A Natural Woman

by Carole King

  As a visiting American celebrity I was invited on several occasions to the Phoenix Park residence of my country’s then ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith. There John and I mingled with Irish and American luminaries, including Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan; Jim’s brother, the writer and theater director Peter Sheridan, and his wife, Sheila; and actors Sean Penn, Gabriel Byrne, and Lauren Bacall. After dinner the ambassador led us to the salon, where anyone who wished could get up and perform what the Irish call a “party piece.” If you guessed that my party piece was “You’ve Got a Friend,” you win the chance to read on.

  The morning of March 31, 1995, I received a call from Lorna asking if I wanted to go to London to write with Bob Dylan. I caught the next flight out of Dublin and proceeded to Bob’s hotel. Though Bob and I had met previously, this was the first time we had come together with the specific intention of writing a song. In between Bob’s random improvisations on guitar and the few chords I essayed on a keyboard in his elegant suite, we spoke about mutual friends, the state of the world, our respective children, and Gerry Goffin, with whom Bob had written several songs. After a couple of hours of more talking than writing, we concluded that no song was likely to emerge that day. I didn’t mind. I had thoroughly enjoyed my visit with this intelligent man who’d made musical and political history in a decade in which the answer was blowin’ in the wind.

  Though we never discussed our common status as celebrities, I came away with the feeling that Bob wasn’t comfortable with the fame that followed him everywhere. He had learned to wear it as if it were a coat that hadn’t been a good fit in the first place—old, familiar, but never quite right. Exception: when Bob was writing or playing, he didn’t seem to notice or need the coat. His music fit him perfectly.

  When I stood up and started to walk over to the door to collect my purse and my actual coat, Bob stood up, walked with me, and asked if I’d like to join him onstage that night at Brixton Academy. As if I needed extra persuasion, he said, “Elvis and Chrissie are gonna do it.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to be matter-of-fact even though I could barely contain my excitement about playing simultaneously with Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and Chrissie Hynde. I started to put my coat on but had trouble finding my second sleeve. I busied myself with that while trying to regain my composure and then found both simultaneously. I said, “See you then!” stepped into the hallway, and made my way to the lift.

  Bob’s set that night included “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and “I Shall Be Released.” Chrissie Hynde, Elvis Costello, and I sang backup on both songs.

  Bob must have had as much fun as we did, because he invited us to sit in with him again for the final performance of his tour at the Point in Dublin on April 11. Chrissie couldn’t make it, but Elvis would be there.

  Wait, I thought. Let me check my imaginary schedule. Between sitting in with Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello or attending a state dinner with Prime Minister John Major, President Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth, and Princess Diana to participate in a conversation in which peace in the former Yugoslavia would be discussed, which would I choose?

  I would be offered that choice only in my dreams. Of course I would sit in with Bob in Dublin.

  Chapter Ten

  They Say That Ev’ry Man Must Fall

  The difference between an event and reports of that event reminds me of the game Telephone, in which someone whispers a sentence into another person’s ear, who then whispers it into the next person’s ear, and on down the line. By the time it gets to the tenth person, “Joey’s going to visit his father” has become “Alice was arrested for farming Jonah’s goat.” Some of the early news reports after Bob’s April 11 concert were so far from the truth that they could only have been written by reporters playing Telephone.

  Here’s what happened.

  In Bob’s Dublin concert I played piano on “Highway 61 Revisited,” “In the Garden,” and “Ballad of a Thin Man.” I played and sang on “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Real Real Gone,” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Then I joined Elvis Costello and Van Morrison in singing backup on “I Shall Be Released.”

  As usual with Bob, there were multiple encores, each of which elicited wildly enthusiastic chants of “More! More! More! More!” When the show was over I lined up at the front of the stage with Bob and his band and Van and Elvis to take our final band bow. When the applause and chanting didn’t abate, the stage manager signaled for the house lights to be turned on. The band members nearest stage left turned and walked down the stairway on our left. Bob, Van, Elvis, and the band members at center stage turned, walked upstage, and exited down a stairway behind the drums. The primary responsibility of Bob’s road crew was to look after Bob, and he was appropriately well attended. Others on the crew were using their flashlights to guide the other artists and band members offstage. The crew must have assumed that I, the only performer in proximity to stage right, was in good hands.

