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

by Stephen Davis

  Carly had known Nichols since the days of the Simon Sisters. The comedy duo of Nichols and (Elaine) May was one of the funniest acts in cabaret, and then Nichols had branched out into making big-budget movies for Hollywood producers. He and his wife, television personality Diane Sawyer, were Carly’s neighbors both in New York and Martha’s Vineyard, which gave Carly an extra comfort zone with this commission. Nichols wanted a great theme from Carly, as he privately thought the script was a little weak. Heartburn was originally a roman à clef by Nora Ephron—another Upper West Side neighbor—loosely based on her failed marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Nichols told Carly the script was a little depressing, and didn’t end happily. The music had to offer some hope, an idea of redemption, and the chance that love could be reborn. Carly was thrilled by the challenge from one of the best theatrical minds in America and was determined to succeed.

  Carly: “‘Coming Around Again’ was the fulfillment of what the spider began. I had a nice piano part; it was rhythmic and unusual for spiders. I began singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider,’ which was the song I wanted to use over the end credits of Heartburn. It sounded catchy enough for me to see what else would fit over the chord progression. I thought a bookend like that would be nice for this particular movie and of course less work for me! I quizzed Nora Ephron about what Meryl’s character was feeling at different points in the plot. She gave me lots of images, some of which I used or adapted, such as ‘burn the soufflé.’

  “Then Mike Nichols and I had a huddle over what the chorus should emotionally impart. I said, ‘How do you hear the chorus as speaking? What message? What’s the “thing,”—what word?’

  “‘Again,’ he said, ‘Again.’ Then Mike said: ‘Around, Around… you know, Around.’ And I said, ‘You mean, around again?’ And he said ‘Yes, that’s it.’ Then somewhere the word ‘coming’ was put in front of the phrase and the song started to become whole.

  “Meanwhile, the spider has never been lost. Both songs [“Coming Around Again” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider”]—if you want to disconnect them—are from the myth of Sisyphus. The little chap spider is climbing up the water spout, only to be dunked down again by the rain, while the poor wife in the movie is trying and trying and trying to push this big rock called ‘Marriage’ up the hill, and they are constantly faltering and the rock is slipping back. But: it’s only if you’re willing to play the game, that it will be coming around again.”

  “Coming Around Again” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” were recorded by Carly in New York in late 1985. Russ Kunkel was crucial in musical supervision and all aspects of production. Carly: “Russ helped me so much. He set up machines in my living room and made me play bass parts I didn’t know how to play. He was a major force, someone who helped me develop some measure of self-confidence. He never got enough credit as far as I was concerned.”

  In all, four producers were credited. The sessions were held at Right Track and the Power Station. (Russ and Bill Payne also contributed to the film’s score.) “Coming Around Again” emerged as a majestic restatement of the hope and belief in the power of love. When Clive Davis, the president of Arista Records, who once had thrown a Carly Simon demo tape across his office, heard “Coming Around Again,” he signed Carly to a record deal that resulted in a decade-long creative flowering that completely revitalized her career.

  When Meryl Streep and Nora Ephron heard “Coming Around Again” for the first time, they both wept. Carly’s song was more than perfect. Every woman knew that there was more room in a broken heart for memories, dreams, reflections.

  Heartburn was shot in New York and Washington that winter. Jack Nicholson was caddish and cool. Libby Titus had a part. So did Kevin Spacey, Milos Forman, and chanteuse Karen Akers (and John Lennon’s old girlfriend May Pang). Released late in 1986, Heartburn was a commercial success but a critical bomb, a film too angry and distraught to be a comedy. Carly Simon’s anthemic songs, evangelizing for the sake of love, were the only rays of hope in a bleak tale of adultery, betrayal, and gamely trying to move on.

  THE SEDUCTION OF CARLY SIMON

  In early 1986, Carly consulted longtime friend Karen Thorne, who worked as an astrologer and spiritual adviser. A chart was drawn up, oracles consulted, cards read. Karen predicted that in the coming dispensation of time, Carly would have enormous professional success; her next single would be a big hit; and also that she would marry a tall man with a very high forehead. Carly took heart from these predictions. She probably already knew that the tall man she would take as a husband would not be Russ Kunkel.

