Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Ben was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for emergency surgery. Carly waited through the surgery, distraught. James was not there. “Here was Ben—very, very sick—and instead of showing up at the hospital, James was out on the street; Carly couldn’t understand it, couldn’t deal with it,” recalls Steve Harris. According to Carly, James wasn’t there with Ben because he was driving his girlfriend Evelyne to the airport.

  After Ben was wheeled out of surgery, “Carly was at his bedside and she was losing it,” Arlyne remembers. Andrea Simon urged propriety and stoicism upon her highly emotional daughter. “She was saying, ‘Remember who you are, conduct yourself well.’”

  When James finally arrived at the hospital, he didn’t go in right away. “He was sitting on the stoop outside while I was screaming at him to go upstairs,” Arlyne says. “He didn’t react to anything I said.” Eventually, he went upstairs—and as Ben was waking up from the anesthesia, a touching scene ensued. The little boy’s penis had been protectively taped against his body for the surgery, “but Ben thought, ‘Where is it?!’” Jake says. When Ben couldn’t find his penis and started crying, James pulled down his own pants and “tucked his own penis under” some material “to say, ‘It’s still here; it’s just under the bandages.’ James really rose to the occasion, and it was very sweet.”

  Still, touching scene or not, Carly couldn’t get past James’s absence during the surgery. She knew he loved the children, but to disappear during the direst emergency, at the very moment his presence was most needed? That grievous act of self-absorption became the point of no return in their crumbling marriage. James could ignore her, but ignoring Ben at his most vulnerable was unforgivable.

  In this, she was bolstered by the climate. The consciousness-raising groups of nine years earlier had evolved into tough girlfriend talk against men behaving badly. Women had bills of rights, lists of what they shouldn’t and wouldn’t take anymore. Over the last few years, during Ellen’s now-rocky and unhappy marriage to Vieri, “I would tell Carly my woes and she would commiserate. One day she said to me, ‘You know, you said this five years ago to me and I’m really afraid you’re going to say this five years from now.’ That was my wake-up call.” Divorce came to be seen as a necessary righting of a dangerously compromised disequilibrium that would only continue to hurt the woman. The belief, introduced by Carly’s first song, that a barely independent woman could best strengthen herself alone had mushroomed into orthodoxy. In the recent An Unmarried Woman, Jill Clayburgh’s character broke up with an “ideal” man (played with rumpled charm by Alan Bates) because she still had “work” to do on herself after her recently ended marriage. Carly—and Clayburgh, and Arlyne’s other client Diane Keaton, and Meryl Streep—represented all those brainy, likably neurotic women who’d just learned to stop taking crap from men, while other women cheered them on.

  Arlyne now wonders if Carly should have listened so much to the empathic outrage at James’s behavior that came her way during those months. “Having a sick kid is different than any other situation. There wasn’t a chance to let them recover from the ordeal without making judgments. It’s like saying, ‘Dad just died; shall we sell the house?’ You can’t decide life-changing things when you’re in the midst of another life-changing thing.”

  Carly lost twenty-five pounds from her thin frame during Ben’s convalescence. Despite her anger at James, “there was a great attempt” for them “to be solid and get back together around Ben,” she says. Mia Farrow knew something “horrific” had befallen her neighbor’s son; but, she says with regret now, she couldn’t be of much help because “the children and I had moved into Woody Allen’s sphere and my friends were not welcome by him there. That doesn’t speak very well of me, but that’s the way I was then.”

  In the fall, with Ben strong enough for her to leave his bedside, Carly embarked on the rescheduled Come Upstairs tour. Her son had conquered a degenerative kidney; well, then, she could conquer her fear of large concert halls. Later she realized that “the very idea of the tour was foolish,” given Ben’s illness and the deterioration of her marriage, but the colliding crises had stripped her of perspective. The first five dates went well; she had triumphantly staved off the “flooding.” But then, in Pittsburgh, “she just gave in,” Jake says. Soon after the fateful night, she described to Tim White what he then termed the “grotesque denouement” of her ten-year-long performing career: “I felt as if I couldn’t stand up straight—and then I couldn’t catch my breath. When I got out onstage I was having such bad palpitations that I couldn’t breathe at all and I couldn’t get the words to the songs out. I seemed to go to pieces in front of the audience.”

