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

femininity was radiated by the young actress Grace Kelly, by the older actress Loretta Young (thrusting open the French door on her weekly TV show), by models Jean Patchett and Suzy Parker, and by the soft-portraitured Breck Girls in Life magazine. Advertisements and commercials of women in cocktail dresses kissing their kitchen appliances drove home a schizophrenic mandate: Lure men with elegant wiles and then become a cheerfully addled serial procreator. Carole wrote in Barbara’s ninth-grade autograph book:
    May your blessings be many, may your troubles be few.
    May your boyfriends be many, and your children, too.
    But don’t come crying when your hair is in curls.
    I told you to try for only girls.
    As “extremely theatrical” (that’s the expression many use) as Genie Klein was, neither she nor Sidney seemed to Carole’s childhood friends to be particularly musical. Carole was the only one they saw at the piano, and she showed talent immediately. In a competitive field of musically gifted students, Carole won the Shellbank talent show and requested as her prize a baritone ukulele. Soon after, she appeared on the national TV talent show, Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, strumming that uke through a rousing rendition of the hit parade–topping “Shrimp Boats.” Carole avidly listened to what she’d later call that “Patti Page era” music. “I used to listen to the radio and tear every song apart and try to figure out why it was what it was, even if it wasn’t a hit,” she has said.
    Carole gave parties in her family’s basement—“and they were packed,” remembers Barbara, especially during rounds of Spin the Bottle. Carole’s date was her boyfriend, whom she met in Shellbank’s advanced math class: smart, creative—and tiny—Joel Zwick. “I was the most unthreatening boyfriend you can imagine,” says Zwick (who went on to become a successful director; among his credits are the TV sitcom Laverne & Shirley and the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding ). “I don’t think I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet or cleared five feet until I graduated high school. Genie Klein had such a dramatic way and she was so protective of Carole, she was intimidating. But I was too harmless for her to worry about. In fact, my nickname was Only Joel, as in (when the girls were having a pajama party and I’d ring the bell): ‘You can open it; it’s only Joel. ’”
    â€œEventually, these parties Carole and other kids gave had lots of touchy-feely going on,” Barbara remembers. To “get felt up” in the ninth grade was a first step to three or four years of fending off the pull of sex, a tension made all the more fraught by the new sleeper hit by an L.A. group, the Penguins, to which everyone was slow-dancing. The sensual, pleading song—so different from those genially corny white hit parade staples—sounded like nothing these Brooklyn girls had heard before:
    Ear-ear-ear-ear-ear-earth angel. Ea-earth a-an-gel…
    Will you be mi-ine?
    â€œOn Monday there was this other music; on Tuesday there was rock ’n’ roll.” That’s how The Band’s Robbie Robertson once described the seemingly overnight mid-1954 shift in popular music. One day middle-aged white writers were cranking out saccharine pop songs like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?,” “Mr. Sandman,” and the trusty “Shrimp Boats,” which were presented, by way of live skits, on TV’s Lucky Strikes–sponsored Your Hit Parade …and the next day the world changed. White teens started listening to, and demanding, an alternative: black music. (This overnight change can also be illustrated by the fact that in January 1954 an unknown Elvis Presley was recording Joni James covers; just a few months later, his raw, plaintive “That’s All Right, Mama” was making good on his