Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Actually, they both did. “If you ever want a home-cooked meal—” Carly offered.

  James replied, “Tonight.”

  (That may be the cleaned-up version. Carly described their meeting to Rolling Stone this way: “James came up and embraced me…and then we went in the bathroom and fucked.”)

  “From that night on, we never spent a night apart from each other,” Carly says—at least when they were in the same geographical location, which now was most of the time. “All that” romantic activity of Carly’s “kind of stopped on a dime, with James,” says Jake, “with a little bit of overlap.”

  As for that first bit of “overlap”: a week later, on November 18, Carly and Steve and Jake flew back out to L.A., where she performed again at the Troubadour. She was the main attraction; Don McLean, the opener.

  After the show came a knock on Carly’s dressing room door. She now had a roadie, named Wuzzy. Just as Wuzzy was saying to the uninvited visitor, “Miss Simon can’t see anyone right now,” Steve, recognizing the man at the door, said, “Wuzzy! Yes, she can.” And into the dressing room walked Warren Beatty. Beatty was involved with Julie Christie, but that hadn’t deterred him before and wouldn’t now. As Arlyne—who soon also managed Diane Keaton, who eventually had a long romance with Beatty during the ’70s—remarks: “If you win an Academy Award,” or the equivalent, “he’s right behind you.”

  Later that night Carly and Jake were in her room at the Chateau Marmont when Beatty knocked on the door and came in again. Steve Harris cryptically relays Carly’s description of her private time with Warren: “He was very persuasive. Very, very persuasive.”

  After the Troubadour engagement, Carly returned east and traveled to Martha’s Vineyard to be with James. When they were together in the house he’d just built, things turned very serious very quickly. He had been the Man for three years now, and she was the glittery new girl in town. They were rock-star prom king and queen, and the fatedness of their coupling (which Danny Kortchmar and Leland Sklar had predicted) was intensified by their puzzle-piece-fitting backgrounds. “We felt like we’d known each other all our lives,” Carly has said.

  They talked about the meaning that performing and success held for them. James said that when his father had gone off to Antarctica with the navy when he was six, he’d bonded so intensely with his mother that it felt Oedipal. Succeeding always carried, he said, a sense of “inherent and impending retribution”—if he succeeded, he’d go from being the vulnerable child to the father-killing man. Carly could relate; performing was, in a different but seemingly parallel way, about love for her, too—about her father’s love.

  Betsy Asher thinks Carly’s outgoing, solicitous nature was compelling to James. “He and Joni had spent a lot of time trying to work it out, so when Carly showed up, she was so sociable and sunny and took up all the slough that it sort of completed him to have all that social” energy. Others have noted that Carly had facial features—the low-bridged nose and full mouth—similar to Margaret Corey and Susie Schnerr. “Every man has a certain physical type,” says a woman who knew James well during those years and who, over time, saw Carly as “the love of James’s life.” Whatever the essence of the immediate depth of attraction was, within days of their union in the Vineyard, they were, with lovers’ hearts and psychics’ power, envisioning a family. “We were talking dreamily,” Carly recalls, “and James said, ‘We’ll have children and give them names like Ben and Sally.’” The quiet, elusive man had fallen hard. “My love for Carly is a very religious thing,” he would eventually say. “I just exchange with her so completely, I don’t know where I end off and she begins.”