  Then, in late January 1985, something awful happened. A schoolteacher called Christa McAuliffe was a passenger on the space shuttle Challenger. She was to become the first teacher in space. Millions of children would watch the launch on television. She was also an avid Carly Simon fan and had announced she was carrying Carly’s cassettes with her into orbit. Carly was watching at home when Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds into the flight. All seven astronauts perished, and national trauma ensued.

  But Carly plunged into her work. She had to write an album for Clive Davis now, and was out of practice. She hadn’t much liked her last two albums. But now she looked around her world and family for inspiration, and ended up with one of the most successful songbooks of her career.

  Summer 1986. Caroline Kennedy, only daughter of the late president, married Edwin Schlossberg, a museum consultant, on Cape Cod. Carly entertained the wedding guests that evening at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport. This is where Carly became close to the bride’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then twice widowed and the owner of the most spectacular beachfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Carly hit it off with Jackie immediately, and soon Mrs. Onassis was calling with lunch invitations, ostensibly to discuss possible book projects, since Jackie was by then a hardworking editor at Doubleday, the old New York publishing house.

  One day that summer, Carly had an epiphany at the Vineyard house. She was going through compartments in the guitar closet when she found “a little assemblage” of James Taylor’s stuff: a guitar string, some twine, some burnt-out matches, wire-rimmed glasses with a lens missing, and a crumpled Polaroid snapshot of Carly. She shuddered to remember that he had been gone from the house for five years, and yet he was so much in evidence: His fishing rod still hung above the sliding doors in the living room. The Plexiglas panels he’d nailed into the windows still kept out the winter chill. They also turned the room into a summer inferno, but Carly had never wanted to change anything because it was the last remaining part of the house James had built before she knew him.

  Later Carly sat down and wrote an epistolary memoir about finding traces of her husband. The stuff she had found were the contents of pockets that got too full. James used to empty his pockets almost at random, anywhere in the house. These collections would turn up on top of the fridge, under a bed, or spill on a window ledge. Their contents now seemed to describe to Carly the pain her husband must have been in. “What I once saw as a sort of hectic masculine jubilee,” she wrote, “I now see as something terribly poignant.”

  The house, Carly wrote, was a perfect metaphor for their marriage. Everyone who visited the house thought it uniquely beautiful, like a Russian church or a Bavarian castle. “Only you and I know it was a folly…. We were like two maniacs posted at the gates of domesticity, feverishly going about preventing anything really comfortable from happening…. Still I go on living in this flamboyant white elephant, and I am constantly reminded of my whole other life.”

  By the end of the memoir, Carly decides to take stock. She remembered how she tried to move into a new bedroom after James had gone. She renovated the children’s old playroom, above the living room, and furnished it with a lilac carpet, chintzes in floral patterns, stained-glass portraits of Ben and Sally, antique lamps, and a brass bed. She hated it, and moved back into the marital bedroom.

  “But I have to try again,” she wrote. This time it had to be the living
room that got a rethink. So the old blue guitar would go into the basement, along with the joke crèche, and the cowbells James brought home from Greece, and the broken lantern from the ’76 hurricane. Same with the Plexiglas windows and his surf-casting rod. “I am sorry,” she wrote. “I won’t throw anything away; there’s lots of room in the basement still, but there will be no inventory. No need. I’ll quite easily be able to remember everything.”

  Carly’s untitled memoir was known to close friends by its first line: “I used to have a whole other life.” Later in the year, she sent the text to Jacqueline Onassis at Doubleday. Jackie called her immediately and asked her to expand the memoir into a book proposal and a sample chapter, but by then Carly and a phalanx of musicians and producers were furiously writing her first album for Arista Records. The idea of a written memoir was put aside, and Carly disappeared into New York studios for the next six months.

