B005S8O7YE EBOK (13 page)

One of the things that had sustained my parents and grandparents through two world wars and the Great Depression was the dream that someday their children and grandchildren would have a better life. Gerry and I were barely in our twenties when we achieved that dream. We were homeowners. We lived in a
safe, attractive neighborhood in which we enjoyed the freedom to work, play, and raise our beautiful, healthy daughters in relative affluence. We didn’t have to worry about a midnight knock on the door by soldiers in a tyrannical regime. We should have been deliriously happy, and indeed, I was happy. In my bubble of contentment, I thought my husband was happy, too. But Gerry was beginning to feel the winds of the societal storm brewing on both coasts. That storm would become a tempest with enough momentum to polarize families across America and around the world.

H
aving achieved supremacy in New York, Donnie looked for new worlds to conquer. The next logical place was the West Coast. Hits by Hollywood artists such as Bobby Vee, the Everly Brothers, and Gene McDaniels were receiving quite a bit of airplay. Donnie’s relationship with Liberty Records producer Snuff Garrett had already led to a string of top 10 hits for Aldon writers, including Bobby Vee’s
“Take Good Care of My Baby,”
by Gerry and me, and
“Run to Him,”
by Gerry and Jack Keller.

Donnie’s decision to open a West Coast office was astute and timely. His choice of Lou Adler to run it was equally shrewd. Lou’s longtime relationships with West Coast artists and producers led to hits for Aldon writers with a diverse group of artists. Lou went to Nashville with the Everly Brothers to produce “Crying in the Rain,” which I had written with Howie Greenfield.

The first time I heard
“Crying in the Rain”
on the radio I was driving home on Northfield Avenue. I was immediately transported back in time to relive my excitement at seeing the Everly Brothers at an Alan Freed show. I recalled the hours spent in my room singing the third part to the Everlys’ distinctive dual
harmonies on songs such as
“Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie.”
Later I learned that I wasn’t unique in this regard. Other fans were doing the same thing. People who couldn’t carry a tune sang along with the duo and imagined themselves as the third Everly Brother. The Everlys’ records were arguably an early form of karaoke; all the singer had to do was fill in the missing vocal. Suddenly I was crying. There I was, a housewife running errands in West Orange, New Jersey, hearing the Everly Brothers’ recording of my song on the radio for the first time contemporaneously with millions of other people in the greater New York listening area.

With other producers and artists in L.A. clamoring for our demos and trying to recapture our sound and arrangements note for note on their masters, Donnie decided it was time to send Goffin and King to California.

In 1963 air travel was a lot less commonplace than it is today. Gerry was twenty-four and I twenty-one when we embarked on our first airplane trip, nonstop from New York to Los Angeles, out of what was then called Idlewild Airport.
^*
With the prevailing westerly winds pushing hard against the plane, the flight took over six hours. I should have been more nervous about the idea of spending six hours in a heavier-than-air metal tube hurtling thousands of feet above the ground in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean, but I was too excited. Gerry, initially more nervous than I, quickly attained a more relaxed state of mind by imbibing the mixed drinks made with tiny bottles of liquor served by the attractive female flight attendant, then known as a stewardess. As we flew across the continent I watched cities turn to suburbs, then to farms and open spaces. Occasionally, spidery patterns of houses, streets, and roads indicated the presence of a town.

I had viewed images of the Rocky Mountains and the Grand
Canyon in magazines, but seeing them in three dimensions from the perspective of an eagle I felt the power of nature on a grand scale. As the vast, diverse North American landscape unfolded below me, the beginning of my lifelong love for our home planet unfolded inside me. I’ve traveled across the country many times since then, both by air and on the ground, but I’ve never forgotten my first eagle’s-eye view of America’s magnificent natural landscape. That perspective would inform my later work to ensure that the remaining wild land in the Northern Rockies ecosystem is legally protected. Back then I saw vast empty landscapes. Since then so much more land has been developed, and so much less of it remains wild. When I tell members of the United States Congress that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren deserve to experience the remaining unspoiled land and wildlife on this earth as close as possible to the way it was thousands of years ago, I’m honoring a commitment I made on that first flight to Los Angeles.

