KING STILL REIGNS
Carole finds new creative outlet
In the songwriters’ pantheon, few can hold a candle to Carole King. By the time she was 25, she’d co-written such pop classics as The Shirelles’ Will You Love Me Tomorrow?, Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman and Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion.
Before she was 30, she’d released her 1971 solo album Tapestry (there have been 24 others), which sold more than 25 million copies and won four Grammys, becoming the soundtrack for a generation. Last summer, she performed it in full to a rapturous Hyde Park, yelling exultantly as she strapped on an electric guitar: “This is what 74 looks like.”
It was a rare moment in the spotlight for one of pop’s most retiring icons. King is no oddball recluse, simply a musical genius with little interest in fame. It’s an attitude encapsulated in Beautiful, the awardwinning musical about her early life, when her character declines to perform, asking: “Who wants to hear a normal person sing?”
“Normal? That’s me, yes!” King smiles. “The music business is very demanding and I cannot live like that, I need other things.”
Gerry Goffin, her and songwriting partner and first husband, “was always the spearhead: ‘Come on, we need to write the next record for The Shirelles!’ ” she says.
“I was driven, too, but not to the level many people are in the business. I still feel that way. My life isn’t about touring, it isn’t about all the things so many of my peers do. My life is about having one.”
Now the musical Beautiful is marking two years in London. The show, which began on Broadway in 2014, starts with King as a 15-year-old New York schoolgirl selling songs to publishing companies (“I was fearless,” she says), then marrying Goffin after becoming pregnant at just 17.
Professionally, the duo were unstoppable, producing hits such as Up on the Roof for The Drifters, One Fine Day for The Chiffons and Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees. But domestically, things were stormy. Goffin wanted to be out schmoozing contacts and experiencing the emerging 1960s counterculture, while King yearned for more time with their two young daughters.
“We lived in suburbia, and I was the only working mom, so we were the outliers,” she says. “I loved my work but there was a little awareness that I did not fit in and the concept of not fitting in bothered me.
“Part of my personal mantra is ‘I want everyone to be happy’ and (it) has been ever since I was able to think of it. It’s not very diva-ish and it’s also ...” — her voice changes to mock-growly — “impossible!”
King had to leave the first readthrough of Beautiful, saying — according to her daughter and manager Sherry Kondor, the show’s executive producer — “I can’t watch my life played out before me.’ ”
She also dodged the first night on Broadway “in part because I didn’t want to be seen watching the show, in part because I didn’t want to distract attention from Jessie Mueller (who played her), because it was her night.”
But three months later, she sneaked into a show and found it “wonderful.” Since then she’s seen it five times.
Every one has made her cry. “Not at the painful moments — with them I’m like, ‘Yeah, I know, it happened, get over it.’ ”
Instead, she sobbed at the scene where she and Goffin’s best friends, songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, On Broadway), reunite after a brief split. “It’s so touching,” she gulps, wiping away tears.
She sobs again recalling the scene when Mueller, as King, resolves to divorce philandering Goffin. “She goes home and says to Mom, ‘What am I going to do? Everything is wrapped around him,’ and she gives her a pep talk, which Mom pretty much gave me.”
The show ends with King, newly single at 29, making her solo debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall. “I was still a baby, a puppy! The way (Beautiful) gave me the triumph of transcending all that pain — I don’t know if I would have thought to write it, but the fact they did is lovely.”
King went on to collaborate with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, and there were to be three more husbands — one of whom, Rick Evers, subjected her to domestic abuse before dying of a cocaine overdose — and two more children.
Now at 75, she’s a single grandmother of five.
And she’s writing a novel. “That’s where I’m putting most of my creative energy now,” she says. “It’s about the journey of a woman, who is not me but she has some experiences and shares my world view, so people will say, ‘Oh, that’s Carole, there!’ ”
A lifelong Democrat, she protested against Donald Trump’s inauguration by marching, and in January re-releasing a 1982 song One Small Voice, containing the line “The emperor’s got no clothes on ...”
Will she be writing any new protest songs? King shakes her head. “I still perform occasionally, but no, I feel like I’ve said so many things, I would be repeating myself.”