From an abusive relationship and marital infidelity to her
struggles as a single mom in a notoriously drug-fueled industry, Carole King's long
journey to music success had no shortage of tragedy and heartbreak along the way.
When Carole King was nearly 9 years old, things changed for her family in a big way. That was
the age, she wrote in her memoir, A Natural Woman, when her little brother was diagnosed as deaf and
severely disabled. He was 2 years old at the time, and her family was faced with the heartbreaking
decision to move him to an assisted living facility where he could get the care he needed.
King loved her brother a great deal, and when he was gone, she wrote about how she would lie
awake and wish he was still in the room next to hers. She went nearly a year without seeing him,
and although she always loved visiting him, she was acutely aware of the fact
that he would never get to experience life the same way she did. She also heard the whispers,
recalling even friends and family members telling her mother that it was her own
fault that she had given birth to a child with disabilities. King wrote in her memoir
that after her brother moved into the care facility, it was always her and her mother
going to see him. Her father, she said, didn't visit him, ask about him, or speak about him.
Carole King has been candid about the upheaval she experienced in her young life,
and her family changed again two years after she had to accept the departure of her beloved
brother. She wrote in A Natural Woman that she was just 11 years old when her parents decided
to take some time apart, and it came at the end of a series of fights that she witnessed,
in spite of their attempts to hide what was going on.
It wasn't a clean break, and there was no immediate chance to adjust and move on.
King says that her parents repeatedly got back together and tried to make the marriage work,
divorcing, remarrying, and divorcing again amid other separations that happened throughout her
teenage years. Their divorce deeply impacted not only her childhood, but her adulthood,
too. King says that it left her with a deep need to find her own home and family — and would lead
her into four marriages in an attempt to find what she had felt her life had always been missing.
In 2012, Carole King sat down for an in-depth interview with the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum. Among the things she touched on was meeting her future husband and songwriting
partner, Gerry Goffin, when she was just 16 years old. They wrote "The Loco-motion" the
following year, and it was the same year they got married. At 18, she had her first daughter.
That was around the same time that she and Goffin started having difficulties,
and they separated while they were in the middle of a move to California.
They ended up making their way to the West Coast separately,
and King settled in Laurel Canyon. Finding her place there was difficult, though, as she was
now a single mother in a place where there were few other single mothers. Ultimately, King said,
the challenges she and her children faced together wove them into a close-knit family. She's said,
too, that she was grateful to have had her children with her during her Laurel Canyon years.
"I'm so proud of all my kids."
While being a mom kept her from fully partaking in the free-wheeling, anything-goes culture
that had famously sprung up in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood, it also kept her grounded.
Not every song can be a favorite. That said, there's one that Carole King isn't fond of at all:
1962's controversial "He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)." The song's story is a very real
one. According to Rolling Stone, it started when Eva Narcissus Boyd decided to leave her
hometown in North Carolina for the Big Apple. Boyd ended up babysitting King's children,
and she got her foot in the door when she recorded "The Loco-Motion," a song
co-written by King. When King saw Boyd covered with bruises and asked her what had happened,
Boyd told her that her boyfriend had hit her. According to Rolling Stone,
King recalled her saying, "He really loves me," and that they would eventually get married.
King and her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, put that sentiment to music,
and the song got handed off to the Crystals, who sang it for producer Phil Spector. The Crystals,
at the time, didn't want to record the song,
and their misgivings proved right. No one bought it, no radio station wanted to play it,
listeners complained about it, and Spector even axed the single. King would later tell NPR,
"That's one song I kind of wish I hadn't had any part of writing."
Carole King and Gerry Goffin were married at the height of their songwriting collaboration, but
it was a marriage that forced King to face some difficult times. In her memoir, A Natural Woman,
King wrote about the beginnings of Goffin's eventual downward spiral. According to her,
it started when someone spiked his coffee with LSD, a drug he would continue to use. She wrote:
"He lost touch with reality at first for days, then for weeks at a time
for many years afterward, with intermittent periods of lucidity, creativity, and wisdom."
She went on to recall his increasing paranoia and erratic behavior,
and it eventually reached a point where King knew that she had no choice but to try to
get help for him. Goffin was initially handed a diagnosis of schizophrenia,
but he was later diagnosed as manic. Amid a series of trial-and-error treatments,
doctors asked King to give consent to try electroshock therapy. She wrote in her memoir:
"I didn't feel that I had a choice. I signed the paper,
left the facility, and cried all the way home."
When Gerry Goffin died in 2014, Carole King's statement read,
in part, according to Rolling Stone,
"Gerry Goffin was my first love. He had a profound impact on my life and the rest of the world."