  As she later told Stephen Holden, Carly realized she had a choice. “I could either leave the stage and say I was sick or tell the audience the truth. I decided to tell [the truth and say] I was having an anxiety attack, and they were incredibly supportive. They said, ‘Go with it—we’ll be with you!’ But after two songs I was still having palpitations. I suggested that I might feel better if someone came on the stage. About fifty people came up [onstage] and it was like an encounter group. They were massaging my back and legs and saying, ‘Hey, Carly, we’re with you—take your time.’ They rubbed my arms and legs and said, ‘We love you.’” With her fans’ help, “I was able to finish the first show. But I collapsed before the second show, with ten thousand people waiting.” She cried her eyes out at the failure and humiliation.

  Carly came home and tried to sort things out. Though she was giving up performing (at Lucy’s behest), she continued to record. She put together an album—Torch—of classic torch songs (adding a song of her own) and a blues number. Mike Mainieri arranged and produced it. Its cover showed Carly in a low-cut gown, writhing in pain and longing, grasping the arm of a tall, dark—James-like—man who, his back turned, is pulling away from her. She dedicated the album to her parents, her uncles, and Jonathan Schwartz, all of whom had ingrained in her a love of standards. She added: “Also to those who made me cry.” A gold-card member of the sexual revolution, a pop goddess, Carly had been in love so many times you’d think she’d have hardened by now. “But some of them,” she says today, as she felt then, “just last, like motherfuckers…”

  Carly took the album to L.A. in mid-1981. She tracked down Danny Armstrong, who was living there. “I don’t know how she got my number,” he said, “but she said, ‘Why don’t you come over; I’m at a friend’s place and my friend isn’t here.’ I said, ‘I’ll bring my wife’”—he had recently married, and he was still in payback mode—“and she asked, ‘Oh, do you have to?’ I said, ‘Yes. I do.’” He paid Carly a visit.

  Danny, who had thought that Carly “followed directions on life’s box,” and who had smoothed the ruffled feathers of his class resentment with the consolation that she could never achieve any of her idol Odetta’s soulfulness, was stunned by the pain she was in. As they talked, he saw a woman far deeper than the jaunty girlfriend he remembered. “She was so unhappy; after me, she’d been through a lot of crap. She’d changed a lot.” Danny had assumed that fame had made the uptown girl more uptown; this was a reversal of expectations. She put the album on the record player. “You’ll like this; it’s right up your alley,” she said. They listened to her sing “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good”—“and,” Danny recalled, “it was so good—so moving—it upset me.”

  James and Carly officially separated. “James would never have left; he’s not the type. He would never leave anybody—never; he makes the women leave; they have no choice,” Jake says, echoing Susan Braudy’s perception of his passive-aggressive nature. So Carly made the move, which meant she shouldered the responsibility, and risked any remorse, for their marriage being over. James took a small apartment in the neighborhood to be close to the children. “James and I had had other [lovers], but we hadn’t split, and when we split, he took it terribly; I didn’t take it well, either,” she says.

  The children were deeply affected. Eve
ntually—one might say inevitably—came regret, and Carly begged James to come back. “I beat my head against the wall so many times,” she says. “‘Please! We’re affecting two children’s lives—let’s reconsider!’” But James had moved on from Evelyne. The new woman in his life, who was not happy with Carly’s entreaties (nor Carly with her), was actress Kathryn Walker. Carly’s particular view of things then is that “when James met Kathryn Walker, he was happy for a moment because I loved somebody else”—Scott Litt—and now he was tended to. (Kathryn Walker’s comments to Tim White, in the biography Long Ago and Far Away: James Taylor, His Life and Music,* indicate a much closer, more sincere meeting of the souls between the two: “James and I met at a point in both our lives when we were open to a fresh start, to the need for a new beginning…We also just fell in love.”) In Carly’s view, Kathryn was determined and predatory. “She was a fierce, fierce woman who wanted James at all costs. She knew exactly what she wanted.”

