Lesley Gore: Singer who scored a huge teen-heartbreak hit in 1963 with ‘It’s My Party’ before becoming a successful songwriter

Yearning delivery: Gore at the piano in 1966 (AP)

Lesley Gore was only 16 when she was thrust into the limelight as the girl-next-door singer of the 1963 teenage heartbreak vignette “It’s My Party”. However, she made the wise decision to continue with her education rather than embark upon a full-blown career in show business. After graduating from high school and recording “Judy’s Turn to Cry” – the follow-up single that continued the “It’s My Party” storyline and became the second of the four consecutive Top 5 US hits she scored within the first nine months of her career – she enrolled at a college half an hour away from her New York home.

“I pretty much tried to maintain as normal an educational schedule as possible. I did not go on tour unless it was a holiday or summer,” she said of her participation in landmark events like the 1964 T.A.M.I. Show, in which she performed alongside Chuck Berry, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Supremes, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. “I was a good student and I enjoyed school. It was good to get away from the attention,” she recalled of her time at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville where she studied English and American literature.

Gore maintained her profile with appearances on programmes like American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and remained a mainstay on the US charts until 1967, the year she played Pussycat, Catwoman’s protégé, and sang “California Nights” in an episode of the TV series Batman. However, with opportunities for overseas travel limited, and despite cutting foreign-language versions of several of her hits, she missed out on a bigger international career, and only charted in the UK with “It’s My Party” and “Maybe I Know” in 1964.

Her most culturally significant record, the proto-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me”, enjoyed a second lease of life when it was revived by Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton and Bette Midler, the vengeful divorcees in the comedy The First Wives Club in 1996.

“‘You Don’t Own Me’ is a very powerful song: ‘Don’t abuse me, don’t misuse me’,” said Gore. She was clued-in and aware of the disconnect between her as the interpreter and the composers behind most of her Sixties smashes. “The interesting thing about ‘You Don’t Own Me’ is that it was written by two men, John Madera and Dave White. They played me this song on a guitar at a hotel up in the Catskills in 1964... When I heard that song, I knew I had to sing it,” stressed the singer, who came out publicly in 2005 and lived with the same partner, the jewellery designer Lois Sasson, for 33 years. “I didn’t put it in anybody’s face. I really never kept my life private. Those who knew me, those who worked with me were well aware.”

The daughter of a children’s clothes manufacturer, she was born Lesley Sue Goldstein in 1946. An admirer of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, whose yearning and longing delivery she seemed to be able to emulate in her teens, she took lessons with a vocal coach and ended up recording demos with his piano player. These came to the attention of the record producer Quincy Jones, who had just returned from France to become A&R man at Irving Green’s Mercury Records in New York, and suggested she record “It’s My Party”, written by John Gluck, Wally Gold and Herb Weiner. “Quincy Jones was a great mentor, a very sensitive man, even though he was 14 or 15 years older than me. He was able to get a great performance out of me because he made me feel comfortable in the studio,” she said of her signature song and introductory hit. “That was an amazing experience, the whole band was there. Ellie Greenwich and 12 singers.”

When the producer Phil Spector heard the result and expressed an interest in cutting “It’s My Party” with the Crystals, Jones pressed 100 copies of Gore’s single and mailed them out to radio stations, therefore ensuring her version beat any possible competition. “When it started getting played, we weren’t prepared for it. I didn’t even know it had been released,” she remembered of her overnight success. Further singles like “That’s the Way Boys Are” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Loser” returned to the teenage formula “You Don’t Own Me” had ignored, and necessitated a new approach when she was dropped by Mercury after the hits dried out in 1970.

After moving to California, and drawing inspiration from the few female Brill Building songwriters like Ellie Greenwich and Carole King who had provided her with sterling material, Gore began composing, in order “to have something to do and feel like a musician every day. That’s what got me to the piano, that’s what got me up in the morning: a blank piece of paper and a hope to have something by the end of the day.”

Her songwriting endeavours certainly paid dividends. With her brother Michael she wrote “Out Here On My Own”, the Academy Award-nominated ballad sung by Irene Cara in the 1980 blockbuster musical Fame. In 1996 she helped reshape “My Secret Love”, included on the soundtrack to Grace of My Heart, the Brill Building homage picture whose Kelly Porter character – played by Bridget Fonda – she had partially inspired.

“I think that’s what they were trying to intimate. Was it true? I don’t know, everyone seemed to be based on somebody and yet the stories weren’t absolutely carved in stone. There was sort of a Carole King character, sort of a Brian Wilson character. So I think that was their intent,” Gore said of the project that didn’t live up to expectations, despite the involvement of heavyweights like Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello, Matt Dillon and Martin Scorsese.

In 2005, she issued Ever Since, her first album of new material in three decades, and made a return to live performance. She also began writing a memoir and a Broadway show based on her life. She died of lung cancer.

Lesley Sue Goldstein, aka Lesley Gore, singer, songwriter, actress: born New York 2 May 1946; died New York 16 February 2015.