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- This is One-On-One.

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- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

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- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

Welcome to "Remember Them".

Steve Adubato with my co-anchor Jacqui Tricarico.

Jacqui, we did not coordinate this look, did we?

- All blues.

(Jacqui laughing) - I love blue.

- I know you do.

- Blue background, blue tie, blue.

Jacqui, but way more importantly, let's tee up this "Remember Them" segment on, people may know the name Lesley Gore.

They may know one or two of her songs, but Lesley Gore, inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame 2024. Who was Lesley Gore and who do you talk to for this entire "Remember Them" episode as to why she was and still is so important in the area of music and entertainment?

- I had the privilege of speaking with Lesley's brother, Michael Gore, who Lesley and her brother Michael worked together on a lot of projects, a lot of songs throughout the years.

And he comes on to give us really an inside look into their childhood and what led to both of them pursuing music in different ways.

And Lesley, singer/songwriter that started her journey at 16 years old.

Was doing voice lessons in New York City traveling from Tenafly where she was born and raised, going into New York with her mom to do voice lessons.

And over a course of several different events, she was handed this song, 'It's My Party'.

And Steve, do you know that song?

You have to know 'It's My Party'.

- Okay, ready?

Jacqui, the song 'It's My Party'.

Do you know the next line?

♪ And I'll cry if I want to ♪ (Jacqui laughing) - Wait a minute.

I was born then, you weren't.

How do you know that second line?

- Well, because that's a song that has transcended over time, over decades, over generations of different people and one that we all know today.

But she's had so many hits since that song, since that first song that really took off.

There is 'Judy's Turn to Cry' and 'You Don't Own Me', which is another really great one.

'You Don't Own Me' became this national anthem, this feminist anthem, if you will.

- In the sixties?

Wait a minute, hold on.

In the sixties?

- Yes, yep.

And the 'You Don't Own Me' single came out in 1964.

But again, one of those songs that we hear so often, and Michael and I talk about it, it's a song that Taylor Swift plays right before she takes the stage on her tour.

- You know what’s so interesting, and Jacqui as you've been watching, "Remember Them" you know how great an interviewer she is.

I had always known of growing up as a kid, I knew who Lesley Gore was, but Jacqui and the "Remember Them" team research folks who you may know who they are, but then you find out more about them.

You find out about their journey.

Not only where they were born in New Jersey, but I know it's not very far from, is it Tenafly she was born in?

- Yes.

- People go Tenafly to New York, geographically not a long distance.

But the reality is, for those of us who were born in New Jersey, getting into New York and making it in New York, as Frank Sinatra said, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

I mean that was some challenge at 16 years of age.

We remember Lesley Gore now and there's a PBS connection.

We always have to have a PBS connection.

Which series was she involved in?

- Yeah, she was.

She was involved with a series called "In The Life" that ran on PBS and it really looked at the LGBTQ+ community and she helped host that series and it really was important to her as being part of that community as well.

- I didn't know that.

- Oh yeah, yep.

She had a partner for many, many years and she did a lot within that community to bring awareness.

And I know that was an important part of her life and being a feminist icon, that really was part of her identity as well.

- The fact that in the sixties, someone who is so important at the time in the entertainment industry could not come out and be who she was.

And now we talk about that, that speaks for itself.

- Another area that Michael and Lesley worked on together was for the hit film "Fame" in 1980.

The movie "Fame" that came out, they worked on that soundtrack together, Did a couple of different songs on there.

And 'Out Here On My Own' is one that they did together.

And Michael, so generous of him, gave us the opportunity to hear a never before heard recording demo of him and Lesley working on that song together that we're gonna hear up next before you see my interview with Michael.

- This is Jacqui talking to Michael Gore, Lesley's brother.

Good stuff, "Remember Them".

♪ Sometimes I wonder ♪ ♪ Where I've been ♪ ♪ Who I am ♪ ♪ Do I fit in ♪ ♪ Make-believing is hard alone ♪ ♪ Out here on my own ♪ ♪ We're always proving who we are ♪ ♪ Always reaching for that rising star ♪ ♪ To guide me far ♪ ♪ And shine me home ♪ ♪ Out here on my own ♪ ♪ When I'm down and feeling blue ♪ ♪ I close my eyes so I can be with you ♪ ♪ Oh, baby, be strong for me ♪ ♪ Baby, belong to me ♪ ♪ Help me through ♪ ♪ Help me need you ♪ - Joining us now is Academy Award-winning composer and producer Michael Gore, here to talk about his sister, singer and songwriter Lesley Gore.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us.

- Hi, Jacqui, great to be here.

Always happy to talk about my beautiful, talented sister Lesley.

- You and Lesley grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey, had those New Jersey roots, and from what I understand, there was music in the house at an early age for both of you.

