More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon

by Stephen Davis

  Like “Anticipation,” Carly’s “Legend in Your Own Time” was written in part about Cat Stevens, although she has said that other factors played in.

  Carly: “I was in the passport office, waiting to get one. It was a long line, on a hot day. I was on my way to London to make Anticipation. The guy in front of me was reading an article about [the late country music star] Hank Williams. The headline said, ‘A Legend in His Own Time.’ And, somehow, the story of Hank combined in my mind with what would happen to me if I ever became a ‘legend.’ Then I thought of the singer-songwriter stars with whom I was smitten, alone in their hotel rooms after a night onstage, with all the love that had been directed toward them that evening. Then I caught the echo of a room service cart coming down the hall with a piece of burnt toast and an overcooked egg and a pot of cold coffee.

  “I thought of the hours before the ‘man on the road, the legend’ gets the room service, and of all the connections he can’t make in the parties after the show; in the bar after the parties after the show; with the girl he brings to his room who may still be asleep as the cart gets closer to his hotel room with the non-breakfast. How sad—and sadder—for the contrast of what the love onstage had been, and what it had felt like.” Ambition and loneliness often go hand in hand, the song says, with guitars and bongos and close, double-tracked harmonies on the fugitive choruses.

  “Our First Day Together” and “The Girl You Think You See” were story songs, the former a folkish ballad, almost an homage to Joni Mitchell; the latter, a funny bit of Broadway-inflected soft rock. The album’s first side would conclude with “Summer’s Coming Around Again,” a pretty bossa nova—the boy from Ipanema—that had been kicking around Carly’s repertoire for years, resurrected here with a soft arrangement for guitar and piano.

  Now Carly heard that Mick Jagger was in London, and she told her people that she needed to meet him. Through Elektra’s London office, she received an invitation to the Rolling Stones Records press party for the rereleased single of “Brown Sugar”/“Bitch,” augmented with an extra track, “Let It Rock.” Carly attended this affair with the two Pauls—Samwell-Smith and Buckmaster. Introduced briefly to Mick, she importuned him about singing on her record, but he explained that he was preoccupied with making the new Stones album, and then was swept away. Carly was disappointed, but she felt that now she had at least met the Rolling Stones’ protean front man.

  Trident Studios, Soho: July through September 1971. They worked on “Share the End,” with lyrics by Jake, an anthem for an apocalypse. Jake also cowrote “The Garden,” a slightly spooky ballad. Carly wrote “Three Days” about her time with Kris Kristofferson: a short-term reverie and a regretful parting. “Julie Through the Glass” was a piano lullaby for Carly’s niece, Julie Levine: “And we’ll help you to love yourself / ’Cause that’s where loving really starts.” The album would end with Carly’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s new “I’ve Got to Have You,” a dark song of sheer desire, with a southern accent and a crying, fuzz-toned guitar solo offset by dramatic drum fills and intimations of romantic pain. These were the tracks that would appear later in 1971 on the album Anticipation.

  “Making that album gave me the best memories of recording—maybe ever,” Carly said later. “The entire album was just me and my band in London. Cat Stevens was the background singer on a lot of the songs, and there were strings on a few songs [arranged by Del Newman], but it was basically the three guys in the band and myself. On the whole it was so sparse, but I loved it.”

  In September, Elektra flew Carly’s brother to London to take the album photographs. Peter Simon found his sister holding hands with Cat Stevens and talking quietly with him in the backyard of the house she was staying in. Peter was a massive Cat Stevens fan, and loved that Cat was hanging around the house and the studio, staying as close to Carly as possible. One afternoon they took a taxi to Hyde Park, where Peter posed his leggy sister in a diaphanous skirt, holding on to the park gates like a lioness shaking her cage. Another sequence showed her running through a leafy glade. Carly also did some press interviews while she was in London. The man from Record Mirror was smitten: “She has the kind of dark Latin good looks and attractive sultry features which would have left me a mooning adolescent at sixteen and, as it was, left me a mooning thirty-year-old as we sat on the living room couch of her tasteful rented house in Camden Town.”

