Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Brandt had folk guitarist David Bromberg produce Carly’s demo, which consisted of five songs, the featured one of which was a Carly composition: “Please Take Me Home (to Bed) with You.” Brandt brought the record to Clive Davis, who—having signed Janis Joplin to Columbia, and having presided over Columbia when the Byrds were on the label—was considered, as one A&R man puts it, “the ears of all time.” Davis listened briefly and thought he was hearing a Barbra Streisand type. “Clive practically threw it across the room and told Jerry, ‘What do I want with another Jewish New York girl!?’” Carly says Jerry told her. Brandt brought the demo to Jac Holzman, founder and president of Elektra Records. Jac had discovered Judy Collins and overseen Collins’s version of Joni’s “Both Sides, Now”; he’d signed the Doors, lighting the fire of Morrison’s megalomaniacal grandeur. Holzman recalls, “Jerry said, ‘Look, I think this girl is rather unusual. Her name is Carly Simon. I asked, ‘Is she one of the Simon Sisters?’ One of my favorite songs was a little lullaby called ‘Wynken, Blynken and Nod.’”

  Still, Holzman was preoccupied with his imminent trip to Expo ’70 in Japan. “Almost as an afterthought,” he recalls, he dropped the tape in his suitcase. Sleepless in a hotel outside of Osaka at four a.m., he dug out the tape and popped it into his cassette player. The tart strains of Carly singing “Please Take Me Home (to Bed) with You” made him sit up straight. He thought: She’s wonderful. Her voice had “a toughness and sinewyness.” When he got to Tokyo, he called Jerry Brandt and told him he wanted to work with Carly.

  Back in New York, Holzman played the tape for his employees. “Nobody was very impressed,” he recalls, “but it was my record company, so I didn’t pay any attention.”

  One day at the end of summer 1970 Carly took the elevator to the top of the new Gulf + Western building on Columbus Circle and tried not to get phobic when she realized that the building was swaying (as intended by design). Holzman, who had grown up on Madison Avenue and whose family had attended the Park Avenue Synagogue, recognized that he and the singer “were from similar backgrounds—haute Jewish New York,” as he puts it—which made it easier to relate, “although she was certainly more Brahmin. Those people can be pretty snooty, but Carly wasn’t.” Thus, the social-class issue that had been a minus to Albert Grossman, the members of Elephant’s Memory, and even to Danny Armstrong was a plus to Holzman. There had always been a niche for the sophisticated, urbane—almost “society”—girl in the world of popular music. Kay Swift, the classically trained musician who wrote “Can’t We Be Friends?” and the score of Broadway’s Fine and Dandy, who’d married a Warburg and had a love affair with George Gershwin, had filled it in the Depression era; Helen Forrest, the impeccable interpreter of Big Band lyrics, who sang with Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and Harry James, had filled it in the late 1930s and 1940s.

  Holzman wanted Carly to record the songs of Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and Donovan. He didn’t see her as a writer. Carly set out to prove Holzman wrong. “I wanted to be a writer more than anything else.” By now she was “already in love with James Taylor from a distance—that whole sound,” she’s said. James’s drummer on Sweet Baby James, Russ Kunkel, was “a kind of demigod to me,” and “in my mind I fashioned myself like a Carole King. [So] I just went about my business, writing my own songs,” ultimately convincing Holzman that they were worth recording.

  The songs she was writing reflected her playfulness, vulnerability, and romanticism. In “Alone”—whose jaunty melody suggests those living room musicales with her show-biz uncles—she’s reassuring a lover, “It’s not to leave you that I’m goin’”; rather, she wants to revel in the “ache” of solitude and memory, an odd need that her sensual voice makes believable, with asymmetrical phrasing and unexpected harmony. “Reunions,” with its stately Broadway-revue-like melody, is one of the most undiluted of those upper-middle-class slices of life that would become her trademark, which some listeners would gratefully relate to (“To be sad in your beautiful house, with your mother reading The New York Times and your father coming home late—Carly made that an okay story to tell; it was okay to be smart, to be witty,” says her friend Jessica Hoffman Davis) but which many critics would forever resent and mock her for. Her elegant lyrics about the tension between a group of old friends—“wind blows through thin smiles / Someone made a wrong turn / missed a joke by miles”—redeems it for even the staunchest reverse-snobs. Another wistful art song, “The Best Thing,” regretfully mulls the loss of a man of a different background: “I was his foreigner and he was mine.”

