Read Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation for Free Online

Dionysian counter-reality, which was now yielding an even more revolutionary chapter.
    Carole King’s, Joni Mitchell’s, and Carly Simon’s songs were born of and were narrating that transition—a course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the limits of change, which they, and their female listeners, had been riding.
    Here is the story of their lives, and of that journey, from the beginning.

PART TWO
“i’m home again, in my old narrow bed”

CHAPTER ONE
carole
    Carol Klein was born in Manhattan on February 9, 1942 (somewhere, early on, she added the e to her first name) but lived almost her entire youth in the borough to which her parents would soon move: Brooklyn. “You know the New Yorker magazine map, where the whole country drops off after Manhattan? That’s what we were with Brooklyn,” says Camille Cacciatore Savitz whose family, like Carole’s, moved to the end-of-the-alphabet avenues of Sheepshead Bay at the cusp of the 1950s. The neighborhood was still semirural then, with fields abutting houses and the occasional goat in an adjacent backyard, tied up so as not to get to the neighbors’ clotheslines. In short order, the grid of streets filled up with rows of semidetached redbricks—their sidewalk-to-second-floor staircases as steep as rescue chutes, in order to make room for ground-floor garages. Predating these inelegant buildings was the Kleins’ brick, two-family house (another family lived upstairs), with its small front lawn and backyard. From there Carole walked to P.S. 206 every day, in Harry S. Truman’s America: “a little Howdy Doody girl, with blue eyes and freckles and a smile on her face and a ponytail,” her best friend from those years, Barbara Grossman Karyo, recalls. She was already taking piano lessons, sitting down with a teacher to play scales the year that “Tenderly,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” were heard on the radio and Victrola. The mainstay of her piano education, however, was classical (the Russian romantics, her favorites) and the Broadway songbooks of Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. She loved Richard Rodgers.
    Barbara and Carole’s friendship started the way many friendships started back then: “in line.” Both were small, so they were placed next to each other at the front of the organ-pipe-like rows of girls that assembled in the schoolyard each morning. Reticent Barbara admired feisty Carole, who got in trouble for chewing gum and passing notes.
    Carole graduated from grammar school in 1952, when great American literature was still consumed (Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, and Bernard Malamud had brand-new offerings); when everyone flocked to Gene Kelly musicals; when the highly regionalized country (interstate highways would be the project of the next president, Eisenhower) was just beginning to be united by way of Dave Garroway’s Today show, which could be seen on rabbit-eared black-and-white television sets. Ten-year-old girls read comic books about Little Lulu and Sluggo and Archie and Veronica, where the characters spouted freshly postwar jargon— Babs; Chum; Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle; Pow! Right in the kisser! —that set the tone for the epistolary etiquette—
    To Babs,
    Your loving chum is sad to go
    But we will meet in [ P.S. ] 14, I know
    â€”that Carole imparted in Barbara’s yearbook.
    At Shellbank Junior High, Camille Cacciatore joined Carole and Barbara’s best-friendship. Each of the girls had a distinction that made her feel “different.” Camille was one of the rare non-Jewish children in the neighborhood. Barbara had lost a father not to the war but to a disease, encephalitis. Carole had two emotional melodramas to weather, and in the face of what might have been grief, insecurity, and even guilt, she turned to music as release and comfort.
    Carole had