And this wasn’t easy for Carly, because while she was making this album her husband filed for divorce. She was half expecting this, but it came as a shuddering shock to her anyway.
Carly hadn’t wanted a divorce. In mid-1983 she heard that James had gotten off drugs, and she tried several times to get him to come back home. “I beat my head against the wall and begged him to reconsider. ‘Please! We’re affecting the children’s lives here.’” But James stopped returning her calls, wouldn’t even allow the children to pass her the phone after he had spoken to them. So she called her attorney, and the dismal legal proceedings began. She got the (Vineyard) house and the garden. He got the boys in the band. Meanwhile, to maintain a familial presence on Martha’s Vineyard, James bought some prime (and very private) pastureland on the east shore of Menemsha Pond, in the town of Chilmark, and commissioned a modest, U-shaped house with a mooring and boathouse on the beach, and a long view of the spectacular island sunsets. Eventually he married Kathryn Walker, and lived with her, until their 1996 divorce, near William Styron’s family in rural Connecticut, visiting his magical Martha’s Vineyard house only rarely.
Talking later about her divorce, Carly blamed Kathryn Walker for orchestrating it. Carly was bitter on the subject, according to her friends. James Taylor’s style was too passive-aggressive for him to have actively pursued a legal divorce. But Walker was tough and determined. She had survived the death of her lover Doug Kinney, one of the founders of the National Lampoon comedy empire, who had perished at thirty-two when the cliff he was standing on collapsed in Hawaii a few years earlier. Walker was also sober, and experienced in drug counseling as a member of Al-Anon. James Taylor, it stood to reason in that context, had to jettison his past in order to build his future. “She was fierce,” Carly was later quoted, “a fierce woman, who wanted James at all costs. She knew exactly what she wanted.”
For Carly, the idea of this clever actress succeeding where she had failed was galling. The quasi-popular notion that there was something in the dynamic of their nine-year marriage that made it impossible for James to clean up was an open wound for Carly. Jake Brackman later noted the murderous irony at work. “Carly was trying to [help James] the entire time she was with him. Then Kathryn comes in and—boom!—he’s Mr. Twelve Step. What a hard thing for her to bear, whether it was the fault of their dynamic or not.”
Eventually Carly accepted that James Taylor’s recovery was a blessing for everyone. “The way it happened was one of those annoying things that life coughs up,” she said, sighing. “But it had such a wonderful outcome, so I don’t kick myself about it.”
On the day in late summer 1983 that the divorce was granted, Carly slipped into the downtown Manhattan courtroom and sat behind James and Kathryn. It was the final minutes of their famous marriage, and Carly was deeply moved. “He was sitting in front of me, and I have a picture of his ankle that will stay with me forever… the way his ankle bone turned and where his pant leg stopped, and his sandal.” Her son, Ben, now six, waiting for her at home, had the exact same ankle. “That image—it still stays with me.”
When Hello Big Man came out in September, Carly did another round of interviews. Reporters noted the peach-colored walls of massive apartment 6S, with the killer view of New York’s Central Park; the showy floral displays; the Jane Fonda exercise videos that Carly said she watched but didn’t bother exercising to. She told interviewers that she was on a spiritual path whose end she could not foresee. She said that the song “Floundering” was an accurate description of her current status. And she was often asked about the end of her marriage. She wasn’t shy about letting her fans know that she was still carrying a blazing torch for her former husband. In spite of everything, Carly said, “If James walked into a room, just a look in his eye… his smell… the sound of his voice… could get me going all over again.”
A SOURCE OF PAIN AND GUILT
Hello Big Man came out in September 1983 and maintained Carly’s position in what one critic called “80s pop oblivion.” The pink-colored album jacket has a pretty black-and-white portrait of Carly by Lynn Kohlman. Peter Simon portrayed the session musicians on the inner sleeve. The back cover is a photo of Carly’s beaming young parents and their dog on the balcony of the apartment building they used to own.
