Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  When Cynthia contacted Phil to tell him that she wanted to fix him up with Carole, he called back from Bosnia, where he was researching a movie. “I’d love to meet her,” he said, enthusiastically, “but I won’t be back in time.” Cynthia persisted; once Phil was back in L.A. and Carole was again staying with Cynthia and Barry, Cynthia engineered their meeting at a dinner party through her friend Beth Rickman. “I told Carole, ‘This guy could be for you!’” Phil had arrived with a date, but Beth diverted Phil’s date’s attention, and Carole and Phil “spent a lot of the evening together,” Cynthia recalls. The next night he came to our house and picked her up for a real date. Barry and I said, ‘Oh, you kids! Be sure to be home by midnight’ and ‘No necking in the car.’”

  In a week or so Cynthia got a call from Carole and Phil, who announced to their matchmaker, in unison, “We are madly in love.” “They were even righter for each other than I ever imagined,” Cynthia says. “They like the same movies, they like the same food, politically they’re on the same wavelength.” But those similarities paled next to the point that Cynthia next makes: “Phil is the first guy who has ever taken care of Carole the way she should be taken care of, and who appreciates her in the way she needs to be appreciated.” Interviewed for this book in 2003, Cynthia said, “She seems so happy, and I’m happy for her.”

  Roy Reynolds—having lived through Rick One and Rick Two and Johnny B with his friend—felt just as euphoric about Phil. “Carole is with the man she should have been with her whole life!” he enthused, in 2003. “She told me she’s happy for the first time.”

  With Phil, Carole returned to her Brill Building social set after decades in self-imposed exile. She and Phil spent time with Barry and Cynthia and with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and their spouses. Mike sat next to Carole at the wedding of Cynthia and Barry’s daughter Jennifer, and—his mind racing back forty years, to when Carole and Gerry used to try out their new songs for the Drifters—he sheepishly confessed, “I always loved the way you sang. The only reason I never recorded you was that you weren’t black.”

  Carole’s 2001 album, Love Makes the World—of mostly new songs she wrote with others—radiated her new sense of satisfaction. The title track is as infectious, whole-hearted, and commercial as any of her Brill Building or early-1970s hits, but the album implicitly acknowledges that the music scene has moved on, and Carole seems willing to make do with her slightly patronized but affectionate placement in the baby boomer* legends market. Her voice is warm, slightly hoarse, earnest but natural—the theatrical and accentless Tapestry enunciation has given way to the soft, frank Brooklyn vowels that survived thirty-five years’ diaspora. There is a sense of tying up life’s loose ends, as she sings her and Gerry’s deliciously mournful “Oh No Not My Baby” with only her ex-husband Charlie on bass. Charlie had since remarried, had another son, and divorced, but he was still family, and the intimacy of the collaboration honors the significance of their marriage. (Not that everything is down-memory-lane; she also performs a duet with Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds.) One year before her sixtieth birthday, settled in with Phil, Carole seems in this album to be celebrating her sophisticated maturity: on the cover, in a chic, low-cut black sweater dress and Glenn Close–in–Fatal Attraction curls, she’s hugging herself and smiling.

  Carole was a grandmother of three now, by way of her daughters with Gerry. Sherry a producer of children’s records, and her husband, Robbie Kondor, had two children; singer-songwriter Louise and her husband, Greg Wells, would soon have their second child. As for her children with Charlie: Levi, a University of Texas Ph.D. in cognitive science, would soon marry his girlfriend, Bina, and Columbia University–educated Molly was a sculptor; her large, bold, angular, painted wood pieces have been featured in gallery shows.

  After having been the first female rock star to actively campaign for a president (back when she and James starred in the 1972 McGovern fund-raisers), Carole had never stopped being political: campaigning for Gary Hart in 1984, and working with her good friend Bill Clinton on wilderness issues throughout the 1990s. For the 2004 election, she actively campaigned for her friend and Idaho neighbor John Kerry, traveling the country and giving intimate concerts in donors’ living rooms. The next year she held a concert in Hyannis, capturing the spirit of the campaign. The 2005 live double-CD The Living Room Tour (which became a strong seller through the new boomer merchandising godsend, Starbucks) is Carole’s retrospective of her forty-year career. In her fans’ yelps of joy at her candor (she shout-sings: “I’m sixty-two…and there are so many [songs] I’d like to do”) and in their sing-alongs on the gems of her oeuvre, they’re pronouncing her a national treasure. She’s finally stopped trying to beat that mixed-blessing verdict and seems content to join it.

