by Carole King
Clicking to other channels, I saw similar live shots of the Trade Center interspersed with images of journalists trying to understand and explain what was happening. Personal emotions were overcoming the reporters’ usual composure as each correspondent endeavored to interpret the events unfolding in real time. Through a south-facing window I could see smoke blackening a corner of the crystal blue sky. At 9:59, when the South Tower collapsed, my first thought was that someone had placed a bomb in the building with a timer set to go off an hour after the plane hit. The images on the TV showed that people were running now, with papers that had been important the day before wafting down all around them. The morning blue sky of daylight downtown was rapidly giving way to the darkness of ash turning everything black. I don’t remember if I saw images of people jumping out of the buildings that day, but it was as if I were watching the most horrific disaster movie ever made, except that it was happening to real people. At 10:28, the North Tower collapsed. It was almost as if a movie producer had said, “Make it even more horrific!” When I heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon, I thought, Holy shit! They’re going to destroy every symbolic building in America. Then, when a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, I was convinced that humanity was doomed. I didn’t think it was God visiting his or her wrath on humankind, nor did I think it an act of nature. Those acts of destruction were too closely timed. They had to have been planned by human beings trying to wreak as much havoc and create as much fear as possible. My imagination ran wild as I envisioned potential targets all around the United States being blown up in one terrifying act of destruction after another. But there would be no more planes that day.
Remarkably, my landline was still working. Molly, now living in Brooklyn, would have been on her way to work near Grand Central Station when the planes hit. She would normally have taken a different subway line than the one that passed under the Trade Center, but I became anxious when I couldn’t reach her. I left a message on her mobile and work voicemails and didn’t stop worrying until she called me back. Though Molly was an exceptionally competent young woman who had heard the news and knew exactly what to do, I couldn’t stop myself from shifting into Jewish-mother command voice.
“Molly. Walk north and keep walking till you get here!”
“Mom. I know.”
All transportation in the city had been suspended. My daughter became part of a massive movement of people traveling north on foot. It took her half an hour to get to my apartment. We joined neighbors in lining up at a nearby hospital to donate blood that, sadly, would never be needed by the victims. The next morning Molly went home to Brooklyn and I began making calls to see how I could help.
It seemed that everyone in New York who wasn’t looking for a loved one or working at an essential job was either already helping in the rescue effort or trying to find a way to help. But New Yorkers had organized themselves so efficiently to get food, water, and clean clothing to rescue workers that we were told additional assistance would put well-meaning people in the way. In between calls, the phone rang. It was my friend Carolyn Maloney, U.S. congresswoman from New York’s 14th District, calling to ask if I would accompany her on rounds while she answered questions and tried to bring comfort to families with a missing loved one. There was little that Carolyn or I or anyone else could do, but family members wanted someone in authority to hear their story, tell them what was being done to find their family member, and join them in praying that their loved one had somehow escaped and wasn’t calling home only because she or he was wandering around the city in a temporary state of amnesia.
Seeing the attacks and the aftereffects of those acts that had been carried out by what we later learned were nineteen human beings with the deliberate intention of hurting as many Americans as possible and disrupting the economic and social fabric of the Western world, it was difficult for me to keep from sinking into despair. I redirected that feeling by resolving to drive myself harder to be a good person and hold on to my belief that love makes the world… what? Go around? A better place? Or, perhaps, simply tolerable.
Some people reacted to the attacks with fear and anger. Others responded with an unprecedented outpouring of love. I saw the latter response on the streets of New York in the days after September 11. I saw it in the selflessness of the first responders and the tireless efforts of the rescue workers. I saw it in the generosity and support of people from every walk of life, from every corner of America, and from countries around the world. And I heard the same heartfelt message of solidarity repeated over and over again by people with dissimilar political views:
“Today we are all New Yorkers.”
Unfortunately the camaraderie didn’t last. People with opposing political views moved apart to stand on opposite sides of a seemingly impassable divide. Fear and anger began to grow along with a sense of hopelessness among those of us who didn’t want to live under that kind of emotional siege. Subsequent efforts to obtain funding for medical services for the first responders and rescue workers who had been digging through the pile in the weeks and months after the attack were met with an appalling level of resistance by enough senators and members of Congress to keep them from getting necessary care for their damaged lungs. Solidarity had given way to, “Yes, I know, we were all New Yorkers, but that was yesterday. Today we have a different agenda.”
With so many things out of my control, one thought brought comfort: when in doubt, give back.
