Chapter Eighteen
At first Gerry and I spent most of our time together writing songs. As our musical catalog grew in 1959, so did our romantic relationship. That summer we were married at my parents’ home in Rosedale. The day after the wedding we moved to a one-room basement apartment on Bedford Avenue, a block away from the house at 2466 East 24th Street in which I had spent my childhood. The move was our honeymoon. While Gerry continued working as a chemist in downtown Brooklyn, I took a job as a secretary with a company in Manhattan that manufactured industrial chimneys. After work, using my grandmother’s recipe and others from Leah Leonard’s Jewish Cookery, I prepared supper for Gerry and me on a two-burner stove in the tiny alcove that served as a kitchen. With minimal exaggeration, Gerry used to tell people that our apartment was so small that he could turn the shower on with one hand while opening the refrigerator with the other.
After dinner, we wrote songs. Sometimes I took a day off to meet with publishers and record executives in the hope of receiving one of those twenty-five-dollar checks. We didn’t get one often, but when we did the money was as welcome as a couple of fluffy matzoh balls in a bowl of chicken soup. It would be even more welcome the following year. I was pregnant. Working by day, writing by night, we were either in debt or breaking even—never ahead. We kept hoping for a hit that would free us from our day jobs, but one day my boss did that for me before we could afford to lose the income. My bouts of morning sickness when I was at work and my taking too many days off to meet with publishers may have impaired his confidence in my commitment to industrial chimneys.
I was on a song-selling mission the day I ran into Neil Sedaka on Broadway. When I told him Gerry and I were pushing our own songs, Neil suggested I meet with Don Kirshner and Al Nevins, with whose publishing company he and Howie Greenfield were signed. When I called to request an appointment, the secretary said her bosses could see me the next day. Gerry couldn’t take time off from work, so I would attend the meeting alone. The next day I took the BMT to 49th Street. As I walked up Broadway, I was filled with so much anticipatory energy that I barely noticed the teeming street scene around me. Riding up in the elevator I reminded myself of my two objectives: getting us a publishing deal sufficient to get out of debt, and signing with a publisher with a track record of hits with top artists. Having already attained a #1 hit by Connie Francis with “Stupid Cupid,” written by Neil and Howie, Aldon Music met the second requirement.
Aldon combined the first names of Al Nevins and Don Kirshner. Al had been one of the Three Suns, best known for their 1944 hit “Twilight Time.” Al had financed the partnership, while Don had brought his close friendship with Bobby Darin and Connie Francis and an unerring ear for a hit. Arriving in Aldon’s reception area I could hear a cacophony of male and female voices singing, several pianos playing different songs in different rooms, and two or three current hit records blaring, all at the same time. When I gave the secretary my name she escorted me into Al’s office to meet her bosses. After introducing me, she left and shut the door behind her. My first impression of Al’s office was that it must have been decorated by someone who designed brothels. It had red drapes, a red carpet, and a red piano that dominated the room. The piano had red-and-black stools and a lacquered black shelf around it with red coasters on which people could set their drinks. One could almost imagine the piano being announced in a basso profundo voice: The Red Pianohhhhh.
After I had answered a few preliminary questions such as “How do you know Neil and Howie?” Al invited me to sit at the piano and play some songs. Donnie was constantly in motion, alternately pacing, tapping his feet, and nodding his head slightly off rhythm. After each song, Al applauded enthusiastically, Donnie winked at me, then Donnie and Al looked conspiratorially at each other. After the fourth song, Al praised the music and the lyrics and Donnie complimented me on my “piano feel,” by which I gathered he meant my pound-out-the-rhythm-as-hard-as-I-could style of accompaniment. Al was just saying he’d like to meet Gerry when Donnie looked at his watch, stood up, and said, “Gotta run, babe.”
Moving toward the door, he added, “I gotta go meet Connie”—I assumed he meant Connie Francis—“but can ya come back tomorrow? Bring Gerry.”
“Sure, no problem.”
Donnie paused at the door long enough to say, “I like what you’re doin’. Lemme hear some more songs,” and then he was gone.
Al recapped more elegantly what Donnie had just said, then walked me out to have his secretary set up an appointment for Gerry and me for the next day.