Then Carly’s hopes were dashed. The first single “You Know What to Do” got minimum airplay and stalled at number thirty-six on the adult contemporary chart. The album reached number sixty-nine. The video for “You Know What to Do,” featuring Carly tumbling around the woods of her house, did not make it onto MTV. A second video was made for “Hello Big Man,” based on the many hours of her father’s 8-and 16-millimeter home movies, which Carly had inherited, but the second single was not released, and the video wasn’t seen for decades. Carly appeared on David Letterman’s late night TV show, but it didn’t help sell her record. Warner Bros. would not be renewing her recording contract.
In this period Carly appeared as a guest on albums by Jesse Colin Young and Nils Lofgren. She also provided a blistering vocal on “Kissing with Confidence,” a track on a New Age album by Will Powers, an alias of photographer Lynn Goldsmith.
By then her romance with Al Corley was cooling off, and she was feeling lonely. Then her manager quit, another blow. Arlyne Rothberg moved to Los Angeles to manage Roseanne Barr’s TV career. After a period of uncertainty, Carly signed a new management deal with talent managers Champion Entertainment. (This had been suggested to her by a close friend, MTV mogul John Sykes.) Other Champion clients included Diana Ross, John Mellencamp, and Hall and Oates. Champion’s president, Tommy Mottola, was a consummate industry insider, expensively tailored, with just the right whiff of intimidating Italian connectedness. (Mottola later ran Sony Music and famously discovered singer Mariah Carey at a cocktail party.) In the late winter of 1983, Mottola and his lawyer Alan Grubman signed Carly to a one-record deal with Epic Records, a CBS subsidiary. Carly spent much of the rest of 1984 working on the album that would be called Spoiled Girl.
Carly had many collaborators on those sessions, which took place at three different New York studios, mostly in 1984, including Electric Lady and the Hit Factory on West Fifty-fourth Street. Nine different producers were involved in twelve new songs. The only constants in this scattered production were engineer Frank Filipetti (whose work on Hello Big Man had appealed to Carly) and the avuncular Epic executive Lennie Petze, who helped her navigate through this confusing period. Carly recalled: “For Spoiled Girl, Tommy Mottola et al. decided that I should work with some of the [famous producers] of the day, so I was partnered with the least likely bunch of characters you could ever imagine, and—only this time—I didn’t say anything. You could say it was a character flaw on my part. I let them lead me on. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I didn’t say anything, just did what they wanted. In spite of this there were a few good tracks: maybe two. One of them was ‘My New Boyfriend,’ which got me back together with [Anticipation producer and old flame] Paul Samwell-Smith.” This song, written by Carly, was produced by Samwell-Smith as eighties power pop, complete with sequencers and drum machines, making Carly sound something like Grace Jones channeling Duran Duran. Then there was a (Brian) Wilsonian harmonic choir in the song’s bridge, consisting of Carly, her sister Lucy, Samwell-Smith, and Andy Goldmark (who had been involved in Lucy Simon’s 1977 album).
Another new song, “Come Back Home,” was produced by Don Was, of the commercially successful pop group Was (Not Was). A mid-tempo rocker credited to Carly, Jake, and three others, the song contains lyrics that plead for reconciliation: “Now it’s December, cold and dark / No more rainbows over Central Park / In this house no window has a view / There’s no love here without you.” The pleading “Come back home to me” chorus sounded so much like the Doobie Brothers that radio people expected a vocal from Michael McDonald, not Carly Simon.
Carly also cut a pair of tracks with Phil Ramone, a legendary engineer who worked with Simon and Garfunkel, Pho
ebe Snow, and almost an entire generation of New York artists. “Tonight and Forever” is a quiet ballad, with Russ Kunkel on drums, that Carly sings with a husky tenderness. More upbeat is “The Wives Are in Connecticut,” a topical narrative of bourgeois adultery. The husband is having an affair at the office downtown, but the suburban wife is fucking the entire state of Connecticut behind his back. There’s a funny list of the towns the wife is swinging in: Mystic, New Canaan, Fairfield, etc.
