Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Over the next year, she and Lucy continued singing at the clubs—no longer with matching dresses—in the role of opening act. They were teamed up with “intellectual” cabaret performers: rising comics Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, and Bill Cosby; writer-singers Shel Silverstein and Theodore Bikel, and a folk group, the Tarriers, that included Marshall Brickman (who would later write Annie Hall and Manhattan with friend Woody Allen) and actor Alan Arkin. Carly’s cousin Jeanie Seligmann, who was then attending Bryn Mawr, caught their now-polished act at the Second Fret in Philadelphia and remembers thinking that however plagued with self-doubt she knew Carly to be, “she was destined for stardom—she was just that outstandingly talented and creative.”

  Carly and Lucy recorded a second Kapp album, Cuddlebug, that featured a song of Carly’s, “Pale Horse and Rider,” which one reviewer called an “Ian-and-Sylvia-like up-tempo troubadour gallop,” along with folk standards like “Motherless Child” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” soon to become the vehicle for the Byrds’ introduction of folk rock to a primed young public, and a French version (“Ecoute dans la Vent”) of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

  Carly and Nick had begun the long process of disentangling. The feeling Nick had had in Grasse, that Carly craved an audience, was borne out when they’d go to Arthur, the discotheque of the Manhattan elite, which was a bridge between the Kennedy-era Twist couples and the worlds of Andy Warhol and Leonard Bernstein. Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, James Taylor’s friend, who’d known Carly as the “weird” kid from the Vineyard, played there occasionally with a band he’d formed, and he noticed “she was turning into this rowdy kind of party chick. I’d hear about her, ‘Oh, man, Carly was in there, tearin’ up the place!’ I thought: Well, I guess she’s not gangly and gawky anymore. She’s a fox now.”

  Nick says they broke up because their next step would have had to be marriage, and they both felt too young for that. Still, Nick was probably more upset than Carly: His novel, Grasse 3/23/66, with the photo he’d taken of Carly as the cover, was a stream-of-consciousness prose-poem about heartbreak. A flyleaf running together quotes from the book reveals its essence: “My wife and I drove from Milano to Grasse; in the foothills behind Valbonne we found a house and stayed. A year after arrival, our marriage broke; she left. I am gone mad with words, with grief [emphasis added].” With its passionate prose and Mediterranean setting, it resembles other novels of the era: Second Skin and The Blood Oranges, by John Hawkes, and Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Cohen, who would soon prove significant in Joni’s life.

  It was Carly who wanted most to move on—and that wish set her apart from her closest female peers. Lucy was falling in love with young psychiatrist David Levine. Jessica had fallen in love with fellow St. John’s student Will Davis, whom she married in a wedding so thoughtfully planned (bride photo by Bachrach, silver pattern from Tiffany, dress from Bergdorf’s, two hundred guests at the black-tie nuptials, personalized vows featuring snippets of e. e. cummings), one might never have guessed it had been a hastily assembled affair, for Jessica was pregnant. And that June—1965—Ellen married Vieri Salvadori; Carly, in a cap-sleeved pink satin dress, was a bridesmaid. One of the reasons Ellen and Vieri were marrying young was so that the groom could serve his country without being sent to Vietnam.* Right after the wedding, Vieri headed off for a year in the Air National Guard, while Ellen moved in with her other best friend, actress Jennifer Salt. A few days later, Carly picked up the handsome young English shoe salesman who sold her a pair of Charles Jourdan pumps at Bloomingdale’s. When her salesman returned to England, Carly followed him there. The Simon Sisters had some British bookings, so, she figured, why not go early? Plane-phobic Carly sailed over on the U.S.S. United States in late July, but after their brief fling, Carly parted ways with the salesman. With time on her hands, she called the man who was set to be her and Lucy’s manager for their English tour, Willie Donaldson. Donaldson would give Carly her first taste of genuine adult love, and she would never forget him.

  Donaldson, then thirty, already had quite a reputation in decadent English circles. He was a charismatic, slightly perverted literary and theatrical figure, described by the Guardian Unlimited as “avowedly chaotic but blessed with a formal manner.” Raised on a proper country estate by wealthy parents who had died when he was a young man, he had read English at Cambridge University in the early 1950s, and, while there, had spent some of his very considerable inheritance underwriting the student literary magazines that published the early work of two acquaintances, Ted Hughes and his American wife, Sylvia Plath. After that, Donaldson joined what was known as “the Princess Margaret crowd.” By 1965, he had freshly coproduced the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, which Carly had seen in New York and had loved.

