When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

In the Beginning

35 In the Beginning Carole Hart The following is a tale of magical connections and sublime collaborations . It’s a story about the creation of Free to Be . . . You and Me, but it begins with a short prelude about Sesame Street. My husband, Bruce Hart, and I had just received our first Emmy Award for our work together as writers on Sesame Street.We joined the project with the Children’s Television Workshop before the show even had a name. Once it did, my husband sat down with composer Joe Raposo in a small room with a grand piano, where they wrote Sesame Street’s title song. That experience and the recognition we received from it brought Marlo Thomas to me, through our agent at the William Morris Agency, Scott Shukat. Bruce and I, songwriter Carol Hall, and Stephen Lawrence , who wrote three songs and produced the music with Bruce, were all Scott’s clients. He also secured the release of the Free to Be album, with a small label called Bell Records, after it was turned down by many of the larger music companies, who just couldn’t get past its gender liberation premise. In fact, one well-known music executive rejected it with the words,“What would I want with a record produced by a bunch of dykes?” I tell this story to remind us of the climate in the music business and much of the country at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Marlo was looking for a woman to develop and produce a children’s record album with her. While reading to her young niece, she became distressed by traditional bedtime stories and how they limited options in life for both girls and boys. This realization inspired her to collect a number of nonsexist stories that were beginning to appear in the publishing market. She also had a few pieces specially written. She approached me at our first meeting with her powerful vision and copies of the material she’d amassed. I was impressed with the idea for the album and with Marlo’s passion and intelligence, but I can’t say the same about the material that had been collected so far. I told Marlo that I thought it was an exciting and important project, but I also expressed my disappointment with 36 Carole Hart the material she’d found or commissioned. I said I didn’t think she could get to where she wanted to go with these selections and that we would need to create our own original material. Not knowing Marlo as I do now, I wasn’t prepared for the explosion of activity and creativity that followed. Soon, we were in touch with many talented writers and composers from the theater, movie, and book worlds. Many had no prior experience writing for children. Along with a team of consultants Marlo had assembled, we examined gender stereotypes and identified other elements in our culture that prevented children from being and expressing their true selves. We also had wonderful late-night meetings at Marlo’s apartment with Bruce; Herb Gardner, Marlo’s beau at the time; and their close friend, Shel Silverstein, a beloved children’s writer and illustrator (The Giving Tree). One of our guiding principles was that children are far more intelligent than many people think they are, and we didn’t want to talk down to them. We also wanted the material to be clever enough to appeal to their parents as well. Guided by this philosophy, we started to go to writers. We asked Shel, but he was concerned about writing anything for us because he didn’t want to preach. When we told him that that was exactly why we wanted him, he came up with two perfectly wicked but perfectly on point pieces, a story titled “Ladies First,” and a short, sly, and funny song called “Helping.” Mary Rodgers adapted the story for performance on the album. Marlo also found a newly published book called William’s Doll, by Charlotte Zolotow. Its message was ideal, but its tone was a bit too earnest for our purposes, so we went to lyricist Sheldon Harnick, renowned for Fiddler on the Roof, and composer Mary Rodgers, a woman of many talents, and asked them to turn it into a song, which they did. Brilliantly. There’s a lot more to say about the creation of the material. Inspired by Mel Brooks’s and Carl Reiner’s popular...