Russ Kunkel cowrote, played on, and produced “Spoiled Girl,” Carly’s song about a woman who has too much, and thinks only of herself. It’s one of the harder rocking tracks, brimming with staccato sequencer and synths. On the album named for it, “Spoiled Girl” would be followed by “Tired of Being Blonde,” the inverse of the spoiled girl’s situation, in which a newly self-liberated suburban wife leaves the credit cards and the keys to the Porsche and a good-bye note and, tired of being blond, flees a loveless existence dominated by her caddish husband. “Blonde”—a terrific, radio-friendly pop song—was written by Memphis songwriter Larry Raspberry and produced by guitarist G. E. Smith and bassist Tom Wolk, two stalwarts of the Saturday Night Live house band.
British producer Arthur Baker, most famous for his work with Queen, supervised two tracks. With Carly he cowrote “Anyone but Me,” which summed up many of Carly’s romantic obsessions and featured Carly Simon Band veteran Jimmy Ryan on guitar. Baker also produced the humorous “Interview” to a Cyndi Lauper rhythm, in which Carly turns the table and seduces her interviewer, even seemingly offering an invitation to outright oral sex. (Carly wrote “Interview” with Don Was, with whom she was close at the time. He was going through a difficult divorce, and Carly was able to console him and also helped him find a new apartment, on Riverside Drive in New York.)
Two songs produced by Andy Goldmark round out Spoiled Girl. “Make Me Feel Something” describes romantic numbness after the fading of love’s first freshness. And “Can’t Give Up” is Carly’s final affirmation and celebration of love’s inexorable hold over her, and her inability to stand up to the tyranny of constant desire. A third Goldmark track, “Black Honeymoon”—more jealousy and deception—didn’t make it onto the album. Carly had written it with Jake and Libby on the Vineyard in the seventies. Goldmark put a new chorus on it, but the somber, marvelously jaded song wasn’t released until Spoiled Girl was released on compact disc late in the twentieth century.
Summer 1984. Carly recorded “Someone Waits for You” by Peter Allen and Wilbur Jennings, for the movie Swing Shift. She was also making videos. The clip for “My New Boyfriend,” directed by Jeff Stein and Kathy Dougherty, was shot with a crew of locals and Taylor family as extras on what was supposed to be Cleopatra’s barge, temporarily moored in Menemsha Pond. Carly shimmied all night for the camera like an Egyptian queen, while Alex Taylor was boiled alive in a cannibal stewpot. And then, fatefully, Carly hired Jeremy Irons to direct the video for “Tired of Being Blonde.”
She had a longtime crush on the handsome English actor, dating from his role as Charles Ryder in the 1981 British TV miniseries Brideshead Revisited. Irons was now a full-fledged movie star, tall and ultracool, with a voice that made everyday conversation sound like poetry. His most recent role had been the adulterous friend and lover in the harrowing film of Harold Pinter’s, Betrayal. He came to the Vineyard that summer with his wife, actress Sinéad Cusak, and their young son, Max. They stayed with Carly for weeks, enjoying the island’s windblown beaches and being treated like royalty by Carly and her staff. Carly and Irons worked on the video’s treatment, the idea being that they would make the film when Irons returned to the Vineyard later on.
Carly later wrote, “I was so close to him that summer we made a video together. I found him to be a sweet and funny man. Jeremy and I did have a ‘special’ and dramatically fun time when he came back in September. He stayed in the Menemsha house. I think it was the first time I really ‘did’ cocaine. Jeremy was a fiercely caring person. I won’t deny that he got me pregnant.”
When Carly returned to New York as Sally and Ben started school, Irons followed her. Peter Simon: “My wife Ronni and I were living in New York then, and so we hung around a lot with Carly and Jeremy. They were a great couple, very loving with each other while we were around them. He was a good man, obviously very charming, and obviously reminded her of Willie Donaldson. I think he said his marriage was pretty much over. Carly told us she was very fond of him.”
After Jeremy Irons returned to London, Carly discovered she was pregnant. Whether or not she told Jeremy Irons is unknown, but she did consider having his child. Her doctors and everyone else didn’t think it was a good idea, and she underwent an abortion. Eventually Irons broke up with his wife, and everyone moved on in their brilliant careers. Carly: “And however many other children he went on to sire and spend Father’s Day with, I am not surprised and I wish them well. It [the abortion] is still a terrible source of pain and guilt for me.”