  When Carly called him to say she was in town, Donaldson invited her over. A tall man with plump lips, very white skin, bad teeth, and colorless eyebrows and lashes, he was no Casanova on the surface. He favored baggy suits, under which lay a body that Carly would soon see had an “old man’s look.” Still, Donaldson’s pastiness and deshabille belied his extraordinary appeal to—and self-confidence with—women. He’d broken off with his debutante girlfriend for a journalist’s wife, then had an affair with a dancer, and had just been stormed out on by his current lover, the actress Sarah Miles, when she’d found another woman’s shoe under the bed of their town house. So he was technically unattached when the younger Simon Sister pressed his London doorbell.

  Donaldson showered Carly with flattery, and she was smitten by his attention and his brilliance. The aristocrat’s son and the publisher’s daughter seemed to speak their own language. “From the beginning, I got Willie’s joke—he planted something and I picked it right up,” Carly says, of that magical first meeting. “We took a walk in Trafalgar Square, and we felt a very unnerving immediate intimacy.” Days later, after Lucy arrived for the booking Willie had arranged for them at a club called the Rehearsal Room on Sloan Street, “the three of us—Lucy, Willie, and I—had our first tea together at Fortnum and Mason’s. I realized that every time he turned to Lucy, I was really jealous.”

  Carly fell into “a very passionate, ardent” summer-long love affair with Donaldson. “With Willie, I became the girl I’d always wanted to be—older, very witty, really funny—English-funny, as if I had always been English.” The love affair was “a solid, six-week-long kill for both of us,” Carly says, “so intense” it was as if “we both died. I don’t think either of us recovered.” Years later, Donaldson would write, in his memoir, From Winchester to This, that Carly was “the answer to any sane man’s prayers: funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented.”*

  Willie was that fundamental step in a young woman’s romantic progress: the dark corrective who welcomely destroys the innocence and provinciality of a girl’s bubble world with her college beau. Willie’s intense, casual amorality** was antipodal to Nicky’s dependable reverence. “Nick had always taken care of me,” Carly says, “but Willie was the opposite. I felt I was taking care of him.” She also found him “the funniest man I had ever met. And he had a humor that was just on the verge of being the most flattering and yet was delivered with a killer’s instinct.” Thinking about another decadent, charismatic young British man with whom she would later have a significant flirtation, she adds, “Mick would have loved him,” explaining that, metaphorically, Willie “strode the stage with his own microphone and quietly sang the songs of the deep and sick recesses of his mind. Most people would have advised me, ‘Stay a thousand miles away from Willie Donaldson. He’s dangerous.’”

  Willie plied Carly with telegrams—“Come home, Little Frog Footman!” (his nickname for her) as she and Lucy were boarding the U.S.S. United States for the voyage home. Also boarding the luxury liner, the girls noticed, was Sean Connery. As soon as they checked into their stateroom, Carly sent Connery a letter through a steward, who delivered it while the actor was on the massage table. He arr
ived at the Simon sisters’ stateroom door ten minutes later, his hair greasy from the massage oil; and as the ship lumbered across the Atlantic, he would pursue both sisters. As they talked literature in the velvet-rope-rung first-class lounge, he tried “to persuade Lucy and me to do things we had never heard of,” says Carly. On the voyage’s last night, Carly had half-decided that if Connery called the stateroom she would—Willie or no Willie—go up to his suite, which happened to be the ship’s deluxe penthouse. But Carly was busy rolling her wet hair over beer cans “so it would be straight, like Julie Christie’s”—she didn’t reach the ringing stateroom phone in time. Lucy answered the phone. What happened next, Carly says, is lost to history.

  Arriving back in the Riverdale house on September 8, Carly announced that she and Willie Donaldson would marry; their shipboard telegrams had firmed up their plans. She and her fiancé wrote letters almost daily—“Willie’s letters were dazzling.” Then they petered out. “I got more and more frantic,” Carly recalls. On October 24 a letter postmarked London finally landed in her mailbox. Carly tore it open and took in the news: Willie and Sarah Miles had reconciled. Alas, dear Little Frog Footman, it was ever-so-lovely, but it was over.

  Carly was devastated.