  Carly had a November 28 concert booked at the Shady Grove Music Fair in Rockville, Maryland, but she canceled it and stayed with James. The problems—starting with the fact that James was a heroin addict—would intrude soon enough, as would the stinging fact that James dismissed Carly’s music. (After they’d become a couple, he came upon her first album at a friend’s house and said, of the cover, “That’s a fine-looking woman…” His friend said: “That’s your girl—that’s Carly,” and James realized, “Oh, so it is.”) But for now there was new love, and with a man of decency and honor. Carly recalls an incident that illuminated the best of James’s character: His younger sister Kate had been treated badly by the man she was seeing, “a guy,” Carly says “who was about six foot eight and was a black belt in karate and had almost died three times in Vietnam. James had just asked the guy to get out of the house, and the guy had swung his fist at James, and James was very tall but not tough physically”; still, James took him on. Carly was powerfully moved by James’s loyalty to and defense of his sister and his willingness to go mano a mano with the bruiser. In Jake’s view, Carly had always wanted her father to rise up out of his passive silence in his study chair, especially during Andrea’s affair with Ronnie Klinzing, and say, “This is my house! I’m taking control!” But he never did. Later that night, “James got very drunk,” Carly remembers, “and then he went out to the back of the house and started chopping wood in the moonlight. And as he chopped, he called out, ‘Carly! Carly! I love you! I love you!’—the beautiful voice of this brave, beautiful man, bellowing forth through the cold, sharp night.

  “And that,” Carly says, “is when I fell cementedly in love with James Taylor.”

  The drama of the evening aside, she saw correctly into her new boyfriend’s old-fashioned sense of honor. Years later, when James’s Warner Bros. records were not selling very well (while Carly’s albums were), Walter Yetnikoff, the aggressive new head of CBS Records, wanted to steal James away, to produce and promote him better. Even on the night of the signing of the CBS deal that eventually revived his career, Taylor was troubled over leaving the label that had launched him. “I have feelings about this; I want my integrity intact,” Taylor told Yetnikoff; he said he needed to take a walk to think things over. As he stood to leave, he bowed to Yetnikoff. “The gesture was neither gratuitous nor sarcastic; it was the gesture of a gentleman,” Yetnikoff has said. After the walk, James returned to sign the career-charging contract, but still with evident ambivalence over what he feared was his disloyalty.

  Younger than Carly (as he’d been younger than Joni), James had an endearing boyishness. During another trip Carly made to L.A., in early 1972, James accidentally left her apartment without turning off what he thought was a nonworking shower spigot; he returned to find her apartment flooded. When he walked to a phone booth (the water had damaged the phone line) to call her with the bad news, he was so uptight, she recalls, “he said, ‘Hello, Carly, this is James Taylor’…his full name, like he didn’t know me! It was adorable.”

  But related to that charming diffidence, there was another quality that Carly saw in those first months which, even though it had benefited her, heralded a future danger sign: James’s flashes of coldness; his extreme eschewal of confrontation (“He will walk twenty blocks around a confrontation if he can do it,” says Russ Kunkel) and abrupt—even cruel—termination of contact when he was “finished” with someone, especially a woman. After they started living together, James got calls at the Vineyard house from both Margaret and Joni. He was “rude and impersonal” to them, Carly recalls (Joni described his telephone brush-off of her—“it hurts!”—in “See You Sometime”), telling them not to call him anymore, and Carly remembers feeling that “if it were me, I would have been deeply hurt.” Carly interpreted James’s attitude toward Joni as: “I was his new queen and she was Anne Boleyn on her way to the Tower. I saw how determinedly she was banished. I was wounded for her, empathic for her—presciently, as it turned out.” (In the years since their divorce, Carly has found James’s “dismissal” of her “as confounding as I could ever imagine anything would be. It has beaten me back, self-esteem-wise, too many times and I’m ashamed of my weakness.”)*

  As for Margaret Corey: One day, early in her relationship with James, Carly ran into her at Capezio; they recognized each other by the
names on their credit cards. According to Carly, Margaret may have asked her how she was dealing with Trudy Taylor’s WASP propriety. According to what Richard Corey says Margaret told him, Carly thanked Margaret for paving the way to James’s mother’s acceptance of a half-Jewish girlfriend for her son. (Perhaps to cater to her new mother-in-law, in 1975 Carly told Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres, “I’m only one-quarter Jewish; the rest is German and Spanish.”)

