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

by Stephen Davis

  Carly, pregnant, told her manager she couldn’t do it. She could not appear on live television, coast to coast. It would be too much stress for her, and she was afraid she would miscarry and lose the child. There was a lot of back-and-forth. Elektra was screaming that Another Passenger wasn’t selling and needed this enormous publicity boost. Someone suggested that Carly be allowed to tape her two segments. NBC said that SNL was, famously, a live broadcast. But Carly was adamant, and she won. On the May 8, 1976, show, a frizzy-headed Carly was introduced by host Madeline Kahn and played “Half a Chance” with the house band. The second segment, “You’re So Vain,” was introduced by Chevy, who mentioned that he and Carly went out together when they were kids. He explained that Carly had taped her songs about an hour before the show, the first time a performer hadn’t played live on the show. He then joined Carly’s backup singers, banging a cowbell and sporting a conspicuously apricot scarf around his neck, as if he were the lucky/ unlucky guy sung about in “You’re So Vain.”

  THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

  Now it’s the hot summer of 1976. Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor, is running for president. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is the album of the moment. (Stevie played a classic harmonica solo on James’s “Don’t Be Sad,” on In the Pocket.) British rock star Peter Frampton owns the airwaves, but James’s churchy, hymnlike “Shower the People” is everywhere, too. In late July, New York magazine sends a writer to Martha’s Vineyard to profile Carly, who picks her up at the island’s airport. Carly is visibly pregnant, her long, voluptuous mane of brunette frizz blowing in the wind as she guns her blue Mercedes convertible back to the house off Lambert’s Cove Road. Carly is deeply tanned “to a handsome red-brown.” She wears a faded blue cotton jersey over red linen pants, and always goes barefoot. She tells the reporter that she has canceled her yoga class and the riding lessons scheduled for that day, and offers a quick tour of the sixty-five-acre property.

  “It’s a very domestic scene,” Carly says. “We’re into our garden and the things we’re planting.” The house is covered in Cape Cod gray clapboard and boasts a forty-five-foot tower. The windows are cheerfully trimmed in bright yellows and pinks. They walk into James’s old house, “originally an Appalachian shack,” Carly says. Today it serves as guest quarters. The cabin James and Russ Kunkel built is now an attached music room and studio. James basically designed the rest of the house, which was built in sections. Sally’s room was finished only a few days before she was born. Her live-in babysitter stays in another cabin, which is soon to become the caretaker’s house. Return visitors often found that bathrooms could disappear and be reconstituted elsewhere.

  There’s a large open room with polished wooden floors, almost empty except for a large dining table by the windows. It’s a nice place to sit and look out the windows at chickadees and canary-colored goldfinches nibbling at seed. Sally’s toys are scattered around. The summer sun is flooding the rooms with light. With the lumber joints and trusses showing, the rooms have an airy feel, very open. The walls are almost bare, except for a few family photographs and some drawings by James’s friend Laurie Miller.

  The place is surprisingly modest and understated. The master bedroom is upstairs. James’s tarnished silver christening cup is in Sally’s bathroom. Carly says she now needs a room of her own to write in, and she is going to build a “shack” of her own after the new baby comes. (She’s hoping for a boy this time. She and James have a name picked out, but Carly said it might be bad luck to reveal it.) The bedroom is Carly’s lair. It’s a white boudoir with a quilt-covered double bed placed before billowing white curtains. On Carly’s (left) side of the bed is a corner bookcase with a white touch-tone telephone, an old Rolodex card file, silver-framed family snapshots, and a modern stainless-steel lamp. (This is where she talks to friends in the evening, chatting on the phone as the children sleep in their beds.)

  A cleaning girl, a young island friend, is polishing the toaster oven in the kitchen. Carly says she loves to cook, chop vegetables, experiment with the herbs they grow. James comes in and is introduced. He asks Carly if he can go fishing. He tells Carly to only buy sunflower seeds for the bird feeders, because it attracts a higher-quality bird. He has a fading, yin-yang-looking tattoo on his left shoulder.

