BEVERLY HILLS HOMES OF THE RICH & FAMOUS
Songwriter/Singer Carol Loves Her Beverly Hills Home and its Quiet Neighborhood

by Norma Zager – Editor         

 
 

 

“To know know know him is to love love love him”...if this refrain sounds familiar and embeds itself into your brain, playing over and over like a favorite forgotten memory of youth, you will also remember the singer who made it a classic fifties hit.
      Carol , singer/songwriter, has lived a life full of twists and turns of fate and has done the last twenty years of it in her Beverly Hills home.
      The four-bedroom home on Ferrari Drive sits on .61 acres and is 2,424 sq. ft. Built in 1963, it boasts three baths, a total of ten rooms with a pool and a view.
      Purchasing the home–which is located on quiet and pristine Ferrari Drive, with famous residents like Janet Leigh, Richard Pryor, Adam Sandler, Robert Culp, “Wolfman” Jack and Brian Wilson–was, according to Carol, quite an adventure.
      The owner happened to be at the house when Carol pulled up to see it with her parents and Mahmood, the King of Malaysia.
      “I walked in and fell in love with the beautiful wood ceilings. My father was a jockey; he thought the house was too big and the ceilings too high. When we drove up in the six white stretch limos and an entourage of 18 people, he [the owner] must have seen dollar signs and when I introduced him to the King of Malaysia, he must have thought he hit the daily double.
      “But my father said offer him $25,000 less. So I said to him, ‘I know you think I am very, very rich, judging from the king. But he is not buying the house, I am, and in my mind I am very, very poor and I am going to give you a price and I will not negotiate. If you counter, I will walk away from this house and I’m a Scorpio so I mean business.’ He took the offer.”
       purchased the home after her success at co-writing the score of “Rocky” and said she couldn’t get a loan from the bank.
      “This was the early ‘80s but it was rare for a single woman to buy a home in those days. The bank would not give me a loan because I wasn’t married and didn’t have a nine-to-five job. My manger went to the bank and said, ‘I’ll send you over her ASCAP (American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers) statement.’ ”
      Carol met Phil Spector through a friend at Louis Pasteur Junior High School, who was dating him. Spector was at Fairfax High School at the time. said, “He would hear me singing everywhere and asked me if I had ten dollars. I said I didn’t even have ten cents. He said if got together ten dollars, I could cut a record.”
      Carol went to her parents for the money. “My mother said, ‘Go do your homework,’ ” related . After much pleading, Carol’s father agreed to listen to her sing because she was so determined and precocious. “This went on for awhile and I finally got the ten dollars and Phil said I could cut a record.”
      The first song she recorded was a song Spector wrote, called “Don’t You Worry, My Little Pet.” Carol said the song was highly forgettable but there was a small line she sang solo. “After the session Phil said he really liked my voice and was going to write a song just for me.”
      Carol said Spector’s father had committed suicide and on his epitaph it read, “to know him was to love him.” Phil based the song on that inscription.
      “Phil called me in the middle of the night while I was doing my homework about two weeks later. He played the song over the phone while strumming his guitar and said ‘what do you think?’ ”
      “I said I didn’t know, I am doing my homework.” He told me to be at the studio the next day to learn the song and we’d record in three days.
      Carol said she was too young to drive so she took the bus to the studio, at what became the Old Star studio where Stan Ross ultimately engineered Spector’s legendary “Wall of Sound.”
      “We cut two takes and I walked out in twenty two minutes.”
      Carol said she was too young to have a boyfriend so she thought of her father when she sang the song.
      “We didn’t know what to call the group, but we all loved Elvis’ teddy bear song, so we decided to call our group ‘The Teddy Bears.’ ”
      With Carol in the group were Marshall Leib, who passed away last year, and Spector.
      After the song was released, Carol says Elvis wanted to meet her because he had fallen in love with her voice. “I was 18 when I was introduced to Elvis. My first impression was of a beautiful giant cat because of the catlike way he moved. We went together for nine months and he was my first love.”
      Carol recalls when Elvis was asked to do a command performance for the Queen of England.
      “He didn’t like to fly, but it was a royal command performance. He said they offered him $20,000 for the one night and Colonel Parker allegedly told them, ‘Okay, that’s for me, now what are you going to give my boy?’ ” said Elvis didn’t do the performance.
      Carol’s fortunes changed dramatically when a terrible car accident, 350 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Drive, almost cost her her life. “It took four operations to put my nose correctly back onto my face and ended my singing career. I was so embarrassed and self-conscious about the way I looked.”
      After the accident Carol had a couple of songs on the charts, but they didn’t become hits. She turned to songwriting, and her collaborative effort with her brother Marshall on “Hey, Little Cobra,” made the only woman who wrote a hot rod hit; it is still considered a classic.
      Carol said she always enjoyed writing and when she was seven years old began piano lessons. Her mother, Gail, was a singer and she was supposed to study opera at the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, but the war broke out and Connor’s father brought her mother to America in 1938.
      “My mother gave up her dream, but made my sister and I take piano. I couldn’t stand the constant noise of my sister practicing, so I talked her into art lessons instead. It was much quieter. She is really talented and has exhibited her work.”
      ’ lessons ended when one day, while playing “Fur Elise,” she decided Beethoven could have done a better job so she rewrote it. Her piano teacher was horrified and end of story–no more piano teacher. said she did get another teacher, but with the understanding that there be no more rewrites of the masters.
       said that when she originally got the call about “Rocky,” it was a small film being done on a $980,000 budget. The music budget was only $20,000. said her father, a big boxing fan, was instrumental in her decision to accept the offer. “I said, dad, I’ve been offered a film about a boxer and he said what’s the name of the film? I said Rocky and he said Rocky Marciano? I said no, Rocky Balboa, and he said ‘never heard of him.’ ”
      At first, was apprehensive about only being given a thirty word allotment for the lyrics, but Robert Culp, whom she was seeing at the time, told her she should be proud that she had captured the entire feeling of the film in only thirty words. “That changed my thinking because he taught me the concept of turning a negative into a positive,” she said
       said her house is “kind and gentle” and has been good to her.
      “It allows me to think and I am very noise-sensitive. Our street is so quiet you can hear the snails crossing the road.”
       says her guests love her chime collection from all over the world. “It’s a wonderfully restful sound (except in a windstorm!)”
      She has won a few baking contests, although she says her kitchen is not huge, but very workable. Her collection of 86 smish fish of colored fused glass decorate the walls and she has also won a few baking contests along the way.
       said she wouldn’t change anything about the house and if she could stand the construction noise, would turn the entire upstairs into a master bedroom suite.
      She calls her decorating style “eclectic contemporary”; every room is unique and filled with articles she’s collected from around the world. She said her home is a positive and peaceful place and she is accumulating many happy memories within its walls.
      Her new Kawai baby grand piano is always at the read. wrote two songs for last year’s hit, “The Pianist.” “That was a tough assignment,” she said, “because I wasn’t allowed to change one note of music.”
      She said her two favorite songs are “With You I’m Born Again,” which has just passed the two million air play mark, and the song she wrote after Frank Sinatra died, called “Only the Music, Only My Song.”
       said she’s been performing the song herself and people seemed to be very touched by it. She wrote the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Paul Weston-Wogan.