  Rolling Stone’s Timothy White would call Carly and James “two lanky aristocrats” who would come to embody the “intelligent, self-conscious style and sex appeal that characterized soft-rock stardom in the Seventies.” “But they were different,” adds Tamara Weiss, who’s known them both for decades. “Carly is passionate, funny, wacky, loving, wild; James was more contained, quieter, withdrawn—and he was stoned a lot of the time, back then.” “Carly is vivacious—vastly more social; James is more taciturn, more reticent,” says Danny Kortchmar. “It became a big source of conflict for him, all the attention they ended up getting as a couple, which outweighed the attention they got individually, which was already huge.”

  The personality difference would also fit into their dance with the third partner in their relationship: James’s addiction. James’s drug habit was “harrowing” to Carly. She hadn’t understood when she fell in love with him how deeply he was hooked. The wall the addiction set up between them—the “remoteness” from James—was confusing and painful to her. For the sake of their relationship, James tried to quit three times in their first six months, throwing out his “works,” his strap and syringes. “I needed her very much,” he’s said of that time. For a poignantly addicted man to try to quit drugs, three times, for love of you: in Hip America, there was no more moving—or flattering—soap opera.

  Carly was now writing songs for her third album, No Secrets. The title song, “We Have No Secrets,” was both personally—echoing Carly’s boundary-less but betrayal-laced childhood family life—and culturally resonant. The book Open Marriage had just been published (essentially for slightly older couples who thought they’d missed out on hippie hedonism and wanted a bit of it for themselves), and its anthropologist authors’ endorsement of nonmonogamous marriage was one of the first planks in the house that Tom Wolfe would call the Me Decade. Carly’s pithy line, “You always answer my questions / But they don’t always answer my prayers,” nails the tension between this supposedly wholesome straying and the realities of human nature. (By the end of Carly and James’s marriage, the price of secrets would be all too clear to both of them.) “The Right Thing to Do,” with its fetching melody, is also explicitly about James. In it Carly is both the romantic, stubbornly looking past her man’s serious problem, and the realist, shrewdly assessing her fading value in the sex-and-love marketplace: “And it used to be for a while / That the river flowed right to my door / Making me just a little too free / But now the river doesn’t seem to stop here anymore.” “Making me just a little too free”: the sly acknowledgment of her sex-forwardness and her opportunism was, to her identifying female listeners, flattering in its sophistication.

  However, the river did still stop at Carly’s door. In June of 1972, at Ahmet Ertegun’s party for the Rolling Stones, Carly connected with Mick Jagger. James had recently gone back to heroin again, “so there was room for a little Mick feeling; there was an opening,” Carly says. She asserts that she did remain faithful to James, which Jake qualifies: “in a kind of Bill Clinton definition of faithful.”

  Jac arranged for Carly’s third album to be produced by Richard Perry, a Brooklyn-born University of Michigan graduate who’d discovered Tiny Tim and had most recently produced Harry Nilsson. Perry had wanted to work with Carly from the day he heard, and saw, her first album. (“That sound! That striking-looking woman!”) By the time Anticipation came out, Perry was “already imagining what our album would sound like.” He was thrilled to get the assignment, although, he recalls, “with her first two albums, she’d had affairs with her record producers, so when we were getting ready to meet, Arlyne Rothberg made her sign a blood oath that under no circumstances would she have an affair with me.” This would become a running joke between Richard and Carly, since, says the very tall man with the strong-featured face and dark hair, “if any two people should have had an affair, it would be us; we looked like sister and brother.”

  Carly came to see Richard at his Laurel Canyon house in May 1972, bearing a song she had just written, the gentle, somewhat folkie “Ballad of a Vain Man” (she’d loved Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man”). The song had come together in four separate parts. First, about a year earlier, she’d sketched out in her journal the beginning of a song called “Bless You, Ben.” Then, on a flight from L.A. to Palm Springs for the Elektra Records convention, she’d added another, totally unrelated line to her journal when her seat mate, musician Billy Mernit, looked into the cup on his tray and said, “Doesn’t that shape look like clouds in my coffee?” Thirdly, at one point when she was feeling vengeful about the men who’d emotionally laid her low, she’d scribbled another, tauntlike, line into her journal. The line was waiting for context and meaning, but she knew it was good: “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.” Finally, everything came together at a party in L.A. A man she knew walked in, with a certain attitude, “and I said to myself, This is exactly the person that ‘You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you’ is about!” Carly says today. “I envisioned him looking in the mirror and the scarf twirling, and the imaginary gavotte, and all the women wanting to be his partner.” After the party Carly realized that drippy “Bless You, Ben” was going nowhere, so, elongating its melody by three beats, and syncopating it, she substituted: “You walked into the party / Like you were walking onto a yacht”—she thought “walked into” had a “nice flicker” to it—and kept going.

