by Carly Simon
* * *
Parenthood didn’t get in the way of James’s and my writing, singing, and, in his case, touring. Sally, bless her heart, made our already complicated lives even more complicated, while exaggerating the volatility of our domestic life, with a soupçon of my postpartum hormones thrown into the stew. The sheer theater of the following few years, with its mixture of bad news followed closely by good news, of births and lies, kicked off in the spring of 1976.
May 18th, 1976:
Dear Diary:
Something happened in Knoxville. Maybe our marriage was too good. Maybe he just had to hurt me out of love. It was most probably simpler than that. Just drugs and the spirit of the occasion and the influence of loose southern jackasses. Anyway, James announced to me yesterday that he had to get checked out for clap. I reacted predictably (for me)—very understanding and guarded. The first thing out of my mouth was “You poor darling. It must have been so hard to tell me that. We’ll go together to the doctor. You must feel awful. I understand.” That was 3:00 p.m., maybe 3:30 latest. Ironically I was just about to tell him that I thought I was pregnant. I was waiting to see his face light up, waiting to kiss him and tell him our boy was on his way (though we didn’t know it then that it was a boy).
When I turned around 180 degrees and snapped, it was 8:30 p.m., and I was lying in bed. I went downstairs to break the Whitebook guitar on his head. He caught me in time, and I hit him with my fists as hard as I could, got in my car, and went driving 80 mph around the curvy narrow roads of West Tisbury—returning because I loved him and didn’t want him to worry about me behind the wheel in such a state—oh, a state of hate. Blind, convulsive, killer rage—the thought of those other bodies.
James is vomiting in the bathroom. Suitable to this entry. He’s really sick. Maybe he was poisoned. With a little more hate, I could have slipped something in his dinner. How I loathe him and the thought of those secrets he has and those memories he’ll always keep. Of those Knoxville groupies and their putrid, scented, magnolia bodies. Spit spit spit. I don’t want him to touch me again. He did last night—but he was passionate and loved me and I actually felt that he loved me more than ever. But my blood has turned to ice again, and I wonder how he’ll melt it.
June 5th, 1976:
Yesterday I found out, via the usual rabbit test, that I really am pregnant. It sort of calmed me down a little—the definite knowledge. I will certainly have doubts about my self-image.… With two children, you’re a dowager, and just too old for rock ’n’ roll … and then … what about Knoxville?
In the times when my head
Was together about you
I was an expert at silence
I enjoyed the blondes in their red jeeps
Stopping you on the streets
Knowing no one could compare with me
In my airy skirts and my cool retreats
You could have told the truth all the time
I was that at ease inside
You never made me cry
And then one night I lied
I got down with a boy in the back woods
I didn’t tell you and you didn’t see
And that’s when jealousy got the dog up in me …
But in times when my head was together about you
I was an expert at silence
Now every look you get
Seems like another threat
I pick your pockets almost hoping to find
Something to be hurt about
To prove you unkind
Oh but I still love you baby
Though now I just can’t sit still
And though that boy
Meant nothing to me,
I believe I’ve lost that simple thrill
Of the times
When my head
Was together
About you, and I was an expert at silence
—“In Times When My Head,” 1976
* * *
By 1976, James and I had sold our town house on East Sixty-second Street and were scoping out other places to live. Where, though? James and I went so far as to look at houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, though I could never picture him as a southern country squire in an uptight suburb filled with finance people wearing coral-pink pants and docksiders. We began subletting Apartment #2N in a beautiful rent-controlled building at 135 Central Park West called the Langham, a block north of the Dakota, and we ultimately ended up moving just upstairs to a sprawling north-facing rental on the sixth floor of the same building.
* * *
Ben was born on the twenty-second of January, 1977. Nine pounds, two ounces. “Carly, Carly, Carly Carly, Carly Carly Carly” … it went on and on. Through labor and finally the delivery of our boy, Ben. James with his deliberate calling forth to me and to the boy he had wanted so very much after the sweet girl of his heart, Sally. James had predicted, when we were first falling in love, that we would have a girl first and then a boy. When the shoulders came out first (upside down), Dr. Martens said: “If this is a girl, she’s going to be a football player!” Indeed, he was a very big boy.
James had a tape recorder on him, one of those little ones available in the late seventies. The tape currently lurks somewhere in the stash in the Sony archives. On it is James chanting. He was moaning with me, he was giving me songs, on and on, two syllables in a row, for hours. “Carly Carly Carly.” It felt like I had never heard my name before. It had such significance coming out of his mouth, such a primal yearning for attachment.
The rhythm of it made me think of one time in the waves at Windy Gates. Before Jaws and being afraid in the water. I was eleven. Mommy was on the shore and couldn’t hear me. There the grown-ups sat smiling and passing a juice and vodka jug. I had been pulled by the tide way out of my depth, until I was just a small head on the horizon, bobbing up and down. Then, thank God, someone saw me: Jonno (Jonathan Schwartz), our mate, my mother’s godchild, our friend, jumped into the waves and swam to me and carried me back to shore. Under a wave and then with a wave and then over a wave again. He stayed with the energy of the current but just subtly enough to lead us against the riptide. We washed up on the beach in one enormous wave, both of us breathless. My mother and Peter and everyone on the beach came running. We were coughing and spitting up water and everyone was congratulating Jonno. The only way to survive that is to go into shock. I withdrew into my heart. I remember the feeling, and I felt it again while giving birth to Ben. The other parts of the body can be dancers, but the heart must be resilient and feed the rest.