  Unfortunately, the only hands around were mine. With John gone to escort Ambassador Smith and her party backstage, and with all the artists, band members, and other responsibilities that Bob’s crew had to look after, I literally slipped through the cracks. The stage right black curtain had seemed a logical point of exit for me. I thought it would lead to a stairway on my side of the stage. But when I stepped through the curtain there was nothing under my feet. I felt something strike my head as I fell off the edge of the platform, and then I blacked out. When I came to, I barely had time to notice that I was lying on a pile of black rubber cables before my head began to hurt. I touched the spot where it hurt and felt warm liquid oozing out of my head. I must have been in a mild state of delirium because I began repeating a mantra to reassure myself:

  “It’s oozing. I must be okay. It’s not spurting. That wouldn’t be good. It’s oozing. Oozing is okay. I’m okay.”

  Such was my habit: denial of personal pain.

  Suddenly people began to converge. Some were wearing armbands with red crosses. They told me I had fallen fifteen feet to the arena floor. My landing had been cushioned by the piles of thick rubber electrical cables on the concrete. EMTs examined my head, stanched the bleeding, then loaded me carefully into an ambulance that would take me to the emergency room at Mater Misericordiae Hospital in North Dublin. When I arrived, the ER staff was occupied with several patients with injuries more serious than mine. Even so, they got to me fairly quickly. After examining my head, one of the doctors determined that my head injury was superficial. While he was treating the wound, he asked a question that earned him an A-plus on my “Diagnosing Patients” test.

  “Are you feeling pain anywhere else?”

  I was. It turned out that my head wound was the least of my injuries. My right wrist was broken, and I had fractured my left thumb. I would not be playing piano for a while. After X-raying my wrist and thumb, the medical attendants built a cast for my arm and put a splint on my thumb. Everything they needed was right there in the emergency room. Thankfully “everything” included an analgesic to relieve my pain.

  Having heard me speak, the staff in the emergency room must have known that I wasn’t an Irish citizen. But if they knew that I had been injured in the line of performing with Bob Dylan, they gave no indication. As far as I could tell, they treated all their patients with the same combination of compassion, competence, personal attention, and quality of care. It being Ireland, liberal doses of humor were dispensed along with the health care.

  When at last the medical staff informed me that they had done all they could for the time being, I sent John out to ask the head nurse when I could leave the hospital. While I was waiting for an answer someone brought a telephone over to me with a very long cord. It was Bob on the line. He, Van, and Elvis had been whisked out of the venue immediately after the show and hadn’t learned about my fall until they were on their way to the after-party. Bob’s tour manager had been trying to find out how I was doing, but no one would tell him. The news of my fall had cast a pa
ll over the party. Everyone was imagining the worst. Bob said the crew in particular felt awful. To a man, every crew member blamed himself for not having thought to cover stage right.

  Not wanting to ruin Bob’s party, I tried to put the best face on the situation.

  “I’m doing well, Bob. The doctors are taking good care of me. Everything’s under control.”

  “Are you gonna be okay?”

  I assured him that I was. I had suffered no permanent damage, and I wanted him and everyone else to have a good time at the party.

  “You know,” I said brightly, “you gave a really good performance at the Point tonight. You have every reason to celebrate.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay? Are they givin’ you everything you need?”

  “They are. Please don’t be anxious. I’m fine.”

  Bob wasn’t buying my attempt at a good face. We had come from the same culture in which Jewish mothers famously say, “I’m fine. I’ll just sit here in the dark.”

  Finally, having exhausted all the ways he could tell me how sorry he was, Bob wished me a speedy recovery and put Van on.