  The song reflected her belle-of-the-ball year and a half, which had negatively affected her self-esteem more than it seemed on the surface. Carly had belt-notched all those coveted hotties—Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, not to mention the unfamous ones (and her truly loved James)—and with her “extreme intelligence and worldly wit,” Ellen observed, she had enjoyed the party. Yet, Ellen adds, “I don’t think she knew how to do it in her heart.” Jake agrees. “Those were all wrenching emotional affairs for her.” Sexual revolution or not, she’d felt used. “And this thing that Nicholson and Beatty* had, where they find a new girl and then they want to share her as a male bonding thing, that passed-on feeling [translated to]: ‘You gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me…’”

  As Carly sat down at the piano and started playing “Ballad of a Vain Man,” Richard Perry grabbed his bongos and started “banging them up to a thunderous crescendo,” he recalls. Sure enough, inside the gentle folk song was a full-blast rocker. “Just listening to that song for the first time, I thought, Oh, my God—what a hit this is!” he says.

  Carly flew to London in the middle of the summer to record No Secrets. James joined her when he finished a lengthy round of political fund-raisers with Carole for George McGovern’s presidential bid. James and Carole were the first rock stars ever to stump for a presidential candidate; Warren Beatty organized the concerts and James’s participation came as a favor from Carly to Warren. By now, “Ballad of a Vain Man” had turned into “You’re So Vain”—the anthem of a woman exerting power over the boyfriend who did her wrong. The narrator’s bitchy playfulness lights up the song. (“I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you?” is Carly’s adult version of her waving Ronnie Klinzing’s jockstrap aloft.) The clunky-as-a-yearbook-autograph rhyme—“yacht,” “apricot,” “gavotte”—signals that this rock song is boldly uncool. It’s a chick song. Happily using these ill-fitting words, the narrator is observing the employment of clothes, status symbols, and gestures of narcissism and insecurity in the war for self-esteem. But rather than using these things to shore herself up (or to put
another woman down), she’s using them to mock a powerful man. This is what makes people view the song as feminist—real-life feminist, not academic feminist. “Carly understands middle-class women,” Arlyne Rothberg says.

  Over the course of their week working on the track, Richard Perry says, “anyone who heard that record would giggle, because you knew it would be a massive hit, and it kind of tickled you to have that feeling. Normally, no matter what something sounds like, you still hold a little quotient [of hope] in reserve. But with this record, everyone knew.” “Take it to the bank!” Steve Harris laughed, when he heard it. “Bet the house on it!”

  Of the several providential touches that made people feel that way, the first was Jagger’s walking into the studio one day, at Carly’s behest, to sing vocals on the chorus. Perry was delighted and stunned. “It was the peak of the Rolling Stones’ success and Jagger never did anything like that”—but there he was, adding his unmistakable cracking voice to Carly’s sarcastic “Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you?”s. “I honestly credit Mick with making my entire career,” Carly says, “because his voice was so important on ‘You’re So Vain’—the sound, the mystery of who the song was about: it had a lot to do with Mick.” James, however, may have felt more unbalanced about Mick’s participation—and about other men in Carly’s past and present in general, at least according to one observer: Danny Armstrong. Danny happened to be in London, so Carly invited him to a session. “James was standing in the control room—I saw him as a very nervous, upset-but-keep-it-cool-on-the-outside person,” Danny said, when interviewed for this book. “He kept looking at me—he was interested in what the heck I was about, and it went both ways.”