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

by Stephen Davis

  Meanwhile, both Carly and James had albums to write. They were both contractually obligated to the same media conglomerate, and now both had production deadlines to deal with. Sometime around April 1972, James replaced heroin with “methadone maintenance,” and began to work on his next album.

  Hardworking Carly Simon, meanwhile, was drawing inspiration from her tense, touching, and incredibly exciting romance with superstar James Taylor to write some of the songs that would define her for the rest of her career. The next few months in 1972 would produce some of the premier moments of her life. And then her next hit record would put even her unstable boyfriend’s career firmly in the shade.

  BEST NEW ARTIST

  By early 1972 Jac Holzman thought the singer-songwriter movement was already passé. He noticed that a lot of the good ones really wanted to be in a band and play rock and roll. But Elektra signed Harry Chapin on the strength of his songwriting. The label passed on unsigned Bonnie Raitt because she didn’t write her own songs. Holzman talked to Carly about this, because she was looking for a producer for her third album, and Holzman wanted something very different from Carly Simon and Anticipation, which was still in the Top Ten album chart.

  Carly had ideas of her own. She wanted to be produced by Paul Buckmaster, the dashing young British arranger who had worked with the Rolling Stones and Elton John.

  She made a two-song demo with Buckmaster in New York, played on by James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar. The highlights of this tape were an earthy version of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” and an old song by Carly, “I’m All It Takes to Make You Happy.”

  She played the tape for Holzman, who was polite but firm. Paul Buckmaster was out. Holzman insisted that Carly’s new record be made by mainstream pop producer Richard Perry. He wanted Carly to make a record for the massive rock music audience, not the post-folk singer-songwriter crowd. “I wanted fresh producer meat,” he later wrote, “someone born in the studio, with solid arranging skills, a person who would push Carly and not flinch when she pushed back, as I knew she would. My candidate was Richard Perry.”

  Perry, thirty-two, was one of the most successful producers of pop music. Recent projects had included bestselling albums by Barbra Streisand and singer Harry Nilsson. Carly listened to these records and just didn’t get it. She thought they sounded slick, glossy, overproduced. But she also wanted something different this time. “I was tired of the whole self-pitying thing that was going on in many of my songs,” she said later. “I didn’t like to see myself talking about disenchantment as much as I had. [Anticipation] was about things that never quite turned out the way I’d wanted them to. Things that were disillusioning. I wanted to wipe out all that melancholia and come up with something more positive, more interesting, subjects that haven’t been… delved into.”

  She told herself she had to stay positive, because the spotlight was really on her now. “Going into it, I felt a lot of pressure on me, that it had to be good. It’s a show business syndrome that you get caught up in; that you must surpass yourself all the time to stay in the ballgame.

  “So I went into that album quite frightened of working with somebody that I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I would get along with him, in part because he’s from a different borough [of New York City]. He’s from Brooklyn and I’m from the Bronx. I’m not joking about the boroughs…. I was against the idea. I thought he was too slick for me. Barbra Streisand—I didn’t want to have that kind of sound.”

  Elektra prevailed. Carly would make No Secrets in London, at Trident Studios, with Richard Perry and the crew of star-quality English musicians who had just worked on Harry Nilsson’s album Nilsson Schmilsson. Now she just had to write the songs—and get Mick Jagger to sing on her album.

  In early January 1972, Carly flew to Los Angeles, and then to Palm Springs for Elektra’s sales convention, where she was due to perform for the company. When she arrived she was informed that the airline had lost her luggage, which was never seen again. Missing or stolen were all her jewelry and the American Indian long chamois dress she wore onstage. Carly: “But the thing that killed me was my journal was gone. It was a black leather Gucci notebook with loose-leaf pages. My whole first smell of success, my opening at the Troubadour, that whole year—James Taylor—was all in my journal. It also contained all my lyrics up to that time, all the different versions of all the songs. All gone. I was sick.”

