One
MORE THAN ONCE ITâS crossed my mind that if my mother had been just the tiniest bit more nurturing, if sheâd have looked at me a little less critically, maybe I would have felt like enough. But then I would never have had the intense need to be seen and heard, and I wouldnât have had the life Iâm about to share with you.
My mother, Anita Bayer, was pretty much afraid of everything, from flying on an airplane to being raped in her apartment to the idea that my father might love me more than her. When I was two months old she was giving me a bath when I slid out of her hands like a bar of soap and slipped underwater. Instead of lifting me out, she panicked and raced out of the bathroom, leaving me alone and submerged.
âHelp! The babyâs drowning!â she screamed to her oldest friend, Sally Held, who, thank God, was visiting. She rushed in and pulled me out of the water. As Sally later told the storyâand believe me, she told it oftenâit was she who calmed me down and laid me in my bassinet, at which point my mother put her face really, really close to mine, kissed me on my forehead, branding me with her bright red lipstick imprint, and said, âNever scare me like that again!â
MUSIC PLAYED ALL THE time in our Manhattan West Side apartment. My father, Eli Bayer, favored classical music and could pick out any song on our piano by earâwith one finger. My mother loved all the great divas. Her favorite, Judy Garland, blasted daily through our walls. We had records of all the top musicals, and I grew up knowing the lyrics and melodies from every show by heart.
Addie, who took care of me while my parents were at work, taught me to say my prayers every night. We would both get on our knees, clasp our hands in front of us, and, despite the fact that I was Jewish, recite the Christian childâs prayer: âNow I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake . . .â
If I should die before I wake? Who thought to put that idea into a kidâs head? Now each night I had to worry about not waking up. The fear of death, so intuitively instilled in me in that bath, took an even stronger hold. Falling asleep was very high on my list of Things That Were Unsafe.
Oh, and my dad went to prison. Always the good guy, he helped his older brother by bribing an army officer friend to keep his nephew out of World War II. When I was two he spent six months in jail. Of course, I have no cognitive recollection of what his sudden disappearance from my life felt like, but I didnât have to remember the feeling. It remembered me. It especially remembered me at bedtime when the panic would engulf me.
People used to say I was the image of my father. When I was a baby they said, âPut a cigar in her mouth and sheâll look just like Eli.â All I saw was that I had his hazel eyes and we both tanned easily, unlike Mom, whose skin burned in the sun. And my dad always carried some extra weight, so thatâs another tendency I may have gotten from him.
Anita Nathan was five foot two and with a more than ample bosom. She happily passed to me her diminutive stature but withheld her big boobies. As an assistant dress buyer in the Garment District, she managed, with little money, to cut a fashionable figure. She loved when her more sophisticated friend Sally let her tag along to her uptown parties, where one night she met Eli Bayer, twenty-two years her senior. They began going out, and when he got her pregnant, he did âthe right thingâ and married her. Anita would have definitely been happier if I hadnât come along so fast, but then, without me the deal would never have been sealed. She was still a child herself who wanted my dadâs complete attention, so I grew up feeling her resentment of his deep love for me. In truth, she would have preferred that I wasnât there.
AND THEN THERE WAS the real world outside of apartment 10-A, with all of its dangers. For one thing, there was polio. Millions of kids worried about catching it, but I was certain I already had it. I lay in bed at night imagining myself becoming paralyzed. In an attempt to allay my fears, my mother had bought me a walkie-talkie so I wouldnât feel so afraid.
I buzzed. âMommy, are you there?â
The walkie-talkie crackled. âIt depends whoâs calling.â
I knew this was her being funny, but this was no laughing matter. âItâs me. Carol. Iâm scared.â
âPolio again, Iâm guessing?â
I heard my mother get up from her comfy bed and dutifully come into my bedroom. She took my plump leg and bent it backward and then forward. She did the same with the other one.
âSee! They both bend. If you had polio, they would not bend. Now, get up and walk around.â I walked once around my small room.
âIf you were paralyzed you would not be able to walk. Youâre fine.â She gave me a kiss on the cheek and left. Unfortunately, her reassurances only lasted until she was out of sight. I counted backward from a hundred, and then, still awake, I got up and hurried into their room.
âIâm still scared,â I announced.
âEli,â my mother said, âtell me whatâs wrong with her. Why canât she just go to sleep like a normal child?â How could I tell them I didnât feel normal?