COMING AROUND AGAIN
With nine credited producers, it took a long time for Epic to roll out Spoiled Girl, but Carly’s fourteenth album finally emerged in September 1985. For the cover, Carly posed for New York photographer Duane Michals as the blasé spoiled girl in fashionably basic black. As a mid-career rethink, the album was a disaster. The first single, “Tired of Being Blonde,” stalled at number seventy, but Jeremy Irons’s video, with its cross cutting and parallel storylines, got into MTV’s rotation and proved more popular than either the song or the album, which reached only number eighty-eight. Carly later wrote, “I had had records that didn’t perform in the past, but Spoiled Girl really didn’t perform. It was my first ‘bona fide’ flop—because not only did it not do well, but also because I didn’t like it. If you make a record that’s true to yourself, and you love the work, it can’t be a flop. It can only sell poorly.”
Around this time, Carly became romantically involved with Russ Kunkel. It happened one evening when her phone rang on Central Park West. Al Corley was calling from the nearby restaurant he had opened with some partners. Carly: “He said I’d never guess who just came in. It was James and Kathryn, and they were with Russ Kunkel. I told Al not to say anything and that I would shortly make an appearance, just to see what might happen.” This situation was also intriguing to Carly because James and his star drummer had parted ways after James admitted to Russ that he’d had an affair with Russ’s wife, Leah, when they were recording “Handy Man,” which Leah sang on. Russ was angry at this betrayal and stopped playing with James, his place often taken by Rick Marotta.
Carly swanned into the restaurant, pretended to be surprised, and was pointedly not invited to join the diners, even though the fourth chair was empty. So she stood there and chatted up Russ. Kathryn was glaring daggers at her. James looked down at his supper, smoke pouring out of his ears. (He had recently asked, through management channels, that Carly stop talking about their marriage in interviews.) Just as Kunkel worried that the scene was getting too uncomfortable, Carly gave him her phone number and invited him to call her if he was in town for a while. As she began to walk away, Kathryn reached over to comfort an upset James, but her angora sweater accidentally brushed the table candle and caught fire. There was a flurry, and water was sprayed. Carly dined out on this for months.
Russ Kunkel called Carly, and she invited him to lunch. He told her she looked great, and she was attracted to him: a tall, balding, talented, and relaxed guy. He went back to L. A., rented out his house, flew to New York, and moved in with Carly and the children. By the end of 1985, Carly and Russ had announced their engagement. And that December, James married Kathryn Walker.
The problem was that the dinner Carly had crashed was about Russ rejoining James’s band. Now there was major awkwardness, because James didn’t want Carly at his concerts, either out front or backstage. Carly told an interviewer: “I fell in love with Russ and he with me. But he was working with James and I wasn’t allowed to go to the shows. I didn’t get i
nvolved with Russ to get closer to James, as some accused me of doing—talking behind my back of course. For me it was very difficult.”
After some time had passed, Carly and Russ decided to see what would happen if Carly came to a show. One night they walked through the stage door hand in hand. When James found out she was there, he freaked. No one could recall seeing James Taylor that angry before. After the show, Peter Asher had to take the drummer aside for a quiet word. Maybe, James’s longtime manager advised, being engaged to his boss’s ex-wife was not the greatest idea in the world. “It made my boss feel uncomfortable,” Kunkel recalled, long after Carly canceled their engagement the following year. (Another night, Kathryn Walker had Carly thrown out of Radio City Music Hall, where James had announced his marriage to Carly in 1972.)
But in the period she was with Russ, Carly was relatively happy and also wrote and performed some of her best music in years. Russ may have been an uncomplicated guy, but he was kind to her, always available, extremely encouraging, and not competitive at all. “He was loving and very guiding, which is something I really needed at the time, especially in my work. I can honestly say that he was more important than anyone else in my musical education. He taught me to be self-taught. He was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience, and he was definitely not in competition with me at all.”
Russ would also prove an invaluable helper when, in mid-1985, Mike Nichols asked Carly to write the music for Heartburn, a new film he was directing starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 30