  Carly told writer Keith Altham that working with Paul Samwell-Smith brought out something new in her work. “Paul turned me down at first. He couldn’t tell who or what I was from that first album, but then he came to hear me at Carnegie Hall and I reached him through that. I was so jealous of the Cat Stevens albums he produced; they were so clear and exciting.

  “On this new album, I’m more naked than I’ve ever been before. It was embarrassing listening to the playbacks at first, rather like looking at yourself without make-up in the mirror for the first time. Most of the material is just me and my guitar. Paul is keeping it very simple. It has a quirky feeling, but as the album progresses I’m beginning to like it, and that’s the secret.”

  HOW ABOUT TONIGHT?

  Elektra released Anticipation in early November 1971, and it was an immediate hit record. Radio had been playing the “Anticipation” single since late October, and the 45 started surging up the sales charts. It stayed on Billboard magazine’s Top 40 chart for the next three months. The album sold a half million copies in that period and stayed on the charts until mid-1972. Jac Holzman’s faith in Carly, despite the doubters on his staff, had been validated. (Carly dedicated the album to Steve Harris, Elektra’s star minder, who had held her hand in some of her darkest moments.) Holzman gave some of the credit to the producer, Paul Samwell-Smith. “He made a very caring and lovely record,” the label chief later wrote. “He gave the songs a frame of easy intimacy that helped the listeners to welcome them into their lives. Anticipation really consolidated Carly’s position as a writer-singer of enormous craft, imagination and honesty.” Reviews were generally positive and sympathetic. Rolling Stone recognized Carly as representative of the new “liberated” woman coming of age in the early seventies, and took her new songs as signifiers of what progressive women were (really) thinking about. Mainstream American magazines—Vogue, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal—said the same thing. (But not everyone bought into this. In New York, the antibourgeois Village Voice frigidly dismissed Carly’s songs as simply more pop pabulum for the ruling class.)

  On the evening of November 9, Carly went to see James Taylor perform at Carnegie Hall. She had heard the rumors that James had been dumped by Joni Mitchell, who had tired of babysitting a high-functioning heroin addict. Carly noted how fervently and vocally James’s youngish fans, especially the girls, reacted to the despondency of “Fire and Rain”—calling out to him between songs—and how they were then soothed, rapturously, by the lullaby “Sweet Baby James.” This was the first time Carly had seen the essential James Taylor, in full cry. For her, his performance had an endearing, heartbreaking quality that moved her to tears.

  Carly knew Nat Weiss, James’s attorney. He offered to take her backstage to see James. When she got there, she found him seated, still holding his guitar, amid a throng of well-wishers, including his sister and brothers. When James saw Carly, he quickly stood up and leaned down to accept her kiss. His demeanor changed markedly, brightening up. Band members Danny Kortchmar and Lee Sklar checked out James and Carly interacting with each other. They both had the same thought: “Mrs. Taylor.” Gradually the dressing room emptied out, until it was just Carly and James and a couple of his brothers. As she got up to leave, she told James that if he ever felt like a home-cooked meal, he should give her a call.

  James looked at her and asked, “How about… tonight?” Everyone else laughed. Carly said she would make him something delicious, and gave him her address. James said he would be over later.

  James Taylor arrived at Carly’s apartment a couple of hours after that. She made him so
me eggs and toast. They stayed up most of the night. He made no move as if he wanted to leave. She said she was tired, and was moving to the bedroom, and he could join her. She put on something more comfortable and got into bed. James took out his guitar, sat down on the side of the bed, and started playing to her, as she lay with her hair spread on the pillow in the soft pink light of the lamp. He played and played, beautifully, expertly. It was a predawn serenade, a private recital, bold as love. It was beyond touching, beyond moving—James Taylor playing his heart out to Carly Simon. His head was bent low, and his eyes were closed most of the time. James broke Carly’s heart for the second time that night.