Today when I step out of a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport I’m struck by the smell of exhaust fumes and the absence of sunlight under an overpass that wasn’t there forty-odd years ago. Stepping out of the terminal in 1963, I was struck by how warm and bright the sun was. We had left New York in January and been miraculously transported into July. As I reached for my sunglasses I thought,
Now
I understand. Sunglasses aren’t an affectation here; they’re a necessity.

Climbing into the back seat of the stretch limo Lou had sent for us, I had the sensation of time moving more slowly than it did back east. This shouldn’t have been surprising. Though we’d been flying for most of the day, it was barely past the crack of noon. We had the whole afternoon ahead of us. The limo glided out of the airport and headed east on Century Boulevard. When the driver told us we were only a half hour away from the Pacific Ocean I thought, Wow! It took us only six hours to be a continent away
from the Atlantic Ocean. My grandparents’ journey from Eastern Europe had taken six months!

The driver eased the limo into the unending stream of cars that filled every lane of the freeway. The northbound traffic looked like something out of a science-fiction movie, a creature composed of parallel streams of individual cars, each contributing mindlessly to the forward movement of the larger organism. Toward what goal? Fame? Money? Power? Sex? All of the above? At the time I didn’t even know the questions, let alone the answers. In Beverly Hills rows of palm trees lining Sunset Boulevard reminded me of leggy starlets at a dance audition. Most houses were hidden, but some of the large estates displayed the owner’s value of opulence over privacy. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I hadn’t seen even one person walking on the street.

Some things are trite because they’re true. Sitting in the back of a chauffeured limousine being driven through Beverly Hills, I felt like the proverbial star of a Hollywood movie. By the time we reached West Hollywood I was certain that every house in the city had a pool, every man was as rich as Howard Hughes, and every woman as sexy as Marilyn Monroe. All I had to do was close my eyes and my heart’s desire would be granted. When the limo pulled up to the apartment building where we would be staying, I had no idea how much my family’s future would be determined by the City of Angels.

T
he world changed on my twenty-second birthday. It was February 9, 1964, when Gerry and I watched Ed Sullivan introduce the Beatles on his television show. I could barely hear the band over their screaming fans. By the time the Fab Four had finished their first number, teenage boys across America had resolved to let their hair grow and take up the guitar. The growing restlessness of young Americans was fertile soil for the seeds of dramatic sociological transformation planted by the lads from Liverpool. Irreverent answers in interviews with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr resulted in many young men realizing, Yeah! These guys look how
I
wanna look, and they’re sayin’ what I’m thinkin’! And as young men wanted to be the Beatles, young women wanted to… well, you know. But underlying the Beatles’ sociological impact was their remarkable music. Their songs had catchy melodies, smart lyrics, imaginative harmonies, and energetic arrangements.

The day after the Beatles’ appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
,
the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This might not have happened without the lobbying skills of President Lyndon B. Johnson, arguably the most powerful Caucasian American then working to ensure civil and voting rights for all Americans.

Gerry and I became involved in the civil rights movement in part because of our close connection with African American artists, but mostly because of our shared sense of outrage about racial injustice. We canvassed for the cause and gave money to support activists on the front lines in Mississippi and Alabama. When civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi around the solstice of “Freedom Summer,” we were saddened by the loss of all three, but the loss of Andy Goodman hit closest to home. We knew his mother, Carolyn.

President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, and the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964. We viewed these as signs of progress. Other signs of the times included long hair, Renaissance clothing, East Indian print curtains, beanbag chairs, discotheques, pop art, hallucinogenics, and antiwar protests that would swell to such large numbers that President Johnson would announce on March 31, 1968, that he would not seek reelection.

