A Natural Woman

by Carole King

  Why “Colour” with a “u?” For the same reason I still call a cell phone a “mobile” (rhymes with “no guile”). I had been in Ireland. When I travel I tend to pick up accents, customs, and spellings. The Irish spellings and names for certain things stayed with me long after I had returned to the United States. Another thing that stayed with me was the result of time I had spent with Irish filmmakers, notably Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan. After my return to America, I was moved by a number of films to write songs for Colour of Your Dreams. A decision by the leading male character at the end of After Dark, My Sweet prompted me to write “Lay Down My Life.” The impassioned monologue delivered by Sean Penn as Terry Noonan in State of Grace led to “Just One Thing.” And I wrote “Wishful Thinking” after watching Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s documentary about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Filmed in 16-millimeter black-and-white, Weber’s stark documentary pulled no punches in showing Baker’s tragic deterioration from a charismatic, talented young man in the 1950s to a wasted junkie in the 1980s. As painful as I found the film, it put me in the right mood to write a song about the desire for something unattainable. In addition to being a song about romantic yearning, “Wishful Thinking” embodied my wish that Chet Baker’s personal history had not turned out as badly as it did.

  I wrote and recorded “Now and Forever” at the request of Penny Marshall, who was directing a film called A League of Their Own about female baseball players in the 1940s. I had expected the biggest hurdle to be delivering something Penny liked. When I heard that she was going to use my song over the end-title credits, I was elated. And then I got the Call.

  I picked up the phone with a cheery “Hello?” and heard a voice say, “Caaarole?”

  I didn’t need caller ID (not yet in common use) to tell me who it was. If I’d had any doubt, I would have known for sure when I heard Penny say, “We have a prahhhblem.”

  With Madonna starring in the movie, the problem was that Madonna’s contract required Penny to use one of her songs over the end-title credits. With Solomon-like wisdom, Penny put Madonna’s song over the end titles and shot a new sequence for the beginning of the film over which she used “Now and Forever.”

  I took so much pleasure from learning to play, on guitar, a song from R.E.M.’s Out of Time album called “Losing My Religion” that I was moved to write, on guitar, the song “Colour of Your Dreams.” As at Burgdorf, composing on guitar helped me write more simply because I was limited to the chords I could play on that instrument. I was thrilled to have Rudy’s expertise to put across ideas I had imagined but couldn’t play. Knowing his abilities, I often wrote with what Rudy might play in mind. One of my favorite things to do when we were recording was to “play Rudy.” With the tape rolling, I communicated through body language where I wanted Rudy’s solo to go next. He never failed to understand and deliver the music I was hoping to hear, which he took to the next level by adding improvisations of his own.

  And in “Friday’s Tie-Die Nightmare,” with phrasing reminiscent of that of Bob Dylan, I described a dream I’d had about the New York City subway.

  It was not my first song about the subway.

  Chapter Seven

  Lessons from Underground

  My relationship with the subway began before I was born. My pregnant mother rode it frequently because she had already learned Subway Lesson 1: when the subway runs smoothly, as it does most of the time, it’s the most efficient and affordable method of getting around New York City.

  A destination on the same side of Manhattan is a straight shot on a local, with the possibility of catching an express along the way. One of my earliest experiences of Murphy’s Law occurred at a station where I had to decide whether to wait for an express or take the local that had just pulled in. A local makes more than twice as many stops as an express. If I got on a local, inevitably the express roared by while the local was slowing down for one of the stops the express didn’t have to make. If I got off the local at the next stop and waited for an express, three locals would come and go before the next express showed up. By guessing wrong and arriving late time and time again I learned Subway Lesson 2: the only way to catch an express is to leave early enough to make the entire trip on a local.