  A year later, an interviewer asked Carly about that first night with James. “It was great,” she replied. “We went back to my place, and then we went into the bathroom and fucked.” James denied this, and maintained with a straight face that he and Carly didn’t have sexual relations until they were married.

  Carly had a gig headlining the Troubadour in Los Angeles beginning November 18. She flew west with Billy Mernit as a traveling companion. As their flight was descending, Billy noticed the reflections of overhead clouds in the cup of coffee on Carly’s tray table.

  “Look, Carly,” he said, “clouds in your coffee.”

  Carly had sold out the Troubadour. The band was happy that their groupies Hilary and Molly were back with their hash brownies and backrubs. Jake Brackman was in town, doing movie business. Don McLean was opening the shows, about to have a big hit record with “American Pie.” The opening night went well. The crowd cheered for “Anticipation,” and sang along. There were repeated calls for encores, and Carly was flushed with excitement. Later, in the dressing room, she said she wasn’t ready for visitors, but relented when Steve Harris told her that Warren Beatty was waiting on the stairs. He was the biggest star in Hollywood. Carly knew that he was involved with actress Julie Christie, but she also knew that didn’t matter. Warren was very complimentary about her performance, and wanted to know where she was staying.

  A few hours later, Carly and Jake were in Carly’s room at the Chateau Marmont, listening to a tape of her performance, when there was a knock on the door, which Jake answered. It was Warren, back again. Jake left. Carly later told Steve Harris that Warren Beatty had been “very, very persuasive” with her.

  Carly flew back to New York after the Troubadour shows and seriously took up with James Taylor. Jake Brackman noted that all Carly’s romantic liaisons now ceased to exist. Ex-boyfriends and new flames who called her for dates were told, “I’m with James Taylor now.” Then she changed her phone number to an unpublished listing.

  James took Carly up to Martha’s Vineyard to show her the house he was building. This proved to be an austere, fanciful, extremely vertical bachelor’s shack, still under construction, on some forested land James had bought with the money he’d earned from the Sweet Baby James album. The carpenters included James’s youngest brother, Hugh Taylor; the brilliant local artist Laurie Miller; and Zack Wiesner, who’d been in James’s first band, the Flying Machine. The house’s ground floor was basically a recording studio with a galley kitchen. The upstairs was the bedroom and a mixing board. There was a wood stove, and electric baseboard heat upstairs, but the house was still cold. Little David, James’s German shepherd dog, barely recognized him. The whole scene was very early seventies: communal, rustic, and rudimentary. Carly would wake up in the morning to find the carpenters, roofers, plumbers, electricians, various band members and their girlfriends, plus hangers-on (and delivery men) drinking coffee and having breakfast downstairs. “There were all these people,” she recalled, “and they were eating our food, making coffee all the time.” It was a serious adjustment, but she did her best to accommodate James’s crew. (They called themselves No Jets Construction, after a local campaign to stop commercial jet aircraft flying into the island’s primitive, World War II– era airfield.) With his new wealth, James was a leading source of employment for his friends, the island’s impoverished young artisans, and Carly decided she had to make the best of her new boyfriend’s Vineyard scene.

  Carly, speaking ten years later: “James was the kind of person you looked at and wanted to save. We went to live on Martha’s Vineyard, where I found two years worth of unopened mail, stacked up to the ceiling. I spent the first six months of our relationship going through it. It was a labor of love. I was determined to get James out of this hole of unopened correspondence. And I remember that the house was filled with hangers-on, all the time.”

  As for James Taylor, he had fallen hard for Carly Simon. This level of emotion was unusual in his life, and he told friends he was deeply affected by it. He had found someone who would really look after him, something he had always needed. One night, he got into a fight with his sister’s boyfriend, who’d been rough with her. James called him out, and it ended badly. James, extremely upset and fairly intoxicated, disappeared into the woods. Carly went out looking for him, calling his name. It started to rain. Eventually she heard him calling back to her, his disembodied voice echoing through the bare trees. “I love you, Carly,” he cried. “I love you, Carly.”

