‘Novel writing comes like songwriting’
The legendary singer Carole King tells Julia Llewellyn Smith about moving on from music after 50 years in the business
In the songwriters’ pantheon, few can hold a candle to Carole King. By the time she was 25, she’d co-written pop classics such 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 25million copies and won four Grammys, becoming the soundtrack to a generation’s lives. 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 Olivier-award-winning 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 first husband and songwriting partner] was always the spearhead: ‘Come on, we need to write the next record for The Shirelles!’” she continues. “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.”
King is in London and giving a rare interview to mark Beautiful’s second anniversary in the West End; later that day, she appears on stage beside a delighted cast. 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 cries), 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 Sixties 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.”
In person, King is every bit as engaging as her stage character: small and smiley, with eyes still as piercingly blue as in the famous Tapestry album cover, and curls slightly blonder and more groomed. The jeans and cheesecloth shirt 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 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 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 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.”
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 collaborated 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.
“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, ‘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 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.”
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.
“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!’”
‘I’m a very comfortable 75, I understand my limitations but the challenge is to not stop doing things too soon’
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is booking at the Aldwych Theatre, London, until July 22; beautifulmusical.co.uk