I once tried to write a movie biography of a legendary ballet dancer. He was alive, then in his senior years, and I interviewed him at length. He was a person with a vivacious personality, a store of anecdotes and many dramatic events upon which to draw.

But I learned as I went on that he would not allow himself to be portrayed as anything less than perfect: a god in tights and toe shoes. Ballet dancers are all about perfection; they are somehow human and not human at all. Though I had the greatest admiration for this man, I had to abandon the project when it became clear that he did not want a portrayal that showed any struggle on his part.



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So when I was asked many years later if I wanted to do a musical about Carole King, who was and is very much alive, I said no. I did not want her hovering over my shoulder, airbrushing the struggle and pain out of her life. Luckily I was talked out of this moronic decision and I soon came to see that Carole is the opposite of a ballet dancer: she has never pretended to be perfect or above the difficulties that trouble the rest of us.

She writes and sings openly about her struggles, heartbreaks, pains and joys. Part of her enormous and enduring appeal is that people think that she is just like them. Of all the great pop stars, she is the least diva-like – the one who most seems like a regular person.

But Carole is not a regular person. She was so smart she skipped two years of high school and was in college by the age of 16. By the age of 17 she and her writing partner and then husband, Gerry Goffin, had written the No 1 song in the US, Will You Love Me Tomorrow. They would write many more No 1s, and many, many more top 10, top 40 and top 100 hits. She is the first woman to be awarded America’s highest prize in music, the Gershwin prize. I think you could argue that she is the first great female composer.

When she was writing songs in her bedroom in her parents’ home in Brooklyn, and coming in on the subway to Times Square to try to sell them, there were no well-known female composers. Over the years the occasional female lyricist had risen up – the great Dorothy Fields comes to mind, and Betty Comden, and the brilliant Carolyn Leigh. But there were very few women composers, and none with a sustained series of hits.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Esther Hannaford (as Carole King) and Josh Piterman (Gerry Goffin) in the Australian production of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Photograph: Joan Marcus

People think of Carole as a revolutionary feminist icon but it’s a simplification of a complex person. First of all, she was never radical. Her dreams were to be a wife and mother living in the suburbs, an escape from the “rat-race noise down in the streets” of Brooklyn. When she got pregnant at age 16, the suburbs were very far away. She and Gerry lived with her parents in her childhood home, and they had to work.

So when she came into the office at 1650 Broadway where she and Gerry were given a cubicle, she often had her baby with her, who slept or smiled or burped while Carole wrote the melodies for Gerry’s lyrics. Years later, when she moved to Los Angeles and was recording Tapestry, her children – she now had two daughters – would call her in the recording studio to ask the questions that are always so urgent to children: Where’s my blue sweater? Can we stay up and watch TV? What’s for dinner?

As for her feminism, it was less a political idea than it was the practical reality of her life. She was born with a preternatural gift for melody. Nothing was going to stop her from writing and, when she marched into those Times Square offices to sell her songs, nobody cared that she was a woman (in fact, a girl) – they either liked the song or they didn’t. If they thought it would sell, they bought it. More often than not, they bought it and more often than not, the record sold.

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She was a hard worker. If Donny Kirschner told her he needed a song for the Shirelles by tomorrow, she and Gerry had a song by tomorrow. If the Shirelles said they would only sing the song if Carole would orchestrate it with strings, Carole went to the library, got a book on orchestrating with strings, and did it. Carole and Gerry always wanted to hit No 1, and they did it more than most people, but they didn’t stop long to savour it. They were always on to something new, adjusting as “the sound” changed. They composed The Locomotion, and a few years later Natural Woman. They kept growing.

Carole opened herself up to me completely as I did my research, answering every question I asked her, and never asking me to soften or improve the events of her life. (She told me two stories she asked me not to use, not to protect herself but the privacy of the other people involved.) And she was insistent that I include her best friends and fellow songwriters, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, as central characters in the story. Without saying it, she was saying: my story is not just me – it’s all of us.

She was a long way from that ballet dancer I’d tried to write about and, in my mind, all the more perfect for being so human.

• Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opens in Melbourne on 16 February