Jane Esiner with a fascinating and insightful Carole King bio

“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move” Jane Eisner (Yale Jewish Lives/Yale Univ. Press)

This is the story of the woman who wrote many of the songs that are the soundtrack of my life, and probably yours as well. Yet her life story is little known, in part because she has spent most of her life somewhat afraid of the spotlight and disdainful of celebrity. Did you know Carole King has been married four times (none of them to James Taylor!), she has four children, and her oldest, Louise, is her manager; that she went to extraordinary local public schools in Brooklyn, starting her career as a teen?

Carol (no “e” at the end, that came later) Joan Klein King Goffin Larkey Evers Sorensen, of Brooklyn, then Los Angeles, then extremely rural Idaho, was the daughter of first-generation Americans whose own parents has escaped pogroms in Russia to travel for a fresh start in the USA. Her parents met at Brooklyn College in 1936 where Sidney Klein was a chemistry major and Eugenia Cammer was an English and Drama major. Their marriage was troubled, they separated, reconciled, and eventually divorced.

Carole was born in 1942; she had a younger brother (Richard) who was born in 1948 deaf and extremely mentally challenged so he was institutionalized. The piano in the Klein household became a link between mother and daughter, and it would be Carole’s spaceship to adventure and musical joy. Promoted ahead of her peers she started junior at age 10, smart, talented, petite, and not as mature as her classmates. Carole would begin high school at age 13. She would graduate in 1958. But “her life was shaped by two dramatic trends in postwar America: the rapid decline in antisemitism, and the flourishing of popular music youth culture.”

She fell in with young musicians like Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Neil Sedaka; peers who were all writing songs. Neil introduced her to Ahmet Ertegun, who with Jerry Wexler headed up Atlantic Records. The next day she went to see Don Costa at ABC-Paramount Records who offered her a contract. Soon, she met Gerry Goffin, and they made magic music together. They also got married and made two babies. They got a record contract with Don Kirshner of Aldon Music in the legendary Brill Building.

Their fellow composers and lyricists there included Lieber and Stoller, Bacharach and David, Sedaka and Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Berry and Greenwich! Carole wrote and arranged constantly, and she and Gerry were asked to write for the Shirelles, a hot new girl group. Their song? “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” They became the first Black female group to have a #1 hit and a million-seller. The team of King & Goffin became legendary. Many great songs followed, hits for all kinds of young singers. Sadly Gerry was bipolar, and their marriage didn’t survive. She and the two girls moved to California, she met Toni Stern and another team was born. A second career resulted in a second husband, and two more kids. But the male relationship that lasted a lifetime for Carole was completely platonic and natural and easy: James Taylor.

The next huge step: 1971’s iconic album, Tapestry, one of the most important LPs ever. It lasted on the Top 200 Billboard Album charts for 46 years after winning 4 Grammys! She was home nursing a new baby and her produced Lou Adler accepted them for her. More successful albums followed (and two more disastrous marriages, the last of which took her and the kids to Idaho for “a five-year adventure”. Carole King was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as songwriter with Gerry Goffin in 1990, and in 2011 as a singer. In 2014, a musical about her life (Beautiful) opened on Broadway.