Talk about growing up in Tenafly and the musical environment that you brought up in that really led to the careers of you and Lesley.

- Exactly.

So, Tenafly was a great place to grow up.

We moved from Brooklyn, very early age.

We first moved to Teaneck when I was two, and then my parents were building the house in Tenafly, and we moved in there when I was five, Lesley was nine.

It was an idyllic place to grow up.

It was a beautiful town, we had great neighbors.

We had kids on the block that I was friendly with, that Lesley was friendly with, and the school system was terrific.

And, you know, Lesley and I were very, very close.

There were four and a half years difference between our ages, but we liked very, very much the same things.

There was always music in our house.

It's interesting.

My dad was in manufacturing.

He ran a ladies swimwear company, but he loved music, as did my mom.

So there was always music in the house.

So from a very, very early age, we were... Lesley and I were both into music.

Two things happened.

My parents went and bought an upright piano for me.

And we went one night to a show in New York, I think it may have been "My Fair Lady."

And we came home late at midnight, went to bed, and I woke up the next morning and I went to the piano and I sat down at the piano.

I played like four of the songs from "My Fair Lady."

My mother almost- - Wow.

- My mother almost fainted.

And Lesley, very, very similar.

From the time she was 3, 4, 5, she sang all the time.

She had a great collection of 45 RPM records, little singles with a changer on it.

She used to stack 20 of them up, and she used to sit on her bed and she used to sing The Everly Brothers.

And then, you know, Johnny Mathis, and she just used to sing all the time.

So there was a great deal of music in the house.

And we reached a point when I started to play, of course, by ear, which is, you know, just its own phenomenon.

I had never taken a lesson, but I was able to sit down and if I heard something, I could play it.

And so Lesley and I used to start working together at the piano.

We went off to school, and then we would come home and go down to the music room, and I would get behind the piano.

And we'd be playing Chuck Berry and Lesley would be singing, and then we'd be playing Johnny Mathis and we'd be playing Rogers and Hammerstein.

And at a very, very early age, we would spend like two hours every day after school working at the piano.

- The collaboration started so early and continued so far into both of your careers.

And thinking about that time when you still were kids, Lesley was essentially a kid at 16 years old when she got a vocal coach, correct?

And she essentially then became famous overnight, a lot of people said, but I know Lesley would often say it took a week.

She would joke around in interviews, "It wasn't overnight, it was a week," where Quincy Jones, the producer at the time, released her song, "It's My Party."

I mean, "It's My Party," everybody knows that song.

It's gone through many generations of all of us knowing what that song is.

But talk about that time when that song was released, because it almost didn't all happen that way, correct?

- It did.

You know, so two things happened.

Number one, my parents heard me play the piano, and I saw my mother look at my father and say, "Piano lessons."

You know, they were going right for it at age five.

And they also wanted piano lessons for Lesley.

Now, Lesley was a good pianist.

She played, but she really didn't want to take piano lessons.

So she asked my parents, "What I really would like to do is to take vocal lessons."

And through friends, she found the name of a vocal coach in New York City in the Brill Building, which is, you know, the great Tin Pan Alley building in New York City.

And my mom drove her to the city, and the vocal coach's name was Myron "Pappy" Earnhart, Myron Earnhart, and his nickname was Pappy.

And Mom drove Lesley in for two separate week lessons.

And then Pappy turned to my mother and said, "You know, Ronny, she's a really, really good singer.

I- I, you know...

I'm not saying she doesn't need lessons, but I'd love to take her into the studio downstairs, because sometimes voices that sound great in person don't sound great on record and vice versa."

So Mom said, "Okay."

So Pappy's wife was the accompanist, and they went into the studio downstairs and they just did a piano voice demo of four different standards "When Sunny Gets Blue," and there was a song that his wife Hilda wrote.

And, you know, they were good.

They were really, really good.

And so what happened was the demos ended up getting passed around, basically through friends.

We had a cousin who was a boxing promoter.

He managed Emile Griffith, who was the welterweight champion of the world.

And Howie said, "Let me get this to Joe Glazer, who was one of the biggest booking agents in New York.

And he got it to Joe.

And literally three days later, Lesley had seven record offers.

- Wow.

- And it was just amazing because, you know, she didn't quite know what to do.

Connie Francis was signed to MGM, which was one of the offers.

So she thought, "That's not a great idea."

And Brenda Lee was signed to Decca and she said, "Not a great idea."

So she came around to wanting to sign to Mercury Records.

The only female vocalist on Mercury Records who was enormous was Sarah Vaughan- - Right.

- Who was indeed a legend, but not exactly in the same bag that Lesley was in.

So she went ahead and she signed.

So I'll give you just two minutes of backstory.

Mercury Records had a very young, talented musician who was a trumpet player, and he wanted to bring back the big band sound in Europe.

