A Natural Woman

by Carole King

  Eddy Arnold, Sonny James, Jim Reeves, Kitty Wells, and Marty Robbins dominated the country music charts.

  Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took LSD.

  So did Gerry.

  I don’t believe Gerry knew he was dropping acid the first time he ingested it. I believe someone who thought he was doing him a favor slipped it into his coffee. It wasn’t a favor. After that, Gerry took LSD many more times on his own. He lost touch with reality at first for days, then for weeks at a time for many years afterward, with intermittent periods of lucidity, creativity, and wisdom. The appeal for Gerry and others who sought to “expand” their minds was the notion that lysergic acid diethylamide would make them more creative and metaphysically aware. But people on acid found it difficult to communicate and function in a world dominated by people not on acid.

  When Gerry initially showed signs of paranoia, I saw nothing illogical in that. A person on acid would naturally be paranoid considering that taking LSD was illegal and officials existed whose job it was to catch and incarcerate people who’d taken it. Then he started to exhibit other symptoms of mental illness about which I should have been more concerned, but I was completely unsophisticated about such things. Apart from my brother’s disability, I had never experienced mental illness in myself or anyone else. And the mental health specialists I would eventually consult knew a lot less then than is known today.

  When Gerry’s behavior started to become more irrational I was afraid he’d do something he’d regret later. At that point I was still thinking in terms of embarrassing rather than dangerous. I wasn’t afraid he would hurt our children or me because he had never manifested violent or abusive behavior and wasn’t doing so then. He just kept saying things that almost made sense but didn’t, and doing things rational citizens may think about doing but don’t. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he climbed up on a ladder and painted “Love Your Brother” on the side of our house. However, when he attempted (and thankfully failed) to seriously hurt himself, I knew it was time to call for help.

  At first the doctors diagnosed Gerry as schizophrenic. Then they decided he was manic and treated him with massive doses of Thorazine to bring him down. Not unpredictably, he went into a deep depression. Though his doctors adjusted his medication this way and that and brought him in for psychiatric sessions, Gerry remained in a severely depressed state. The next treatment the doctors recommended was electric shock therapy. Because their patient was incapable of rational thought—hence the need for such a drastic remedy—the decision to give consent was legally in the hands of his young wife. To say that this was one of the most agonizing decisions I’ve ever had to make is to grossly understate the difficulty. I was twenty-three, Gerry was twenty-six, and our daughters were five and three. I didn’t see how I could possibly decide something of this magnitude on behalf of someone else, especially when every muscle in my heart, throat, lips, and tongue wanted to shout, “NOOOOOOO!” But the doctors assured me that all the less intrusive options had been exhausted and a shock treatment would restore my husband to his normal state.

  I didn’t feel that I had a choice. I signed the paper, left the facility, and cried all the way home.

  A decade later, Jack Nicholson would give a stunning performance as Randle Patrick McMurphy in Milos Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s novel. The film gave moviegoers, in excruciating detail, a heart-wrenching insight into the treatment I had consented to put my husband through. Nicholson gave a terrifying portrayal of what it was like to receive electric shock therapy. In Forman’s fictional production, excessive wattage and frequency of shock treatments were used to manipulate the behavior of mental patients. I have no reason to believe that was the case in Gerry’s circumstance, but I couldn’t help but imagine him in McMurphy’s situation. I didn’t think I could make it through the entire film, but because I had been the one who signed the paper allowing Gerry to undergo shock treatments, I made myself watch every frame. Weeping for the young couple we’d been, I lived through Gerry’s suffering and the pain of my decision all over again.

  Shock therapy helped Gerry for a while in 1965, but the circumstances that had led to his ingestion of LSD in the first place had not gone away.

  The summer of 1965 found Gerry in a calmer frame of mind. We were at a band rehearsal when two of the Myddle Class arrived late. Rick and Charlie talked animatedly over each other, words tumbling out of their mouths, until they calmed down enough to report the experience they’d had the night before. The act they’d gone to see at the Café Wha? in the Village was a trio featuring a young black man from Seattle who sang and played guitar in a manner unlike anything they’d ever seen or heard before.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Rick said. “The guy played guitar with his teeth!”

  Charlie chimed in to describe how the guitarist had turned his amp all the way up and transformed the electronic feedback into an otherworldly musical experience. The guitarist, Jimmy James, would later become known to the world as Jimi Hendrix.

  That summer, to the dismay of traditional folk fans, Bob Dylan plugged his guitar into an amplifier and “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Later in the year he performed on electric guitar with a group known as the Hawks. I related more to Bob’s electric music. Evidently, so did mainstream America, but Bob’s purist fans remained adamantly vocal in expressing their displeasure. At one of Bob’s electric performances in 1965 with the Hawks, when someone in the audience shouted, “Judas!” Bob told his band to play louder. No problem. The Hawks would later achieve renown as the Band.

  In San Francisco, Bill Graham electrified audiences at the Fillmore Auditorium with Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the new visual art form of psychedelic light shows. Bill’s acts and the light shows were best appreciated under the influence of the omnipresent pot smoke at the Fillmore, where a contact high was unavoidable unless you literally didn’t inhale.

