Carly took to the piano for “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” The last number of the regular set was “It Keeps You Runnin’,” the band in rock-and-roll mode. Carly walked off with what a reviewer called “a phenomenally sexy bounce.” She came back with James for the encore, “Devoted to You,” and ended the evening with a rousing version of “Goodnight, Irene,” in a rearrangement by James.
In the dressing room, the very relieved band was boozing and listening to James tell Polack jokes. Carly graciously received congrats on her stellar performance. James went out of his way to insult the Rolling Stone writer who was following Carly around for a forthcoming profile.
Carly received the writer at home in New York two days later. It was a spring day in early May and the trees were in bloom outside the living room window of Apartment 6S. The room was dominated by a large painting of a gorilla lounging on a beach chair. James was not in evidence; the children were in Riverdale with Andrea Simon, now “Granny Andy.” Carly served chilled white wine and Perrier.
Interviewer: “A lot of your songs seem to be about adultery, and you take a traditional viewpoint that it’s a bad thing. It’s almost like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
Carly: “No, that doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t consider myself traditional…. But I’ve never bought that open marriage thing. I’ve never seen it work. But then, that doesn’t mean that I believe in monogamy. I don’t believe that sleeping with someone else necessarily constitutes an infidelity.”
Interviewer: “What would?”
Carly: “Having sex with someone else, and telling your spouse about it. [She laughs.] It’s anything you feel guilty about.”
The tour continued a few nights later at the Bottom Line club in Manhattan. A masseur now joined the entourage. Each night before her set, “He massaged me into feeling very much like I was coming out of the Belgian Congo. My hair was wild by the time he had finished with me. I felt that this particular jungle of an audience seemed a lot less dangerous than the one I had just come out of.” James continued to support and sing with her. The tour’s backstage contract rider specified unopened packages of Pampers (disposable diapers) at every show. Arlyne Rothberg rearranged the seating chart so the record execs were on the side and the fans were down front. The audience was largely male, and they cheered everything in the eleven-song set. Carly was “gowned and frizzed like the fairy princess of patrician funk,” wrote one critic. The show was flawless according to The New York Times. Billy Mernit did a solo piece mid-set, and James repeated his folksy version of “Up on the Roof.” The two Michael McDonald collaborations got the best response, as “You Belong to Me” was pushing Carly’s latest album into the platinum category. Rolling Stone: “She combines perfect elocution, near perfect pitch, and a vibrant, smoky timbre with one of the most powerful deliveries of any woman in rock…. Simon seemed to come close to satisfying her male audience’s fantasies—erotic as well as musical—of what white, middle-class, woman-centered rock could and should be.” After the show, Carly and James autographed unused Pampers for fans waiting at the back door.
A few nights later, at Villanova University, near Philadelphia, Carly was shaking with fright at having to perform before a large, sold-out audience. The massage didn’t help. Carly: “I came up with the idea that I had to take the focus off myself and do something utterly ridiculous that would preoccupy the audience. So when I was introduced I came out onstage completely wrapped in toilet paper. I don’t remember why I told the audience that I was wrapped head to foot in toilet paper. It looked like a Halloween prank, but at least they laughed at me, and that took the edge off it.”
Back in New York, Carly and James taped a duet of “Devoted to You” in a TV studio for Dick Cavett’s talk show. James played guitar and sang with his eyes closed. Carly sang while looking at James. The body language was tense, and it was not a relaxed performance. After the last verse (“Through the years our love will grow / Like a river it will flow / It can’t die because I’m so / Devoted to you”), James looked thoughtful for a moment, and then ad-libbed, “A sobering sentiment.”
Carly originally agreed to do seven shows, but then Arlyne booked a few more, until the total was about a dozen. After one of the final concerts, one played without her family in tow, something unusual happened. Carly remembered: “It was Memorial Day, I was up in Woodstock with my band, and I gave [one of the musicians] a ride back to the city because I had a limousine waiting for me.” The limo pulled into a Howard Johnson’s parking lot in the Rockland County town where the musician lived at the time, and where his wife was waiting for him. This woman exploded into a jealous rage when she saw that Carly was in the limo. “And he and his semi-estranged wife started the heaviest fight that I’ve ever seen in my life, outside of Madison Square Garden. They were just crazy. It was upsetting and fascinating and confusing and inspiring—all those things. It was an ugly scene, but I was jealous of the amount of passion between them. I was shaking, because I thought I was going to be dragged out of the limo and knocked around, too.”
In fact, Carly tried to get out of the car to calm things down, but the woman shoved her back into the limo and told her to shut up and get the hell out of there.
“It made me feel, once again, that I’m a voyeur, and a sort of spy. And I’m afraid of anger, of being angry. That if I act out my real feelings, they will overwhelm me. I’ll say something that I will regret for the rest of my life, or blow something terribly badly.”
