Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  The Chicago Tribune’s Lynn Van Matre (in her joint Joni-Carly review, headlined “A ‘Spark’ of Strengths, with ‘Hotcakes’ of Humor”) got at something important: Carly’s songs “are stamped firmly with her own personality, yet the personal touch doesn’t go so deep that listeners can’t borrow a little from the music to apply to their own situations.” Carly would continue to ply this identifiability. For almost twenty years after Court and Spark, Joni would largely abandon that territory (which she had pioneered) to stake her claim as a risk-taking musical artist.

  The joint review was ironic because Carly felt competitive with Joni. Jac Holzman had left Elektra to research video and audio development for Warners; Elektra merged with Asylum, and Carly felt herself to be “the ugly stepdaughter” thrust into Joni’s sponsor’s stable. Carly heard that Geffen had said things about her; “I don’t know if any of it is true,” she would later say, “but they seemed vitriolic.” Because Hotcakes was released close to the same time as Court and Spark, Carly and her manager, Arlyne Rothberg, felt that Joni’s album was given priority.*

  Six months after Hotcakes and Sally were born, James released his fifth album, Walking Man, his first without Peter Asher, Kootch, and others in their recording family. Despite seven weeks of promotional touring (and the achingly lovely title song), it sold surprisingly poorly, ending up as his lowest-selling album. When Carly had had her double #1 with No Secrets and its “You’re So Vain,” James’s almost simultaneously released One Man Dog had peaked at #4, its single “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” at only #14. So now Carly had two albums and several singles that bettered her husband’s—and handily. “And not only were Carly’s doing better, but their albums were always released at the same time,” Arlyne laments today. “You have to think back and say it was bad planning on everybody’s part, including mine. Why didn’t we have the good sense to say, ‘Let’s put at least eight months between them’?”

  The disparity was “hard” on Carly’s marriage, Arlyne says. “We hadn’t come that much into female liberation—not that it’s even easy today.” Steve Harris recalls that now, during James’s solo performances (he toured all the time, whereas Carly had stopped touring), “People in the audience would cry out, ‘Where’s Carly? Where’s Carly?! Sing “Mockingbird”!’ I don’t know if James liked that.” To appease his fans, James would bring his wife out from the wings and they’d duet on that cut from her album. Arlyne says that Carly “always, always” minimized her success in front of others, especially when James was around. “It became so natural that I did it automatically with James,” Carly says. “She would never take a compliment without saying, ‘I’m married to one of the world’s great musicians,’” says Jessica.

  Carly fell madly in love with Sally, and, like many upper-middle-class women in the new earthy-mom age who’d been raised with household help assisting social, distracted mothers, she was wrestling with a task that seemed as daunting as any other breakthrough. Ellen says that, for both of them, a big question was: “How can you carve out your own life, your own way of being in the world, that is radically different from the mothering that you had—and become a different kind of mother?” Even though she had her son, Niccolo, first, Ellen says, “I learned from Carly that you could consciously become someone different. She was a relaxed, spontaneous, loving, giving mother—so different than my own upbringing with nannies and formality.”

  Consciousness raising had exposed the mother-daughter knot. So many women were obsessing—to themselves, their friends, their therapists—over that relationship’s seemingly inescapable imprint that author Nancy Friday was, shrewdly, writing a book (My Mother/My Self) that, upon its publication, would become a massive best seller. Carly had a mother’s helper, but she did the day-to-day work herself and—to the horror of Trudy Taylor (“who,” says Arlyne, “would tell everybody how to live their life; I think she criticized Carly a lot. I can’t imagine anyone not being scared of her”)—she was breast-feeding Sally. Using her body to nurse her baby—feeling “essential to someone else’s life”—was, she said, as “heavy” (the then-favored word for “profound”) an experience as “a woman could feel.”

  The young family moved to L.A. for a few months so James could record his sixth album, Gorilla (its title track named when James, after a fight with Carly, went to the Central Park Zoo, saw a gorilla, and imagined that that’s how his angry wife viewed him), and Carly her fifth, Playing Possum. Carly’s album cover was a provocative statement, that being a wife and mother didn’t mean you gave up any hot-chick rights.