  Over the years—indeed, the decades—Carly’s brief, passionate love affair with Willie Donaldson has remained incandescent to her. She says, even today, “I can’t seem to get back that sense of myself that [Willie] was bound to and found attractive.” “Willie! Do you know how often I hear his name with her?” marvels her friend and former manager Arlyne Rothberg; “You’d think he saved her life!”

  Lucy became engaged to David Levine. Carly, rejected by the man she loved madly, remained alone, all the more so after the Simon Sisters disbanded. She had dropped out of Sarah Lawrence; she was jobless; she had spent all her money on psychotherapy. It was a lost, aimless time for Carly—and things would get worse before they got better.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  carole

  1964–early 1969

  In the telescoped lens through which we tend to view the 1960s, the Beatles’ arrival in the States in February 1964 looks like the match that lit the youth revolution—the moment when popular music shifted from a commercial diversion to a conduit for social change, in one great lovefest punctuated by Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! But those early Beatles were actually somewhat frostily received by young self-defined sophisticates. Though the mop tops incited teary passion when their Ed Sullivan Show debut beamed onto millions of Zenith and Sylvania screens, the screamers were mostly aged nine to sixteen. By contrast, the peers of Carole, Joni, and Carly had already staked out a “higher” native-born, musical loyalty—to Dylan and Baez or to secularized gospel music, from Aretha Franklin, whose brilliance shone through even her ill-produced Columbia albums, and the Genius, Ray Charles. Though the February 1964 Beatles were appealingly cocky and boldly fey—an intriguing new combination for insular U.S. youth—they registered, to many post-teen music snobs, as novel background noise to a change already begun. And though Dylan had excitedly demanded, “What was that?” when he’d first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” he soon cautiously downgraded his assessment, decreeing the Liverpool boys “bubblegum,” though his girlfriend, Greenwich Village–bred union activist’s daughter Suze Rotolo, who’d been mentoring her beau in political consciousness, presciently called them “fantastic.”

  It wasn’t until 1965’s Rubber Soul that many of the young early skeptics would reverse their original opinions and fall madly in love with the Beatles, and that the bowl-haircutted boys in the collarless suits—now long-haired and oracular, the brilliant Lennon-McCartney synergy in full swing—would emerge as the blinding countercultural avatars we regard them as today. But with their maiden voyage, from that presumed-dowdy country beyond the wide ocean, they lobbed the grenade of a superior, fully formed youth culture across the fruited plain of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies: clothing designers (Mary Quant, Ossie Clark), photographers (David Bailey, who coined the image of the fashion photographer as rebel), and models ( Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy); as well as actors (Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, David Hemmings) and actresses ( Jane Birkin, Jane Asher, and, especially, Julie Christie, whom thousands of young American women, Carly Simon among them, were suddenly dying to look like). Mainly, the British Invasion would be about other rock stars: performers who (Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and—baddest of all—Brian Jones) trounced the Beatles’ own skiffle-band-based geniality with their effortless decadence, and who (Erics Clapton and Burdon) knelt at the altar of the Delta blues more deeply than any white boy in America, or who (Stevie Winwood) sang with a plaintive blackness that startlingly contradicted their wispy, white appearance.

  The British Invasion was the second blow (Motown having been the first) to Carole and Gerry, and they humbly swallowed this bitter pill in their West Orange home. It was a tract house, with a doorbell that rang with the eight-bar hook of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Inside, Carole—along with her live-in household majordomo, Willa Mae Phillips—cared for Louise and Sherry. She and Gerry had a black Cadillac, and when she drove it into Manhattan, she invariably got towed, like some befuddled Lucy Ricardo. While many of her contemporaries were turning their faces to a new sun, Carole remained under the old one: a housewife-mother in a dull suburb, who played mah-jongg with Donny Kirshner’s wife, Sheila, and Brooks Arthur’s wife, Marilyn, evincing the taste of an older woman. She was living her life from the inside out, according to her responsibilities and her character, admirably oblivious to image.

