Chapter Twenty
Donnie was not without idiosyncrasies. He was deathly afraid to drive, and he refused to fly. It was rare to receive his full attention except when follow-ups or chart positions were a topic of discussion. And he constantly sought reassurance.
“Sheel, babe,” he’d say to his wife, Sheila. “Look at this new carpet! Isn’t it great?”
Then he’d turn to us: “Isn’t my wife the greatest?”
And after playing a test pressing of Connie Francis’s new recording of an Aldon song: “Doesn’t Connie sound great? This is gonna be a smash!”
For Donnie, everything connected with him was “great.” Ironically, that’s what made Donnie great. His enthusiasm was so infectious that he got everyone within earshot all fired up about whatever he was fired up about, and what he was usually the most fired up about was convincing the artist or producer of a top 10 hit to record an Aldon song and release it as their next single, which Donnie called the “follow-up.” When Donnie said, “Come on, guys, we gotta get that follow-up!” that was an unambiguous directive to head for the cubicles.
In 1960, the hottest girl group was arguably the Shirelles, four teenage girls whose then current hit was “Tonight’s the Night.” Donnie wanted that follow-up. Shifting into high gear, he summoned each writer or writing team into his office and addressed that writer or team as if she, he, or they were the only writer or team that could deliver his desired outcome.
“Now listen,” he’d say. “The Shirelles are up. I’m gonna get the follow-up, and I want you to write it. Come on, babe,” he exhorted, using the term with no regard for gender. “Do it for me!”
And we did. He made us want to do it—for him.
The next day each writer or team, in turn, went into Al’s office to play Donnie the song they had written the night before. Al, who tended to leave the day-to-day business to Donnie, wasn’t usually there. With Gerry at work, I waited with the other writers in the reception area. Hearing snippets of each new song coming through the door filled us alternately with confidence and anxiety.
Gerry and I competed the most fiercely against Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Each couple came to think of the other as “the other married songwriting team,” and each couple was intimidated by how talented the other couple was. Whether in spite of that or because of it, we four have remained friends over many decades. What we shared was unique. We Aldon songwriters may have thought of ourselves as mortal enemies when it came to getting a follow-up, but we were a tightly knit brother- and sisterhood of friends, colleagues, peers, and, most of the time, allies.
Donnie chose Gerry’s and my song for the Shirelles. The next hurdle was playing it for the people at Scepter Records. Their office was in the same building. As soon as Donnie hung up with Scepter, he gave me the go-ahead. Bypassing the elevator, I ran up the stairs with Gerry’s handwritten lyric and played the song for Scepter’s owner, Florence Greenberg, and Luther Dixon, the cowriter and producer of “Tonight’s the Night.” Florence and Luther liked the song and wanted to record it with the Shirelles right away, so I recorded the demo right there in their studio. It was a rudimentary presentation in which I sang the song live over my piano accompaniment and tried to sound like the Shirelles’ lead singer, Shirley Owens. One of the other Shirelles—Doris Coley, Beverly Lee, or Micki Harris—told me later that when Shirley recorded the lead vocal, she was trying to sound like me sounding like her.
Within ten weeks after it was released on November 21, 1960, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” climbed to #1 on Billboard’s popular music chart and stayed in the top 10 for seven weeks.
A lot of people think I wrote the lyrics for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” because they express so eloquently the emotions of a teenage girl worried that her boyfriend won’t love her anymore once she gives him her most precious one-time-only prize. Those lyrics were written by Gerry, whose understanding of human nature transcended gender. My contribution to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” included writing the melody, playing piano in the studio, and arranging the string parts. Though I had previously written choral parts, I had never composed a string arrangement. But when Gerry suggested we use strings I was fearless in volunteering. I knew how to write and read music. I would work out the parts on the piano and refer to an arranger’s handbook for transposition and range.
As I worked on the arrangement, Gerry sang ideas to me in a voice that many people considered unmusical, but I never did. Like a translator with a unique understanding of an arcane language, I was able to interpret the ideas Gerry was trying to get across. We had listened to hit records by the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for artists ranging from Wilbert Harrison (“Kansas City”) to the Coasters. We had also found inspiration in the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Aaron Copland. One of the most unusual arrangements we had ever heard was composed by Stanley Applebaum for Leiber and Stoller’s production of “There Goes My Baby.” Who but Leiber and Stoller would have thought to combine the voice of Ben E. King with cellos and timpani? That was visionary.
We, too, tried to be visionary. With “There Goes My Baby” as our model, I incorporated Gerry’s ideas and my melodic lines into an arrangement meant to complement the voices of the Shirelles. I tried to make my charts look as professional as the ones I’d seen on the music stands at Don Costa’s sessions by hand-copying the part for each instrument separately on music staff paper with a steel ruler and India ink. I wish I’d known that an arranger had only to scratch out a score in pencil and a team of copyists would work overnight to make the charts look the way they did on the music stands. After many hours handwriting more than fifteen charts, I was bleary-eyed. I looked at the clock. It was 4:45 a.m. I looked in on Louise and then went to bed.
The alarm rang entirely too soon. I dragged myself out of bed, brought Louise to my grandmother’s, then took the BMT up to Scepter. Recording the rhythm track took less than an hour. Then the string players arrived. The first time I heard the cellos play the rhythmic figure at the beginning of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” I was euphoric. To this day I can think of no greater musical joy than to hear a song or an arrangement come to life with instruments and voices. Some composers literally hear the sounds in their head as they write; Don Costa reportedly was such a composer. I had to wait until a session to hear what I wrote. As the musicians began to play the parts I had written for “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” I became giddy with excitement. My little black dots and squiggles on the page were coming out as beautiful music. The experience exceeded my wildest expectations.
I was eighteen.
The first time we heard “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” on the radio we were in our 1956 Mercury Monterey. We didn’t care that the speakers were low-fidelity. We knew how it was supposed to sound. The following week, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” leaped onto the charts with what the industry called a bullet. Gerry and I had set a million as the number of singles sold that would trigger him quitting his day job. The day Donnie learned that the record had reached the million mark, he insisted on conveying the information personally to Gerry. He had his driver pick me up and then we drove to Gerry’s workplace in Brooklyn. Upon hearing the news, Gerry walked away from his job and, as he said many years later, he hasn’t had a real job since.
Though Gerry and I remained each other’s primary collaborator, he began using his newly available daytime hours to write with other Aldon writers. One such collaboration with Barry Mann, “Who Put the Bomp,” would become a hit single with Barry as the artist. I, too, collaborated with other writers, notably Cynthia Weil and Howie Greenfield. Aldon had become one of the hottest publishers in the business, but none of us stopped long enough to notice how successful the company was. We were too busy competing to be Donnie’s “go-to” songwriters.
I never understood why some of Gerry’s relatives persisted in referring to him as a “bum” even though he had been gainfully employed as a chemist. Quitting his day job only confirmed their opinion of him—until they realized that he was making more money than they were, at which point they took great pride in his success.
Now that we had reasonable financial security, with Gerry collaborating with other writers, I was hoping to lighten my workload and spend more time at home with Louise.
It didn’t quite work out that way.