  But of those songs Carly brought to Jac, the one he was most riveted by was “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” which she’d written with Jake. “All the other songs had some aspect of conventionality, which you expect in a song,” Jac says, “but this was different.” Jac’s staff said the title was too wordy and the song too stuffed with emotional activity—the parents’ bad marriage; the friends’ unhappy lives; the boyfriend’s enthusiasm for marriage but controlling nature; the woman’s initial resistance and ultimate capitulation—to be released as a hit single. “Everyone [at Elektra] argued that it was too complex, blah blah blah—‘it’s not going to be played on Top 40 radio,’ and all that was true at the time,” Holzman says. “Still, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a first.”

  Jac knew this was the single; it was a “signature song; it conveyed who Carly was.” “That song was so much me,” Carly has said. Not only did it draw on her childhood, it described her last few years: she had moved on from three men she might have married—choosing to break off a pre-engagement with Nick Delbanco and a tacit engagement to Danny Armstrong, and suffering Willie Donaldson’s severance of their engagement—while her sister and best friends had married and were having children. She was never dishonest about her sexuality (when she moved into her own apartment, “I still had a hard time sleeping alone,” she has said, “so I never did, and since it was 1969, there was no reason to”) and her datebook was full. Through Jake, she’d met and had a fling with Jack Nicholson and then with Bob Rafelson (the star and director, respectively, of The King of Marvin Gardens, which Jake had written) and was now dating Rafelson’s brother Don, while still carrying a torch for Danny Armstrong. (Having many lovers didn’t harden Carly’s heart, her friends would note; it only multiplied the times it could break.)

  And all of this was representative. In a brand-new poll of college women, 10 percent more respondents called marriage “obsolete” than had described it that way the year before. Such skepticism had started as idealistic nose thumbing at what the state demanded two lovers do, an idea Joni had expressed in “My Old Man.” But now feminism had added a new component: it was no longer that two lovers didn’t need a “piece of paper from the city hall”; more than “city hall” being suspect, your old man was. He, not “the state,” was going to “cage [you] on [his] shelf.” Men had long quipped that marriage overdomesticated them; now women did. “I want a ‘wife’!” Judy Syfers had just written, in a common-sensically funny, much-talked-about essay in the premiere issue of Ms.

  Carly and Jake’s critique of marriage was a musical version of what women in their circle were doing in prose—and in life. Sally Kempton, Carly’s Sarah Lawrence classmate, had just published a long buzz-magnet of an autobiographical essay, “Cutting Loose,” in Esquire, where Jake’s film criticism appeared; it eventually led to her divorce from her producer husband. Jonathan Schwartz’s wife, Sara Davidson, had covered the women’s movement for Life magazine; she’d describe her marriage’s dissolution in Loose Change. Susan Braudy, a Newsweek deskmate of Carly’s cousin Jeanie Seligmann (and the author of the James Taylor profile in The New York Times Magazine) was documenting her separation from her husband in Between Marriage and Divorce.

  The average age of first marriage for U.S. women had been going up a little every year since 1965—the year that Joni had delivered her Second Fret stage patter about women living alone in tasteful lairs—and the increas
e would proceed unabated.*

  Still, for all Carly’s enthusiastically exercised freedom, she’d absorbed lessons from her shrewd coquette mother on how important it was to hold a man’s attention. Danny had felt she was “pressured” to have an “orderly” married life like Lucy’s, and she had always felt that pressure herself. As she put it while promoting her record, “We were all brought up playing with bride dolls and taught to believe that having children was it.” More, she had valued both Danny’s and Nick’s careers over her own, as they had expected her to.

