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

by Stephen Davis

  Carly’s husband joined her to sing on “Stardust,” a blatantly explicit homage to Mick Jagger, with whom said husband still suspected her of carrying on a long-term affair. Mick was a presence in this marriage from the beginning, and James was never satisfied with Carly’s profession of innocent friendship with the Rolling Stone. Mr. Taylor’s feelings about the track are unknown, but “Stardust” is pure, un-ironic hero worship, bumping and grinding along. “I told my friends that you were just a man / Real nice…/ I feel so important!” (The drummer on this and other tracks is Rick Marotta, whose rhythmic drive would be important to Carly throughout the rest of her career.)

  James also sings (with his brothers Alex and Hugh) on “Them,” a song about aliens. And he is the subject of the song “James,” an aching ballad, a fever dream that recalls long-ago romantic exaltation and especially the first night he played for Carly while she lay in the warm glow of her nighttable lamp, communicating with blue chords, soft phrasing, and improvised variations, demonstrating his genius and his worth to her. With a soft cello sending a prayerful message, the lyric beseeches, “Let the music speak for your heart…/ And bring us together once again.”

  Carly and Mike Mainieri worked the hardest on “Jesse,” Carly’s new mid-tempo rocker slated to be the album’s first single. Rick Marotta hits the drums hard, and James, his brothers, and daughter Sally, now six, sing backing vocals on a song about a woman’s ambivalent feelings for an incontinent lover who wets the bed and needs fresh sheets. (“Jesse” was widely assumed to be about Jesse Colin Young, the honey-throated rock crooner.) Carly said “Jesse” was “a song laying plain the fact that good intentions go to hell when you are crazy for someone.” By the end of the lyrics, she decides to put fresh sheets on the bed.

  The last four songs of Come Upstairs comprise a sort of chronicle of some of the rejection and difficult times Carly had been through for the past year. “In Pain” is a desolate piano ballad that devolves into operatic power chords. This is Carly as Pat Benatar (or Dory Previn), howling fury in the third verse—“I’m in pain”—a raging emotional torrent her audiences hadn’t heard from her before. “The Three of Us in the Dark” is a clever love triangle song—with a husband and a secret lover—asking who is just a guest and who has to go. Session musician Sid McGinnis played guitar in the style of Carly’s husband, adding poignancy to the song. “Take Me as I Am” is a hard-edged synth rocker, played fast, the singer’s idealized version of herself and a plea for self-acceptance. The song sequence then closes with “The Desert,” an arty, lovelorn self-portrait amid moonlit dunes and feelings of impending and certain loss.

  James was away much of that winter, 1980, absented from his family much like his father before him. He was also working on a new album in L. A. and making appearances for the liberal congressman John Anderson, who was trying an insurgent run for the president against the floundering and unelectable incumbent, Jimmy Carter. In this period, Carly was sometimes comforted by a young recording engineer who was working on Come Upstairs: There was talk that the title song was about that relationship. Around that time, she sold “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” to the makers of the painkiller Medipren, and the “Pain” jingle was as omnipresent on the radio as Carly’s ketchup commercial had been, years before.

  In April 1980, Andy Warhol, the supremo of pop art, received a call from the ABC-TV network. They were reviving Omnibus, a cultural program famous from the early days of television. The producers wanted three artists to do portraits of Carly Simon. In addition to Warhol, they had recruited Larry Rivers and Marisol, a sculptor who worked mostly in wood. According to his diary, Warhol liked Carly’s music and agreed to the portrait, but only if he got paid. The producers contacted Carly, who affirmed that she would buy the portrait if it weren’t too expensive.

  Warhol called his friend Bianca Jagger, Mick’s now ex-wife, who assured him that Mick had been with Carly while he was married to her. She said that Mick was now with the American model Jerry Hall because she always gave him a blowjob before letting him out of the house. She added that the only girlfriend of Mick’s she was ever jealous of was Carly, because she was intelligent and looked like Mick—and Bianca—and it was a look Mick really liked.

