Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  While trying to rescue her husband and caring for Sally, Carly continued to write and record. She put her complaints about James’s absent parenting and their fights over the parental double standard into the sarcastically sweet-sounding “Fairweather Father” (in the liner notes, she denied the song was about James) for her 1976 Another Passenger. Though the album, produced by Ted Templeman, didn’t sell well, it was praised by Rolling Stone’s Ken Tucker. Still, that review and others reprised some old cliché complaints about her.

  By now, the hard-core rock press had gotten over their enthrallment with “You’re So Vain” and were back to dismissing Carly as slick and pop. Even some women reviewers disliked Carly for a life that seemed too easy, straight, and connected.* Yet the women’s movement was encouraging college girls to apply to law and med school; to be a young woman was to recast as correctly “political” those things (acquiring professional status and one’s own money) that had been disdained as bourgeois—and were still bourgeois if you were male. Whether they were slightly younger women who were embracing currently-NOW-blessed, once-thought-“straight” ambition, or ex-wild-children Carly’s own age made suddenly sensible by having babies, young and youngish women were becoming more “middle-class.”

  From Passenger, Carly had a hit with a Michael McDonald song, “It Keeps You Runnin’,” and its “Libby” celebrates her new close friendship with songwriter Libby Titus, “a charming, funny, vivacious hell of a woman,” as Danny Kortchmar describes her, whose lovers or husbands included, in said order, the Band’s Levon Helm, Dr. John, and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen.

  Another new friend was Mia Farrow, Carly’s neighbor in the Central Park West building that she and James moved into as renters after selling their brownstone. “I wanted to be Carly,” Mia says. “I would see her walking down Seventy-second Street smiling, with a big bunch of flowers and her coat almost to the ground—the woman can stride!—and I knew all was well with the world. Even though she was riddled with phobias and she was always running herself down about her stage fright, she’s also fearless with love and life.” The two women created, in their floors-apart twelve-room spreads with Central Park views, a cup-of-sugar-borrowing friendship that spanned the 1970s and 1980s. And Carly visited on Mia the kind of solicitousness she lavished on her other women friends: Carly would make Mia her special red wine pasta; Carly was Mia’s son Moses’ godmother; when Mia’s mother took a fall in the building, Mia came home to find Carly and Jake standing over the older woman with a first-aid manual. Carly fixed Mia up with a male friend of hers, dressing Mia for the date “in an antique lace blouse from out of her closet,” Mia recalls, “and introducing me to the man with lights down and candles burning.” They would spend hours comparing money problems and shortcomings. “Not that we weren’t both paralyzed with fear, but I’m more repressed, and Carly seemed so strong in my life—like a warrior, and the most loyal person I know. And she has a childlike quality of being unbuffered by her accomplishments. I’ve spent my whole life around celebrities in one way or another, and I’ve never known a celebrity less likely to get any safety and comfort from her success; it’s like she’s nine years old sometimes.” And Mia noticed, of course, Carly’s trademark quality: “She is the most romantic and most indiscreet person I know.”

  The demureness of the photos (emphasizing Carly’s face and long legs) for Another Passenger was due to the fact that she was pregnant through much of 1976. On January 22, 1977, she gave birth to a son, Benjamin, by natural childbirth. James timed Carly’s six hours of contractions and, charmingly, made up a story to try to preoccupy his wife during each one. It was Carly who’d endured the horrendous labor pains, yet she told a reporter that James’s help and his lack of flinching had led the impressed doctor to “let him stay ’til the end”; in this she was displaying the pride and optimism of the bad-boy-taming woman, reveling in the reliability she had gently coaxed out of her rebel. She was naïve, of course. A friend who himself had a drug problem remembers how Carly would tell him about James’s rehab efforts, hopeful each time. The friend was dubious. “James would go in detoxes; then he’d come out and something would happen and he’d go back to drugs. He had the junkie mannerisms, the junkie gait: things he didn’t lose. If you keep those attitudes, after rehab, something gets you uptight and you’re back on drugs again.”