  Van didn’t have a lot to say that night—not that I minded. His words and music over the years have expressed thoughts and emotions familiar to me and pretty much everyone else on the planet. He expressed his sympathy and well-wishes in a few words and then handed the telephone over to Elvis. In contrast to Van, Elvis uses a profusion of words to express whatever he’s thinking at the moment, a quality appreciated by fans and friends alike. Elvis’s many words that night were as welcome as Van’s few.

  As I handed the phone back to the attendant, John came in with the verdict from the head nurse. I would be released that night only in Bob’s song. The doctors wanted to keep me overnight to make sure I didn’t have a concussion. This gave reporters eight more hours to play the Telephone game. The next morning John told me he had received calls from friends and family in the United States who had heard either that Bob had pushed me or that he had hugged me too enthusiastically. The only fact that all the reports had gotten right was that I had fallen off the stage. John had also heard that there had been a flurry of phone calls among Bob’s managers, the business people at the Point, and an assortment of lawyers to discuss their concern that I might file a lawsuit, but I would never have done that. Still, the people at the Point and Bob’s team went out of their way to make sure I had everything I needed and appropriately offered to reimburse me for medical expenses.

  As it turned out, reimbursement wasn’t an issue. Ireland had national health care. Every Irish citizen was covered. No one had to forgo seeing a doctor because she or he couldn’t afford it. At the Point, in the ambulance, in the emergency room at Mater, and during my overnight stay, I received excellent and efficient care that continued through several follow-up visits, checkups, multiple X-rays, a change of cast, the use of modern equipment, and ongoing medications. When on occasion I had to wait, it was never for more than twenty minutes. I suffered minimally, recovered completely, and for all that I paid a total of twelve Irish pounds—at the time approximately twenty-four dollars. And I wasn’t even an Irish citizen.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ireland, Yet Again

  After returning to America in 1995, I went back to Ireland in the summer of 1996. Peter Sheridan was directing a production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and wanted me to play the role of Kate. We would open at the Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin, move to the Theatre Royal in Waterford, then take the show around Ireland. Peter never doubted that the universal humor and familiarity of the interactions among Simon’s Jewish characters would resonate with Irish audiences. During rehearsals, when Peter wanted to help me find an emotion, he’d relate an anecdote from among the many he’d accumulated growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in North Dublin. Invariably the story he chose evoked the desired emotion, though I had yet to find exactly where Kate was in me.

  As the only Jewish American cast member I became the default dialect coach for the Irish and British actors. My biggest challenge was young Alan King, who eventually overcame his thick North Dublin accent to become entirely convincing as Kate’s son Stanley. I consulted my father, then eighty, over the phone about such details as what type of head covering my character should wear while lighting the Sabbath candles. He recommended I go to the Jewish quarter in Dublin. And could he remind me of the melody of the Chanukah prayer? He could and did. At the end of every performance, when my character lit the Chanukah candles, it was I, Carole, who sang the prayer my father had taught me with the tune that he had learned when he was a little boy:

  “Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kidishanu b’mitz’votav v’tsivanu l’hadlik neir shel Chanukah. Ah-mein.”

  In the late twentieth century the melodies of many traditional Jewish prayers were being modernized. I was not a fan of the major-key version of the Chanukah prayer. In 2011, at the suggestion of my daughter Louise, who produced my album A Holiday Carole, I recorded the traditional Chanukah prayer with its traditional melody. Louise arranged the prayer into a song form, then she and her son sang it with me. The last vocal we hear on that track is then eight-year-old Hayden singing, “L’hadlik neir shel Chanukah…” Tears come to my eyes every time I hear the prayer of our ancestors marching forward to future generations through my grandson, my daughter, and me.