* * *
With the ever-joyful presence of baby Ben and his older sister, as well as the various great friendships I developed during that time, including with Mia Farrow and Anna Strasberg, two other residents of the building, I remember the Langham as the setting of pretty fun times, mixed as always with the difficult ones. There was a big career change for James, too. I remember one night around that time when producer Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker, the president of Warner Bros. Records, who had produced James’s last two albums, Gorilla and In the Pocket, flew from L.A. to New York to convince James to re-sign with the label. Peter Asher and Nat Weiss, James’s manager and lawyer, were equally eager to sign James to Columbia Records. Lenny Waronker went so far as to offer James Warner Bros. stock (James owned some already, but Lenny upped the amount). That night in our apartment, the overall vibe was We need an answer now, now, now. The pressure on James was torturous, and I remember his sky-high anxiety levels, how at one point he lay prostrate on the floor of our bedroom, nearly crying and banging his fists on the floor. By night’s end, James had gone with Columbia, and the subsequent album, JT, released in 1977, with its handsome, eye-contact cover photo and songs including “Handy Man,” “Secret o’ Life,” and “Your Smiling Face,” served as a comeback of sorts for James, not that he needed one.
August 5th, 1977:
Our relationship is far from the idyllic one that the general public reads about. James continues to es
cape. He can express his angry feelings to me much more readily than his loving ones. He tells me he loves me either in songs (no little measure) or when I am sleeping and he’s just turning he will say “I really love you, Carly, I’m sorry I’m being a bummer,” and I’m too tired to respond. Still, by the end of every day, I always soften back to my default position of delight and thankfulness that I’m married to James.
I toured in 1978 after the release of Boys in the Trees (the album). “You Belong to Me” was a big hit as a single going somewhere very nice on the charts. I could look it up, but I’m one who doesn’t like to remember the very good or the very bad in positions of popularity. I had a mysterious response to performing at that time. Sometimes I could sing in front of an audience without problems and other times I was overtaken by forceful heart palpitations and felt I was about to die. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Different things would rattle me and I would end up looking for another reason, another syndrome, another dream, or hire another therapist. James wasn’t involved but was bemused. It was really the heyday of grand group-encounter sessions. (Remember EST?) Everyone was demeaned and called names, reduced to sub-human turds and then raised again under the guidance of an enlightened trainer who doled out praise in very small amounts and had us all in his thrall. We left after a weekend and we were all still “pigs” but we’d learned to like being “pigs.”
I was just one more typical idiot of her time who was trying to replace religion with New Wave good intentions. Even skeptical Jake was not beyond the infection of his mind with the talk of New Age Sufi-ism. Meditation classes and yoga classes, and reissues of books by retired or ancient swamis were on everyone’s bedside table. The usual arguments about the after-life and past lives took place at every dinner party. There were those who could bifurcate and those who could levitate and those who had been abducted by aliens. I had so many different wise men and women from different sects casting predictions and suggestions, but hardly did two of them ever agree. Surprisingly, the Beast would let me know when I was going over the line. With all the contradictions, my faith became somewhat confused and eventually I stopped collecting pamphlets. It was a grown-up decision, after years of wandering from agreement to disillusionment. Growth is wisdom and resulted in a decrease in bitterness. My values became clearer and more pointed. I had less anger toward James. Also less passion.
* * *
As the 1970s came to an end and the eighties began, I had a couple of big hits in “Nobody Does It Better” and “Jesse,” which was originally inspired by my son, Ben, and how in an attempt to “baby-train” his sleep patterns, I was advised by all the books to leave him crying alone in the crib for a limited period of time, which was traumatizing for both of us. The song began as “Ben, I won’t go to you … I won’t come and pick you up,” or lyrics to that effect, that later turned into “Jesse, I won’t cut fresh flowers for you / I won’t make the wine cold for you.” That all started with leaving my baby boy in his crib to cry things out.
But overall, despite having hits here and there, my albums didn’t do as well on the charts as they once had. My assertiveness receded slightly, and I retreated to a more hushed place in my head. I grew quieter and quieter. With James often on the road, my days were mostly overtaken with domestic and maternal affairs—taking Sally for pancake breakfasts at the Black Dog, the little restaurant on the Sound; going shopping for lamps and rugs in Edgartown; picking up food for dinner at Cronig’s supermarket. I totally agree with Diane Johnson, who once wrote in A Shadow Knows, “I often think that motherhood, in its physical aspects, is like one of those prying disorders such as hay fever or asthma, which receive verbal sympathy but no real consideration, in view of their lack of fatality, and which after years of attrition, can sour and pervert the character beyond all recovery,” a quote I identified with strongly enough to put in my diary.
