Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  * By 2005, the average age of first marriage for a U.S. woman was just under twenty-six years old—a highly significant 5.5 years older than it had been in 1955, when the typical American bride was just over twenty. (The very fact that the term “average age of first marriage” sounds stodgy and even prejudiced today shows what this generation of women, its bards, and feminism did: they made marriage optional. Just about every educated urban woman who was born in the mid-1940s can count friends who have never been married or never had children yet have led exciting, distinctly unpitied lives. This was never the case before.)

  ** Helen Reddy’s jingoistic “I Am Woman” became a hit a year and a half after Carly’s, in September 1972.

  * The original interface of glamour and feminine charisma with effective, mainstream, sell-it-to-America feminism can be seen in reading an early 1970s profile of Gloria Steinem by Leonard Levitt in Esquire. The intoxicating charm of Steinem to the many men with whom she (like Joni and Carly) was involved, and her just-prefeminist ability, through the 1960s, to become (as a song Carly would write with Jake puts it) “the girl…you want [me] to be” to the string of Kennedy-associated political figures and Manhattan journalists, editors, and publishers who were her captivated beaux was—not unadmiringly—described by Steinem’s friends. The article was excoriated as an antifeminist hit job.

  * Stevens, it would turn out, was spiritual. After a near-drowning in Malibu in 1975, Stevens vowed to pay God back for saving his life; he converted to Islam in 1977 and has lived, taught his religion, and (until recently without the religiously forbidden musical accompaniment) sung under the name Yusuf Islam ever since.

  * Abigail adds, “I think Carly’s graciousness and generosity might have been mistaken for conceit by some people at the beginning—‘She has so much; why does she flaunt it?’ That kind of thing. Maybe some of the guys were a little suspicious of her.” But a few years later, “when Danny and I were in some turmoil, Carly invited me to stay with her and James at the Vineyard. She was wonderful.” “Carly worked double-time to win over James’s crowd,” Betsy Asher says. “But there was real caring underneath her social effectiveness.”

  * Shortly after Carly and James married, in 1972, Arlyne Rothberg arranged a lunch, at Mr. Chow’s in L.A., between Carly and Joni, at Carly’s request. Arlyne invited Linda Ronstadt along to dilute tension. Carly and Joni were so wary of each other that they barely lifted their forks and mediator Arlyne didn’t either, out of anxiety about the situation. “Linda,” Arlyne says, “was the only one of us who ate. She ate everybody’s lunch!”

  In 1996, Joni and Carly had dinner together. Afterward Joni told a friend, “I had no idea what a great person she was.” They talked about James, and when Joni realized that Carly had essentially never gotten over him—the man Joni had come to view as cruel (and may not have entirely gotten over herself)—Joni was very moved. Ultimately, says a friend, the two women ended up “laughing about him.” In subsequent meetings—one with Betsy Asher—they talked about themselves (with notoriously voluble Joni doing most of the talking), instead of about the man they had shared so long ago.

  * The “man” at the party who inspired that line was almost certainly Warren Beatty. “Oh, let’s be honest, that song is about me; it’s not about Mick Jagger; it’s about me,” Beatty proudly told an interviewer in 1999. However, in one of Carly’s very earliest comments about the song (in November 1972—before it was released, much less gossiped about), she let slip that “I had about two or three people in mind” when she wrote the song. Jake’s rightful packaging of best friends Beatty and Nicholson—both lovers of Carly’s in that last year (as were their friends Bob Rafelson and Rafelson’s brother Don) whose “passing on” of her from one to the other to the other to the other felt hurtful and ultimately offensive to her—leads to the likelihood that the “vain man” was really the “vain men”: that whole clique of cocky, hip, filmmaking—and girl trading—bachelors who often “walked into” Hollywood parties, together or separately, with yacht-boarding entitlement and aplomb.

  * Jim Gordon’s intensity with the drumsticks unfortunately portended future dysfunction; he later became a schizophrenic and is currently in prison for murdering his mother.

