a few years younger, she might have crossed paths with James Taylor on MacDougal Street: she’d been a waitress at the Café Wha? and had worked in the office of the Cafe Au Go Go; she’d met Peter while she was working for a publicist and he was singing with Gordon. Now, here she was: playing the beleaguered hostess to this “big kid who was in some ways mature beyond his years” but was untroubledly, and seemingly indefinitely, freeloading on them. Betsy started leaving newspapers open to the “Flats to Let” pages, as a hint that James ought to find his own place. “I thought of James as a kind of nuisance younger brother,” says Betsy.

  The crowbar that pried James out of the Ashers’ maisonette was Margaret Corey, the girl with whom James had engineered a meeting through her brother Richard. She had come to London to study acting (and to link up with James), and, funded by her father, Professor Irwin Corey, she leased a Belgravia apartment, where James joined her. Tiny Margaret (“James would pick her up, she would jackknife her legs up, and he would bounce her up and down like a basketball,” Richard says) was so outspoken and madcap, she seemed to ha
ve enough assertiveness for both of them, which was very appealing to James.* She had once insisted so loudly on putting her feet up on an airplane seat, she was bodily ejected before takeoff. Margaret would walk around the Village in short skirts and see-through blouses; a dancer herself, she was forever developing crushes on beautiful male ballet stars (just before James, she’d pursued and, to her rapture, finally bedded dashing Bolshoi Ballet choreographer Yuri Vladimirov); and she was sophisticated—she knew Lenny Bruce through her father, and she cultivated a friendship with photographer Richard Avedon. As James prepared to record James Taylor at Apple, he found familiar solace in heroin. Being game for any new experience and eager to bond with her boyfriend in the ultimate way, Margaret shot up along with him.

  James Taylor would turn out to be overproduced, an imperfect showcase for this complex young singer-writer who would prove capable of exuding darkness, thoughtfulness, and intimacy in equal measure. Peter Asher, convinced of James’s talent, would vow to get it right the next time. He and Betsy were planning to join the musical diaspora and settle in L.A., where he would concentrate on producing and managing James to best effect. Still, all the best producing and managing couldn’t do what one just-right song could do, as Peter Asher knew better than anyone. It was to his mother’s basement music room that Peter had been summoned one day in 1963, to hear a new song by the still-unknown Paul McCartney, who was practicing there with the unknown John Lennon. Peter descended the stairs—and heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”