  After I achieved public recognition, friends and family members counseled me to stop taking the subway. But I didn’t take their advice because I, too, had mastered Subway Lesson 1. Anyway, people on the subway rarely recognize me, and when they do, they either know I don’t want to be bothered, or they think, That’s not her. She wouldn’t be takin’ the subway. With few exceptions, New Yorkers tend to be matter-of-fact about celebrities. One day I was part of a crowd rushing from the 1 train at Times Square to catch a crosstown shuttle when a well-dressed man in his forties strode up alongside me. Without missing a step, he said, “Carole King! What are you doin’ takin’ the subway?”

  Keeping up my own stride, I answered, “Same thing you are. Tryin’ to get from point A to point B!”

  I was one of the last to squeeze into the shuttle before the doors closed. The well-dressed man didn’t make it, but as the train pulled out, its metal wheels screeching around that first long curve, I saw him smiling. I’d like to think it was because he appreciated my answer, but it was probably because he had just seen another shuttle pulling in.

  The subway is most useful during rush hour, when it’s especially difficult to get a taxi. Change of shift for most taxi drivers is at 4 p.m. I know this because of all the years I spent trying without success to get a taxi to pick me up between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon. On the rare occasion when a driver stops and admits you—which he will do at that hour only if your destination is directly on the way to his company’s garage—it’s a mixed blessing. It’s rush hour. Delay is inevitable. Surface streets are filling up with commuters’ cars headed toward bridges and tunnels. You have eight minutes to get to your daughter’s dance recital downtown, and where are you? Sitting in traffic at a dead stop, watching the meter tick up waiting time while trains are racing unobstructed below you. Five minutes later, seeing that traffic hasn’t moved, you think, This is ridiculous! I’ll get there faster if I walk. You pay the driver and exit the taxi only to find that it’s starting to rain.

  When the weather is bad, it’s remarkable how similar taxis are to birds in a flock who change direction all at once. When the “Off Duty” light of every taxi in Manhattan goes on simultaneously with the first drop of precipitation, you’d best have either an umbrella or a MetroCard.

  The subway is a fascinating place to people-watch. I spent many hours in the fifties and sixties on what was then called the BMT.* During the forty-five-minute ride between Sheepshead Bay and Times Square I often passed the time making up stories about the people around me. In the late fifties most of my narratives went as far as my imagination would allow. This woman with the red-rimmed eyes has just come from losing an argument with her husband. That man with the tortoiseshell glasses hates his job. The gaunt woman in the brown coat is on her way to yet another doctor to see if this one can cure what all the other doctors have told her is an incurable illness. The man grading papers is a teacher. (Duh!) The man sitting in front of me is an inconsiderate boor. Why? (And here’s where imagination stops and reality kicks in.) Because I’m on my way to the city, I’m visibly pregnant, and I’m hanging precariously on to the strap above him while he, an apparently healthy adult male, is studiously reading the same page of the New York Times over and over. I can almost hear him thinking, If I make eye contact with her, I’ll have to give her my seat, so I’m not gonna look at her.

  And he didn’t look at me. Not once.

  There must have been a coffee factory under the Manhattan Bridge. I never found out where it was or if it even existed, but I will forever associate the aroma of roasting coffee with the V and M shapes of the painted brown steel braces framed against the sky as they did the important work of holding the Manhattan Bridge together. The journey across the bridge gave Manhattan-
bound commuters ten minutes of daylight before the train descended into a tunnel beneath the cobblestone streets of the city.

  Observing my fellow riders, I began to see a pattern. Some days everyone looked good to me. The fellow with the early-morning grumpy face whose ratty trench coat needed cleaning might have been handsome under other circumstances. I saw beauty in the countenance of a college student who was frantically trying to clamp a bunch of papers back into her aptly named loose-leaf notebook before we arrived at her stop. And in the full-moon face of a heavyset woman with several chins whose burgundy-colored pumps appeared too small to contain her feet, let alone her entire weight, I caught a glimpse of the slim, attractive girl she had once been.