  Carly went shopping with Steve Harris’s wife, Nicole, and found a dress she could perform in. She had to follow Elektra’s new signing, Harry Chapin, who knocked ’em dead with his pianism and dynamic songs. Jac Holzman was the master of ceremonies, and he told his staff, “Remember our success last year with Carly Simon. Harry Chapin is this year’s Carly Simon.”

  Carly, before she started her set, leaned into the mike and said, “Harry, if you’re this year’s Carly Simon, you must have had some very interesting boyfriends over the past twelve months.” The whole room laughed at this, and gave Carly a heartfelt ovation when she finished with “Anticipation.”

  Then Carly and Arlyne decided that Harry should open concerts for Carly later in the month. The first was at Symphony Hall in Boston on February 12. When Carly’s audience gave Harry a thunderous ovation at the close of his set, Carly wondered about the wisdom of having a tough act to follow. She went on and played a concert that was criticized by the local press for being nervous and shallow.

  February 1972. “Anticipation” is the number four record in America. Harry Nilsson’s bombastic “Without You” (produced by Richard Perry) is number three. Don McLean’s “American Pie” is number two. Al Green is on top. Carly flew to Los Angeles to play the Troubadour, this time as the headliner. (Don McLean opened for her.) There, despite the reassuring presence of Warren Beatty at the club, Carly had a weekend-long panic attack. She discounted the pleas of her manager and her record label; these Troubadour shows would be her last public performances for several years.

  In March the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced their annual Grammy Awards. Carly Simon won for Best New Artist. James Taylor won Best Pop Vocal Performance (Male) for “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was also voted Song of the Year. Carole King and her Tapestry album won most of the other major awards.

  In April, Warren Beatty called Carly in New York and said he was working to get George McGovern the Democratic nomination to run for president against Richard Nixon later in the year. Beatty wanted James Taylor’s phone number so he could importune him to play benefit concerts to raise money for McGovern. Carly gave Warren James’s number on Martha’s Vineyard, where James was working on his house and making his next record. A few weeks later James and Carole King headlined a benefit concert with Barbra Streisand in Hollywood that raised a quarter million dollars for Senator McGovern’s campaign. Over the next six months, James and (occasionally) Carly would appear at McGovern benefits in Massachusetts and New York in an effort to get rid of the hated Nixon, whom they regarded as crazy and a crook.

  Spring 1972. Carly was writing. She was still working on the song “God and My Father,” hoping to make it a big statement on her next album, but she was having trouble getting the right connections within a difficult song about feeling abandoned by God when her father died. “I realized I had my father confused with the Devil, and I was writing things I didn’t understand myself. It was as if someone was dictating the verses to me and I was writing it down.” At one point she called her manager from the Vineyard and sang the song over the phone. Arlyne Rothberg said that this moved her to tears.

  It was easier for Carly to find inspiration in her love for James Taylor, especially when she flew up to visit him on the Vineyard. James was using his considerable new wealth to buy more land on the island, and also in Nova Scotia, where old farms were selling for a song. Carly wrote most of the song “No Secrets” on the Vineyard after a long talk with (a mostly reluctant) James about his previous love life. (Unlike Carly, who tended to stay friend
ly with former lovers, James wanted nothing to do with his ex-girlfriends.)

  Flying back from the Vineyard to New York, Carly wrote “The Right Thing” in the back of an Air New England DC-3 plane in celebration of her affair with James. She had a cassette recorder with her, and by the time the plane landed, she had developed most of the structure of the song. She had recently seen the film The Last Picture Show, and “loving you is the right thing to do” came from a line in the film. Carly: “It actually was one of my absolutely undisputed songs about James, written three months into our relationship.”

  Carly also had strong hopes for a new narrative song, “His Friends Are Fond of Robin,” which described in detail someone much like a character in a J. D. Salinger short story. But her most important new song was still in her new journal. It had begun in the old one, the one that was lost, under the title “Bless You, Ben.” The lyric was about “an imaginary man who came into my life.” But the lyric seemed morose to her. Then the song shifted focus as Carly thought about some of the men she’d been with, and how some of them had treated her. She’d had a line in her notebook for about a year: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” The title of the song now shifted to “Ballad of a Vain Man.” It had a killer hook of a chorus, and in her head Carly could hear herself singing on it—with Mick Jagger.