  Her voice on the album is Brooklyn-cadenced and emotional. It’s a voice that says, “It’s too late, baby, whoa, it’s too late”: too late for her old ambivalence about fame. Among the tracks, she treats fans to a medley of songs that she wrote, she says, “with Gerry Goffin?”—the gentle interrogative is contempo-speak—and also asks her fans to honor him: “my first husband, my first lyricist, and still a very dear friend,” understating the tenacious bond that had withstood their early angst and their combined six marriages to subsequent spouses. Even today, Gerry, his fourth wife, and most of Carole’s and Gerry’s collective children, including Dawn Reavis Smith and her children, spend Thanksgiving with Carole.

  At the live performance’s close, she hoarsely shouts, “I love you!” and the crowd whoops: Likewise! But it is another exhortation of hers—“We’re Am-ER-ica; we’re gonna make it!,” ad-libbed into the refrain of “Sweet Seasons”—that lingers. That hope-against-odds sensibility had permeated Tapestry, and it had gained fresh necessity in the post-2000-election culture war, which the song was now addressing. And its spirit had been born on that long-ago day when, with friend Camille Cacciatore at her side and the Brooklyn phone book in hand, Carole Klein of Sheepshead Bay became Carole King of America.

  In March 2007, the National Association of Record Merchandisers and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voted Tapestry #7 on a list of two hundred albums that every music lover should own (Sgt. Pepper was #1). Tapestry had inched out Dylan’s celebrated Highway 61 Revisited.

  In late November, James Taylor joined Carole in headlining for three nostalgia-filled sold-out nights at the Troubadour. Danny Kortchmar, Russ Kunkel, and Leland Sklar backed them up; Gerry was given props from the audience.

  Carole is no longer with Phil Alden Robinson. By age sixty-five, she was single again. Danny had bemusedly noted that the responsible, conventional girl he’d first met as the “Brill Building pro” had—surprisingly—gone on to live “three different lives; maybe four different lives.” To which one might add: “And counting.”

  surviving

  Jim Hart seemed to provide just the right mesh with Carly. “He was so attractive, and very smart, and well read—and Carly is high-maintenance,” says Jeanie Seligmann, voicing a widely held opinion. “Not just anybody would want to take on this very complicated person. So it had to be someone where their needs coincided. It seemed that Carly both needed to be taken care of and needed to take care of Jim. She had the money, for one thing, and she was eager to encourage him to reach his potential as a writer, while he could tend to her emotionally.” Jim actually relished that latter task; he found Carly’s efforts against her phobias touching and heroic. “Fifty percent of Carly’s day is spent warding off the fear that something is going to kill her—imagine having to live that way!” he says. “But she lives in a kind of hopefulness that I’ve seen very few people live in. She wraps her heart around her craziness and she does it in a way that’s genius; she out-foxes her own neuroses.”

  Jake Brackman agrees. “Jim is very steady. He may be in a kind of low-grade depression all the time, but it works for him; it makes him mellow. Carly is an emotional roller coaster. Jim will listen to Carly’s slight-of-the-day; he’s not entitled t
o his own drama, he’s not competing with her. She can take the stage all the time. And he has that social quality that James was totally lacking: you can take Jim anywhere and he won’t look at his shoes; he’ll look at you, and he’ll say he had a wonderful time and mean it.” Of Carly’s celebrity-studded world, “where he was constantly hobnobbing with Bill Styron and Art Buchwald and Mike Wallace and John Updike”—not to mention Jackie Onassis—Jake says, “Jim completely held his own with these people—he can carry on a literary conversation as good as they’re gonna get. His social relations are extremely smooth. He’d learned from a very young age how to ingratiate himself with the Jesuit priests. He became best friends with Mike Nichols, independent of Carly. When Carly and Jim were having problems, Mike would take Jim’s side.”

