When Paul Blake, the producer of Beautiful, asked me if I wanted to write a Broadway musical about Carole King, her ex-husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, and their fellow songwriters, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, there was something I had to know before I could commit.
"Are they all alive?" I asked.
"Good news," Paul said. "They are."
Actually, that sounded like bad news. I had once worked on a screenplay about a real person whose vanity was so advanced that he would not let me portray him as anything less than thrillingly perfect which took all the struggle, and thus drama, out of his story. Audiences aren't interested in characters without flaws – even Achilles had that tendon trouble.
But Paul kept after me, constantly telling me things that might entice me. He reminded me that the songwriters had had their offices at 1650 Broadway, one of the two buildings people mean when they refer to the legendary Brill Building sound. (The Brill Building was down the street at 1619 Broadway.) These buildings had once been the province of the classic American songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley age and then, in the '50s, became the place where kids came to create rock'n'roll. Maybe there was something in that clash, the old being ousted by the new? Carole, Barry and Cynthia were coming to New York to interview book writers. "Come meet them," Paul said. "They're a lot of fun."
So I went and he was right, they were a lot of fun. I was so at ease, I told them my idea, and I could feel as I told it that it was right: a musical about kids chasing out the old guard so they could create the new sound of rock'n'roll. Carole's face lit up. I knew I had nailed it. She leaned forward to share her reaction.
"That," she said warmly, taking my hand, "is completely wrong."
"What?" I said, almost losing my balance even though I was seated.
"We idolised Gershwin and Porter and Kern and Berlin," she said. "We studied their music."
Cynthia piped in: "I wanted to be Cole Porter."
How surprising. As teenagers, they changed the sound of popular music but they were traditionalists at heart – rock'n'rollers, yes, but classicists, too. Before the meeting, I had known only one thing about these songwriters: that they were talented. But now I saw that they were something not all talented people are: they were interesting.
I said I would write the show, if they would have me. And I knew what kind of show I wanted to write: not a fictional creation like Mamma Mia which used an original story with the Abba catalogue, but the true story of these incredible people, and how some of the greatest songs of the last century were created.
They were not only a writing team but a romantic team and, as much as they loved each other, their relationship was fraught.
To do this, I interviewed the four songwriters, separately, for many hours over many days. I asked them about everything in their lives – from birth on – because at the beginning I had no idea what the show should be. If you see the show, it seems inevitable now that it starts with Carole on her way into Manhattan to sell her first song, and that it ends at Carnegie Hall with her celebrated concert as a solo artist, but when you are looking at four lives and some 70 years worth of memories, to get to the inevitable, you have to weed out a lot of the evitable.
The interviews with the songwriters were helpful for two reasons. First, of course, they gave me the facts and stories of their lives. But just as essentially, maybe even more importantly, these interviews gave me an unfiltered exposure to them as people, which guided the ways I would write them as characters.
I interviewed Barry and Cynthia together at their home in Beverly Hills. We sat in their kitchen and we laughed a lot. They are very funny, smart people – funny and smart about themselves as well as the world around them. So I knew that's how their characters had to be, too.
I interviewed Carole and Gerry separately – I spoke with Gerry at his home in Beverly Hills and Carole came to my office in New York. In Carole and Gerry's case, the interviews were much more emotional than the ones I did with Barry and Cynthia, and so their storyline is more emotional. Like Barry and Cynthia, they were not only a writing team but a romantic team and, as much as they loved each other, their relationship was fraught. Carole got pregnant out of wedlock at 16, there was a hurried wedding, infidelities, mental illness, substance issues, divorce, estrangement, forgiveness, reconciliation. (They were so fully reconciled that when Gerry died in 2014, Carole not only spoke but sang at his memorial.)
After the interviews, I stared at my giant notebook, packed with hundreds of pages of their stories. One feeling hovered above everything: a feeling of friendship. These people had been friends for more than 50 years. It's one thing to be friends with old school chums but they were not school chums; they met as competitors at 1650 Broadway, vying for Don Kirschner's attention, racing each other up and down the Billboard chart, fighting for the best artists to sing their songs. And it was not a casual competition – they once took a vacation together just to make sure the other couple wasn't writing more than they were. It was often fierce.
And yet.