  Other days everyone looked ugly. I viewed the group of teenage kids playfully shoving each other as a bunch of juvenile delinquents planning to rob the woman standing next to me, or worse, me. I was annoyed by the tall woman with flaming red hair and mismatched rouge who was stinking up the entire car with a corned beef sandwich that she was eating on the fly. At the time I didn’t think about the possibility that she might have had to skip breakfast so she could get to the electric company in time to pay the bill. And the word “ugly” categorically defined the slightly balding middle-aged man pressed up too close against me with his coincidentally roving hands. (“I was just trying to keep her from falling,” he might have said, had he been asked.) At first I felt violated. Then I became defiant. I was not going to be a victim. I jammed one of my spike heels hard into his ankle. The man gave a muffled yelp and quickly took his hands off me.

  I’m not sure exactly when I figured out that the way I perceived others on a given day was a reflection of how I was feeling. I do know that rather than revealing itself in something like an Aha! moment, the realization was subtle. It came to me gradually, like… Ohhhh… right.

  That realization was Subway Lesson 3, which turned out to be the basis for my first subway song, “Beautiful.” And rather than it being a conscious thought about which I intentionally sat down to write, it emerged on its own. And because “Beautiful” is one of those songs that came through me, I was unaware of a professional detail about the song until a fellow songwriter pointed it out: there are no rhymes in the chorus—unless you count stretching “will” into “weel” as a false rhyme for “feel.”

  You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face

  And show the world all the love in your heart

  Then people gonna treat you better

  You’re gonna find, yes, you will

  That you’re beautiful as you feel

  As a songwriter, of course I would have put rhymes in the chorus. As an instrument, I never noticed.

  It’s been years since I rode a BMT train, and subway tokens have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, but I still believe Subway Lesson 3 to be as true as it was the day I learned it. I still believe that everyone is beautiful in some way, and by seeing the beauty in others we make ourselves more beautiful.

  Chapter Eight

  Blood Brothers

  I had the chance to reacquaint myself with the subway in 1994 from April through December when I starred in a Broadway musical written by Willy Russell. Blood Brothers had been playing to standing-room-only crowds both on London’s West End and New York’s Broadway. Producer Bill Kenwright was preparing to put an additional production on the road starring the leading lady then on Broadway, Petula Clark. He had already established a model of success with interchangeable female pop stars with an alto vocal range in the lead role. Knowing that I possessed an alto range and acting experience, he wanted me to replace Petula on Broadway. No audition would be necessary. All I had to do was agree to a six-month commitment to perform eight shows a week and the role was mine.

  I was fifty-two when I began my run as Mrs. Johnstone (pronounced Johnston). Being onstage for most of the show eight times a week left me with no time or energy for my own music. After every evening performance I collapsed into the back seat of a town car and was thankful to have such a luxury. I found moments of normalcy in folding laundry, going to my favorite restaurant for lunch, taking the subway around town, and, weather permitting, walking, unrecognized, around my city of birth. It was on one of those walks that I came upon the familiar faded reddish brown stone building in which I had studied drama, dance, and music at the High School of Performing Arts. I couldn’t go in because it was after hours, but from visible signs and posters I inferred that it was still a school, only now it had a business curriculum. When I peered in through the barred windows the old staircase looked exactly the same. I could almost hear and see my fourteen-year-old classmates hurrying to the next period propelled by a dream that drove them to the exclusion of almost everything else. I touched the cornerstone and silently conveyed the news that, after thirty-eight years, I was starring in a Broadway show.

  Offstage, when I wasn’t walking or taking the subway, I spent most of my time eating, sleeping, or exercising. I needed to keep up my strength for what I considered a demanding role on a grueling schedule until I saw Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard. Once I got to know my fellow cast members I realized that for them an eight-show-a-week schedule with the concentrated energy required for every show was not only normal but desirable. Playing Mrs. Johnstone was a lot more challenging emotionally than physically. In my own life I try to keep pain at bay, often to the point of denying its existence. Yet in order to be credible as a woman who suffered as Mrs. Johnstone did, I needed to draw on my own suffering. Every performance ended with my character in despair because her adult twin sons had just been shot to death. Mrs. Johnstone blames herself. When the boys were infants and she was a single mother of seven living in extreme poverty, a childless woman of means persuaded her to give her one of the babies by preying on her superstitious nature and fear that if she didn’t give the baby up she would lose all seven of her children. As the run progressed I found it increasingly difficult to step away from my character’s anguish. There couldn’t have been a worse time for me to be going through menopause. On the drive uptown one night, after a particularly harrowing immersion in Mrs. Johnstone’s misery, I watched the quarter moon set over New Jersey and wondered why I had allowed myself to be drawn back into acting when I’d already had a perfectly good career in music. But I had taken on the role, and I would not only see it through but extend my commitment through December 31, 1994.