  Kathryn Walker was an actress of the most serious sort. She had taken graduate classes at Harvard, been a Fulbright scholar in dramatic arts in London, and her résumé featured theater work and work in Emmy-winning PBS and other quality TV productions in New York. She was fresh from a wrenching (and, no doubt, guilt-inducing) tragedy. In August 1980 her fiancé, Doug Kenney, the Harvard-educated cofounder of the National Lampoon and cowriter of Caddyshack, a brilliant, unstable thirty-two-year-old cocaine abuser who had joked about suicide, died from a suspicious fall from a cliff in Hawaii right after Kathryn had left him on the island to return to work. (Kenney’s was one of the funerals that had occasioned Joni’s relationship with Dave Naylor.) Among Kenney’s last jotted writings, which his friend Chevy Chase found, were declarations of his love for Kathryn. If there was anyone motivated to save a man, it might be a woman who’d endured the suicide of a man who’d signaled that he’d needed saving from her.

  In 1982 and early 1983, two avoidable deaths stunned James Taylor. His friend John Belushi died of a cocaine-heroin speedball, and his acquaintance Beach Boy Dennis Wilson drowned while swimming drunk. These tragedies issued that “either I quit or die” message that Peter Asher always knew would be the only hope of salvation for James. At almost the very time that Carly’s divorce from him was filed, James checked into a detoxification clinic; he had cleared four months for the process. “You don’t ‘get someone straight’; the addict has to do it himself,” says a person who was with James “the night he went into rehab. He went there by himself. You hit bottom, you wake up, you make that decision.”

  Kathryn Walker helped James Taylor through it. Susan Braudy ran into her in the midst of James’s detoxification—which included night sweats, outbursts, nightmares—and “Kathryn said, ‘This is too much! This is impossible!’ She couldn’t deal with it anymore.” But, says the friend who was with James when he entered rehab, “Kathryn was powerful.” She was also that rare thing in 1982: “a practiced Al-Anon member.”

  After detoxification, James funneled his energy into exercise. He worked out five days a week at a gym and jumped rope hours a day. “It’s hard to stay sober,” the friend, who often worked out with him, says. “He’s done an amazing job.” He never relapsed.

  That Carly should have spent nine years doing everything she could think of to try to get James over his addiction (while some of her friends undercut her by partaking of drugs with him); that she had to painfully watch his addiction detract from his parenting of their children—and then for him to get clean so quickly and thoroughly after their divorce, with another woman’s help—“this was the absolutely crushing irony,” Jake says. “Carly was trying to do this the entire time she was with him, then Kathryn comes in and—boom!—he’s Mr. Twelve Step.” A friend who met Carly in the early 1980s recalls, “She said, ‘It’s not fair! When I had him he was a heroin addict and now Kathryn gets him and he’s healthy!’ She talked about James obsessively. It was clear to me that she was profoundly in love with him, and that she certainly hadn’t settled certain issues about this. A great deal of what was left needed emotional cauterization; that wound seems, to me, to be open still.” The person continues, gingerly: “You take heroin, you’re escaping from some pain; you’re able to stop taking it, maybe the pain’s gone. Carly never drew the connection: James clearly was not prepared to walk away from drugs when he was married to her. I didn’t see the two of them together so I didn’t know the dynamic, but,” the person is implying, maybe there was something in the fabric of the relationship that made it hard for him to stop. As Carly herself said, “I very much became the enemy.” “What a hard thing for her to have to bear,” Jake says, “whether it was the fault of their dynamic or not.”

  According to Carly, her divorce from James, which she did not want, “was totally orchestrated by Kathryn Walker.” Carly remembers their last moment as man and wife: “He was sitting in front of me in the courtroom and I just have a picture of his ankle that will stay with me forever. I remember every way his ankle bone turned and where his pant leg stopped, and his sandal—it stays with me.” Not with a bang but a whimper.