Although King added that she was grateful for their two daughters, the story of how
their relationship ended is heartbreaking. After marrying and having children young,
they divorced in 1968 — but not before staying together through Goffin's very
public infidelity. Rolling Stone says that among their early hits together was "Chains,"
recorded by a group called the Cookies. One of the Cookies was Earl-Jean "Jeanie" McCrea,
who had an affair with Goffin and gave birth to their child in 1964. Goffin immediately
acknowledged the child as his, even as fellow songwriter Jack Keller explained
it away like this to author Sheila Weller for her book Girls Like Us:
"A guy may go on the road, producing, while his wife is home. You get what I
mean? It's normal. Everybody does it — it's no big deal."
It was, however, a big deal to King — and to McCrea's husband. According to Girls Like Us,
Goffin and McCrea made no secret of the fact that they had planned to have a child together.
Those who knew them best would later share the heartbreak, betrayal, and insecurities that King
struggled with even as she and her husband not only continued to write songs for McCrea
and the Cookies, but as she helped buy a home for McCrea and the child Goffin had fathered.
Carole King wrote about her relationships in her autobiography, A Natural Woman,
and that included her relationship with Rick Evers. He believed he was destined to die at
33 years old, because that was the age Jesus had been crucified. She also shared in her memoir,
"Rick Evers physically abused me — not just once, but many times."
"The line is that I would never be with someone like that… until I was."
King wrote that the first time he hit her, it was just three months
into their relationship. She had been folding laundry when Evers questioned
her about a phone call she'd taken earlier in the day. Suddenly, Evers punched her.
King wrote that the incident kicked off a vicious cycle of abuse, apologies, promises,
and ultimately more abuse, and that she made all kinds of excuses for not leaving. She wrote:
"And not one of the excuses justified my staying."
On tour, Evers clashed with the band and was universally disliked. King
described herself at this time in her life, writing in her memoir:
"I had become a small distant creature wrapped in fear, shame, and guilt."
Carole King wrote that in spite of her abusive relationship with Rick Evers, she got back into
the studio — alone — and recaptured some of her creativity and passion for music. Meanwhile,
she was unaware of Evers' growing dependence on cocaine. In her autobiography, she wrote that
it wasn't until much later that she learned he'd struggled with drug addiction long before he met
her, and it was an addiction that he fell back into. She had already gotten to a point where
his strange behavior had made her think about reaching out to mental health professionals when
she spotted drops of blood on the bathroom floor and realized Evers had been injecting cocaine.
King woke her kids, got on a plane, and headed to Hawaii while she decided what to do. They
stayed there for a few days, when a phone call delivered the news that all she had
been thinking about was moot: Her husband had been found dead in a shooting gallery,
where he had died of an overdose at the age of 31.
The Carole King-penned song "You've
Got a Friend" has been covered many times, but no versions are as iconic
as the ones performed by King and her longtime, real-life friend, James Taylor.
"As soon as I heard it I said, 'Man, that's just, that's just it. That's a great, great song.'"
King has said that the song seemed to pour out of her when she was writing
it. According to Smooth Radio, she was once quoted as saying,
"It was written by something outside myself, through me."
It wasn't, however, born from a vacuum. King
later told Taylor that "You've Got a Friend" had been inspired by the line,
"I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend," from his song "Fire and Rain."
For the full story, it's necessary to go one step further. "Fire and Rain" was deeply personal for
Taylor, recounting a time in his life when he said goodbye to a friend. According to Timothy White's
Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor — His Life and Music, the real story behind the song isn't
the oft-repeated tale of the death of Taylor's girlfriend in a plane crash. Instead, the Suzanne
who's mentioned in the song was a friend he'd had as a teenager growing up in New York. After he
left the U.S. for London, they fell out of touch, months passed, and finally mutual acquaintances
told him that she had died by suicide. He wrote "Fire and Rain" in part to her memory.
In 2021, Carole King was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for the second time.
While the first time was for songwriting — alongside former partner Gerry Goffin — the
second time was as a performer. She's only the third woman to be inducted twice,
and the only woman to have those two inductions be in both a performing and non-performing capacity.
But suggest to King that she's a feminist icon, and she'll likely deny it. In an interview with
The Telegraph, she said that she had never felt as though she was held back for being a woman.
"I always knew I could do music and I just went in and did it. And men actually respected me for it."
But sections of her memoir, A Natural Woman, suggest that it was ultimately a little more
complicated than that. When she wrote about scoring a massive hit with "The
Loco-Motion," she noted that it ultimately led to the creation of Dimension Records,
which is where King and Goffin ended up working. Even though they collaborated on
each song they produced, it was only Goffin who was given a producer credit ... and the
pay that went with it. He was in the control booth while King performed, sang, arranged,
conducted, and directed singers, leading her to write about how regretful she was for not
trying to negotiate production credits and salary as well. King wrote in her memoir:
"I had no trouble valuing Gerry, but I didn't know how to value myself."
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.