  How to get to him? “I got this idea to do an interview with Mick Jagger. Arlyne mentioned it to an editor at The New York Times. He said if Jagger was willing, it would be great. We got in touch with Chris Odell, who worked with the Stones.” Mick liked the idea; he had a new album—Exile on Main Street—coming out, and said he could use the publicity. Carly: “So last May [1972] I casually went out to L. A. and ended up hanging around waiting for Mick to show up—for five days. When he finally arrived he had been on airplanes for thirteen hours and was exhausted. All we talked about that night was how much we hated flying. It was very strange, that first meeting, because I expected to look so much like him. People were always commenting on the resemblance. I expected to walk into a mirror. But then, I didn’t think we looked anything alike.

  “Mick was wearing a cotton suit in turquoise, very short white socks, and saddle shoes. And he kept apologizing about how tired he was. And then I had to leave for New York the next morning. I saw him again when I was in L. A. in June, but by then we had become friends and I felt it would be too difficult to write an objective piece.”

  Carly’s career in journalism was now over, but the ploy had produced the desired result. Mick Jagger told Carly Simon that if he survived the Rolling Stones’ North American tour that summer, he would try to be in London when she made her record in September.

  ON BEAVER POND

  In June 1972, Carly flew to Los Angeles to meet her new producer. Richard Perry was tall, bushy headed, with a long face and a prominent nose. Carly had been romantically involved with both her previous producers, but this was not to be the case with Perry. They met at Elektra’s studio on La Cienaga. She sat at a piano and played some of her new songs for him. When she sang out the “you’re so vain” chorus, he was ecstatic. Perry knew a hit song when he heard one, and he told Carly that their creative collaboration was going to work really well.

  While she was in L. A. Carly met with some movie people who were interested in her. There was buzz in the industry about Carly—successful, single, available, hot, a potential new star. There was talk of her being (type)cast in the film Fear of Flying. What no one knew was that Carly’s stammer, which could still surface when she was anxious, would keep her from accepting the films that would occasionally be offered to her.

  Carly also saw Mick Jagger again, just before the Stones went on tour. He told her that he hoped no one died, as they had the last time the Rolling Stones came through. Mick’s wife, Bianca, he said, was jealous and didn’t like her husband consorting with Carly. Bianca told her friend Andy Warhol that “the only girlfriend of Mick’s she ever got jealous of was Carly Simon, because Carly is intelligent and has the look Mick likes—she looks like Mick and Bianca.”

  Carly spent the rest of that summer commuting among New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Los Angeles. “Ballad of a Vain Man” was in development. (When Carly musically annotated the song, she titled it “You’re So Lame” on the score.) “God and My Father” was now called “Nighttime Songs.” She was tinkering with the material constantly, sometimes unsure of herself. James kept telling her to hold back and not give too much of herself away.

  That summer there were so many carpenters and craftsmen working on James’s property that the couple decided to get away awhile. James acquired a mobile home, and he and Carly and his dog, David, drove around New England for a couple of weeks. While they were staying in the Berkshires, Carly suggested they visit her brother on his communal farm in southern Vermont. James was amenable. Peter Simon: “Somehow James managed to get this huge Winnebago down our mile-long dirt road and into the driveway. They stayed all afternoon, and seemed to really enjoy the quiet of Vermont. I took them up the hill to show them our beaver pond. James needed a cover photo for his next album, so he went back to their motor home and put on a fresh shirt and a tie, which gave him a formal, sort of preppie look.” Peter asked him what the title of the record was, and he said that he had briefly considered Farewell to Showbiz and also Throw Yourself Away, but no one liked these titles. Then he chose One Man Parade, but changed his mind and was calling the record One Man Dog. “So I got him out on the pond with his dog in this aluminum boat we had, and I shot the photo from the shore. I found the tie to be a little strange, but the photo was also about James’s general isolation—a man and his dog against the world. He must have liked it, because it was on the sleeve of One Man Dog when it came out later in the year.”