* * *
I was very preoccupied with Ben’s health. He became sicker and sicker, with constant fevers. We took him to one doctor after another and he spent almost a year on gamma globulin to strengthen his immune system. After Christmas in 1978, we decided to get him to a warmer climate, and took a trip to Tortola. James’s mother, Trudy, came with us. One day on a coconut-gathering trip, James badly injured his hand trying to cut the fruit open. After that, Trudy was concerned with being a mother to James, whereas I had my hands full being a mother to Ben, who kept coming down with one illness after the next. Parallel moms. Nothing worried me so much as the state of Ben’s health, and as much as Trudy wanted to tend to James’s hand, the underlying problem with James was drugs, in the same way the underlying problem with Ben, we would find out only later, was a dysplastic kidney, which was causing his immune system to break down. In retrospect, my focus should have been 50 percent on Ben, 50 percent on James. Instead, it was 80 percent Ben, 20 percent James.
I wasn’t focused on my love for James, nor was he focused on me. He spent our Tortola vacation searching for coconuts, or out sailing with friends. It wasn’t that I was blind or insensitive to James’s drug use or his sliced hand; I simply had my worried mind full to the brim with Ben’s physical condition. It didn’t occur to me at the time that James might have had a girlfriend, or that she even had a name.
“Ride with the tide and go with the flow.”
“Here we are, like children forever, taking care of one another.”
—“There We Are,” James Taylor
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
showdown
“How’s Ben?” I asked when I got home one night in the spring of 1980, and was relieved to find out from Lillian, the babysitter, that my three-year-old son didn’t have a fever. Still, an hour later, Ben woke up and told me that both his tummy and his back hurt. When I took his temperature, it was skyrocketing: 104. I tried to reach James, but couldn’t.
It was a time when things between James and me were unbuckling in slow motion, with the status quo of our world no longer sufficient for either one of us.
I didn’t know of any rock ’n’ roll guys who didn’t cheat on their wives or girlfriends. They’d have sex with someone and the next day have no recollection of who that person was. Did that count as infidelity? Then there were any number of “behind the stalls in dressing rooms” moments. What about those—did they count? The rules, it seemed, were foggy, bendable, forever in play. Out of town and out of sight, James would get wasted alongside his “brothers” and end up doing God knows what with God knows whom. Rock ’n’ roll aside, men did these things anyway, I told myself, especially when their beauteous wives are transformed suddenly into mothers: milk-spewing, overprotective lionesses, preoccupied with the safety and well-being of their kids, the husbands in turn feeling rejected and becoming resentful small children themselves. Around that time I read Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata, which tells the story of a man who claims his marriage began to deteriorate when he first had sex with his wife. The man describes sex in the most guilt-ridden terms, as a perversion, an obscenity, a “fall” from a quixotic ideal of purity, and tells how after his wife had children, he began to hate her. It made a huge impression on me.
The down-tempo unraveling of our marriage began when I discovered that James had had a dalliance with one of his backup singers during his 1979 summer tour. A close friend mentioned it to me casually, assuming I must already know, but it came as news to me. It was a discovery that opened a revolving door of mutual deception. As revolving doors go, was this one going to stop and let me out, or keep spinning? I confronted James about it, going so far as to fall onto the rug in despair. “This isn’t about you,” James said coldly. But if it wasn’t about me, who, then, was it about? Did James feel, as I did, that we were not really living, but merely simulating? That something once clear, sharp, generous, infinite, a window view looking out over some forever landscape, was now too hazy to see through?
* * *
Smarting with hurt, and feeling unloved and alone, I embarked on my first extramarital
relationship with another man. Scott Litt was my engineer, and when I confided in Scott how unvalued and uncared for I felt in my marriage to James, he let me know repeatedly that it was okay for me to flirt with other men, as if that was news. The recording studio had a suggestion box where anyone could leave anonymous notes, and two or three of them, I remember, said, Dump James. It was obvious they could have come from no one but Scott. He came to be one of the few men in my life whom I really trust.
In light of Scott’s and my relationship, my producer, Mike Mainieri, insisted I had to tell James in the name of honesty. Why I so instantly took his word over my instinct to wait is beyond me. I guess I wanted to hurt James very badly. The following weekend, on the Vineyard, as James and I sat on a boulder in a field we called “the poison ivy patch,” I confessed, and felt tormented doing so. In spite of whatever dalliances James had had over the years, I couldn’t bear to break the vow that, when I had made it, felt as religious as any experience I’d ever had. It was then that James confessed that he’d been “seeing a few other women,” among them Evey: an Asian dancer who, he told me, was currently living in the fourth-floor walkup apartment on West Seventieth Street he used for rehearsals.
It was an awful conversation, one I didn’t want to have. Nor did I wish to spend a second longer with Scott if there was the remotest possibility that James’s and my marriage could be on solid footing again. I left the conversation with the conviction that James’s “thing” with Evey was temporary, but as time went on, it became clear that Evey wasn’t going anywhere, and that James didn’t want her to, either. The one time I asked, James had refused to let me meet Evey. “She won’t talk to you,” he said.