  In Los Angeles, Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys released an album called Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). I didn’t become aware of the Beach Boys’ music until “California Girls” and “Help Me, Rhonda” migrated to East Coast radio. After all the hours I spent in the ensuing years enjoying the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and other albums, I could see how Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) foreshadowed the Beach Boys’ future work, particularly “Good Vibrations”—which brings me to my encounter more than three decades later with Brian Wilson in the year 2000, when we were both fifty-eight. We were at a Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony. I had come to induct James Taylor. Paul McCartney was going to induct Brian. As Brian and I waited backstage together, someone asked which of us had first used a chord that we both use frequently in our songs. Musicians know the chord as “IV over V.” In the key of C, it would be F with a G bass. In the key of G, it would be C over D. I’ve heard people call it “the Carole King chord” or “C over K.” But Beach Boys fans might just as easily call it “the Brian Wilson chord.” Whatever its nomenclature, musicians and nonmusicians alike will recognize it as the climactic chord in “Good Vibrations” when the vocals come together to create a singular, glorious, unforgettable moment:

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

  If you’re unfamiliar with “Good Vibrations,” that moment alone is worth the download, which you will of course be paying for.

  Brian and I agreed in 2000 to leave it to our respective fans to resolve the “first use” question. “After all,” he said, “fans know a lot more about our lives than we do.” We did know enough in 2000 to affirm how grateful we were to be alive and reasonably well after all our generation had been through. Just then a production assistant came to bring me onstage with James to perform “Shower the People,” after which I inducted James.

  Old rock and rollers never die. We just lose track of time.

  In 1966 Gerry and I were twenty-seven and twenty-four. As the Vietnam War escalated, so did our inv
olvement with the Myddle Class and their age group. Sometimes we joined our younger friends on peace marches. When we didn’t have a babysitter, we brought our children with us. We continued to write enough hit songs to cover our mortgage, household expenses, and Willa Mae, whose presence in our home gave me the freedom to hang out with younger people and act like the eighteen-year-old I’d never had a chance to be. Gerry was increasingly experimenting with hallucinogenics with Aronowitz and his friends in New York, who justified such experimentation on intellectual grounds. People who expanded their consciousness were celebrated by pop culture, the intelligentsia, and the coastal news media as bold, daring, and on the cutting edge. In reality, such explorations were mostly unscientific with no built-in controls.

  Such were the times in the mid-sixties, when Americans were polarized generationally, culturally, and politically. I wasn’t as extreme as Gerry and Aronowitz, but I, too, was finding it difficult to reconcile my association with the corporate music industry with my self-identification with those who were contemptuous of the Establishment. People who made statements against government policies ran the risk of becoming targets of investigation by the FBI, and indeed, the antiwar activist David Harris, then married to Joan Baez, was imprisoned for draft evasion. Others expressed dissent through fashion, music, theater, or art. This made for very colorful times. The Austin Powers films would later put a comedic slant on the sixties, but at the time we were dead serious. The generation with which I identified was trying to stop a runaway war in a faraway land that was killing our young men as quickly as they could be impressed into service.

  Ending the Vietnam War and the draft was a unifying goal for a lot of young Americans, some of whom served, though many didn’t. Some men served reluctantly because they couldn’t afford the college tuition that would have exempted them from the draft. But a considerable number willingly volunteered. Among those fortunate enough to return home from Vietnam were veterans who were proud of their service, who couldn’t understand why they were being vilified. Extreme antiwar opponents were misdirecting their anger at the very Americans who had sacrificed the most. Gerry and I were united in our understanding of that distinction, and we were united professionally in speaking to and for our generation through our songs. But personally, we were falling apart.

  Our family was under a tremendous strain. In addition to taking psychedelics with Aronowitz and hardly ever being home, Gerry was struggling with what we now call bipolar disorder. I sought relief by going to clubs, concerts, and other activities more appropriate for a younger single woman. Our daughters’ yearnings were much less complicated. All they wanted was a loving, stable family with two caring parents at home. But with all the turmoil within and outside our family, the end of Gerry’s and my marriage was almost inevitable.

  I clung desperately to the filament of hope in the word “almost.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Leaving New Jersey

  In 1967, when Jerry Wexler offered to sign me as a recording artist with Atlantic, my first question was, “Can Gerry produce me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know I’m a songwriter, not a performer. And I have kids, so I’m not willing to go out and promo—”

  Wexler was chuckling.

  “You think I don’t know that? Talk to Gerry and let me know what you want to do.”

  As I drove toward the Lincoln Tunnel pondering this incentive for Gerry, I thought, What if we moved to the city? Next thing I knew I was heading down Ninth Avenue to the coolest place I knew: Greenwich Village. First I found a parking space. Then I walked among resident families with young children who appeared to be thriving. Then I began to look for a home. All I could find were cramped apartments and brownstones with concrete yards near crowded schools close to parks inhabited at night by drug dealers. Still I kept looking, hanging on to that filament, and hoping the combination of a move to the city and a producing deal could save our marriage.

  It didn’t.