  The focus of Carly’s worried vigilance shifted off James’s physical signs and onto the baby’s: Carly felt sure that something was wrong with their son. “He was hardly a sick-looking child, but he would run these high fevers; Carly would have to put him in a tub to get them down,” says Arlyne. “All the doctors were saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with him, there’s nothing wrong with him,’” but she continued to take him to doctors. “She persisted; she was like a mother possessed.”

  Carly’s seventh album, Boys in the Trees, produced by Arif Mardin, was released in June 1978. (In the meantime, she had had a #1 adult contemporary hit singing the Carole Bayer Sager–Marvin Hamlisch song, “Nobody Does It Better,” the title song of the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me.) Carly posed for the cover photo, by Deborah Turbeville, sitting, bare-breasted, in an empty ballet studio, rolling a silk stocking up one leg. But she and Arlyne ended up thinking that, as Arlyne puts it, “the picture didn’t lend itself to the sensationalism of having her naked” so they had it retouched to add a silky camisole. The album, which went platinum, gave Carly a Top 10 hit with the bouncy, torchy, loving “You Belong to Me,” which she cowrote with Michael McDonald, and which, like so many of her songs—including another on the album, “In a Small Moment” (and “In Times When My Head,” in the previous one)—was about cheating, jealousy, and temptation: the adult preoccupations she had witnessed in her childhood and which were dancing around the corners of her current life. The title song—the reverent, eerie “Boys in the Trees,” in which she relives her sexual awakening in the bosky secret garden of the Simon beauties—is one of her most personal and haunting. It showcases her mainstay themes—pounding lust, high anxiety, female competition—and in the same way that endearingly clunky lines have become her signature, so, too, now is a kind of unique geography. The place “where the boys grow on the trees”; the woman-rivers; the lovers who become each other’s West Indies; men becoming oceans: all dot a sensual interior map as pungent and viney as a Rousseau painting and as quirky as Dr. Seuss land.

  The five-and-a-half-year marriage of James and Carly seemed at a point of sublime equilibrium. They had their son and their daughter, and the Vineyard house that James (who would rather be up there fixing a carburetor than going to one of Carly’s Manhattan fundraisers for Ms.-supported political candidates) was working on. And, for all Carly’s angst about their competition over pop-chart standings (she had recently talked to her brother’s guru, Ram Dass, about the sticky situation), this new album of hers involved more of James’s input than any previous one. He la-la-la’d on “Boys in the Trees.” Carly sang his self-mockingly bluesy “One Man Woman” and a disco song—“Tranquillo (Melt My Heart)”—that they had written together, which was unabashedly derivative of the year’s musical smash hit, the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Most affecting was their duet on the Everly Brothers’ “Devoted to You.” On it the two “lanky aristocrats” sounded as stirringly pious—as poor-white-soul—as if they were sitting in an Appalachian church pew.

  It had been a good couple of years for James Taylor. His Greatest Hits album had been released, and after moving to Columbia he’d enjoyed, in the album JT, a full-scale comeback. The rocking “Your Smiling Face” was his biggest self-written hit since “Fire and Rain,” and he had another hit in his inspired remake of Jimmy Jones’s slyly boastful pop soul “Handy Man.” But it was not a good time at home. Carly was still desperately searching for the cause of Ben’s fevers. Arlyne, who had a son with a medical condition and who knew how a child’s health could overtake one’s life, was awed by her friend’s refusal to take no for an answer. Because
so many doctors were saying that despite the fevers, the child was fine, “even James said, ‘Leave him alone!’ and I could understand anybody saying that, because the doctors had been so reassuring,” Arlyne recalls. “But Carly’s attitude was, she was going to save that kid, no matter what! She was the best mother of anyone I knew—and that was before the parenting books; you had to do it by instinct.” Carly was still breast-feeding Ben;* despite Trudy Taylor’s very vocal disapproval, she would do so for three and a half years.