  Her new husband’s eloquent poetry lifted Carly’s romantic heart. Soon after they married, they traveled to Quebec, and he took from their intimacy there the sense of being “north on the plain of Abraham / cupping these few droplets of flame / as for the first time.” Theirs was “a love,” he wrote, “that has searched for its landscape,” that “pierces a new air, kisses your face / and changes it after all these years.” He awaited his wife and lover’s “breath once more / to light the flesh of this day.”

  Carly worked with Jim on the theme song for Mike Nichols’s next movie, Working Girl. Viewing the opening footage of the movie—the Staten Island ferry gliding past the Statue of Liberty toward Manhattan’s skyscrapers—Carly knew she wanted to score it with “a hymn with a jungle beat.” It was Jim who turned to Finnegans Wake to come up with the first line of the soaring anthem, “Let the river run / let all the dreamers wake the nation.” Carly and Jim together turned to the poets William Blake and Walt Whitman,* and came up with the hosanna “Come, the New Jerusalem,” the song’s emotional fulcrum. “Let the River Run” is one of Carly’s most stirring songs; and when she was named Best Song winner at the 1988 Academy Awards, she took the stage and said, “Thank you to my husband, Jim Hart. You wrote the best lines of the song—thank you, sweetheart.”

  Still, Jim says he lost his temper a lot that first year and a half of marriage. One blowup occurred in October 1989, when Carly and Jim were set to attend a Rolling Stones concert at Shea Stadium with Carly’s twelve-year-old son, Ben; John Kennedy Jr.; and Allen Ginsberg and his partner, Peter Orlovsky. It was shortly after a New York tabloid headline blared “The Hunk Flunks,” about Kennedy’s second failure of the state bar exam, and the humiliated young man didn’t want to be seen in public. But Carly took him in hand. As Jim recalls, “She picked up the phone and said to John, ‘You listen to me! This is not open for discussion! You are going to that concert and you are going to have the time of your life and there’s no argument about it!’ She was ‘Auntie’ with him.”

  Carly was right about Kennedy having a great time at the concert, but she hadn’t predicted the trouble she’d have with her husband’s jealousy. A preconcert meeting between Carly and her party and Mick Jagger was arranged—but Jim was left out of it. As he recalls, “We get to the stadium, and I’m aware that I’m excluded from the meeting. It’s made to look like an accident but—I have really good radar—it’s no accident.” As Carly, Ben, and John went backstage to greet the rock icon who had been a seductive presence in Carly’s life since 1971, “I went bat-shit,” Jim says. “I was out-of-my-mind jealous about Carly being with Jagger.” When everyone was back in their seats and Jagger was onstage, “I just glowered through the whole performance”—so intensely that “John got scared; he was thinking, ‘Jesus, who is this guy?’” Later, back at the apartment, “I blew my top.” Jim was so enraged at Carly for what he felt were her lingering feelings toward Jagger that Ben, alarmed, called the police. Later, Carly screamed sense into Jim: “Don’t you see? I could have married those people! I didn’t want those people! I wanted you!”

  True to the promise of their marriage—and to Carly’s faith in Jim’s talent—Carly supported Jim while he plugged away at his novel, Spike and Dive. The expectation was clear: “‘Jim, write the Great American Novel.’ And Jim tries to write the Great American Novel, and it’s a really tough road,” he says. Being married to Carly and being close friends with Bill Kennedy opened doors. But the writing itself went slowly, and, as Jim says, “people of integrity and credibility and professionalism don’t mess around” with unmaterialized books, so the connections only went so far. The novel he and Carly thought would take a year and a half was not completed in two years, nor three, nor four. Carly’s friends worried that her faith in Jim’s ability to turn his desire to be a writer into published work was now like her faith in James’s ability, during their marriage, to turn his stated desire to quit heroin into actually quitting. Jim felt tremendous pressure. “I said, ‘Am I nuts at my age’—forty-two—‘to try to write a novel?’” His friends had varying opinions. One said, “Look, Jim, I wrote for twenty years and no one knew who I was—you gotta keep doing it.” Another said, “Do you want to be a failed novelist, or a successful insurance man?”