  On December 18, Carly headlined at the Bitter End. The line to get in ran for a block down freezing Bleecker Street. She was worried because she had a bad cold and a sore throat, but the show had to go on. She climbed on the tiny stage in a high-necked blue dress, crammed in with her band. Her mother was sitting at a table in front. Her brother, Peter, was rushing around with his camera. Her sister Joanna swept in, late, fresh from singing a performance of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor at Carnegie Hall. Carly called her very pregnant sister, Lucy Simon, up to the stage and together they sang “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.” This proved a sensation. Down in front, Andrea Simon was pounding the table and shouting for more. The second set was even better than the first.

  The next day a reporter asked Carly what she thought her “image” was.

  “I don’t think I have any one image, but other people seem to think I do. I’m told they see me as a new kind of woman; very strong; very, very liberated, independent, large, forceful, big smile, lots of teeth…. But I never think of myself as one person. There are so many different Carly Simons. There’s a shy and introverted one, acquiescent, intimidated. Other times, I can be the master of ceremonies, the person bringing everyone else together. Different people bring out different things in me.”

  Carly had also started to write songs again, the first new material since she had worked on Anticipation the previous summer. One was called “God and My Father,” with a complex lyric about what had happened to her inner self when Richard Simon died. Carly: “One night I was curled up in bed with this new notebook of pages that hadn’t been written on, and I just decided to write and see what came out on paper. The first line I wrote was about hearing God whispering lullabies. I just kept on, not really knowing where I was going. It was a strange sensation.”

  At the end of the year, Carly was interviewed by the British music paper Disc and Music Echo. She told the reporter that she loved working in London and would definitely make her next record there. She repeated that she liked playing in clubs, and hated concert halls, where she couldn’t see the audience. She said, “My feelings get very hurt if I’m not liked,” so success was very important to her. Asked about her relationship with James Taylor, she allowed, “Let’s just say that it’s not a professional entanglement.”

  The year 1971 had been a good one for her, Carly said. “I liked the acclaim [of having a hit record]. It made me feel… in awe of myself… for the first time in my life, really. Now I feel driven to get this feeling—again and again.”

  POOR MOOSE

  Now it’s early in 1972 and Carly Simon is supposed to be writing songs for her third album, but she is distracted by various problems, including finding someone to produce it—Paul Samwell-Smith is otherwise engaged—and someplace to live with her new boyfriend, James Taylor. J. T. has made it clear to her that he needs taking care
of, and Carly is sure that she’s the woman to do it. It isn’t clear if she even knew at the time that James was using heroin. She is sure that her apartment off Lexington is too small, and his house on Martha’s Vineyard is still under construction—and will remain a work site for the next thirty years. Carly starts to look around someplace familiar—the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zip code 10022—and after a few weeks she finds a place in the East Sixties that will do for the two lovers, at least until they get busy and two turns into three.

  James Vernon Taylor was born in Boston in 1948. His father was Dr. Isaac Taylor, originally from North Carolina, lately of Harvard and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Taylor married the beautiful Trudy Woodard, the daughter of a waterman and boatbuilder from the North Shore of Massachusetts. Their first child, Alex, was born in 1946. James came next, followed by brother Livingston, sister Kate, and brother Hugh. In the early 1950s Isaac Taylor moved his young family from Boston to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he became instrumental in founding the state university’s school of medicine and was a prominent medical educator.

  The Taylors of North Carolina were an old mercantile family that went back to Colonial days, blue-blooded American root stock. But recent generations had coped with mental illness and alcoholism, and this extended to James’s father. It led to friction between James’s parents, and this in turn may have contributed to Dr. Taylor’s decision, in 1956, to leave his family for two years to take a post with the U. S. Navy’s mission to Antarctica as chief medical officer of the naval base. (In fairness to Ike Taylor, as he was widely and affectionately known, he had spent World War II in Cambridge, getting his education, and had sat out the 1950– 53 Korean conflict as well. The navy job may well have been his way of fulfilling a desire to do something for his country.) The upshot was that the Taylor family’s father disappeared for two long years, and the five children grew under their mother’s sometimes distracted watch.