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

a little brother, Richard, who was born deaf and severely mentally retarded. Genie and Sidney Klein sent him to live at the nearby Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, an institution of last resort for families with mentally disabled children. Sometimes Richard was home for a weekend. “And when he was,” recalls Camille, “the house was always filled with pandemonium.” It was clearly unworkable for the boy to live at home, but Willowbrook was a frightening place—a silent, 350-acre campus of hidden-away children. Even fifteen years before a television exposé uncovered scandalous abuse and neglect (young patients sleeping in cages in their own feces, among other horrors), there was enough suspicion of ill treatment for parents to do their own investigating. One day Camille came along with the Klein family to visit Richard. She remembers “being in a little room with Genie, Sidney, Carole, and Carole’s brother. Genie was talking to her son very emotionally, asking him, ‘Did anyone on the staff hurt you?’ She lifted his shirt up, as if she was looking for welts. She was crying.”
    But Carole, Camille says, seemed girded. “She didn’t cry. She didn’t talk about it”—not about the day, the institution, or her brother. Still, years later she would put those feelings into her tender “Brother, Brother,” about a fortunate person’s sympathy toward a luckless sibling cut off from the world: “And though you didn’t always talk to me / there wasn’t much my lovin’ eyes could not see.”
    Carole’s parents’ divorce, so novel in that traditional world, had, to her friends, a haunting irresolution to it. “I remember once, when Carole and I were about eleven, Sidney came to the house to pick up Carole for his visitation time with her, and I saw this wistful, romantic scene at the door: Carole’s divorced parents hugging and kissing,” Camille says. “It was as if they really loved each other but couldn’t figure out how to make it work.” On the surface, the elder Kleins were as ordinary as other Brooklyn parents; their working lives rendered them not at all bohemian, and with their (in Barbara’s memory) “shabby, dingy house,” they’d never be called glamorous. Still, there was something romantic about them, in the eyes of their daughter’s young friends. Camille recalls Sidney Klein as “a tall, gorgeous man with a mustache—he looked a little like Clark Gable. Sidney was vital. He wasn’t one of those disappearing-into-the-woodwork fathers, of which there were plenty. At a cottage they took every summer on Lake Waubeeka in Danbury, Connecticut, he even took me for a ride on a motor scooter. It scared and thrilled me.” Barbara recalls Genie Klein as “a beautiful, fragile, ethereal, flighty, slightly eccentric woman, with perfect diction. She wasn’t like the other mothers.” Later friends have noted that Carole’s eschewal of artifice—which blossomed in Tapestry —is in marked contrast to her mother. “She seemed to be her own person very early,” says Camille. Leslie Korn Rogowsky, a friend from their teen years, adds, “She had a sense of who she was and what she wanted to do; that was unusual—you felt it.”
    The children of city utility and service workers (Barbara’s father worked for the gas company and Camille’s for the transit authority, while Carole’s dad was a fireman), the three friends were thrifty: babysitting for fifty cents an hour; stopping for five-cent pickles and dime knishes on the way home from Shellbank; occasionally splurging on lunch at the Chinese restaurant, ninety-nine cents for a four-course meal, leaving a tip of pennies. But beyond humble Brooklyn, there shimmered an elegant media ideal of womanhood. Broken only by the pluckiness of Debbie Reynolds, a serene, pedestaled