  The tour continues outdoors. Two carpenters are working on something garden-related, and the “rock man” is rebuilding one of the old sheep farm’s ancient stone walls. An archery target is set up at the end of the pasture, where James likes to practice. The tower looms over everything. “James always wanted a tower,” Carly says, sighing.

  Back in the house, the island girl is picking up Sally’s toys, mostly Sesame Street puppets. The writer asks Carly if she is working and is told not really. The last time she was in a recording studio was a few weeks earlier, when she and James sang backup on a Livingston Taylor track. James is observed inspecting shrubs recently planted around the house. He’s in a stained and faded T-shirt and dirty shorts. Carly whispers, “Sexiest legs in the world.” James enters with a book, Conifers for Your Garden, and the planting of spruces is earnestly discussed. James is “immediately appealing, surprisingly friendly. He is a shy, gentle man, who, Carly says later, ‘watches television violence—all the time.’”

  Lunch is served: salad, melon, iced tea. The sun is high and hot. Birdsong fills the air. The oak leaves flutter in the breeze. James is fixing the garden hose. “The Taylors have an easy intimacy. The grounds are large enough for them to be alone-but-together, and when they pass, James calling from the guesthouse porch and Carly answering from the house, it’s an easy ‘Hiya, sweetie.’” The writer wonders if this happy couple is putting on a performance for her. Carly confides that James’s highly publicized heroin addiction is totally over. (But, she tells friends, she still rifles his pockets to make sure.)

  Carly frets because she hasn’t planted the marigolds yet. James wanders around with a beer. A plumber arrives, provoking a long discussion about where to put the toilet in the guesthouse. “James and Carly are used to having people work for them and have found just the right combination of graciousness and command.”

  James tells Carly to leave the toilet placement to him. The babysitter has taken James’s Audi, so Carly and the writer drive off to town in the Mercedes, with Carly singing along to the Spinners tape in the dashboard. Asked about her famous stage fright, Carly lists all the remedies she has tried: psychotherapy, yoga, transcendental meditation, EST, hypnosis, biofeedback, drugs, more yoga, acupuncture. She speaks “longingly” of being able to perform in her husband’s concerts. “My secret pipe dream,” she muses, “is James and me and the children, traveling around together in a much less high-powered scene, maybe a motor home, playing shows and then moving on.” She mentions that James owns a 350-acre farm in Nova Scotia that she’s never even seen.

  Later in the day, Carly drops the writer back at the airport. She would have asked her to stay the night, but the William Styron family—their best friends on the Vineyard—have recently arrived on the island, and Carly is having them over for a barbecue, a campfire, and games—badminton, volleyball—for the children. Novelist Bill Styron is a depressive, hard-drinking Virginian, so he and James get along. (Carly: “They were both Southerners, and talked of southern things, mainly biscuits and ham.”). Rose Styron—a lovely poetess, independently wealthy—is one of Carly’s closest friends. The kids are beautiful. At evening’s end, James will be persuaded to produce his Martin D-18 guitar and sing something. The Styrons’ oldest daughter is named Susannah, so “Oh Susannah” often gets a workout when the two families socialize.

  In the autumn of 1976, James Taylor and his band were still on tour. Carly moved their growing family into an enormous rented apartment at 135 Central Park West. The twelve-room flat occupied the building’s entire sixth floor, overlooking Central Park. When the Macy’s department store’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade proceeded down the avenue in November, the giant balloons were so
close to their windows that Sally Taylor wanted to offer milk and cookies to Kermit the Frog and Mickey Mouse. The actress Mia Farrow (who had been married at twenty to Frank Sinatra but was now single) also lived in the building. Carly and Farrow became so close that Carly agreed to stand as godmother to Farrow’s son Moses. “I wanted to be Carly,” Farrow later told a biographer. “I would see her walking down West 72nd Street, smiling, with a big bunch of flowers, and her coat brushing the sidewalk—that woman can stride—and I knew all was well with the world. Even though she was riddled with phobias and she was always running herself down, she was also fearless—in love and in life…. Carly was like a warrior, and the most loyal person I know…. I’ve spent my whole life around celebrities, and I’ve never known a celebrity less likely to get any safety and comfort from her success. It’s like she’s nine years old sometimes…. She is the most romantic, and the most indiscreet person I know.”