  At Norman Seeff’s studio in L.A. Carly took off her dress and started dancing around in a little black teddy and knee-high black boots. When she and Arlyne saw the contact sheet, they both zeroed in on a profile shot of her: she was on her knees, with her long, muscle-thighed legs apart, and her fists clenched at her side. It seemed as if she had nothing on under the teddy, which stopped mid-buttock. The photo was artily cropped so her head was half cut off, her hair springing down her back, her lips parted. It was an image of a beautiful, half-undressed, erotically charged young woman. In 1975, it stood to be the most explicitly sexual photograph ever chosen for the cover of any woman’s album. Carly and Arlyne usually disagreed on cover shots, but on this one they were joined at the hip. “We both knew it was a great picture, and we were prepared to fight for it,” Arlyne says. They didn’t have to; “the record company never interfered.”

  That new mother and “erudite Simon & Schuster heiress” Carly Simon would use such a photograph caused a sensation; Sears Roe-buck, the Wal-Mart of its day, banned the album; perfect strangers came up to Carly at Bloomingdale’s and told her she was obscene and disgusting. But the album cover (which went on to adorn almost as many male dorm walls as the Betty Grable poster had adorned barracks walls in World War II) sent a welcome signal in that winner-take-all feminist moment. Carly was calmly defiant that being treated like a “piece of meat” by others was entirely separate from asserting her own carnality. “There’s a great deal of difference,” she informed Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres. “Being attractive sexually is not something which I feel guilty about or embarrassed by in any way. I feel that it’s great. I felt very sexy when I wrote most of the songs” on Playing Possum. (As if to underscore the point, she conducted part of the interview with Fong-Torres in an erotic art gallery, where she was selecting a painting—“Quite nice, but not erotic enough,” she casually opined to the dealer—as a present to producer Richard Perry.)

  Cueing off on the album’s unavoidable talking point—its cover—Stephen Holden said that Playing Possum was a “celebration of the body at play” and that with it “Simon has largely abandoned plaintive balladeering for a blunt style that means to be aggressively sexy.” Holden thought she tried but mostly missed the mark, except for what was supposed to have been the hit single, “Attitude Dancing” (it made a disappointing showing, peaking at #21). Actually, Holden had it backwards: “Attitude Dancing,” an unmelodious gimmick song about a kind of precursor to “vogueing,” was one of the least interesting songs in the album. The title song, “Playing Possum,” a too wordy and too obvious bit of sociology inspired by her brother, Peter—about politicos becoming communards becoming Eastern-religion spiritualists—came in a close second in an album otherwise overflowing with songs that are rawly and elegantly all about sex. “After the Storm” takes on the impact of sex after an argument, from stimulation to appeasement. In the traditional, folky “Look Me in the Eyes”—with its delicate melody and celestial chorus—she’s rubbing a lover’s “limes” all over her body and “climb[ing] on you like a tree.” The song’s hook—“but I beg you when you love me, look me in the eyes”—poignantly joins the sexuality to intimacy. And despite the sometimes quotidian lyrics and an uninspired melody, “Waterfall” (with James humming in the background) seems to be about orgasm. “Are You Ticklish?” is a woman at a dinner party coming on to a man she wants to bed. In “Love Out in the Street,”
Carly is a noir hussy having a public sex spat with her lover. (She and James did have fights. During the production of Playing Possum, in March 1975, a twenty-seventh birthday party she hosted for him at their rented Coldwater Canyon house turned so unpleasant for her—Jake recalls it had “something to do with Joni”—that she ended the evening by checking into a hotel.)

  The album’s controversial centerpiece—Arlyne was nervous about Carly’s insistence that it be released as its first single—was “Slave.” The song was Carly’s way of lamenting that, despite the rhetoric of feminism, acculturation and psychology were hard to change: “I’m just another woman, raised to be a slave.” James’s withholding nature, his lack of enthusiasm for her music, and her need to minimize her success around him: all of this kept feeding her desire to win him, a prize as elusive as her father had been. The song’s candor is devastating.