  Warhol’s diary: “They sent a limo for Carly, but when she arrived at the Factory she was too nervous to come up until we sent some wine down to the car. Then she came up and was sociable. We made her put on lipstick and then after we worked she was hungry and we sent to Brownies for health sandwiches and she loved that. I taped it all. (Brownies: $8. 30, $23. 44).” The finished silk-screen portrait of Carly, heavily rouged, duly arrived at Carly’s apartment after the show was broadcast, and it hung in her various homes until it was sold for a fortune much later, in what Carly described as “a time of need.”

  In May 1980, Carly and James patched things up and took the children to England, crossing the Atlantic on the liner Queen Elizabeth II. James wanted to show the children where some of his songs had been written in London, and he took them by his old flat on Beaufort Street, Chelsea. Carly introduced him to old flame Willie Donaldson, now a successful author and satirist. (In his diary, Willie said he thought Carly was disrespectful to James, but only when he wasn’t looking.) The family then traveled to Scotland by overnight train and toured the seacoast of Inverness. James told the children that his father had said the Taylor family originally came from around there, and that they were seafaring merchants who sailed to North Carolina and back in their own ships. Carly, James, and the kids spent a couple of happy days driving around the foggy, looming mountains and the valley glens whose landscapes were some of the most breathtaking Carly had ever seen.

  BLOOD EVERYWHERE

  In June 1980, Warner Bros. released Come Upstairs, Carly Simon’s ninth studio album. Producer Mainieri was credited with cowriting all the songs but “In Pain,” and French songwriter Jacques Brel was thanked for inspiration. British photographer Mick Rock depicted Carly jiving in au courant padded shoulders, wide lapels, and gold lamé. Mainieri had given the new songs a fashionably metallic sheen deliberately unlike the softer, piano-based, singer-songwriter soundscapes Carly’s fans were used to. As promised, the promo guys went to work. More specifically, the label hired independent promotion men—part of a loose (vaguely “connected”) association informally known as the Network—to fan out around the country with cash-stuffed envelopes and bribe radio program directors to play “Jesse,” the album’s first single. (Though this system of payola was a good deal for the indie promo men, crooked radio guys, and corporate promotion vice presidents getting kickbacks, it turned out badly for the labels that created it, ending in lost profits, lawsuits, and congressional investigations later in the decade.)

  Sure enough, “Jesse” got on the radio, reached number eleven on the charts, got a gold record for a million units sold, and stayed alive for six months. But when sales of Come Upstairs stalled and the album reached only number thirty-eight, “Jesse” was said to be a “turntable hit,” a record that got on the radio but didn’t sell. A Warner Bros. executive later told a reporter, “‘Jesse’ was legendary as one of the most expensive singles of all time, in the amount of indie promotion spent on it. I don’t know the actual number, but it was probably around $300,000. It was a top ten record, got loads of airplay, but they didn’t sell any albums. It was perceived as a hit record, but it was a stiff. It was only successful for the independent promoters. You couldn’t blame them for taking the money.”

  The reviews of Come Upstairs were indifferent. Critics who had once championed Carly as an original now complained she was trying to be trendy, and that it wasn’t working. Others said that the album was depressing, that Carly’s audience wanted good news, not bad.

  June 1980. Ben Taylor was now three years old and had been sickly all his life. He still cried a lot and ran fevers, and none of the doctors could explain why. The enormous child was still at Carly’s breast. When teased by her friends, she answered that lac
tation made both mother and son feel better. But then the boy’s fevers got worse, especially at night. In one account, James Taylor called his father in North Carolina. Ike Taylor called a friend at Columbia Presbyterian in New York, and Ben was finally seen by doctors who provided an accurate diagnosis: Ben had a dysplastic kidney, one that had developed abnormally and was leaking toxins into his body. The doctors wanted to remove the diseased kidney without delay, and Ben was rushed into what amounted to emergency surgery.

  Carly handled this situation as best she could, since James was nowhere to be found. No one knew where he was. Arlyne Rothberg rushed to the hospital and found Carly shaking uncontrollably and in tears. Soon Andrea Simon arrived and urged Carly to pull herself together and comport herself with dignity. Arlyne called James’s management, let them know that Ben was being operated on, and demanded they track James down. John Travolta tenderly comforted a distraught Carly and kept her company during the week Ben was in the hospital.