  ** Some close to James Taylor believe that he never got over his sense of competing with Mick Jagger, and that he may have felt that a flirtation, or more, between Carly and Jagger had re-upped toward the end of their marriage (during the same period that James had a lover). “It burns him to this day,” says one insider. During one Australian concert, when James was already divorced from his second wife, Kathryn Walker, James discovered that the Rolling Stones were staying in the same hotel as he was, and were playing a bigger stadium. He was “furious at this,” says someone who spoke to him during this time—“and you don’t carry that around for thirty years unless you really have a problem with Mick.”

  * Peter Asher had used his erudite British accent to beg Laurance Rockefeller, the chairman of the board of his family’s Rockefeller Center, in which Radio City is housed, to allow, for the first time ever, a rock concert to be held on that wholesomely tourist-friendly stage.

  * The public gallery in the L.A. courtroom in which Daniel Ellsberg, former RAND Corporation military analyst, stood trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers (secret government documents pertaining to the Vietnam War) to The New York Times was star-studded—Barbra Streisand and Joan Didion attended daily. And when Ellsberg turned forty-two, a month before Carole’s Central Park concert, all four Beatles attended his birthday party.

  * Carole lost touch with both Camille and Barbara, her closest childhood friends. Especially hard for Camille was one occasion, in 1976, when she and her mother, Mary (bearing a hand-crocheted pillow with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” embroidered on it), tried to visit Carole backstage at the Beacon Theatre (Carole’s performance had featured special guest Bruce Springsteen, who duetted with her on “The Loco-Motion”) and were turned away, very likely without Carole knowing they had come. They left her a note and never heard back. Shortly after that, Camille and Barbara tried to contact Carole about their Madison High reunion. They got a form-letter refusal back from Carole’s publicist.

  * She would soon purchase hundreds of acres of land in Connecticut for the guru, the sale of which eventually helped fund Yogaville, the guru’s town in Virginia.

  * Though disco music (which enveloped the country from 1974 to 1977 and whose female queens were Gloria Gaynor, Bette Midler, and Donna Summer) is generally dismissed as trivial, it was not without significance. It legitimized gays as a force in the social and popular cultural fabric of America. Although the Stonewall riots that triggered the gay rights movement occurred in 1969, as late as November 1973 it was not eyebrow-raising for Jackson Browne to toss off the words “faggots” and “fag” in an interview with Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone. That publication, from its 1967 inception, stood for a rock world that was every bit as macho as sports and the military—as was its publisher, Jann Wenner. It is a measure of how things have changed that today Jann Wenner (still firmly in control of and identified with his Rolling Stone) is “married” to a man and they are the parents of a child, conceived by a surrogate. Wenner and his partner, Matt Nye, even gave themselves a baby shower. Imagine traveling back to 1971 and telling the magazine’s readers and subjects that such a thing would happen.

  * One child of the five was hers from a previous marriage, whom Dylan adopted.

  * Even though the facility was a jail and not a prison, convicted men sentenced to several-year sentences were incarcerated there.

  ** On some legal documents “Edward” is given as Evers’s middle name; on others, “Morrison” (his mother’s maiden name) is.

  * That life would soon take a somewhat startling turn. Danny Kortchmar, now divorced from Abigail, would, as he puts it, “fall madly in love with Louise” the next year, 1978. They would live together and he would produce her first, self-named album. Abigail was appalled
by her ex-husband’s romance with a barely of-age girl they’d known since she was nine. Abigail asked Carole: “How could you let this happen?” According to Abigail, Carole replied, “I like Danny.” The two women didn’t talk for a while.

  * At the time she was known as Joyce, her given name. She later shortened it to Joy, the name she goes by today.