  The unsettling, politically incorrect song caused Arlyne to publicly break ranks with her client. “I don’t like ‘Slave,’” she told Fong-Torres, “not because of its music but because of its point of view.” Arlyne, a rare female manager in rock music, had bristled when, during an early Central Park concert, the male stars had a trailer to dress and relax in, while Carly was made to change in the public ladies’ room. But Carly held firm. Yes, she said, she expected the song to elicit a “little scurry of female hair on the back on first hearing, probably because [women will] take the song at face value,” but she said that it was actually a “pro-high-consciousness” song because it identified a stubborn relic of female behavior that she was “angry about—goddamnit, sometimes I actually still feel like a slave!’”—enough to want to alter. In retrospect “Slave” is apocryphal. Even decades after she and James divorced and remarried (and divorced those second mates), Carly Simon’s inability to stop loving James—her involuntary fixation on their time together—is right up there with her great generosity, her sophisticated wit, her almost dangerous candor, and her joie de vivre as one of the most noticeable things about her. “James!” she exclaims in an e-mail. “What a clenched fist of hard love!” For years, with few exceptions, he has declined contact with her (“He’s not going there—guys don’t,” one male friend says)—and about this willed avoidance she muses, with the pain that one hears in her songs: “There is no exit from that silence.”

  During the headily feminist/Me Decade years—when New York magazine’s cover featured a picture of a smiling mother of three who “ran away” from her family and when Avery Corman was writing his soon-to-be-best-selling novel, Kramer vs. Kramer, about a custody fight between an oppressed wife turned self-actualizer and a sexist husband turned full-time father—the female partner of (as Rolling Stone had called them) the Simon-Taylors was dealing with the reality beneath the new fairy tale.

  First, there was her commitment to being a mother. She was so wrapped up in Sally, for a while she thought she’d never record again. Second, there was her terror of performing. Fame—“that’s been my viper, my devil, my iguana,” she says—had exacerbated her stage fright; her “panic attacks” (which biofeedback, est, and Transcendental Meditation couldn’t quell) were manifestations of her guilt at being the one Simon sister who wasn’t supposed to be a star but became one. “Every minute of her career was drama,” Arlyne recalls. For years to come, whole days before her performances would be devoted to her trying to calm herself, sometimes with the full-time help of loved ones.* Carly was literally hypersensitive. The lights, crowds, and loud noises of a large venue led to a condition called “flooding”; she would experience palpitations, feel as if she were going to have a heart attack. She stopped touring. Third, there was deference to James. This time around, his Gorilla and her Playing Possum were more evenly matched in sales, and James’s hit from that album—the delicious “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” which was a remake of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Motown hit for Marvin Gaye—shot to #5. “There have been moments of terrible friction based on who is higher on the charts,” Carly admitted a few years later, “and it’s more comfortable if James is more successful than I am.” At the same time, Carly controlled most of their day-to-day life. “He completely went along with her life,” says Jake. “That’s the thing with a junkie: They’ve got a secret;* they’ve got a little other life—that’s what they control. But their outward life, they give you to control.” The men around Carly saw her changing. “She went into this myth of being a wife and mother so strongly, even when James was on the nod,” says Jake. On James’s tour of Japan, Russ Kunkel recalls, “Carly came along and she was like anybody’s wife.” Russ adds, “They seemed, as a couple, very much in love.”

  The early to late-middle 1970s was one of the worst times to be married to someone with an addictive personality. Hard drugs, especially cocaine, were now considered “recreational,” and celebrities were always plied with them. “James would get a lot of free dope because people wanted to spend a little time with him and that was their ticket to an hour or two,” Jake says. “They’d say, ‘I just got a little China white’ or ‘I just got a little Mexican brown.’” “I’m ashamed to say that I was really in cahoots with James,” Betsy Asher says. “I was in trouble myself—doing coke, way too much.” “It wasn’t a strange time for [addiction] to be happening in the music business—it was almost unheard of for it not to be happening,” Carly says. At the same time, much less was known about spouses’ roles in addiction than is known today, and the addict’s desperate-to-help partner had to make do with guidance that had barely moved beyond the pot-and-psychedelics days. “Colleagues of mine who were practicing in the 1960s and 1970s tell me that the concept of ‘codependency’ didn’t come in until the end of the 1970s,” says Dr. Terry Horton, medical director of Phoenix House, the largest and one of the oldest nonprofit substance abuse services organizations in the country. Al-Anon, Alcoholics Anonymous’s spouses’ group, was known only to people in “the program”; this did not include James, who utilized private treatment (at a facility on York Avenue, and through talks with Dr. Andrew Weil, and others) but was not in AA.