WE’RE SO CLOSE
In the summer of 1978 both Carly and James were on the radio, with “You Belong to Me” and “Handy Man.” Carly appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a billowy dress, shot by the Japanese fashion photographer Hiro. The article dwelt on the writer’s astonishment that Carly was breast-feeding Ben (a quite large toddler at eighteen months) during the interviews. It also noted that Ben “cried uncontrollably” when the feeding stopped and Carly left the room. She was also on the cover of People, which reported that she lost $75,000 playing intimate venues on her recent tour, and that James Taylor’s hobby was carpentry and he was building an addition to the couple’s Martha’s Vineyard home.
There were new people who wanted to hang out with James on the island. Comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd rented houses that summer, and Belushi especially wanted to befriend James. The irrepressibly vulgar Chicago comic would drop by and take the kids for ice cream, or steal James to go fishing. Carly was both ambivalent and disconcerted about Belushi. He liked to physically pick up an astonished Carly and spin her on his shoulders. The second time he did this, at a beach bonfire one night, she was dismayed to remember that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
Belushi loved drugs—mostly marijuana and cocaine—and in no time James Taylor was a goner. The Saturday Night Live crowd all had JVC video cameras; by summer’s end there were videos floating around that showed James and Belushi with needles in their arms, probably injecting speedballs—an amusingly toxic cocktail of cocaine and heroin. James started to disappear for a few days at a time, going on alcoholic benders with singer Jimmy Buffet, also a visitor to the Vineyard. Carly would be distraught, fearful for James, afraid also to do anything about it. It wasn’t as if she could call the police and report James Taylor as a missing person, but with the current state of her marriage, that’s what he was.
The next few years would be difficult ones for Carly, as her husband gradually submerged himself into old habits. He was often away, touring or recording, and when he was at home, amid the haut bourgeois chintz of 135 Central Park West or the spartan, unadorned walls of the Vineyard house, he was often abstracted, sitting in the shadows, looking out the window. Carly told her best friends she was raising their children as a single mother.
After losing control of himself, when he passed out at a party, when he felt he’d made a fool of himself, James would be remorseful, and Carly’s heart would go out to him. “I don’t have any moderation,” he admitted to an inte
rviewer. “I get intoxicated. I lose control. I black out. I make mistakes when I’m too high, which—when I finally come to—I deeply regret.”
“James was an unusually guilty addict,” a member of his band said. “Most drug addicts are either too stoned, or too worried about their next fix, to feel guilty about what they were doing to themselves and the people around them. But we knew that James really suffered because of his addictions.”
Carly’s position was difficult. James liked to snort powders with his manager’s wife. What could Carly say? All these comics who wanted to hang with her husband—Belushi (and his wife), Monty Python’s Eric Idle, Richard Belzer—were into drugs. When the parties got raucous, late at night in New York, Carly would appear in her pajamas and tell James and the partiers that they were waking the children.
“James was dealing with his fame and his career while trying to figure things out,” Carly later recalled. He would say he wanted to quit, to change his ways. “And, in not knowing how to help him, I became even more helpless and foolish, and probably more of a deterrent to his stopping.” Carly increasingly found herself going through her husband’s pockets, flushing drugs, throwing away paraphernalia, checking his eyes. There were tremendous rows. Carly would throw James out of the house, or he would just flee, walking across Central Park, barefoot, and trying to check into the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue, where his manager had an account. The hotel would call Peter Asher’s office in L. A. and say that someone—disheveled, with no identification, no shoes—claiming to be James Taylor was trying to check in.
Carly: “I lived in a state of fear—for years, and also in a constant state of denial. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to know how serious it was. I just wanted to help, to do anything for him I possibly could. His needs always came before mine.
“Addiction really takes over everything, and we were in its power…. When James walked in the door, I was examining him, his expression, the size of his pupils, looking for evidence. I was nervous when he went into the bathroom. I was incredibly naïve. I thought I could actually help him. Who was I kidding?”
Eventually, James Taylor’s behavior was something that Carly became accustomed to. Aside from a couple of emergency situations, it was mostly James not feeling well, sleeping late, and the stressful hassle of delayed drug deliveries to the house. Friends who knew the couple even thought that the situation might have suited Carly, who liked to be the center of attention and related well to weaker personalities.
Carly: “So I became—very much—‘an enabler’ [then an unknown term] and then I became ‘the enemy.’ And it reminded me of how I’d been treated by some of the men in my life, especially my father. It is… so hard to break those patterns! I found James incredibly intoxicating and brilliant and funny. What was devastating was how he turned so many of those things against me. And you feel so… responsible.”
In November 1978, Carly was in Texas to perform as a guest vocalist at a gala concert given by the Houston Symphony and Burt Bacharach, one of Carly’s songwriting heroes. Channeling Dionne Warwick, most of whose hit songs were written by Bacharach, Carly sang “I Live in the Woods.” This was one of her first public ventures into the world of balladic standards, but the audience gave her an ovation at the end, and she was reassured.