Some nights I got lucky and they let me sleep in between them. As I got a little older and it became less appropriate, I would tiptoe back into their room after Mom was asleep. Iâd tap my father and heâd get out of bed, point for me to sleep on his side, and shuffle off to sleep in my room. Iâd pull his blankets way over my head so if Mom woke up sheâd think I was him. In the morning, he would wake me up and Iâd quickly run back to my room, trying to shake off the humiliation from my bizarre nighttime ritual. I would go off to school showing no signs of the crazy drama each night held. I was one of the popular kids. I was happy by day, so none of my friends had any idea of the other Carol.
When Jonas Salk came up with the polio vaccine, I escalated seamlessly to fearing leukemia, which was not only incurable but harder to diagnose. I always had black and blue marksâwhat kid didnât?âbut it was a symptom, and I thought I had lymph nodes sticking out in my neck. How many eight-year-olds knew the words lymph nodes? Yeah, I was a piece of work.
And then, of course, there was the bomb. Like millions of other preâbaby boomers, I spent most of my early school years worried about Russia wiping us out. This fear established itself in grade school, when air raid drills were a part of the fabric of the Fifties. On no notice, sirens would blare, and we were sent scrambling under our little wooden desks with their attached seats, the protective qualities of which I always questioned. Plus, with my extra pounds, it wasnât such an easy fit.
And the bombs didnât only have to come out of the sky. This was the era of the tabloid-dubbed âMad Bomber,â George Metesky, who for sixteen years cut holes in movie theater seats and left explosives in them, turning the normally pleasurable experience of moviegoing into, for me, yet another exercise in terror. Many a subplot was lost on me as my eyes scanned each row in search of crazies with paper bags.
MY WEIGHT WAS ONLY perfect once in my life, when I was six pounds seven ounces at the age of a minute. I was always either putting on pounds or on a diet. I loved food, but eating itâat least the foods I desired (carbs and more carbs)âhad terrible consequences. While I was definitely plump, I was never obese, though if you believed my mother I was always just a doughnut away. On the other hand, my father would say, âDonât worry, Anita, sheâs beautiful. Sheâll lose the baby fat.â
So shopping for clothes, as you can imagine, was a nightmare. One afternoon, walking down the street, completely out of nowhere, my mother said, âWalk behind me, fatty. Youâre embarrassing me.â That hurt. It felt awful. It still does. I understood even then that my mother only saw me as a reflection of her own narcissism. I didnât know the word yet, but I knew how sad it made me feel. I was afraid to feel the anger so I stuffed it down with more food.
After failing to find a birthday dress to fit me at Macyâs, off we went to the plus-size store. âWelcome to Lane Bryant,â the slim hostess said, as she held out a silver tray of big freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. âWould you like one?â she asked. As my hand leapt to grab one, my mother just as swiftly pushed the woman and her tray away from me.
âThey should be ashamed of themselves!â she said emphatically to no one in particular. âWhat a racket! God forbid they should lose their chubbies.â We never went back there again, though we did buy one ugly pink party dress (think plus-size and thatâs a lot of pink coming at you) that I would wear at family occasions where my mother and her sister Lucilleâwhose daughter, my cousin Joan, was also a âfattyââwould commiserate, eyeing us and shaking their heads as if to say, âI canât believe this happened to both of us.â
ONE NIGHT AFTER DINNER, my father began to have chest pain. Really bad pain.
âDr. King is on the way,â my mother announced, hanging up the phone. âI have to run down to the drugstore and get Daddy some medicine. You wait up here with him.â Before I could suggest that maybe I should go down to the drugstore, she was out the door and I, a scared ten-year-old, was left to stay with my seriously ill father.
The pain was so great he could hardly breathe. I hoped that my interrupting his sleep every night hadnât caused him to take ill. âPlease, Daddy, donât die,â I prayed silently. It became a mantra. He was pretending to be calm, but I could see he was as scared as I was. I could barely breathe as I watched him turning blue. Please, Daddy, donât die. Please, Mommy, come back with the medicine. And, through it all, the most terrifying thought: What if he dies before the doctor gets here? But the doctor did come and an ambulance took my father away to Mount Sinai Hospital. He was having a heart attack.
I never slept in my parentsâ room again. And I began saying my prayers before trying to fall asleep. I would end them with âPlease let my daddy live a long life,â always repeating the word âlongâ exactly fifty times. If I lost track, I had to start again.
Thankfully, he did recover, and came home a week later. But now my fears had a solid foundation to build on.