  * “Song for Sharon” is a mélange of many references. Named for a childhood friend, Sharon Bell, who shared young Joni’s enamorment with weddings, it is, like three other songs on Hejira, about recovering from, mourning, and coming to terms with her breakup from subsequent boyfriend John Guerin (with whom she did have a noisy blowup “at”—or at least near—“the North Dakota junction”). It describes her search for a mandolin in Staten Island with her friend Joel Bernstein; it presents a chorus of real-life close females—her housekeeper, Dora, her best friend, Betsy Asher, and her mother—advising her on how to use her ample free time as an unattached single woman, while, she admits, all she really wants to do is “find another lover.” And it tells, namelessly, of Phyllis Major Browne’s suicide.

  **Daryl Hannah’s uncle, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, claimed to have seen Daryl in the hospital after the incident with “ugly black bruises on her eye and chin and on her ribs” and asserted, in a letter to Us magazine, that “Jackson beat Daryl.” Browne responded to Wexler, in part: “I did not beat [Daryl]” and offered to “describe Daryl’s actions to you and then judge for yourself as to how these injuries may have occurred.” A November 1992 statement by the Santa Monica Police Department said: “We went to the house where Jackson Browne lives regarding a possible disturbance. We resolved the situation in about five minutes. There was never any assault. There are no charges pending and no prosecution sought by or intended by the District Attorney.”

  * Shortly after the song’s release in 1994, Jackson Browne gave a radio interview in response to the song. He said that Joni was a troubled person; he added that she had “never gotten over” him. Though the first statement is understandably defensive, the second statement (coming from a mature musical icon and social activist) sounded tackily boastful—unless, of course, one understood what was there but unsaid, that she had never gotten over how she’d put herself at risk because of her feelings for him.

  * In 2003 PBS aired a documentary/musical tribute to Joni, “Woman of Heart and Mind.” Several of Joni’s past significant others were featured or mentioned as such. Don Alias was extremely hurt that he was not asked to participate and was not mentioned, and he strongly suspected that the producers left him out because of his race. (A white female friend from Joni’s past also thought the omission seemed pointed.) Alias said: “Her relationships with Larry, and John, and Graham were mentioned, and I want to know why I wasn’t there. Why did they take so lightly—as if it didn’t exist!—a relationship with someone I loved so much? That bothered the hell out of me.” He paused. “Well, when I talk to Joni again, I want to find out.” He died before he could.

  * This question was put to Sue Mingus, in an e-mail she invited. She declined to reply.

  * “The comparisons to Joni were a terrible thorn in Carly’s side at the beginning,” Jake Brackman says. Between Joni having been James’s girlfriend and Joni’s high esteem as a songwriter, “both of those things formed two blades of a single sword into her heart. She wanted the respect that Joni got. When Carly sold the rights to ‘Anticipation’”—to Heinz Ketchup, for a popular commercial—“and appeared on the cover of Playing Possum in that little teddy, people would say to her, ‘Joni wouldn’t do that.’ And that hurt her.”

  * Jake reels off: “I’ve done it, Jim [Hart, her second husband] has done it, [friend] Tamara [Weiss] has done it, Sally’s done it…” Leah Kunkel remembers Carly throwing up backstage before the 1979 No Nukes concert and thinking, “She’s a little…crazy!” Carly took to wearing too-tight shoes, so the discomfort would preoccupy her out of her stage fright, and before performing at President Bill Clinton’s birthday, she had her whole band take turns spanking her so the pain would knock out her fear of going on after Smokey Robinson.

  * James enjoyed hiding references to heroin use in his lyrics, he once told one of his dope dealers (who was interviewed for this book) during a dressing-room hand-over of some balloon-bagged product in the early 1970s.