And he convinced Mercury Records to put up, I think in those days, a lot of money, maybe like a hundred thousand dollars if remember correctly, and went to Paris and various other cities in Europe.

And unfortunately, the tour was a bust.

It didn't work at all.

So he had spent a lot of their money.

Mercury Records called him back to New York and said, "You're gonna sit in this office.

You're gonna be an A&R guy.

We're gonna give you people to possibly produce, and now you're gonna have to sit here and work for us."

So the very first person Quincy got were some demos, the demos that Lesley sang.

And indeed, it was Quincy Jones.

And the next thing we knew, a couple of weeks later, he was at our house in Tenafly.

He pulled up in a chauffeur-driven limousine, which was very impressive in those days, only for us to find out later that Quincy didn't drive, which is why he had a limousine.

And the first song that he played was, "It's My Party."

And it was a sale.

You know, they decided that very day they were gonna record "It's My Party."

And cut to just a few weeks later in New York City, they had a recording session, "It's My Party."

There was a song called "Danny," which our neighbor down the block, Paul Anka, wrote for her when he found out she had a recording contract, two other songs.

And it was done on a Saturday afternoon, and it was absolutely great.

It just really went beautifully.

Cut to when she, the next night, goes to Carnegie Hall to host a concert, and he gets out of his cab and he runs right into the producer, Phil Spector, who was the great producer who did The Ronettes and the Crystals.

And Quincy said, "Hey, Phil, how are you doing?"

He said, "I'm fantastic.

I just recorded this incredible song called "It's My Party" with The Crystals.

He said, "Oh, that's great."

Phil Spector went into Carnegie Hall, Quincy got right back in the cab.

He said, "Bell Studio."

He went right back to the studio that night.

They mixed the record.

They mastered the record.

They made a hundred copies.

And on Monday, the hundred copies were sent out.

That Thursday, "It's My Party" by Lesley Gore was the pick of the week on WINS, which at that time was a rock and roll station as opposed to a news station.

- And Lesley heard herself for the first time on the radio then.

(laughs) - She did.

- She- - Amazing.

- She did.

She was driving home with friends from school and it came on the radio and she, for the first verse, almost didn't believe it was she.

I mean, she- - Right.

- Was like, "Could that be somebody else?"

It was just so...

It was just so different.

And the record just took off.

And so this was March 30th, was the recording of the record.

June 1st, the record was number one, - And so many other hits after that.

"You Don't Own Me" is another one that so many people still know today.

I've heard Taylor Swift plays that song every night.

Well, every time she does her Eras Tour, it's the last song that she plays before she goes out on stage.

- That's correct.

- What did that song mean to Lesley, "You Don't Own Me"?

- You know, Jacqui, I think it, you know, the... She had some great songs, but they were in the vein of "It's My Party," "Judy's Turn to Cry, "She's a Fool," "That's the Way Boys Are."

Lesley used to tell the story that, you know, they would either find songs that were at publishers, but she was doing a radio hop up at Grossinger's, which was a hotel up in the Catskills, and she was sitting at the pool.

And two guys came over to her and said, "We've written a song, and can we take you over to the side and play you the song?"

And it was Dave White and Johnny Madara, and the song was, "You Don't Own Me."

Lesley heard it.

Immediately, she said, "You have to play this for Quincy."

She fell in love with it because it wasn't the average sort of bubblegum 1960s song, which were fun and nothing bad at all about them.

They were just...

It was great music.

But "You Don't Own Me" just really how a sentiment, which was, "Don't tell me what to do.

Don't tell me how, you know...

If and when I go out with you, don't put me on display.

You know, it was basically, "I just wanna be myself.

I wanna be free."

And I think it really coincided with Lesley, the personality, and I think she really felt it.

Again, they went into the studio with Phil Ramon engineering, who was an engineer in those days, a very famous producer who produced Paul Simon among many, many other people, Quincy and a German orchestrator named Claus Ogerman.

And this triumvirate just made a ton of hit records together.

And I think they knew that night, they really had something special.

- A lot of people called it a feminist anthem, but it was so much more than that, that Lesley talked about so many times, just what that song meant to her.

So thank you for explaining that for us.

- In terms of your collaboration with Lesley, like we said, it started off very young in that home in Tenafly, but it grew to be so much more.

Talk about some of the collaborations that you had with your sister Lesley- - Sure.

- Including your work on the hit movie "Fame."

- Sure, of course.

So, because I was playing the piano and because I was exposed to all of the recording sessions, because once Lesley got going, you know, she needed a ride in.

So my parents took her in, I hopped along with them and I would sit in the control room and I would watch Quincy work, and I'd watch.

So after a while, I sort of started to get an idea of, "Gee, this is what it should sound like."

And I would come home the next day and I would play the piano.

And one day, I was working downstairs and Lesley came running down and said, "Michael, what is that melody?"