  When Gerry told me he was going to move to California without me, I didn’t break down until he walked out the door. I didn’t know I had that many tears. Since the disintegration of my family of origin I had dreamed of that mythical man with whom I would have four beautiful, healthy children, live in a big cheery house, and spend the rest of our lives as a happily-ever-after family. I had invested Gerry, our children, and the house on Waddington Avenue with storybook dreams and a fairy-tale ending. Waves of despair crashed around me as all those hopes and dreams were dashed on the rocks of our failed marriage. But I had no time to dwell on dashed hopes and tears. For both emotional and financial reasons, I couldn’t stay in the house in West Orange. I would rent a place, if not in the Village, then somewhere in the city. I wasn’t going to be any less cool than Gerry.

  I found a brownstone I liked on East 10th Street near University Place at the edge of Greenwich Village and was wondering if I could afford it when we got an offer on our house. Because the buyers wanted to move in as soon as possible, I rented a garden apartment near Waddington Avenue so the girls wouldn’t have to change schools. There was so much to do. I had furniture to dispose of and personal effects to pack. With the children at my mother’s, somehow I got through those heartbreaking tasks.

  I stood in the foyer and faced my last moments alone in what used to be our home. My sadness deepened as I walked through the empty rooms and saw the bare carpets with depressions where the furniture had been and faded rectangular areas on the walls where photographs and paintings had hung. The mural on the landing upstairs was a scene of his native Italy painted by a local artist we knew only as Mr. Cellini. The mural would remain with the house, and so would the wall of built-in closets in the master bedroom and the drawers on both sides of the bed that had contained the state-of-the-art hi-fi components on which Gerry listened at earsplitting volume to the rough mixes he brought home from the studio.

  As I stood on the Yves Klein Blue carpet in the master bedroom I recalled the disbelief and grief I’d felt watching reports of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. I remembered seeing Walter Cronkite lose control of his emotions when he delivered the news that the president had died; the shock of watching Jack Ruby shoot Kennedy’s alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, live on television before millions of equally stunned viewers; and the poignancy of three-year-old John Kennedy Jr. saluting his father’s flag-draped coffin as it passed slowly before him. I had been informed and entertained through the black-and-white television in its carefully measured space in the wall of closets that now held nothing belonging to my family except the history we were leaving behind. That bedroom would be my answer to the question members of my generation would ask each other for years afterwards:

  “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”

  I wouldn’t miss the living room that we’d never used because the furniture was too posh to sit on, or the costly curtains and drapes that had been custom-made for the windows of that particular house. But I would miss the Thanksgiving dinners I had cooked in the kitchen and served in the dining room in an uncharacteristic annual display of culinary domesticity. I’d miss the giggles and whispers of sisterly play emanating from the girls’ rooms. I’d miss the family room, the hideous red room, and the swings and the slide that had delivered Louise, Sherry, and their friends to a safe landing in the railroad-tie sandbox.

  And where was my husband, my first grown-up love, my writing partner, my daughters’ father? Where was my Gerry, who, when he was home, spent more time in the Eames chair in our bedroom than anywhere else in the house, sitting, thinking, absently stroking his beard?

  I was about to open the front door to leave when I had the impulse to take one last look at the kitchen. All that remained of the Goffin family in that room were a few empty cartons on the floor where the Saarinen dining table had been. How anticlimactic, I thought with a catch in my throat. I walked through the foyer, opened the front door, stepped outside into the bright, sunny day, and immedi
ately resented the weather for not mirroring my sense of loss. My sense of humor nudged me in the ribs.

  You’re resenting the weather? That’s pathetic.

  A wry smile came as I closed the door behind me. I turned and rang the doorbell. From inside the foyer came the familiar melody: do do mi mi re re re do.

  Still out of rhythm.

  Now I had some big decisions to make. Assuming I could afford it, the house on East 10th Street would definitely work for the girls and Willa Mae, our dog, Lika, Telemachus the cat, and me. And with Jerry Wexler’s assurance that his offer didn’t depend on Gerry producing me, all the elements seemed to be lining up in favor of my moving to Greenwich Village. But something kept holding me back from making an offer on that house. It might have been the pull of all the music and media celebrating California. It might have been because I didn’t want to be left behind. But one thing above all compelled me to turn west. With Gerry moving to Los Angeles, there was no way I would deny my daughters proximity to their father.

  In March 1968, Sherry, Louise, Lika, Telemachus, and I moved to California.

  PART II

  Chapter One

  Wonderland

  I was on the East Coast in 1967 when the Monterey Pop Festival took place in Monterey, California. By the time Woodstock happened two years later in upstate New York, I had already moved to the West Coast. In the ensuing years, every time someone asked me where I had been for both events I was obliged to confess, yet again, that I had been on the wrong coast each time.

  “Holy shit! You missed Monterey Pop and Woodstock??”

  “Yes.”

  Inevitably the response was, “Wow. Bummer!”

  No kidding. But the real bummer was getting divorced from Gerry. When we separated he was twenty-nine and I was twenty-six. We’d been married for nine years. Though I was too upset to write with him, our conversations were civil enough that we could agree on some basic principles. We didn’t want our divorce to be ugly or bitter; we would divide our financial assets equally; and the girls would live with me under joint custody.