In 1964 I was somewhat aware of current events, but I was more concerned about my husband’s declared desire to expand his mind. I had no interest in doing that. Someone in our family needed to keep enough brain cells functioning to run our household. One of us needed to at least pretend to be an adult. I could do that by writing melodies to Gerry’s increasingly socially conscious lyrics. After that, all I could do was hope those songs would be hits. There was a fair chance of that happening. As the antiwar movement grew stronger and Americans became increasingly polarized, protesters were romanticized in popular songs. A man’s long hair, by which
he self-identified as “hip,” invited name-calling and worse from other men who proudly asserted their status as “straight” with the short hairstyle of a businessman or a Marine buzz cut. At the time “straight” was not associated with sexual orientation; it meant you were not a hippie. Women who wanted to be hip wore their hair long and straight, while the hairstyle of a straight woman might be a teased flip with bangs resembling that of an astronaut’s wife. If a woman’s hair was curly and she wanted to be hip, she either ironed her hair or wound it tightly around orange juice cans to remove all the curl. That was my category.

Other things besides hair revealed one’s political inclination. “The Man” was a name hipsters used to refer to entrenched interests. You were either against The Man, or you
were
The Man. The slogan “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” galvanized young people to oppose the existing social order. In the music business, Bob Dylan and other folksingers with “message songs” began to eclipse the pop singers who had previously dominated the charts. Unfortunately for Gerry’s and my livelihood, the marginalized artists included many who had been recording our songs. Groups from Great Britain such as the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and the Beatles climbed the charts in record numbers. Collectively referred to by the news media as “the British Invasion,” most were self-sufficient. Sometimes they covered songs by American writers, but the British groups were successful in the United States primarily with their own material. They didn’t need our songs. Without a small miracle, Gerry and I were not going to be able to maintain our comfortable lifestyle.

We got our miracle, and it wasn’t small. It was exactly the size of the woman whose reign as the Queen of Soul would transcend several generations.

T
he more Gerry and I traveled back and forth between coasts, the less happy I became about being away from our children so much. I thought we should look for opportunities closer to home. One of the most successful New York–based record companies was Atlantic Records. Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun had continued to be diligent in looking for songs for their R&B and soul artists whose strength lay more in performing than in writing. Ironically, their top artist, who wrote her own songs, would save our bacon by recording a song she didn’t write.

One afternoon Gerry and I were walking down Broadway to retrieve our car when a long black limousine with dark windows pulled up alongside us. The rear window rolled down and revealed Jerry Wexler. He got right to the point.

“I’m looking for a really big hit for Aretha.”

He didn’t need to say her last name. Miss Franklin had already enjoyed several top 10 hits. We moved closer to the car to hear what else he had to say.

“How about writing a song called ‘
Natural Woman
’?”

Gerry and I looked at each other. What a great title! We could
do that. Wexler saw our look and nodded. Then he pressed the button to roll up his window, Gerry and I stepped back onto the sidewalk, and Wexler’s face disappeared into the darkness. We watched the limo ease back into the flow of traffic down Broadway, then Gerry and I began walking again.

“Oh my God, he wants us to write for Aretha!”

“I think we can do it.”

“Of course we can!”

“Yeah… I think I already got an idea.”

With me bubbling over and Gerry thinking out loud in his thick Brooklyn accent, we continued to reaffirm our ability to deliver the requested song all the way to the lot where our car was parked.

Having a specific assignment that we had every reason to believe would lead to a cover by a top-selling artist was highly motivating. As soon as we came out on the Jersey side of the tunnel, Gerry put on WNJR to inspire the right musical mood. Arriving home, we parked in the driveway, went into the house, and found Willa Mae presiding over the children’s after-dinner playtime. We spent some time with the girls, but we were chomping at the bit. We kissed them good night and headed up to the red room. I sat down at the piano, put my hands on the keys, and played a few chords. It was unbelievable how right they were, and we both knew it.