  The strictures of Carly’s complicated domesticity were making her work harder than ever. While taking care of a baby, a toddler, and an addict husband (who was touring many months of the year, leaving her functionally as a single mother), she was writing songs for Come Upstairs, her eighth album of almost totally original songs in as many years. She who (as opposed to Joni and Carole) had floundered in her free-as-a-bird early to mid-twenties—writing unsuccessfully; taking lowly jobs; unable to marshal the ambition that her boyfriends (disapprovingly) saw in her but her girlfriends didn’t—discovered something that other women of the I Am Woman, post-hip era were discovering: that limits and responsibilities could actually discipline and focus you. “I’ve gotten to know myself much better in the context of marriage,” she told Rolling Stone’s Charles Young, who seemed shocked by that women’s-magazine-like admission. “Everything was amorphous before,” Carly continued. “Now I know what I can do and what I can’t. Too much freedom doesn’t help you artistically.” Young tried to shake some proper I’d-die-for-my-art! statements out of this too-sensible realist, asking Carly what she’d do if her “muse” told her she’d have to move to a “grungy small town in the Midwest” for artistic inspiration. She replied, “I would have to see if they had good schools, good drinking water, good playgrounds.” A really grungy town, Young prodded. But he wasn’t talking to muse-directed Joni. “Then I couldn’t go,” Carly said. “My children need me here.” Yet all this groundedness didn’t keep her from also saying, when Young asked why so many of her songs seemed to be about adultery, “I’ve never bought that open-marriage thing—I’ve never seen it work—but that doesn’t mean I believe in monogamy. Sleeping with someone else doesn’t necessarily constitute an infidelity.” Rather, she said with a laugh, infidelity was “having sex with somebody else and telling your spouse about it, anything you feel guilty about.” She concluded, as many in the decade had concluded: “I don’t think anybody has any idea what sexual morality is anymore.”

  Despite his success, James was not in control. He was binge drinking—going on benders with his friend Jimmy Buffett, blacking out at parties. (“I don’t have much moderation in my drinking,” he would soon admit to his friend Tim White, in Rolling Stone; “I get intoxicated, I lose control, and I’ve sometimes made mistakes when I was too high that I deeply regret.”) Jessica remembers visiting Carly in a Boston hotel room, and “James was sitting back in the shadows in his white pajamas, in and out of being present. He was a very nice man when he was present, but he suffered from his addictions all the time.”

  Soon after, the couple was visited at their Vineyard house by a coked-up John Belushi and his wife, Judy. When Judy, whose tough, cool manner had led Carly to believe that she didn’t share Carly’s angst and worry, confided to Carly that she didn’t know how to keep her husband from doing drugs, Carly burst out in tears at the futility of her own more earnest efforts. By the winter of 1979–1980 “Carly was very long-suffering,” Betsy Asher says. Betsy recalls “one outrageous night” in New York when she, James, and others “had been out at a Cuban restaurant and walking with Eric Idle and his now-wife, Tina, and Richard Belzer, who was over the line. We went back to Carly and James’s place—it was two or three in the morning—and Richard was yelling obscenities out the window and Carly came out and said, ‘The children are asleep.’ Poor thing! She was carrying the whole load alone.” Jake agrees: “Betsy and James were snorting together. So many people were. People that Carly considered her friends, me included, were at cross-purposes with her; they were turning on with James.” Still, “James was trying to figure his addiction out. He would profess a desire to change; he would say that very sincerely and Carly would be full of hope.” “And,” Carly says, with admirable honesty, “in not knowing how to help, I became even more helpless and foolish and more of a deterrent to his stopping. In my very small and genteel and tidy way, I was trying to make up for the explosion of a city”—James’s addiction, abetted by their friends—“by cleaning up one small block”: throwing away the drugs, examining his pupils.