  During these same years that Jim toiled and stalled on his novel, Carly was very productive. Jake had once seen her as having two roads to choose from: either being an arts-and-cause maven like Andrea or being an artist and presence in her own right. Now, moored in a marriage to a man who tended to her emotionally, and at the same time anxiously mindful that the career revived late in the game through Coming Around Again and “Let the River Run” wouldn’t stay afloat forever, Carly became both the social maven and the workhorse. She began writing the first of what would be four children’s books, Midnight Farm, and working with Jake on an opera, Romulus Hunt, as part of a collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and Washington’s Kennedy Center; she opened a small Manhattan art gallery named (after her Academy Award–winning song) Riverrun; and she would eventually open, with her friend Tamara Weiss, a boutique, Midnight Farm, that is still thriving on Martha’s Vineyard.

  Most important, she released two albums by the end of 1990 and one in 1992. One of the 1990 offerings was My Romance, in which she wisely renewed the standards franchise that would serve her well in years to come, this time interpreting a group of wistful torchers—“My Funny Valentine,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Bewitched,” and “Time After Time,” among them—like the kind that she and Tim Ratner had fallen in love to when Jonathan Schwartz played them on his all-night radio station. She also included the Irish ballad “Danny Boy”: the first song she had ever learned to sing, courtesy of her “good” nanny, Allie Brennan (as opposed to her mean nanny, Nancy Anderson), to whom she dedicated the album. The other album, Have You Seen Me Lately? featured her new original compositions. It was a pressing midlife quest; as she frankly described it to The New York Times’s Stephen Holden, she was “middle-aged and feeling a decaying process starting.” Having been “brought up nonreligious” (yet now married to a former seminarian), Carly was finding that “I have more questions and am trying to find answers more concentratedly than I’ve ever had to in my life.” But the album, in which (as Holden restated the now-tedious trope) her “white, upper-middle-class adult sensibility” was trained on “the longings and insecurities of people who have it all, with wrenching honesty”—and which was delivered in Carly’s typical “at once open-hearted and high-strung” voice—didn’t catch on like its predecessor, Coming Around Again, had. But the 1990s would produce so many life-and-death challenges that Carly’s palette of concerns—expressed in her songs of (as Holden put it) “anxious desire and erotic competitiveness”—would give way to more primal issues.

  Carly’s next album, the soundtrack for her friend Nora Ephron’s 1992 directorial debut, This Is My Life (about a single mother raising two daughters), gave her a minor hit (#16 on the adult contemporary chart). “Love of My Life” came to her one night when Sally and Ben were going to bed. Sally, eighteen, would soon be off to Brown University, but Ben, fifteen, had had a bumpy boyhood. Between his dyslexia, his bouncing
around to various schools, and a character much like his father’s (but warmer), Carly had always been anxiously enmeshed with him. As the youngsters strode to their bedrooms that night, Carly impulsively called out: “You are the love of my life!” The angst of motherhood—both prosaic and operatic (“My heart is riding on a runaway train!”)—illuminated the song.

  Since 1981, Carly had avoided playing large venues. Her fear of flying and her anxiety disorder hadn’t receded. Now she had Jim drive her and her backup band to local concerts in a Winnebago. Carly used her affliction to bond with and help others. The singer-songwriter Marc Cohn (who’d just had the hit “Walking in Memphis”) became one of the young male friends to whom she would also become a big sister. “We had soulful conversations” during the early 1990s, Marc recalls. They shared “extremely debilitating disorders where you have to function despite being in a very anxious place.” Carly took matters in hand. “She wrote me a contract for getting over my writer’s block: I would sit down at the piano for an hour a day. She gave me a long list of things I couldn’t use to keep from writing—I couldn’t use my divorce; I couldn’t use my anxiety. Then she made me sign it. It was incredibly Carly-esque: generous, understanding, and funny.” Marc did such a good job of overcoming his anxieties “that when things got easier, I almost didn’t want to tell her; there’s a part of that symbiotic friendship when it’s easier to be equal.” But he did tell her—“and she was thrilled for me.”