‘This musical helped me transcend the pain’

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. Did she mind? “Yes and no, 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.”

In person, King’s every bit as engaging and maternal as her on-stage character: small and smiley, with eyes still as piercingly blue as in the famous Tapestry album cover, and curls just slightly blonder and more groomed. The jeans and cheesecloth shirt she wore then have been replaced by a still casual but less hippyish waterfall cardigan over black trousers.

She bustles around her hotel suite pouring me what, in her still-strong Brooklyn accent, sounds like “cawfee” and offering me tips on raising teenagers.

“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 jokily to mock-growly “impossible!”

King had to leave the first read- through 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 away 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. “Often I think of young Carole as ‘her’ not me, but it is my life, I am the Carole you see on stage. The emotional beats are all true.”

Every show’s 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 Carole 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. My mother was very wise about human nature and I often went to her when I was troubled.”

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. I can feel the audience rooting for Carole. Who knew?”

By this time King had moved from New Jersey to Laurel Canyon, California, where she collaborated with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. There were to be three more husbands — one of whom, musician Rick Evers, subjected her to domestic abuse before dying of a cocaine overdose — and two more children.

“My children are all people I’d like to hang out with but I don’t consider that fact my achievement, because I didn’t know how to raise them when I was young — I was still a child.

“Sherry said the worst thing about me as a Mom was I wasn’t good at discipline, I was inconsistent. The best thing I gave them was unconditional love, even when we were fighting in the teenage years, they knew that.”

Now she’s a single, fresh-faced (but not remotely plastic-looking) grandmother of five. “I’m a very comfortable 75, I think I really understand my limitations but the challenge now is not to stop doing things before its time and I have to sense when it’s time,” she says.

“I watched my mother go through that when she stopped driving — I’m a long way from that, but in general terms we watch our elders go through that. Your mum can’t see as well or hear as well and you hear her say …” King lapses into even purer Brooklynese, “’ You’re walking too fast I can’t keep up!’ ”

These intimations of mortality seem to have spurred King to even greater creativity. Gleefully, she shows me pictures on her iPhone of her Idaho ranch engulfed in snow. “We’ve just been snowed in for more than a month, just me, the couple who caretake for me, our three dogs and the chickens.

“It wasn’t scary, we had a lot of food and I worked on my novel.” “Your novel?” She nods proudly.

“That’s where I’m putting most of my creative energy now. It’s about the journey of a woman, who is not me but she has some experiences and shares my worldview, so people will say ‘Oh, that’s Carole, there!’’

A lifelong Democrat, she protested against Donald Trump’s inauguration by marching in her local town and in January re-releasing a 1982 song One Small Voice containing the lines “The emperor’s got no clothes on … Take that child away/ Don’t let the people hear the words he has to say.” “I’m as gobsmacked as you are [by Trump],” she says. “But we should not talk about it, because we’d talk about it all day.”

Will she be writing some 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. My work is out there.”

From now on the focus will be her fiction. “There are so many new things I can say in a novel. The energy that drove my music is now driving my writing. You put yourself out there, you open yourself up to the universe and you let yourself be a channel for whatever comes through.

“Every time I go forward with the story there’s a sense of ‘Is it going to come?’ I think I know what I want it to be and then so often I find it’s writing itself. It’s exactly the same process as songwriting: you listen to it coming out of you and say ‘Oh my God! It’s good!’ ”