  Her lack of pretense was rewarded—she and Gerry were the objects of the Beatles’ fascination. “In England, Goffin and King were huge—they were legends,” says Peter Asher, who was the Peter of the pop duo Peter and Gordon as well as the brother of Paul McCartney’s soon-tobe fiancée, Jane Asher. “We were crazy about Goffin and King. We didn’t know who they were, just the names. But they wrote all the songs we loved—‘Crying in the Rain’; we were huge Everly Brothers fans.” Well before their own stardom, the Beatles had covered Carole and Gerry’s songs, treating their Hamburg audiences to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” as well as to more obscure Carole-Gerry compositions, and playing “Take Good Care of My Baby” at their audition for Decca Records. When the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” was inching up the British charts, it met competition from Carole’s own rendition of “It Might As Well Rain Until September,” a bigger hit in England than in the United States. Finally, they’d just recorded Carole and Gerry’s “Chains” on their debut album, Introducing the Beatles (since then, re-issued as Please Please Me). Peter Asher recalls: “When the Beatles first came to America, that’s who they wanted to meet: Goffin and King.”

  Entrusted with the task of introducing Carole and Gerry to the Beatles was New York Post writer Al Aronowitz, who lived near them in New Jersey. Aronowitz had met the Goffins when The Saturday Evening Post assigned him a piece on girl groups. The bearlike journalist was insecure and prickly; he both adulated genuine hipsters and feared they’d find him lacking, a sensibility that found an uncanny mirror in Gerry. Gerry Goffin and Al Aronowitz inevitably became close friends, best friends. Yet it was Carole who would most be changed by Aronowitz’s clamorous entry into the Goffins’ life. The chain of melodramas Aronowitz incited and the people he delivered to them would lead Carole to remake her personal and musical destiny.

  Aronowitz had befriended the Beatles’ chief roadie, Neil Aspinall, when the Fab Four landed at Idlewild Airport on a cold February day in 1964. To ingratiate himself to the group he was assigned to cover, he ferried Carole and Gerry to the Beatles’ suite at the Warwick Hotel. “John made come-ons to Carole,” Gerry later said, “but in a kidding way.” While the media and teenyboppers lusted for John and Paul, it was Carole Klein from Sheepshead Bay upon whom their idols showered awe.

  Aronowitz had a knack for befriending musical legends. Bob Dylan wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man” at Aronowitz’s house: “sitting,�
� the journalist recalled in his memoirs, “with my portable typewriter at my white Formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit Camels cigarette smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out on my stolen canary-colored Saturday Evening Post copy paper” and playing Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” over and over for inspiration. And it was Aronowitz who brokered the musical introduction of a generation, bringing Dylan to meet the Beatles—an evening that also turned the Beatles on to marijuana, setting their work on the path from playful and tuneful to profound and culture-changing.

  Aronowitz’s friendship with Dylan and his keys to the kingdom of “deep” songcraft made him a kind of life coach for Gerry. “Aronowitz thought Gerry was a genius,” Barry Mann says, and Al used that admiration—plus drugs—to help push Gerry out of his rut of three-minute wonders to the Other Side. “I thought Gerry’s lyrics were beautiful,” is how Aronowitz put it, in an interview for this book a year before his 2005 death. “I considered marijuana a wonder drug; it gave me my greatest epiphanies. The first time I smoked it, I felt free.” Like scores of jazz musicians over the decades, and like the imminent entire panoply of rock musicians, Gerry made dope smoking a key part of his creative life.

  Gerry’s mission had a kind of remedial urgency. America was changing, with astonishing speed and intensity, and the change was being led by its youth. The Vietnam War was tapping into an even wider vein of outrage than had the civil rights movement, whose earliest, hardest battles had been shrouded by the Deep South’s violent barricades mentality at a time when national television news had yet to achieve its ultimate power and reach. The idealistic, euphoric energy that massed around Dylan and the Beatles was something that Gerry and Carole felt a part of, but their music didn’t match. Dylan’s headlong rush of poetic, free-associative lyrics made Gerry feel “like a dwarf.” He’d thought that he and Carole had been writing meaningful songs with the likes of “Up on the Roof,” but now Dylan’s songs made him, and to some extent Carole, realize despondently, “We weren’t even close.” When Gerry met Dylan backstage at the latter’s Carnegie Hall concert and offered kudos that concluded, “You’ve got a right to be very proud of yourself,” Dylan’s sarcastic rejoinder—“I do?”—was a slap on Gerry’s already-humiliated face. The knife was plunged deeper when Carole, walking down MacDougal Street with Aronowitz in 1965, ran into painter-musician Bobby Neuwirth. Aronowitz, perhaps naïvely, was proud to show Carole off to someone in Dylan’s inner circle. But Neuwirth’s greeting to Carole was aggressive. “You’re the chick who writes songs for bubblegum wrappers, right?”