  In 1979 Carly wrote and recorded one of her most candid albums: Spy. Taking the fraught secrecy and erotic betrayals of her childhood (which now had counterparts in her marriage), she set out to “spy on myself.” Other than a minor hit with the hard-rocking “Vengeance” (about a man and woman out-betraying each other)—full of her signature belting—no one seemed to notice the heartfelt album, which, in retrospect, sounds like a zero-hour bid to save her marriage. In “Just Like You Do,” she makes common cause with James’s vulnerability—her fears and phobias the equal to his addiction—begging him “to return to that brave innocence we once knew.” “Love You by Heart,” which she wrote with Libby and Jake, is a plea for James to get off junk. “We’re So Close,” which announces its significance with stark piano chords, serves up a therapy session truism with elegance and surprise. Using, as a vehicle, the skilled Vineyard architectural work that James had thrown himself into for escape (and using her favorite narrative story form*), she has the man in the song say, “We’re so close, we can dispense with houses”: in the rush of love and avoidance, even what is being (or needs to be) built can be brushed aside. She closes by learning that an overinvested-in rebound that’s meant to repair only worsens the problem: the man ends up saying, “We’re so close we can dispense with love.” From houses to love, from symbol to essence. To this day, Carly believes “We’re So Close,” through which she acknowledged her marriage’s dissolution, “is the saddest song I ever wrote.” The betrayals that the album hints at were real. “The ‘jungle’—the basic reptilian brain—took over” in terms of temptations, Carly says. “There were admissions of infidelities and things you try to do”—confessing, apologizing—“with all the amount of love surrounding it.” When male rock stars were on the road, there were girls—it came with the territory—and James was not immune. Meanwhile, James, as someone who worked with him thought, still harbored suspicions that Carly and Mick Jagger were continuing contact. Finally, as 1979 turned to 1980, James became involved with a Japanese dancer named Evelyne and Carly drew very close to studio engineer Scott Litt.

  Carly and vibraphonist Mike Mainieri began to write together: she the lyrics, he collaborating with her on the music, “and in the slow weeks of winter we rented a small house in Vineyard Haven on the beach.” Of their efforts, collected in Come Upstairs—songs that represented Carly’s new desire to “get there faster, without so much intellectualization”—Rolling Stone’s Ken Tucker said her “instincts are bold, but her music betrays her. Confronting a self-imposed semiretirement [not evidenced in her album output, just her performing], declining disc sales and the pervasive peppiness of the new wave, Simon has responded with a comely perversity by writing a batch of new songs that are either loose and trashy or tight and morose.” The title song was a new wave–beated riff on Carly’s franchise subject, seduction and sex; it was likable, but some of the others had a faux-B-52’s feeling that brought out her shrillness without her melodiousness. Having gotten a late start on her career, she seemed to be in overdrive now, both missing and hitting. With her infectious “Jesse”—utilizing the full arc of her plea-to-rocking-growl range—she hit #11, her first big score in a little more than two years. (Meanwhile, James’s album Flag was going platinum due to its single of Carole and Gerry’s “Up on the Roof.”) Barely noticed on Come Upstairs was the song she titled “James.” On it her voice is so meek, she—the brassy-classy queen of indiscretion�
��seems to be asking permission to name him. Strikingly, she uses the same images (a seashell pressed to the ear; the younger James slumped soulfully over his guitar) that Joni had used in her songs about him.

  On the strength of her hit with “Jesse,” Carly planned a Come Upstairs tour, pushing herself back on the road. All of this—the writing and recording, the time with Scott Litt, the James separation that wasn’t a separation, the planning of the tour—was wrapped around her life’s core: Sally and Ben. Carly was the over-the-top mother she’d become (“She’s like me,” says Arlyne, of their mothering of their once-infirm adult sons: ‘You’ll do your own laundry when I’m dead!’”) because of her memory of her own childhood. Perhaps it took a former child hypochondriac to obsess about Ben’s fevers, despite doctors’ telling her he wasn’t sick.

  In summer 1980, before the tour was to start, came Carly’s “worst day of my life.”

  It turned out she had been right in her insistent hunch about Ben. As Arlyne recalls, “She found a doctor who said, ‘Look at this—his kidney!’” It was dysplastic (abnormally formed). “One kidney was totally diseased; it had to come out immediately. The other was partially diseased; it would be regenerated. Carly’s finding that doctor was one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen.” However, according to Timothy White’s book, James’s father, Ike Taylor, was crucial in securing the doctor.