  Now, and for the next three years, the magazine writers all began their profiles the same way: “Carly throws open the front door of a luxurious, enormous Central Park West apartment, extends a hand and draws me in. She’s a glamorous creature, tall, grinning, turquoise silk pants, bare feet, a corona of fluffy hair. Magnetism, charisma, and sex…‘Kome eento my drawing roum,’ she says, affecting a playful Middle European accent, and drifting over to plop down on a brown velvet couch overlooking the landscape of the park.” She kept telling the interviewers that James’s problems with heroin were safely in the past.

  Around that time James switched record labels. Warner Bros. was slow to pick up his expiring contract, so he signed with Columbia instead. Warner Bros. released James Taylor’s Greatest Hits for the Christmas market, and the record took off, selling over a million units by early 1977. James couldn’t get permission from the Beatles’ dysfunctional Apple Corp. to include “Something in the Way She Moves” and “Carolina in My Mind,” so he recut the songs in Los Angeles with his rhythm section and session players in October. A live “Steamroller Blues” was from his 1975 tour. Greatest Hits got to only number twenty-three in Billboard, but the album became a fan favorite, stayed in the charts for years, and sold in the multimillions.

  Late in the year Carly took a call from her manager, who was excited about a new opportunity. The new James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, was in production in England. But John Barry, who usually wrote the scores for the Bond series, was in tax exile and unable to work in Britain. So the producers had hired Marvin Hamlisch, a New Yorker who had won Oscars for his music for such Hollywood blockbusters as The Sting and The Way We Were, and for several Woody Allen comedies. Hamlisch and his girlfriend, Carole Bayer Sager, had written a new song for the film called “Nobody Does It Better,” and they wanted Carly to sing it on the movie’s soundtrack. Arlyne Rothberg told Hamlisch that Carly would definitely do it, and then called Carly.

  Hamlisch telephoned Carly on a snowy day in early December and was invited to the apartment. Carly: “I was so knocked out, that they had offered me this, that it almost didn’t matter what the song sounded like. It had been a lifelong dream on mine to sing a song for a movie. When Marvin came over to the apartment to play it for me, I thought he was the tax accountant I had made a date with for that day, only later on. I was in the kitchen making tea when Marvin sat down at our piano and played that wonderful, cascading opening to the song. This was some accountant! And yes, even songwriters can wear stiffly starched shirts, dark suits, and have their hair combed straight across their foreheads.”

  Carly sang “Nobody Does It Better” for the first time from the sheet music Hamlisch had brought with him. Hamlisch told her it was a perfect fit. She told him that she wanted Richard Perry to produce her vocal track when she and her husband came to Los Angeles after the baby was born, sometime in January. James would be working on his next album, and the James Bond project would distract her from the rigors of new motherhood. She told Hamlisch that she used to mime movie songs in front of her mirror. “So often, what you do in the mirror as a small person comes to fruition. And I also had fantasies about being a spy. So I really wanted to do this. I even owned several trench coats, and I had a pocket flashlight that doubled as a moisturizer.”

  As the year ended, Carly attended the wedding of her older sister Johanna, who married Gerald Walker, an editor at The New York Times. Carly was in the last month of her pregnancy. She was worried about her husband, who was hanging out with some of the brilliant, drug-addled comedians in the Saturday Night Live cast. No good could come of this, Carly knew, but there was nothing she could do except settle in and wait for the baby to come. Between Christmas and the New Year, they were on Martha’s Vineyard. There was a comfortable chair by the fireplace, and James would sit there for hours, playing the guitar, working on songs. There was something new that he was trying out, a song that Carly really loved, that James was calling “Secret O’ Life.”

  THINGS WE SAID TODAY

  January 1977. Carly put a heavy fur coat over her white maternity gown and went to a party at the Dakota, the Gothic pile of an apartment house only a few doors away from her own building. Also present were Dakota residents John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They both made a fuss over the very pregnant Carly. Yoko kissed her, and John wished her good luck.