  The tension in Carly’s song (the narrator has fears that won’t go away but are too threatening to act on) seemed to match the New York–locused, early-mainstream feminist moment.** Writer and film critic Karen Durbin recalls how she felt, in 1968, when her New Yorker colleague, Redstockings cofounder Ellen Willis, started talking about women’s liberation.” It was “a subject I found so seismic that I kept my hands under the desk so she wouldn’t see them shaking while I casually protested that it really wasn’t my thing.” By early 1971, that sense of being threatened but compelled was widespread: any woman who picked up Susan Sontag’s essay on feminism in The Paris Review or Vivian Gornick’s in The Village Voice feared that once she read it she could never turn back. (In “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth” in the preview issue of Ms., Jane O’Reilly coined a word for that moment of can’t-turn-back epiphany—the feminist “click!”) But read on she would. Shoving doubts under the rug (as Carly’s song’s narrator does) was like keeping shaking hands under a desk: a stopgap measure that both women knew would merely delay a life-changing confrontation.

  Carly’s persona—sexy and uptown hip—also matched the moment. Between the fiercely anti–“sex object” early feminism and the so-called padded-shoulder “power suit” feminism of later years lay that glamorous little wedge of early 1970s when feminism had an in-your-face sex-focus and a Manhattan-cocktail-party panache.

  First, the sex part: Ingrid Bengis’s Combat in the Erogenous Zone; Erica Jong’s erotic Fruits & Vegetables and ribald super–best seller Fear of Flying (with its famous “zipless fuck”); “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” by Anne Koedt; “The Politics of Orgasm” by Susan Lydon; Ellen Frankfort’s Village Voice columns-turned-book, Vaginal Politics; Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex; Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics; the swaggering lustiness of Amazonian Germaine Greer (despite her book’s title The Female Eunuch); lines like “My sexual rage was the most powerful single emotion in my life” in Kempton’s Esquire essay—sex-forwardness sold the women’s movement in those years, when the shedding of “hang-ups” was a political mission, “promiscuous” was as reviled a word as “nigger,” and monogamy was something good people didn’t “believe” in. (Carly makes the sotto voce quip women her age often share in these long-AIDS-sombered times during which the word “slut” has slipped back into usage, “Young women have no idea what it was like in those days…” And, in Lesley Dormen’s novel, The Best Place to Be, late-fiftysomething narrator Grace Hanford says, of the very early 1970s, “Those were the days when you slept with every man who so much as caught your eye across a party.”) That lack of apology about sexuality gave the movement its boldest victory: January 1973’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion on demand legal.

  Then there was the chic. The almost–50 percent Seven Sisters alumna-staffed Ms. magazine—which included many extremely un- dowdy editors (Vogue-stylish Ingeborg Day, who also wrote dark erotica, and edgy fashion editor Mary Peacock are just two) and famous editors (Gloria Steinem)* and editors on the cusp of fame (Alice Walker edited there just before she catapulted to renown via The Color Purple)—had so much glamour that Robert Redford actually kept a secret office within Ms.’s suite. Feminist editors of that era might have expressed a preference for, say, Billie Holiday over the music of a white publisher’s daughter, but it was the publisher’s daughter whose life and issues more closely matched most of their own. And beyond the reverse snobbery of liberal-political Manhattan, Carly’s example was less ambivalently welcomed. “Women adored her,” says Arlyne Rothberg, who quickly took over as her manager from Jerry Brandt, and who would notice, over the years, that when a newborn girl was given the name Carly—virtually unheard of before 1971—“it was usually the mother who had chosen it.” “Women looked at her and said: ‘Oh, you can be gorgeous and smart and educated…and be a rock star?’”