  * Local women were especially harsh, since late 1970s Manhattan was exceedingly down at its heels, and downtowners had a cockeyed pride in living closer to its filthy curbs than, say, a Central Park West penthouse. Two female Village Voice reviewers took gentle to not-so-gentle aim at Carly’s May 1977 appearance at the Other End (the renamed Bitter End), which was attended by Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, and Art Garfunkel. Susin Shapiro derided the “culturally privileged turnout” filled with “record honchos” who “cooed and purred,” along with “Carly’s family, friends, some select press, plus a few paying customers in the spirit of token democracy.” M. Mark started her review by declaring, “Carly Simon has been getting on my nerves for years”; harrumphed suspiciously through Carly’s performance; opined, of her romantic-pain songs, “She’s too sleek and well-adjusted to be a credible victim”; and assailed her for being more cotillion than feminist. “Although she’s begun to consider the injustices of the prom world, she apparently hasn’t thought about walking away from that old demeaning dance of courtly love. It’s way past time for Carly Simon to define herself. She’ll always get asked to the prom, and she doesn’t have to say yes.” Steve Harris remembers that evening—including the fact that Mick Jagger slipped into the club (somehow, over these years, he was always subtly circling Carly) and sat down in the back booth with him, Arlyne, and Diane Keaton. The presence of the sexy lead Rolling Stone made Keaton so unbalanced, she called him “Mike” instead of Mick all night.

  * Breast-feeding was still considered downscale, weird, or “hippie” in the late 1970s, especially to high-born women from a different generation and men from the provinces. When Joe Armstrong, the new Rolling Stone bureau chief, came over to Carly and James’s apartment for dinner one night, he was stunned when Carly whipped out her breast to nourish Ben while passing the salt and pepper. “I was this kid from West Texas! You sort of want to watch, but you don’t want anyone seeing you watching,” he recalls.

  * Carly once described this form thusly: “I wra[p] the story line in four simple verses (ABAB) with a bridge just before the last chorus…It’s like the ballads I used to sing that reach a climax somewhere around the fourth stanza, and then the final chorus has a kind of irony, meaning something different when all the facts are on the table.”

  * For the book, which was published in 2002, White (who died of a heart attack just after its completion) was forbidden by Trudy Taylor from interviewing Carly and obtaining her point of view. White’s portrait of Carly is neutral to negative; his portrait of Kathryn Walker, whom he interviewed, and who was by then divorced from James (James had married his third wife, Kim Smedvig, the public relations director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), is almost obsequiously positive.

  * “I think Trudy eventually ruined all her kids’ marriages,” says a person who worked with James. “She couldn’t help it. She loved her kids too much. She was married to a madman herself, who left her.” Ike Taylor had an affair and then divorced Trudy to marry and have two children with a much younger woman; eventually both Ike and his wife died and the children were orphaned. “Trudy was going to do everything she could to ‘save’ those kids of hers,” says James’s colleague.

  ** Russ and Leah had a teenage son, Nathaniel; Leah was also raising her deceased sister Cass’s daughter, Owen.

  * Shortly after he was elected president, and while he was vacationing on the Vineyard, Bill Clinton, with Hillary in tow, came to visit Carly, ostensibly to seek her celebrity’s-eye-view counsel on how to assure that Chelsea would have a normal life—but also because he was a huge fan of Carly’s. According to Jim, the first words out of the president’s mouth to him were a
mock-scolding, incredulous “What tree were you under, not to know who Carly Simon was?”

  * At least one friend of Joni’s believes that Larry exacerbated Joni’s insecurity by “flashing younger singers in front of her all the time” and that she (continuing to work with him as she did, after their divorce) never entirely got over him.

  * The Canadian press was more skeptical, with some columnists noting how long it took Kilauren to prove she was Joni’s daughter, and harshly saying that Joni had given her daughter to another family to raise and then, as a celebrity, with fanfare, claimed her when she wanted to.

  * In November 1981, Carole and Rick filed action in federal court, claiming their right to due process had been violated, and they asked that the road be declared private. In early 1982, a judge dismissed criminal charges against Carole. In January 1983, a federal judge ruled that her rights had not been violated and that the road issue was for the state to decide. In June 1985, Carole’s neighbors and Custer County sued her and Rick in state district court, seeking an order declaring the road open. In August 1986, the district court ruled for Carole; the neighbors appealed the ruling. In June 1987, the district again ruled for Carole; the neighbors appealed.