  James eventually arrived at the hospital, but he didn’t go up to see his family until Arlyne discovered him outside on the street—disheveled, glassy-eyed—sitting on a bench. Arlyne started shouting at him to go to his family, but James just sat there, ignoring Arlyne as if she didn’t exist. Eventually he made his way upstairs and was told that the operation had been a success. Carly was furious, and felt even worse when James explained his absence by saying that he’d driven his girlfriend, a dancer, to the airport and hadn’t known about the surgery. He was also playing benefits for politician John Anderson. When Ben woke up he had a fit because he couldn’t find his penis, which had been taped to his body during surgery. James immediately dropped his trousers, tucked his penis into his legs, and told Ben he couldn’t find his, either. Ben Taylor thought this was pretty funny and stopped crying.

  Carly wanted to forgive James for his behavior, but she was so angry with him that her heart wasn’t in it. When James was in residence in Apartment 6S, neighbors in the old, thick-walled building could sometimes hear the shouting. Carly wanted to hurt James so badly, really wound him, that during one battle she told him that his decade of suspecting that she had had an affair with Mick Jagger had been right all along. She regretted this almost immediately, tried later to take it back, to say it wasn’t true, but the body blow had landed accurately.

  One night in this period Carly and James had a fight and he stormed out of the house. Arriving at Trax, a popular Midtown musicians’ hangout, he announced to his pals, “Jezebel done kicked me out, so I’m up for grabs.” As for Carly’s relationship with John Travolta, she told People magazine later that year, “John has an almost magical way of knowing when I am in need. When James couldn’t be there, John came to me during that week Ben was in the hospital. [John] is sensitive, loving and very immediately there.”

  But when things calmed down, Carly and James stayed married for the sake of the children, although the couple was separated in all but name. Carly was privately mortified that their public image was a sham. Her once-tight bond with her husband was coming unglued, and she felt her father’s abandonment returning in spades. She already realized that patching up the marriage was not going to work.

  In October, Carly was on the cover of People. “We were both really traumatized,” she was quoted regarding Ben’s surgery. “I tend to get hysterical, while James is clinical and then tries to escape.” After showing the reporter around the Vineyard property, as usual a bustling construction site, she allowed, “James and I have built a fairy tale house, but we don’t live fairy tale lives. We were both programmed into conventional male-female roles, and we are always struggling with those. I just wish that he would do as much fathering as I do mothering.” Carly’s friend Libby Titus was even more revealing about the troubled marriage. “Their ship has sprung some leaks,” she said, “and now they’re deciding whether to patch things up or abandon ship and take to the lifeboats. The anger and frustration are just beginning to come out.”

  As for James Taylor, he was in L. A. making his next album with Peter Asher from September 1980 through January 1981. When production was finished, he didn’t come home.

  When she signed with her new label, Carly had reluctantly agreed to go on tour to promote Come Upstairs. This was supposed to happen during the summer, but Ben’s recuperation pushed the fourteen-city tour into the autumn. The band comprised many of the musicians who worked on Come Upstairs, and the tour played mostly theaters. Carly was depressed, had lost twenty pounds during Ben’s illness, and her nerves were shattered by the progressive unraveling of her marriage, but she tried her best to pull the tour off because people were depending on her and she’d said she would do it. Lucy Simon came on the tour to help her sister, and somehow Carly got through eight concerts in late October before arriving in Pittsburgh, where—like Three Mile Island—her cooling systems failed and she suffered a partial core meltdown.

  She later described the first of two scheduled Pittsburgh concerts as the bottom of her performing career. The opening numbers went well, but then her legs wobbled and she was having trouble staying upright. Then she lost her breath and couldn’t catch it. Her breathing slowed and she felt a strong series of chest palpitations. She suddenly began to menstruate prematurely, a condition related to stress. “I couldn’t get the words out,” she recalled. “I seemed to go to pieces in front of the audience. There was blood everywhere.”