  Neil Simon’s character Kate was around forty. I was then fifty-four, but women of Kate’s generation often looked older than their years. In fact, Kate’s life experience was not unlike that of my Grandma Sarah. The problem was that I had no personal knowledge of my grandmother at Kate’s age as anything but “Grandma.” Though Peter’s stories had been helpful, I still hadn’t found Kate in me. My mother came to the rescue. She traveled to Dublin to celebrate her eightieth birthday with me and coach me in the role. Her gift for directing actors, familiarity with the character, and understanding of how to convey her knowledge to me gave me enough confidence to feel on opening night that I had command of the role. With audience reinforcement, my confidence continued to grow until the night I found myself channeling my grandmother. I had experienced something similar with Mrs. Johnstone, except this character was someone whose genes I carried. When I spoke Kate’s lines that night I was deeply affected by my grandmother’s frustration. Thankfully, Peter helped me make the distinction between myself as an actor and the emotions of my character. The run lasted nearly three months—long enough for me to explore different facets of Kate, but not so long that I grew weary of playing her.

  When the show was over I went to a castle in France to write with other songwriters at a semiannual gathering hosted by Miles Copeland. Miles was known for managing the Police and creating music industry companies with three letters and three periods. The best known was I.R.S. During my week at the castle I again connected with music and established friendships with songwriters that continue to this day. After my return to the United States in the fall of 1996, the rest of that year was not a happy time. John and I saw the end of our relationship approaching, and by the beginning of 1997 it was time. Though an ending had been understood from the beginning, I took it hard. I was stuck in pain, grief, loss, and depression for nearly eight months. It was one of the rare periods in my life when I was too miserable to eat—a diet I do not recommend. I was just beginning to rediscover my happier self and appreciate my status as a free, independent, unattached woman when I met Phil Alden Robinson in October 1997. I was already familiar with his work as the screenwriter of All of Me and the screenwriter and director of Field of Dreams. I became romantically involved with this kind, intelligent, and gifted man and remained with him for seven years until we realized that his ties to Los Angeles and mine to Idaho made us geographically incompatible.

  In 1998, with encouragement from my friend Carole Bayer Sager, I coproduced an album called Love Makes the World with Humberto Gatica, whose collection of Grammys for producing and engineering would require several man
tels. Humberto is known for his work with artists whose superior sound is as instantly recognizable as their first names: Céline, Barbra, Bette, Chaka, Mariah, Cher, three Michaels, and three Kennys.* Then there are the Latinos: Gloria, Julio, Marc, Ricky, Olga, and two Alejandros.†

  I lost my father on November 10, 1998. He was eighty-two.

  Yizkor elohim et nishmat avi mori…

  May God remember the soul of my father, my teacher.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Towers

  After recording all the songs for Love Makes the World, Humberto did a final mix on all the tracks, then we worked on a sequence and created a digital master. I had written the title song with Sam Hollander and Dave Schommer, then collectively known as PopRox. I loved the song then, and I still enjoy performing it. The lyric is a positive message with a snippet of attitude and a hint of a love story. The melody has a sexy groove, a syncopated rhythm, and more than a hint of an urban arrangement. “Love Makes the World” is the first track on the CD, followed by the equally positive “You Can Do Anything,” written by Carole Bayer Sager, Kenny Edmonds (Babyface), and me.

  Lorna helped me form a new label, which I named with an anagram of Carole King: Rockingale Records. Our scheduled release date for both the album and the single was September 11, 2001.

  I was in an apartment building more than a hundred blocks north of the World Trade Center when I turned on the TV that morning. When NY1, New York’s news channel, came on, I noted the time in the little square on the screen with the time and temperature. It said 9:02. With my mind on other things, I barely registered the import of what the anchor was saying—something about a plane having crashed into a building. I assumed they meant something like a Cessna until they showed the silhouette of the twin towers with smoke coming out of one of the towers. The question “How could a small plane have caused all that smoke?” was just beginning to form in my mind when the digital clock on the nightstand changed to 9:03. I watched in disbelief as the second plane hit and a fireball appeared on the screen. By 9:04 smoke was billowing from both buildings and flames were spreading rapidly.