How Lesley Gore 'Owned' Pop, From Being the 'It's My Party' Girl to Batman's Pussycat
When you watch the 1964 concert spectacular The T.A.M.I. Show on video, the narrative that you’re supposed to be paying attention to is how James Brown’s legendary appearance overshadows the climactic set by the Rolling Stones. But Brown wasn’t the only usurper. The concert movie opens with a 10-minute set by Lesley Gore, and almost everything else that follows pales in comparison to her sure-footed delivery of six of her hits. With “You Don’t Own Me,” especially, she just about owns an all-star bill.
What’s easily forgotten is that Gore was arguably the biggest star performing on The T.A.M.I. Showin ’64 — bigger than Brown, bigger than the Stones — so it’s no wonder the movie started with a long medley that included her debut single, the 1963 chart-topper “It’s My Party.” But what might have been surprising at the time, and certainly is to most viewers 50 years later, is just what a bravura performance Gore delivers. She was a one-woman exemplar of the girl-group sound, often double-tracked in the studio to make her records sound as full as the Shangri-Las’. But hearing her solo and un-lip-synched, you realize she hardly needed the studio reinforcement. When she had the opportunity to really belt out one of her singles, it was her more lightweight competitors’ turn to cry.
Gore’s musical legacy was a short one, with the biggest hits coming over a period of two years. Tastes in pop were fast-changing, and she never had a charting single or album after 1968. Yet the singer, who died Monday at age 68, generated a handful of songs during that brief window with enough universal import to keep her revered as an unintentional feminist and eventually even gay icon.
Fortunately, a lot of TV appearances from her heyday survive, on top of that knockout T.A.M.I. Show medley. As she explained in a 2009 interview with the New York show On the Beat, “I did a lot of television at the time and there were a number of television shows that I could do — Hullabaloo and Shindig and of course The Ed Sullivan Show… plenty of music shows, so I could kind of keep a career alive even though I wasn’t out doing live concerts.”
That’s not even counting her appearances as herself on TV comedies like The Donna Reed Show and musical cameos in films like Girls on the Beach, where she sang “Leave Me Alone” to a room full of go-go-ing Hollywood teens. Improbably, she was united with James Brown again — albeit never sharing a scene — in the 1965 American International Pictures non-classic Ski Party, where she sang her last huge hit, “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows” to a busload of would-be skiers that included Frankie Avalon and Dwayne “Dobie Gillis” Hickman.
Her best-remembered acting role? Even if there weren’t only a handful to choose from, the consensus pick would have to be her fleeting role as Pussycat in the second season of TV’s Batman series in 1966. Donning a set of cat ears and a bodysuit that surely provided the inspiration for Josie and the Pussycats, Gore-as-Pussycat performed “California Nights” for an appreciative trio of Catwoman’s henchmen, and even more memorably sang “Maybe Now” to a framed photo of her crush, Robin. Coming on to Batman’s sidekick, she purred, “I can see a very important part of your education has been grossly neglected.” But when, in return, Robin tried to put the moves on her, she demurred, “Robin, I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression of me. I’m not the type of girl to kiss a boy on the first crime.”
By 1969, Gore was pretty well out of the pop-stardom picture, although still being invited to represent youth appeal on older-skewing shows like The Mike Douglas Show, where she sang a jazzy version of the show tune “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” in 1969. “I think it’s about time we prettied up this picture,” the talk-show host tells fellow guest Barry Goldwater before introducing Gore, who stuck around to have a non-boat-rocking conversation about Vietnam, of all things, with Goldwater, of all people.
Gore was more illuminating when she stuck to the subject of her own unlikely overnight stardom. She was often called upon to recall the blink-of-an-eye genesis of “It’s My Party” in 1963. As a then 16-year-old high school junior, Gore had gotten the attention of nascent producer Quincy Jones, who had her come in to cut three songs one Saturday afternoon. That night, as she often retold it, Jones went to a concert by Charles Aznavour at Carnegie Hall, where super-producer Phil Spector was also in attendance. Spector happened to mention that he was in the studio recording a sure-fire hit with the Crystals, and it was called… “It’s My Party.”
“Quincy understood the publisher had double-dealt us,” Gore said in a video interview with Micky Burns. “There were two guys… and the other gentleman gave Phil an exclusive for the Crystals. Once Phil let Quincy know that he was recording this song, Quincy woke up on Sunday morning, got the tape, went to Phil Ramone’s studio, ran off 100 acetates, and had them in the mail on Monday morning to the top 100 radio stations. I heard it myself—this is kind of amazing—seven days after I recorded it,” on the radio while driving home from school. “It took me a little while to recognize that it was mine… I realized as I’m singing along that it’s my version!”
“I never knew it was going to be released that quickly,” she explained in an interview with Bob Sirott. As the song no one bothered to tell her was in stores hit No. 1, she was rushed into the studio to record a happier follow-up single, “Judy’s Turn to Cry.” “I frankly thought it was kind of nerdy to put out a sequel,” she recalled. “But the record company was making all the moves. I was 16 with one single out… so I had no input.”
“You Don’t Own Me” turned out to be the real keeper of her career, at least as far as something that transcended juvenilia to apply to divorce or even just overall independence. “Two guys wrote the song, which is why I never thought of it as a feminist song,” she explained. “I thought of it as a humanist song, but I loved the message. It was something that came out of my mouth very easily.”
Gore sang movingly of human frailty, but her flip hairdo was always flawless. Even when visiting the Windy City, she told Sirott, “My body would be parallel to the sidewalk, but my hair was always perfectly configured.”
Not so perfect: Gore’s finances, both during and after her hitmaking days. “In 1967, when Mercury let me go,” she said, “I was in debt to them for what they claimed was $175,000. It took 25 years for me to ever see money from Mercury. I didn’t see money from Mercury till 1989. And I was one of the lucky ones.”
Fortunately, before that, she began to see some money from a songwriting career she belatedly began in conjunction with her brother, Michael Gore. They shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Song for “Out Here on My Own,” sung by Irene Cara in the 1980 movie smash Fame.
In 1999, she appeared on Broadway for a couple of weeks as a guest performer in the jukebox musical Smokey Joe’s Café. A few years later, she began hosting a gay-themed series for PBS, In the Life, although it wasn’t until 2005 that she went on the record about her sexuality in an interview, saying she’d never thought it was important to announce her lesbian status. (Gore had realized she was gay in her 20s, well after her high-school starpower had faded, and had a partner, Lois Sasson, for more than three decades before her death.)
Also in 2005, she released her lone post-1982 album, Ever Since. But she was a more frequent concert performer in her later years, making up for the 1960s, when she rarely toured in favor of using TV and film as a further avenue to fame.
Three songs — “It’s My Party,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” and “You Don’t Own Me” — have largely defined her as the decades went on, with other smashes like “Maybe I Know” falling by the wayside. But the Marvin Hamlisch-penned “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” enjoyed an unlikely comeback when it was used to score an effervescent scene in the animated Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
Asked in 1997 when she’d ever hang up singing, Gore answered, “At the point where I don’t think I sound good anymore or I’m too fat to get into my clothes, maybe something will tap me on the shoulder and say, maybe it’s enough.” It never got to that point, as the singer continued making personal appearances, looking and sounding just fine as recently as last fall, before lung cancer took her life. A hundred thousand “cry if I want to” quips quickly followed her passing on social media, but on oldies radio, the party never stops.