They loved each other, these four great artists, they really did, and they respected each other. They studied each other the way they studied Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. That was an interesting, even classic dynamic – competitors who loved each other. (Fifty years after the events, they could remember exactly how high on the charts each of their songs landed.) So enduring and deep was this bond that when Carole was first approached about a show about her life, she insisted that Barry and Cynthia be included and their stories told, too.
This is typical of Carole – unlike many artists and stars, she knew her enormous success was not hers alone, and that she did not achieve all she achieved in a vacuum. I came to see that she was something of an oxymoron: a shy superstar. She is not falsely modest, she knows what her gifts are, but she behaves like a regular person. She doesn't go around with an entourage and a portable spotlight. She avoids, if at all possible, the press and promoting herself. Funnily enough, I think this is one of the reasons her audience is both so big and so devoted. Many of her listeners feel she is their friend, a feeling I suspect they do not have about other singers they may adore. This is an incredible feat of magic on Carole's part because, even though she just seems like a pretty girl with a cat in the window, she is a genius – the most successful female composer in history.
She knows this and yet the idea of a show about her made her uncomfortable. So when she approved the script and gave us the right to do a production, she said we had her blessing but told us she would not come see it. "It's too emotional for me," she said, "and seeing my marriage come apart isn't exactly my idea of entertainment. Also, I don't want to sit there and have people watch me watching the show, to see what my reactions are." We all thought: well, she's saying this now, but when we open in San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, where we were trying the show out, she would come. She didn't come. We all thought: well, it was San Francisco, only San Francisco, it's not New York, surely she'll come to opening night on Broadway. She didn't. She said she wouldn't and she didn't.
But over the next few months she kept hearing from people who'd seen the show and loved it, who told her she was crazy not to go. So she decided to come. But she still didn't want people watching her watch the show, so she came in disguise – a dark wig and glasses and a scarf – and she watched the show with her daughter Sherry. No one in the cast had been told. About 10 minutes before the end, she slipped out a side door and was met by a stagehand who took her some place away from the cast to change.
My wife and I were standing in the back of the house, watching, waiting. The curtain call had started and Jarrod Spector who played Barry, stepped forward and stopped the applause. It was time for the semi-annual appeal for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a pitch for donations at which he was especially winning.
As he spoke, two middle-aged women walked up the aisle and were about to push the door open into the lobby. They obviously wanted to beat the crowd and get a taxi. I couldn't help myself and said, "I wouldn't leave if I were you." They stopped and gave me a look like, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm just telling you, I wouldn't leave." They sighed, rather huffily, clearly thinking I was making them listen to Jarrod's appeal, but they stayed.
Then Carole came out from stage right. No announcement, she just stepped out and started walking across the stage passing the cast members lined up for the bows. At first only the actors on that side of the stage saw her enter. Realising who it was, they gasped. Then the audience on that side of the house also gasped and started clapping. By the time Carole reached centre stage and everybody knew that Carole King had finally come to see the musical about Carole King, it was nothing short of pandemonium at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. Screaming, shouting, cheering, whistling, tears of joy all around her, as the cast and audience poured out their love for her.
She gave a charming speech and then someone from the audience called out, "Sing something!" It was like an old movie and I love old movies. Because the drive for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS was in progress, Carole said she would sing – if someone bid enough. It didn't take long before there were three bids of ten thousand dollars. Jarrod shrewdly accepted all three on behalf of the cause, and Carole stepped forward and sang, You've Got a Friend.
In the end, as beautifully as she sang it, there was still that reticence she had about being the centre of attention so, near the end of the song, she passed the mic to the company and each member sang the line, "You've got a friend", passing the mic down the line until they had all sung it.
When it was over, Carole bid the audience goodnight. She put her arm around Jessie Mueller who would later win the Tony for her portrayal of Carole and the two of them walked slowly off stage. As I watched them leave, and listened to the waves of applause still coming from the house – no one wanted to go yet – I was conscious that someone was tugging on my sleeve. I turned and looked. It was those two middle-aged women. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" they said, their faces covered in happy tears.
The evening showed Carole's wonderful contradictions: her generosity, her star power, her wish to share the focus and, most of all, the enduring power of her art. I think people love her music the way they do because it is so compassionate, forgiving, and hopeful. The decision to title the show Beautiful came from this optimism. In fact, the show begins with Carole asking the audience, "You know what's so funny about life? Sometimes it goes the way you want and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes when it doesn't, you find something beautiful."
Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is at the Lyric Theatre from September 17.