And I said, "Oh, I've just been kind of fooling around with something."

She said, "I love that."

And she ended up saying, "Could I write the lyric to it?"

So it became a song called "I Won't Love You Anymore."

It was really one of the first and the earliest songs we ever wrote.

I think I might've been 12, and Lesley was probably 16 or 17.

And it charted Top 60 in Billboard.

It was not one of her biggest hits, but it was the start of a bunch of different songs that we did together.

I guess the pinnacle, as you said, was when I was hired to do the music for the movie "Fame" by Alan Parker.

I was originally hired not as the composer, but as a music supervisor, to try to organize both the classical and the big band sound and, you know, the jazz and you know, the gospel and try to put it all together, which is what that movie covered.

And he had an idea for this number for Coco, Irene Cara, at the piano.

I, you know, started to work with him on how he was going to lay it out.

And because I was so close to the project, I went home and I wrote that melody.

And then by that time, we were in separate apartments.

I was on West End Avenue, Lesley was on the East side.

I said, "Lesley, I want you to read this scene and I want you to read the script.

And can you come over and take a listen to this?"

And it was a Friday.

I remember it clearly.

Lesley just went, "Good, good."

And Sunday night, she had the complete lyric for "Out Here on My Own," and it was absolutely tremendous.

What most people don't know about Lesley is that she was a great student, and she was a great creative writer.

She wrote beautiful essays and her lyric writing was absolutely sensational.

We went in that week and we did a piano voice demo, me at the piano, Lesley singing, and we came back at the end of the afternoon when the shooting was finished that day on one of the other scenes that we're doing and played it for Alan Parker.

And he said, "We're shooting that Monday."

And the song was shot on Monday, and we were very lucky, it was nominated for an Academy Award.

I was extremely lucky that year.

I was also nominated for the title song "Fame" and for the score "Fame."

And unfortunately, my beautiful sister didn't win that night.

I won it for "Fame."

- She was nominated three times though, correct?

- Exactly.

And I was also nominated for "Terms of Endearment" a few years later, the Jim Brooks movie with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson.

And, you know, it was just great because it's a song that once again, maybe not to the extent of "You Don't Own Me," but it gets played all the time.

I mean, you hear the song still on programs and on, you know, "American Idol" and various things.

And people go out there and they sing "Out Here on My Own."

We're talking a lot of years later.

And so the song did very, very well.

We wrote many things.

I did a movie for Molly Shannon called "Superstar," and Lesley did the lyric for that.

We had the theme song on that.

We had a lot of other things, but those were probably the pinnacle.

And I think the Academy Award was, you know... the nomination was really it.

- We said her songs have transcended time.

What though do you think is the most important thing that we should remember about your sister, Lesley Gore?

- You know, she basically was not just a bubblegum singer.

She really was an artist.

She had very, very strong views about lyrics, very strong views about material.

She was a wonderful performer.

Later on in life when the hits were not coming as fast as they came in her early years, she went all over the world.

She was in Australia, she was in Europe playing, and she was a fantastic singer.

And she was a terrific performer and she was a great gal.

She had a beautiful partner, Lois Sasson, of 33 years.

They were together right until Lesley passed in 2015.

And Lesley did some of the hosting of the interviews on PBS of "In the Life."

And so, you know, she stood up for gay rights, she stood up for women's rights.

Bella Abzug was a very good friend of theirs, so she was always with Bella in the Hamptons and doing benefits for her.

So, you know, she believed in her causes, but she was a wonderful human being that we lost too early.

- And this year, she is being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame, a 2024 inductee.

What does that honor mean to you and your family?

And also, what do you think Lesley would've thought about being inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame this year?

- You know, she would've loved it and we love it.

You know, unfortunately, my parents are gone.

My mom lived till 100 and passed away this past year.

They would've loved it.

New Jersey and Tenafly in particular was really... We were there from our early school years, right through college, you know, and it was just a great place to grow up.

I think Lesley would really, really be proud to be in the New Jersey Hall of Fame because I think New Jersey really, really meant a lot to her, as it did to the entire family.

- We're so glad she's being inducted this year as well.

The New Jersey Hall of Fame has its new home too, at the American Dream Mall.

- Right.

- Which you can check out.

Website will be up to get more information about that.

Michael, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to join us as we remember and honor your sister's legacy, Lesley Gore.

Thank you so much, Michael.

- Thank you, Jacqui, my pleasure.

- For Steve Adubato and myself, thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by PSEG Foundation.

NJM Insurance Group.

Hackensack Meridian Health.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Kean University.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

And by The Russell Berrie Foundation.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by ROI-NJ.

NJM Insurance Group has been serving New Jersey businesses for over a century.

As part of the Garden State, we help companies keep their vehicles on the road, employees on the job and projects on track, working to protect employees from illness and injury, to keep goods and services moving across the state.

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