The following month Carly began work on her next album. Spy would again be produced by Arif Mardin at Atlantic Studios, on Broadway, a short walk from Central Park West. She worked there through the end of the year and the first four months of 1979, composing a topical album of new songs about a failing marriage through the eyes of an angry, seriously neglected wife and mother not unlike her.
James Taylor decamped by himself for Los Angeles, where he spent that winter working on his new record, Flag. He didn’t like talking on the telephone, and rarely checked his messages, so Carly felt more alone than she had in years. She was also suffering from severe migraine headaches. When she tried to call her husband to tell him how she was feeling, the phone on the other end just rang and rang.
The Woman Scorned is a powerful trope in art and literature, and Carly now made the most of this persona. “Vengeance,” the energized rock song that begins the album and would be its first single, is a woman’s yearning to be free and vowing retribution if her yearnings are stifled. Ian McLagan, who played with the Faces and the Stones, came in to play rock-and-roll piano on the verses. John Hall put on a rock guitar solo, and the full-blast horn section was the Brecker brothers and David Sanborn. Carly wanted this track to really thunder, so Steve Gadd was joined on drums by Rick Marotta, who sometimes played with James on tour. The British actor Tim Curry sang with Carly on the choruses: “That’s vengeance—vengeance—she said—that’s the law.”
Carly later called “We’re So Close” the saddest song she ever wrote. The lyric to this bathetic piano ballad is about a lover who takes her for granted, who meets none of her needs for intimacy or even friendship. “He says: we can be close from afar / He says: the closest people always are / We’re so close that in our separation / There’s no distance at all.” Carly was now mining her difficult marriage for its most private and difficult material, with unusual candor.
“Just Like You Do” is a high-gloss Arif Mardin production with horns and orchestra that plead for a return to the “brave innocence we once knew.” Jake Brackman’s lyrics for “Never Been Gone” concern the emotional ties to Martha’s Vineyard felt by Carly and her family. “Coming to Get You” is an atypical narrative about some unexplained legal situation in an Arkansas family court, certifiably one of the strangest songs in Carly’s career. (The back story of the lyrics was Libby Titus’s struggles with Levon Helm over custody of their daughter, Amy.)
“Pure Sin” is another big dance-rock production, a verbal threat display from a woman who won’t be contained or kept down much longer. Carly wrote “Love You By Heart” with Libby Titus and Jake Brackman, and the lyrics seem aimed at a specific character: “Your habit is old / You don’t need it anymore / Go on and kiss it goodbye / ’Cause you got me.” James Taylor and Arif Mardin helped Carly with “Spy,” a four-on-the-floor disco song. And Carly wrote “Memorial Day” by herself. The song is a lovely and graphic account—in the form of musical episodes—of the tooth-and-nail fight she witnessed between her musician friend and his wife the year before: “Well, they bellowed / And they hollered / And they threw each other down.” If all the elements of this mini-opera didn’t all quite congeal, they expressed a writerly take on action and experience typical of Carly’s work in this period. Steve Gadd finishes the track with a drum solo that’s like a blow-by-blow reprise of the physical fight itself.
When James returned from California, he joined his wife in the studio and sang on “Love You By Heart,” “Never Been Gone,” “Spy,” and “Just Like You Do.” But, perhaps reflecting the somewhat diminished role James was playing in Carly’s life in those days, engineer Lew Hahn mixed James’s vocals much farther down in the track, so his voice would not be as prominent in Carly’s music as in the past.
Carly wanted Spy’s lyric sheet to carry an epigraph from the writer Anaïs Nin: “I am an international spy in the house of love.” She dedicated the album to her producer. The noirish black-and-white jacket and sleeve photographs—Carly in a slouchy secret agent’s fedora—were taken by Pam Frank, a friend from the Vineyard and New York.
The album’s release was set for June 1979. “Vengeance” was chosen over “Just Like You Do” as the first single release from Spy.
HOT TIN ROOF
By 1979 many of the survivors of the American protest movements of the sixties had coalesced around the antinuclear energy issue. Atomic power was hailed as the major energy source of the future, and the government was licensing large corporations to build new nuclear power plants, some of them in risibly dangerous locations, near major population centers, especially in the Northeast. Many local alliances had sprung up to challenge the nukes, especially in rural areas where they w
ould otherwise have been welcomed for the jobs they provided. The antinuclear activists maintained that an accident was inevitable. The government and the corporations maintained that nuclear energy was safe, period. Then, as now, nuclear energy was a controversial, contentious issue.
Later, after the accident happened in southwestern Pennsylvania, the farmers said the cows knew about it first. At dawn on March 29, 1979, dairymen found hundreds of cows lined up along fences five miles north of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station. Following no apparent signals, the cattle faced the site of the reactor hidden from view by a bend in the Susquehanna River. Later the farmers told investigators that if the cows began to bolt, they were out of there, too, no matter what the government said.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 26