  When Ellen told Carly she was divorcing Vieri, Carly—who’d given Ellen that valuable wake-up call a few years earlier—“just kind of sat back and smiled and said, ‘You don’t think that’s going to solve anything, do you?’” Enlightened talk among women about what they deserved from men made such fair-sounding good sense; to educated, privileged women who’d ridden the wave of liberation with élan—who’d done “work” on themselves, who’d scienced love, whether as Jungian Ph.D.s or pop star feminists or anything else—that talk was supposed to be the beginning of self-esteem (a concept that was not yet a cliché). If only that righteous empowerment you were supposed to feel could lead to something other than irony and regret, or could change things. “Years later,” Ellen says, “I told Carly, ‘You were right; that was no easy solution.’”

  Carly released her eleventh original album, Hello Big Man—its title tune, homaging her parents’ romance—the year of her divorce, 1983. She was in the shadows; it was the era of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Carly and Carole and Joni’s generation—their bulging emotional dossier, all those lessons learned—was irrelevant. History was CBGB’s; history was Sid and Nancy. Real history was Stevie Nicks. Unnoticed in Hello Big Man was “Orpheus,” one of Carly’s favorites of her own songs and a personal signifier in her current life. It’s an obvious melodrama, but, to her, a real one. Giving James the name of the ancient Greek poet of the lyre (and, by implication, making herself into his adored wife, Eurydice, whom he lost, tragically, twice), she sings of how James first drove her away, then when she took the bait, closed the door to their relationship and moved on, even though she was more than willing to return. Her pleading refrain—“But it was there for us…”—movingly expresses her regret for ending the relationship, a move he had essentially forced upon her by his behavior.

  Carly had a new man, Al Corley, a handsome blond actor from the Midwest over a dozen years her junior who’d been the original Steven Carrington on Dynasty. Corley (who eventually became a director) would inspire Carly’s taunting, defensive “My New Boyfriend,” on her next album, in which a woman declares her rebound romance with a younger man to be not as shallow as it seems. Al was great with Ben and Sally, “teaching them how to dive off a diving board; teaching Ben to play basketball; he was youthful and very active athletically,” Carly says. In the boundaries-demolishing tradition of her family, in the mid-2000s Carly’s son, Ben, would be romantically involved with Al’s post-Carly girlfriend.

  The Peyton Place–like incestuousness of their lives was never more evident than on one night in 1984 at an Upper West Side restaurant. Carly (now broken up with Al Corley) was there with friends while James, Kathryn, and Russ Kunkel were seated at another table. James and Russ had met and bonded fifteen years earlier at that first “Fire and Rain” session. They were virtually best friends, but there was also a power and status difference—James was Russ’s “bo
ss” (Russ uses that word, unironically); they were recording star and drummer. Russ was the person who, on April 6, 1971, had come into Carly’s Troubadour dressing room and made her even more stage-frightened than she already was by exclaiming (as he recalls his words): “Dig this! James Taylor’s coming to see the show!”

  “Carly came up to the table,” Russ recalls, of that evening in 1984. “Being around Carly was uncomfortable for James because it was uncomfortable for Kathryn, but Carly said ‘Hi!’ And”—in hearing range of James—“she gave me her number and said, ‘Call me if you’re going to be in the city for a while.’” Carly remembers the atmosphere being so awkward that the candle on the table fell over, “and”—she exaggerates—“Kathryn’s sweater went up in flames.”

  Russ continues: “Carly looked great, so, what the heck—I called her. I went to see her, and we had lunch, and there was an attraction there.” In a matter of weeks, Russ leased out his L.A. house, came to New York, and moved in with Carly—he and his boss’s ex-wife became a couple. Someone who knew them all at the time says, “James was over Carly; he didn’t care that Russ was with her, but he didn’t want her backstage at the shows.” Carly says, “Russ and I fell in love, and he was trying to work with James, but I wasn’t allowed to go to the performances. It was very awkward and devastating.” One night Carly challenged that ban. When a person who worked with James ran into Carly and Russ walking into the backstage area before a concert, “I looked at Peter Asher,” the person says, “and he looked at me and we ran to the elevator and pushed the down button to get the hell out of there.” James Taylor got angry. “In hindsight,” Russ says today—with a session player’s sense of “knowing his place”—“maybe” the romance with Carly “wasn’t the best idea because it made my boss feel uncomfortable.”