  Desperate to avoid panic, Carly pondered her options. She could either cancel the concert or tell the audience the truth. She stopped the show and stammered that she was suffering from acute anxiety. Fans were shouting they were with her all the way and to keep going. She felt a little better and tried another song, but then another wave of palpitations overwhelmed her. She told the audience that she might feel better if people came onstage, and several dozen fans joined her, incredibly supportive, rubbing her back, legs and shoulders, telling her to take her time. People in the balcony were yelling encouragement, an extraordinary scene. With this support she (barely) finished the first show and staggered into the dressing room in a state of emotional collapse. Lucy Simon, appalled at what had happened to Carly, took her by the hand and said, “Carly, you don’t need to do this anymore. There’s no real reason why you have to put yourself through this—ever again.” The second Pittsburgh show and the rest of the Come Upstairs tour was canceled, and Carly returned home a broken and humiliated woman in her mid-thirties, convinced beyond hope that her career was in acute jeopardy. Her doctor weighed her at 114 pounds and checked her into a Manhattan clinic, where she was fed and hydrated intravenously. She started seeing a psychiatrist again. The tour promoters sued her for canceling the final shows.

  “Each person breaks down in different ways,” Carly later remarked. “You could call what I had a breakdown, sure. In retrospect, it was foolish to do that tour. So, I decided that at this time of my life, when things were so difficult for me in other ways, I shouldn’t aggravate my nervous system anymore by performing onstage.” The Pittsburgh show would be her last for more than ten years.

  Late in 1980, both Carly and James worked on In Harmony, an album of mostly original children’s songs that Lucy Simon produced for the TV program Sesame Street. Carly sang, poignantly, on her own “Be with Me.” James and daughter Sally contributed a very funny “Jelly Man Kelly.” Lucy Simon, Kate, and Livingston Taylor all contributed, as did Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Libby Titus, and Dr. John. The Doobie Brothers even covered “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.” In Harmony was released in 1981 and was hugely successful, winning a Grammy Award the following year.

  On December 8, John Lennon was murdered in front of his apartment building by a deranged fan. Many neighbors on Central Park West (including Carly Simon) thought they heard the shots as they were fired into Lennon at 11:00 P. M. For Carly, it was the final blow of another extremely trying year. “It was the end of an era,” she sadly remembered—ten years later. “We said goodbye to Ben’s kidney, to our marriage, to hit singles. Then we mo
ved on.”

  FOREVER LOCKED INSIDE

  In 1981, Carly Simon and James Taylor both released albums that described in varying ways the final year of their marriage. James’s came out first, in March. The album’s title, Dad Loves His Work, was perhaps an ironic explanation to his children of why he was rarely around. The eleven songs were full of (seemingly) sincere heartache and recrimination, and many longtime Taylor fans think that Dad is his saddest, and hence (for them) most beautiful album. “Hard Times” tells of an angry man and a hungry woman in a last-ditch plea for stability and acceptance. “Her Town Too” (written and sung with sexy Texan troubadour J. D. Souther) describes a phobic woman, afraid of her own shadow, someone given to backbiting and gossip “on the grapevine.” “She gets the house and the garden / He gets the boys in the band” was a lyric that accurately described the settlement Carly sought in an (unannounced) formal separation. James would later on swear that “Her Town Too” was about Peter and Betsy Asher, but few believed him, considering the ardent fervor of the song’s cherishing last words. “Somebody loves you… Somebody loves you.”

  It went on from there. “Hour That the Morning Comes” is another vignette of the stilted family life James had been living in: he’s “kacked” (junkie slang) on the sly; she’s in denial that he’s stoned. This puts him into despair. “I Will Follow” wants forgiveness for unforgivable transgressions. There are moody chanteys written with Jimmy Buffett and the nostalgic “London Town,” about a younger man busking in tube stations, a seeker full of hope. The album ends with “That Lonesome Road,” in which the singer expresses deep remorse for the way he has, for some inexorable reason unknown to himself, behaved. Dad Loves His Work was a farewell not only to his marriage, but also to his recording career, as Dad’s work was now done, and amazingly, this prolific songwriter wouldn’t make another record for almost five years.