  Thus, in a hedonistic, drug-friendly time, couples outside of the small addict-and-partner help community were left to their own naïve devices. James was a young, lifelong-privileged man, able to feel he could beat the odds. During his marriage to Carly, he did not reach the point “where you say,” as Peter Asher puts it, “‘either I quit or I die.’”

  Carly was at a loss for how to help James. “She’d get hysterical at his disappearance,” says Jake. “She’d find the dope and flush it down the toilet.” Carly says, “I lived in a state of fear for years. Addiction really takes over everything, and we were in its power. When James walked in the door, I was overly sensitive in examining his expression, examining the size of his pupils, looking for evidence—always looking for evidence. I was so nervous every time he went in a bathroom. I was incredibly naïve. I thought I could actually stop his addiction. Who was I kidding?” Still, she says, “like all difficult situations,” James’s addiction was “something we got used to. Generally there were not emergency situations”; rather, there were “ones where he had to sleep something off or the regular methadone delivery [was late].”

  Yet there were other times. “James was a very active addict in those years,” says one who worked with him. Peter Asher says, “You rapidly learn, about druggies: they will lie; they will cheat; they will do all kinds of despicable things. Carly and James would have rows quite often. They were two talented, neurotic, very interesting people, which made their relationships difficult,” even apart from James’s addiction. (“I got him with all his baggage, and he got me with all of mine” is how Carly puts it.) Asher continues, “She was justified in ordering him out of the house a couple of times. During one of those archetypal moments I got a call from the Westbury Hotel, where we had an account. The desk clerk said, ‘There’s a man here—he’s shown up, he’s kind of disheveled, he’s got no shoes on and no identification, and he claims to be James Taylor.’
My assistant, Gloria, said, ‘That’s him!’ She didn’t need to talk to him.” It turned out that “Carly and James had had a huge row, and he left the house and made his way to the Westbury, shoeless. Obviously, it had been an altercation of some vehemence.”

  On the other hand, James’s effort to quit drugs made him tremendously poignant to Carly. “James was very, very rigorous at fighting his addiction, and it was very moving to see his fight,” she says. Jake, who is seasoned in AA talk, says, using a term that wasn’t known back then, “Carly was an enabler.” As Carly explains, “A lot of James’s relationships, including with me, fed into his addiction. When you’re an addict, if you decide you’re seeing, say, maple trees, then seeing one leaf fall from the tree is going to get you to need the drug. A lot of what I became to him became what he had to go get the drug to avoid.

  “So I became very much the enemy, and it fit into the way I had been treated by a lot of men in my life, especially my father. It’s so hard to break those patterns! I found James incredibly intoxicating and brilliant and funny; what was devastating was how he turned so many of those things against me. And you feel so responsible! ‘What did I do wrong?!’” James’s drug addiction, exacerbating his withdrawing nature as it did, stimulated Carly’s neediness, just as her father’s silences had, years earlier. What the needle-and-guitar was for the one, the infirmity-and-piano had been for the other. In both realms was a girl hungry for love and a mother pained that her husband wasn’t more present with their children. “It became a cat-and-mouse game,” says Carly. Tim White expressed it this way: James was “clever, shy, reckless, aloof, gentle and romantic in his own unreliable way; he was as casually self-absorbed as a man hooked on heroin for the better part of nine years could be. Drawing him out of that relationship and into hers, Carly found, was like pulling a grown man through a knothole.” More bluntly, Arlyne says, “It’s impossible to have a relationship with a junkie; there’s no ‘there’ there!”