  Carly gave birth to her son, Ben Taylor, on January 22. James Taylor was in the birthing room, timing the contractions and making up little stories for each one. Carly was in labor for about six hours, and the delivery was natural. At first everything went well, but when they got Ben home, it seemed the baby never stopped crying. The only way Carly could comfort the child was to pick him up and put him to her breast. This went on for weeks, and started to drive James Taylor crazy. Ben cried more than he slept. They were all in a state. The doctors noticed that the baby’s temperature was always slightly elevated, but they didn’t understand why. The pediatrician diagnosed a sleeping disorder, but no one seemed to know what to do about it. The parents were exhausted.

  Carly, her sisters, and their mother appeared on the cover of the February 1977 issue of Ms. magazine, the New York media industry’s outlet for commercial feminism. The article, “The Extraordinary Simon Women,” traced the outlines of the Simon family’s history while revealing none of its secrets. By now, Carly’s responses to the usual questions about her approach to feminism were almost generic: “I’d been educated in a way that didn’t have much space for women’s opportunities, except marriage.” Et cetera.

  March 1977. The Rolling Stones were famously in Toronto, trying to keep Keith Richards out of jail after he was arrested for heroin possession. Then the Canadian prime minister’s wife—and this triggered worldwide headlines—ran off with Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Mick Jagger arrived in New York and left multiple phone messages with the Taylor family’s answering service, which annoyed James, who had never been completely convinced by his wife’s denials of any amorous adventure with Mick.

  Bob Dylan was being divorced. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album was the hottest record in the land. Once again Carly and James took the children and the nanny to California, staying in a Bel Air house owned by music mogul Lou Adler. Carly worked with Richard Perry on “Nobody Does It Better,” giving the vocal a loving, buttery texture that perfectly caught the sly double entendre of the lyrics. They brought in old friend Paul Buckmaster, who helped with orchestrations. Carly also contributed to James’s first album for Columbia, cowriting part of the great sailing song “Terra Nova,” and supplying a heart-stopping Highland vocal drone in the ballad’s coda. (This was the only writing credit she received on one of her husband’s records.)

  While in Los Angeles, Carly also worked on Libby Titus’s first solo album. Paul Simon and Robbie Robertson were also producing tracks for Libby. Carly sang on two: “Darkness ’Til Dawn” and “Can This Be Our Love Affair?”

  James Taylor later told friends that he was “still doing drugs” when he and Peter Asher made the JT album, but the drugs must have been helping, because he was
burning up the studio and making his best album in years. “Secret O’ Life” and a cover of Otis Blackwell’s “Handy Man” would both be hit singles. “Another Grey Morning” and “There We Are” are both beautiful and less-than-idyllic sketches of a contemporary marriage that had its variable moods and malaise. “Terra Nova” is an ultimate traveling song, visionary and deeply emotional. These songs portrayed a seemingly unfiltered James Taylor for the first time in years, and would resonate with his audience when the album was released in June 1977.

  The month before that, Carly was persuaded to play two nights at the Other End, formerly the Bitter End, her old haunt on Bleecker Street. The small club was filled with record people, the press, Carly’s family, and a few celebrities, including Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Art Garfunkel. On the second night, Elektra’s Steve Harris was sitting in the club’s back booth with Alyne Rothberg and Diane Keaton. As Carly started to sing, Mick Jagger slid into the booth with them. Keaton was so flustered by Mick’s sudden presence that she called him “Mike” for the rest of the evening.

  Two different female critics panned Carly’s shows in the downtown weekly Village Voice, both on socioeconomic grounds. One described her as impossibly culturally privileged. Regarding her romantic songs, the other described Carly as “too sleek and well-adjusted to be a credible victim.” For arch-feminists in the crumbling New York of 1977, Carly was too preoccupied “with that old, demeaning dance of courtly love” to be taken seriously. New York in the squalid seventies was no place for an old-fashioned romantic like Carly Simon.