Neil Diamond Reveals the Cute, Pervy Roots of ‘Sweet Caroline’Late yesterday, singer Neil Diamond revealed that the inspiration for his famous song “Sweet Caroline” was a girlish Caroline Kennedy, who was 12 when the song was originally released. He even performed the song via satellite at Kennedy’s 50th-birthday party last week, which friends say was a thrill for the charitable New Yorker. This unwraps one of music’s great riddles, in the order of “Who is Carly Simon singing about in, ‘You’re So Vain’?” and “Hey Steve Miller, what the hell is a ‘pompatus’?”
Diamond, 66, said he was a “young, broke songwriter” in the ‘60s when he saw a cute photo of Caroline Kennedy in a magazine. “It was a picture of a little girl dressed to the nines in her riding gear, next to her pony,” he recalled. “It was such an innocent, wonderful picture, I immediately felt there was a song in there.”
Wait a minute … There may be a lot of complicated lyrics to that song, but we seem to remember at least a couple that aren’t “little girl” appropriate…