  Late in August, Carly was back in Los Angeles, staying at the Hotel Bel-Air. “Every time I come to Hollywood,” she told an interviewer, “I move up a rung in the hotel game. I don’t know how I ended up at the Bel Air, but now that I’m here I don’t know where I can go next.”

  She bridled at another reporter who wanted to know about her love life. “That’s all she seemed to want to know about. I was offended by the way she rattled them off. ‘And just how long did your affair with him last?’ So I asked why she wanted to know, and she said, ‘Well, that’s what the public wants to know about, more than anything.’

  “Then I thought, ‘Well, what is my private life?’ In a sense it is my public life, too. In the last two years [the media] needed a hook on me. It made me more interesting when I was going out with someone famous, but sometimes they made more of things than there actually was, and it embarrassed me to have these things so distorted. What I need to do now is develop a proper self-censorship method, so I don’t blurt out the truth all the time.” She added that James Taylor was helping her with this.

  On a Saturday in early September, Carly flew to London with Arlyne, Jimmy Ryan, and drummer Andy Newmark. Carly and Arlyne checked into the Portobello Hotel, while the two musicians were installed in a nearby flat. Arlyne recalled that Carly was under serious pressure now. “She had two months to finish the album so it could be out for the Christmas rush, and she was working with a producer she’d never worked with before.”

  The first sessions at Trident Studios began on the following Monday, and were discouraging. Carly and the musicians were jet-lagged, and nothing seemed to go right. Richard Perry came on, Carly thought, like a film director: barking orders, full of high-voltage energy, very opinionated. Carly was frustrated. She didn’t want a director; she wanted an interpreter. She tried to call Jac Holzman to complain, but the switchboard at Elektra said he was traveling and couldn’t be reached. (“I’d heard there were problems in London,” he said later, “but I decided to let them sort them out.”)

  Carly: “Richard Perry was trying to do the same thing I was, which was calling all the shots. But he had more endurance and perseverance than I had. But when I sang the way he wanted me to, it s
ounded forced and unnatural. He would realize this and say, ‘I’m sorry, go back and sing it the way you feel it.’ And that would always end up the right way. Almost all my vocals [on No Secrets] are original—I did them when the original track was being laid down. I wasn’t thinking about how I was singing them, and they turned out to be the most ‘honest’ vocals we had.”

  The problems continued for a few days. Carly was unhappy with what she considered Perry’s overuse of orchestration, feeling that it marred the simplicity and sincerity of some of the songs. “I doubted myself, my judgments, an awful lot,” she remembered. Her frequent calls to James on the Vineyard left her feeling lonely and confused. James was into musical minimalism, and kept telling Carly to hold back in her music, not let everything come blasting out.

  The sessions improved by the second week, as the new songs began to coalesce. Laying down the tracks for songs such as “No Secrets” and “Loving You” was exciting, as Carly could see how Richard Perry was building a cohesive sound that took her music into another level of sonic sophistication. But now it didn’t sound slick to her, just up-to-date and “adult contemporary,” as the format was known at the time. Perry got some of the best musicians in London to play on the tracks, including Beatle-affiliated bassist Klaus Voormann, American drummers Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner, and Ray Cooper, who played percussion in Elton John’s band.

  James Taylor came to London during the third week, and Carly was elated. They spent most of their time in Carly’s suite, did some sightseeing, and cuddled in Soho’s atmospheric pubs. She told Arlyne that James had visited her mother in Riverdale to formally ask Andrea Simon for Carly’s hand in marriage. Carly: “I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we should get married. And he said, ‘Oh well, there’s really no reason to get married. We love each other and we’ve been living together.’ Later in the afternoon James said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe we should get married.’ I said, ‘Well, what happened between this morning and this afternoon?’ He said, ‘This afternoon it was my idea.’”