Chapter Thirteen
Giving Back
My forebears passed on to me a love of learning and a sense of responsibility to leave the world better than I found it. I’m a grateful beneficiary of my mother’s intellectual curiosity and my father’s compulsion to solve every problem he encountered. But the call to help others is passed on in many cultures. Consider the volunteers who went to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to help their fellow human beings and rescue animals. In 2006 ordinary citizens from every conceivable background donated more money online than they could probably afford in order to assist with tsunami relief. The earthquake in Haiti in 2010 brought out the best in people from diverse cultures around the world, as did Japan’s triple-whammy earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in 2011. But human generosity doesn’t require earth-shaking events. Good people help their neighbors in communities every day. Whether through military service, political activism, volunteering at a school, hospital, or library, or simply through quotidian acts of kindness, each of us has something to contribute to improve another person’s life. I’m grateful to live in a world where there are so many people who act on the impulse to be kind and helpful.
Over the seven decades of my life, my acts of giving back have included canvassing for civil rights in the 1960s, flipping burgers at a county fair, reading to children, reporting for a television news program on both the environment and illiteracy, and performing at benefits at locations ranging from grand hotel ballrooms to raise money for worthy causes to playing guitar on a flatbed trailer in a parking lot to raise money for a neighbor burned out of his home. But the project that has occupied literally half my time for over two decades has been educating staff, members of the United States Congress, and the public about the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act. The story of the passage of NREPA will have to be told another time. Among other reasons, it’s waiting for an ending that includes the date the bill was signed into law.
An unexpected bonus from my environmental activism has been the friends I’ve made among the conservation community, Congress, and its staff. Though my conservationist friends make quite a bit less money than they could be earning in the commercial sector, they do what they do because they have a passion to make the world a better place, and because someone has to do it. “Because someone has to do it” is probably as good a definition of giving back as any.
I’d like to dedicate the rest of this chapter to other friends whose professional lives and charitable work have inspired me. Maybe they’ve inspired you a
s well.
I was already a fan of U2 when I learned about Bono’s association with Amnesty International in the cause of human rights. When Bono brought his intense focus to cancellation of Third World debt and raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic in Africa and elsewhere, he was an effective advocate. He used his name and fame to make his case directly to heads of state and lawmakers. When I visited with Bono in Ireland I found him to be impassioned and articulate about issues that affect tremendous numbers of people. But what impresses me most about Bono’s activism is not only how relentless he is in pursuit of his mission to alleviate the suffering of so many people, but that he makes it a point to be well informed in great detail. He does his homework.
If Paul Newman’s acting career was inspiring, his charitable accomplishments were even more so. The Academy Award–winning actor combined his cooking skills and business acumen with his name recognition to support a number of worthy causes, but the one closest to his heart was the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut. Initially funded in part with the profits from Newman’s Own food products, Newman founded the original camp with the support of his wife, Academy Award winner Joanne Woodward, and the writer A. E. Hotchner, his longtime friend. Paul’s efforts stirred the generosity of so many people that Hole in the Wall Gang Camps sprang up around the world like mushrooms after a spring shower.*
The camps are designed to give children with grave illnesses an opportunity to spend time with other children with serious health issues in an environment that takes into account the children’s comfort, health, and safety. For two weeks campers leave behind their identity as “the sick child” and experience life as most children do, in the company of other kids like themselves. Special care, equipment, and medication are provided along with the volunteer services of medical professionals, counselors, cooks, housekeepers, maintenance personnel, and all the other people it takes to keep a camp operational. The season lasts from June through the end of August, with sessions scheduled in two-week increments to allow a maximum number of children to attend. There is also a session for siblings, whose identity as “the healthy child” often puts them later in line for the family’s attention. A session gives siblings peer input as well as adult counseling to help them understand that they’re neither “bad” nor alone in sometimes feeling resentful of their brother or sister with special medical needs.
As part of the camp’s fund-raising effort in 1990, Newman recruited friends from Broadway and other celebrities to participate in the First Annual Fandango Benefit Gala. The gala included a gourmet lunch, a silent auction, a live auction, and a performance with musical parodies loosely based on a script adapted by Hotch. The show featured Paul, Joanne, guest celebrities, and, most important of all, campers who acted, sang, danced, and/or played instruments. The children’s disabilities were accommodated in such a way that any child who wished to participate could do so.
I didn’t realize when I agreed to participate that I would be embarking on a journey that would compel me back to Ashford almost every September for the next seventeen years. Performing with the children was a heartening and highly entertaining experience. How could I not become a camp regular?
The downside was losing the children. The upside was helping the youngsters bring to fruition dreams they might not otherwise have achieved and bearing witness to the courage, determination, and grace of the children, parents, and siblings. Performers and celebrity counselors over the years have included Julia Roberts, Marisa Tomei, Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Naughton, Kristin Chenoweth, and Cy Coleman. Every show closed with the entire cast singing a song Cy wrote with Dorothy Fields called “(If There Were) More People Like You.”