  In the rare quiet moments during my final performance that New Year’s Eve, I could hear the roar growing louder outside the theater as people converged on Times Square for the traditional dropping of the ball. The emotions of my character merged with my own. I was simultaneously elated to be playing Mrs. Johnstone for the last time and sad that she and I and the cast and crew were parting company. It was 11:45 when I took my final solo curtain call with the tears of both my character and me streaming down my face.

  Fifteen minutes later I was drinking champagne in a cast member’s apartment near the theater with John, the cast of Blood Brothers, and their significant others. I heard the crowd counting down, loud and live, on the street below while I watched the ball drop on television. And then it was 1995.

  Chapter Nine

  Ireland, Again

  I spent most of January 1995 on an island in the Caribbean with John. I was thankful that my list of activities—sunning, snorkeling, swimming, sailing, and sleeping—did not include suffering. Renewed and refreshed, I went back to the mainland with absolutely nothing on my schedule. When John asked if I wanted to go back to Ireland for a few months while he explored prospects for work in the Irish film industry, I was all for it, and not only for his benefit. Ireland had some terrific songwriters, and I was more than ready to go back to music.

  We flew to Dublin, rented a house on Heytesbury Lane, and drove north to visit Dierdre and her family in Belfast. We were delighted to find them in much happier circumstances. The IRA and Ulster Protestants had laid down their arms the previous year. There was no longer a need for
barricades, vehicle inspections, or armed soldiers patrolling the streets. I dressed warmly against the February chill and strolled openly with John and Dierdre among the residents and tourists in the shops on Donegall Place and Royal Avenue. If I found the effects of the truce uplifting, it must have been a remarkably liberating experience for the residents of Belfast to walk around their city without fear.

  The truce and the economic expansion of the mid-nineties had brought positive changes to Dublin as well. In 1992, while walking at night in Temple Bar (a neighborhood along the River Liffey), I had seen a disproportionate number of men and women in various stages of intoxication sprawled on the streets outside the Temple Bar (a pub named after the neighborhood—or was it the other way around?). My inference was based on the nearby array of empty discarded plastic cups, each of which had likely contained a pint of draft Guinness, Harp, or Smithwick’s (pronounced Smiddicks).

  In 1995, the neighborhood was a lot cleaner. Customers still became intoxicated, but most did so indoors. Dubliners’ optimism was reflected in the new office buildings and elegant residences either under construction or already completed. In contrast to 1992, Ireland in 1995 seemed a place of peace, growth, and opportunity.

  The Irish songwriter Paul Brady and I wrote frequently at his home in Dublin. Though I wouldn’t write with Elvis Costello until a few years later, we spent some enjoyable time together. Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, arranged for me to meet Bono, The Edge, Adam, and Larry, and then he set up time for me to write with The Edge and Bono at Hanover Quay, U2’s state-of-the-art studio on the Liffey. When the day came, I was so engrossed in trying to figure out how to integrate my style of songwriting with that of these two men with their unique approach to writing, singing, and playing that I remember little about the session. What I do remember is how fearless Bono was in improvising ideas. I had experienced times of being an instrument, but Bono seemed to be one all the time. Music and lyrics poured out of him, for better or worse, with a preponderance of the former. Unfortunately, our song then in progress lies buried beneath my conscious memory. If a tape of our writing session is ever disinterred from U2’s studio archives, I would love to hear it.