Two
WHEN I HEARD A song I loved on the radio, it could easily get lodged inside my head. Some phrase of the chorus would repeat and repeat as if on a loop, sometimes for hours on end, displacing whatever fear had taken up residence there. I loved writing my own lyrics to pop tunes. When I was nine years old, I remember rewriting a song called âWishing Ring.â I was in love with the TV show I Love Lucy, and rewrote the lyric like this: âIf I had a wishing ring / Iâd only ask for just one thing / That Lucyâyes, Lucyâwas my mom.â
While away at summer camp, I began writing lyrics to our camp songs. Everyone liked them and sang them on campfire nights. It was then I knew I wanted to be a songwriter. I loved to pick out melodies on the piano like my dad did. My mom took this as a signal to sign me up for lessons. And it turned out that my piano teacher had recorded a hit song of his own, âPetticoats of Portugal.â Becoming proficient at piano gave me the confidence to audition forâand get accepted toâthe highly competitive High School of Music and Art.
MY DAD HAD A second heart attack when I was thirteen, and I worried about him a lot. We had our own dance. Weâd walk up the hill from Sixth to Seventh Avenue on Fifty-Seventh Street, and when Iâd notice him sneaking a nitroglycerine tablet under his tongue for his chest pains, I would immediately stop and pretend to be looking in the window of whatever store we were in front of. âDaddy, look at the new stereo Rabsonâs is selling. Letâs go in and hear how it sounds.â This would give him enough time to catch his breath and feel the relief from the nitro.
Along with constant drilling and horns beeping impatiently, fire engines and ambulances made up the soundtrack of the city. Every time I was away from home and heard a siren, I feared it was an ambulance on its way to my father.
I WAS A SNEAK eater, as in candy bars at school and Nedickâs hot dogs on the way home, so my mother could never figure out why I wasnât losing any weight from her broiled chicken and steamed string beans. When I was in fifth grade, she decided I needed a medical intervention. Each week I got a new set of colored pills. My cousin Joan got them, too. They made us thin, until we went off the pills and got fat again.
I longed to be thin and wear fun, trendy clothes, but instead I wore things that I imagined hid my shape. I lived one entire winter in a gray felt A-line dress with cap sleeves, its hem falling just in the middle of my knees, which I hated for being too wide. âThatâs from your fatherâs side of the family,â my mother was quick to point out.
All through high school I wore these ugly flesh-colored girdles that were so tight they squished my extra pounds, causing them to pop out in places they had never dreamed of popping before. When I removed the girdle, indentation marks showed angrily on my skin. I think the main reason I kept my virginity till the end of high school was because I would have been humiliated for any boy I liked to discover the complete second wardrobe I was wearing underneath my clothing. (A padded bra accompanied the aforementioned girdle.)
But, hey, maybe those guys did deserve something for the effort involved in trying to get far enough under my armor without being wounded by the metal stays poking out of the girdle. (One date, looking down at his red and swollen hand, asked me if I had any ice.) And when they would totally give up in exhaustion, Iâd hear them unzip their fly and fumble for my hand to caress their jewels. I pretended to like how they guided my hand up and down, up and down, until they released with delight. I just wanted to go home and get undressed. That was enough release for me.
IN HIGH SCHOOL, I found my new best friend, Sherry Harway, who lived three long blocks awayâespecially long if, like me, you hated even as minor a form of exercise as walking. We bonded immediately over our love of pop music. And this is when my passion to write popular songs really overtook me.
After school we would come back to my apartment and rush through our homework so we could get to the piano and try to write songs like the ones we heard on the radio. Elvis Presley had long since replaced Perry Como as my true love. We were doing the twist with Chubby Checker, listening to the Drifters and Dion and the Belmonts, and wishing we could compose a song as good as the Shirellesâ âWill You Love Me Tomorrow.â
We tried to write all the time. Sherry and I both wrote music and lyrics. Our songs sounded the way songs might sound if fifteen-year-olds were writing them from their own experience. One of our first songs was called âLet Me Tell You âBout Ronnyâ:
Well, heâs got a cool car
And he wears cool clothes
Mention his name
And everybody knows
Thatâs Ronny
Whoa, whoa, whoa, thatâs Ronny.
Yeah, Iâm talkinâ âbout Ronny.
We were just learning how to write pop songs. I began to study every song I heard on the radio, dissecting each one to find out what was that special thing that made it a hit. What wasnât I doing yet? Was it in the melody? Was it in the lyrics? Or was it only when you found the perfect combination of the two? We kept writing, and we had the advantage of living in New York City, being ten blocks away from the famed Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, and having a piano teacher, Marvin Kahn, who knew a publisher in that same building.
Writing songs at sixteen years old was unusual back in the early Sixties, but Marvin was able to open the first door for us. He introduced us to the Mills Brothers, who had a music publishing company in that buildin...