For decades, Carole King has made the earth move under our feet. At first, we didn’t even know her name since she was the writer but not the voice behind hits like the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
But that changed as soon as King began to sing her own songs, like “You’ve Got a Friend,” and “So Far Away.” She climbed the charts and became an international celebrity.
Yet, King was always an uneasy star, so uneasy that she decamped to the backwoods of Idaho, only to reemerge in recent years as a political activist and the subject of the Tony-winning Broadway show Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
Now, Jane Eisner has pulled back the veil on this private woman with Carole King. She joins us to discuss Carol Joan Klein’s childhood in Flatbush, her name change, the origins of her chutzpah and writing about the life of a woman who long shied away from a public presence.
A journalist and educator, Jane Eisner was a long-time writer and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the editor in chief of The Forward and a faculty member at Wesleyan, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. She is the author of one prior book.