If there were more people who cared
There would be fewer people to care for
More people of worth
Good people worth our saying a prayer for
Less people who don’t
There would be more people who do
If there were more people like you
In 1998 the children and I sang a song at that year’s gala that I wrote with A. E. Hotchner. The song was called “Hope.” Hearing Hotch’s words sung by the campers made everyone in the theater believe in miracles.
The word is hope
Light as air, you don’t care
You can cope if you have… hope
You may be down
Things are bleak, you can’t speak
Don’t you frown, you’ll come around
’Cause there is hope
Among my many memories of autumn weekends in Ashford, these three stand out:
The hectic scene backstage—if you could call it “backstage.” The building was so small that there was no room behind the stage, just a wall. “Backstage” was a passageway in the basement through which offstage performers crossed from stage left to stage right. Off the passageway were a couple of bathrooms that doubled as male and female dressing rooms. Several other small rooms accommodated volunteer seamstresses working overtime to fit costumes on newly arrived guest performers, adjust previously fitted costumes on campers, and assemble hats, shoes, socks, jewelry, reindeer noses, bunny ears, and other vital costume pieces. Odds were that not everything would be ready by showtime, but everything always was. Upstairs the director was blocking the movements of the actors and the children onstage. “You! Move over here, please. And you, stand there, please…. Leo, can we please run through that last number again?… What? Okay. Everyone needs to leave the stage right now so more lights can be hung…. I’m sorry, what? The children need a food break? Okay. Children, line up, please. Hot dogs and other finger foods are available outside….” Twenty minutes later: “The lights are hung? Great! Everyone back on the stage, please…. Wait, it’s time for the children’s scheduled rest period? Can we please get all the adults back onstage?” (Exeunt the children.)
Nathan Lane playing an elderly Sundance Kid opposite Newman’s aged Butch Cassidy. Hotch had set the scene in a nursing home in which the two outlaws might have found themselves had they lived into their dotage. As did many of the actors in these shows, Nathan strayed so far from the script (a very loose structure to begin with) that the other actors couldn’t say their lines because they were laughing so hard. My daughter Sherry played the attractive nurse who brought meds to the elderly Butch and Sundance. In addition to performing at almost every gala, Sherry volunteered regularly as a counselor. That year she shared counselor duties with the very down-to-earth, hardworking Julia Roberts.
Newman playing Sarah Brown in 2006 opposite Bernadette Peters as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. Hotch usually cast Newman in opposite-gender roles for the galas. On this occasion, he cast most, though not all, actors across gender. As Benny Southstreet, I traded repartée with Alec Baldwin playing Nathan Detroit. Kyra Sedgwick glowed with femininity as the respiratorially challenged Miss Adelaide, while Paul and Bernadette egged each other on to find yet another improvised comedic moment between them. The audience of extraordinarily generous donors couldn’t have been happier. Nor could I.
Paul Newman’s turn as Sarah Brown in that show was one of his last performances in a Hole in the Wall Gang Camp gala. This song says it all:
Can do… can do… This guy says the horse can do…
Paul Newman could do.
James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne are never too busy to perform for a cause, be it a local school, saving the Amazon rain forest, or an effort to bring about world peace. No cause is too big or too small for them to lend their names and voices in support. I consider it an honor to share an occupation and a longtime friendship with each and every one of them.
Sometimes I lose hope that human beings will do right by each other, animals, and the planet. Wars continue to be fought. People continue to commit violence against each other. Homo sapiens is the only species I can think of whose behavior includes deliberate cruelty to other beings. This knowledge sorely te
sts my belief that the human inhabitants of this planet will be able to function as a world community with integrity and compassion.
When I feel this way, it helps to remember my ancestors’ journey. My grandparents left their homes and villages and traveled all those miles believing they would find a better world for their children and grandchildren. More than a century later their courage keeps me going. The “you can do anything” message from my father and mother buoys me. Because of all these people, my life really was a tapestry, with each thread leading to a range of possibilities including—knock wood—a wonderful family, good health, great friends, music, peace, joy, love, curiosity, and adventure.
With every sunrise I reaffirm my intention to spend part of that day giving back, be it through a smile, a song, a letter to the editor, a friendly email with compulsively correct spelling and grammar (my father would have it no other way), or simply remembering to say thank you.
With every sunset I’m grateful that I made it through another day, and I hope that my descendants and I are granted enough days to fulfill the promise of my grandparents’ journey.