I floated home. (Full disclosure: a Brooklyn-bound BMT train was involved.) When Gerry got home from work I told him how it went. He was skeptical but willing to take a day off to hear what they had to say.
At the conclusion of our meeting the following day, Donnie and Al offered Gerry and me a three-year publishing contract that would give us, as a team, an advance of $1,000 the first year, $2,000 the second year, and $3,000 the third year. In exchange for $6,000, to be deducted from our future royalties, Gerry and I would assign ownership of the copyrights of all the songs we would write under the term of the agreement to Aldon Music, Inc., “and/or their heirs and assigns.” Any advances would be recouped from the writers’ share of the publishing income. The publisher’s share, equal to that of the writers, would go to Aldon and/or their heirs and assigns. At the time I had no idea what “heirs and assigns” were, but with extensions our agreement with Aldon would come to include all the songs that Gerry and I wrote separately or together from the time we signed with Aldon in 1959 until several years after the release of Tapestry in 1971.
We left that meeting feeling as if we had struck gold. To us, $6,000 was a huge sum of money, and that first check for $1,000 did get us out of debt. To Al and Donnie, $6,000 was a relatively small amount to invest in what was then fifty-six years of ownership and/or the right to transfer ownership of the copyright of any song written by Gerry and/or me during the term of the contract.
With our immediate financial concerns alleviated, we focused on the need to find a bigger apartment before the anticipated arrival of our baby in March. We moved to a ground floor two-bedroom apartment on Brown Street between Avenue Z and Voorhies Avenue in Brooklyn. That entire area had been cornfields when I was a child. Now it was filled with attached brick duplex houses in which a family could live on the upper two floors and cover their mortgage by renting out the ground-floor apartment. Gerry pejoratively called the neighborhood a “people farm,” but I was thrilled to be living in four rooms instead of one.
In January 1960, I was a month shy of eighteen. The baby’s due date was approaching, and all I knew about giving birth was that it would be painful. My main source of information was my mother, who was as helpful as she could be considering that her own experience had been limited to two births for which she had been medicated. Her own mother had practiced natural childbirth, though not by choice or name, but childbirth without drugs was no more an option for me in 1960 than it had been for my mother in the 1940s.
“When I was giving birth to you,” she recalled, “the drugs they gave me made me groggy, but they didn’t stop the pain.” She hastened to add, “Don’t feel bad. You were worth it, even if you did elbow me away the first time I held you….” I rolled my eyes and then we both smiled. It wasn’t the first time I had heard that story.
Then her eyes clouded with sadness as she recounted the memory of my brother coming out purple and staying that way for what seemed to her like too long a time before he turned pink. At subsequent doctor visits, when she suspected that Richard had a hearing disability, she was told that his purple color could have been an indicator of oxygen deprivation, which she later came to believe had caused his disabilities.
My mother’s recollections were not giving me a lot of confidence. As an apprehensive seventeen year old undertaking to learn exactly how childbirth worked and how much it would hurt, I wanted my mother to tell me how painless and uncomplicated her experiences had been. At the same time, I was grateful for her counsel. Had one of my daughters become pregnant at seventeen I would have said, “You’re much too young to have a baby!” but then I would have risen to the occasion, as did my mother.
Though Gerry and I had originally planned to wait before having children, Gerry, too, rose to the occasion. When I went into labor, he helped me into the car very carefully and made sure I had everything I would need with me. Because it would be another decade before fathers were invited to participate in deliveries, Gerry was pacing and smoking in the fathers’ waiting room when our daughter Louise Lynn Goffin was born on March 23, 1960. I was allowed to hold Louise for less than a minute before a nurse took her away to clean her up, swaddle her in a pink blanket, and tuck her in a bassinet in the nursery far from her germy mother. Another nurse brought Gerry to the hallway outside the nursery so he could view his new baby through a window. When at last my nurse allowed him in to see his wife and daughter during one of Louise’s allotted visits to my room, Gerry was profoundly moved. He kept telling me how beautiful Louise was, how much he loved her, how much he loved me, and what a good father he was going to be.
Seeing Gerry’s eyes shining with such a strong commitment to love his family and keep us safe, I fell in love with him all over again.