  Lucy Simon had sensed, when they were retiring their duo in 1966, that Carly’s lower-register voice would be commercial—and by late 1970 that voice had ripened to a confounding richness (it could bleat and purr at the same time) that mirrored Carly’s fluid looks. (When Holzman’s A&R man Steve Harris first met Carly, “there was something about her [face] I couldn’t put my finger on,” he’s said.) The voice Holzman thought “tough and sinewy” was called by one reviewer “poised and dusky,” and “lightly cutting” and “almost harsh” by The New York Times’s Mike Jahn, who added that it brought “a breathtaking note of anguish” to her “pastel” scenarios and “combines” with her pronounced femininity “to cause in the listener a wonderful fascination and curiosity. She strikes several emotions at once and makes them feel glad to be struck.” Stephen Holden, writing in Rolling Stone (he would later move to The New York Times), praised her “radiant vocal personality,” adding, with faint-praise-turned-full: “She has the whitest of white voices and uses it well, singing full throat with her faultless enunciation. Her almost literal note-for-note phrasing of songs is uniquely ingenuous.” People’s Jim Jerome would sum it up by calling Carly’s “one of the most powerfully affecting voices in pop rock.”

  Holzman decided that Jimi Hendrix’s record producer, Eddie Kramer, was the tough producer Carly’s tough voice required. “Eddie was skilled at creating a rich, fat sound, each instrument or voice being heard with its proper weight,” and that’s what he wanted for Carly’s debut. They began recording in late fall. Carly and Kramer fought over the arrangements of the album; Holzman stayed away for a while—“Let them duke it out” was his philosophy. “I don’t mind if the producer and singer don’t get along; typically, the fighting brings out some very good stuff; that’s why I like to hide,” he says. Holzman entered the studio only when he had to, to make sure the production was “full and clean; you had to hear all the nuances. With Carly, that was the critical part.” The album added three non-Carly-written songs: “Dan, My Fling,” a Jake Brackman–Fred Gardner collaboration (based on Gardner’s civil rights song, “Ruth My Truth”), which Carly used as a vessel for her aching regret over breaking up with Danny Armstrong; Mark Klingman’s “Just a Sinner,” which presented Carly at peak belting form; and Buzzy Linhart’s “The Love’s Still Growing,” whose plaintive toughness matched her voice. Jac Holzman was “buoyed” by the finished product. “The songs were sophisticated and openhearted, which is a rare combination. Some of the lyrics reminded me of Stephen Sondheim, with their keen sense of the crosscurrents of life and the human condition. Though Carly sang with a rock backing, her polished, well-bred voice was of a kind rarely heard in that context.”

  Holzman had designer Bill Harvey give the album cover “a soft, matte finish, a mark of substance and quality.” The photo showed Carly in a tight-bodiced, antique lace dress with lace curtains behind her—her head, to use her own later words, “strategically dipped” on one palm; her legs, as Holzman pointedly put it, “gloriously akimbo,” the skirt tent-taut over the heels-together knees-out underneath. The implication of wide-open thighs under a decorous dress was the first of a sex-teasing leitmotif in every one of Carly’s early albums. Carly’s face, Holzman has said, bore “a challenging look, as if she was waiting for the world to finally notice her.”

  Carly Simon and its single “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” were released in February, and Jonathan Schwartz did his longtime friend the favor of giving the single heavy play on his radio show. Along with Carly’s sisters, he would soon be
shocked at her sudden astounding fame. (Carly’s reaction to Joey’s and Lucy’s stunned understanding that she had upturned the sisters’ expected order of things? “Yes, there was guilt,” says her second husband, Jim Hart. “But let’s get this straight: First, there was glee—then there was guilt.”) Jac’s plan was to get the song to female ears. “I knew that once women heard it, we had a shot.” So he sent extra copies to the secretaries and receptionists at the radio stations. Holzman believes the record’s national buzz came from them, their consciousness piqued by the new feminist spirit. By the time Carly came back from her brief vacation to Jamaica with Don Rafelson, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” was #35.

  The single and album could not languish; both had to be promoted. Jac insisted that Carly commit to a performance engagement. This prospect terrified her. She’d wanted to be a songwriter more than a singer so she wouldn’t have to perform.

  Now Holzman’s A&R man, Steve Harris, took over. Steve had seen Carly’s face take on “a beauty [that] was completely transforming” when she’d picked up her guitar and sang, when they’d first met, through mutual friend David Steinberg. He had to get her onstage. Harris called Doug Weston, the owner of L.A.’s Troubadour, and got her booked for three nights, starting April 6, opening for Cat Stevens.