  In early 1987, Clive Davis was at the top of his game. After being dismissed as head of CBS Records for financial malfeasance, he had founded Arista Records in 1974 with backing from Columbia Pictures. His biggest coup to date was transforming the stunning model Whitney Houston into one of the biggest pop stars of the day, someone who could stand onstage with Michael Jackson and hold her own. Melissa Manchester, a big-voiced belter, was another of Clive’s successes. Arista also nurtured the careers of female talent such as Carly’s heroine Martha Reeves and Diana Ross. Clive Davis was very hands-on: he chose songs, hired and fired producers, listened to every track, every remix. Now, after hearing some of the new songs Carly was bringing to the studio—“Give Me All Night,” “All I Want Is You”—Davis ordered the schedule sped up. He wanted the new album out in the spring of 1987. As executive producer, Clive Davis now oversaw the work of nine different producers as Carly shuttled between Manhattan studios during the winter of that year.

  Carly and those close to her realized that the quality of her music had matured into something more sophisticated, and more deeply loving, and this was reflected in the hectic recording sessions for the album that would be called Coming Around Again. Paul Samwell-Smith flew in from London and helped Carly and Russ remix “Coming Around Again,” which would open the album and be the crucial first single. Samwell-Smith also worked on “Give Me All Night,” a jaunty rock song demanding night-long lust; “Do The Walls Come Down,” a plea for access to a former lover, sonically burdened with useless eighties synthesizers (Track keyboard emulator, Linn drums, Steiner electronic wind instrument, etc.); and “Two Hot Girls (On a Hot Summer Night).”

  Carly: “The previous summer [1986] my friend Jenny and I got dressed to the nines and went into Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard to see and be seen. (‘More for a drink and to have a few eyes on us.’) During the evening we were joined by a friend of mine who started hitting on Jenny so ardently that I felt invisible. I immediately began resenting a great friend with whom there’d been no previous evidence of rivalry.” After a few days, Carly started singing “Me and Jenny, twinkling like crystal and pennies.” She told the story of the evening in four simple verses (ABAB) with a bridge before the last chorus. “It’s my narrative story form, one I’m very attracted to, like the ballads I used to sing, where the final chorus has a kind of irony, meaning something quite different when all the facts are on the table.” Michael Brecker played a jazzy sax solo on the track, and Lucy Simon joined her sister to sing harmony on the song’s delicate choruses.

  “All I Want Is You” was written by Andy Goldmark, with lyrics by Carly and Jake Brackman. “So chase me ’round the room / Make me crazy like the moon.” “That song is Stanley Kowalski territory,” Carly says, referring to the iconic brutish hunk in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, famously played onstage and on-screen by the young Marlon Brando in a wife-beater. “It is about flaming love and the lovely screams and passion that is so thrilling to me. The screams used to be misinterpreted by well-meaning neighbors who may in fact still call the police during the climax of the scene. Anyway, Andy Goldmark wrote the chord changes. Jacob [Brackman] collaborated with me on the words.” The track was expertly produced by the New York musician John Boylan and featured the soul singer Roberta Flack. Boylan also coproduced (with Russ and engineer Frank Filipetti) “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” another much-anthologized fan favorite. The song was an unflinching hymn to the ideals of marriage and fidelity, an affirmation of marriage addressed to a friend who was bored with her husband. Carly: “‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’ was written for a friend of mine who was about to leave an absolutely unhysterical marriage for the temporary relief of passion. She was my wondrously talented assistant at the time. Her husband found her love letters (as is the custom) and she was ‘outed.’ I was trying to reveal that she had to be partially responsible for setting the stars off in her own backyard and making the prince on the horse in the fairy tale the man she was about to become pregnant by: her husband. Of course, I rarely believe in my own best ideas, so I had to come up with some pretty nice key changes, going into the bridge.” The result was some of the most heartfelt singing of Carly’s career, with a stirring gospel feel at the song’s climax supplied by the Reverend Timothy Wright Concert Choir.

  Other tracks included a version of Joe Tex’s “Hold What You’ve Got,” produced by Richard Perry and arranged by Leon Pendarvis, with additional words and music by Carly. Clive Davis insisted Carly record “It Should Have Been Me,” by Canadian rocker Bryan Adams and song doctor Jim Vallance. Adams produced a generic track for Carly, and reportedly had her in tears in the studio because he kept insisting she sing like the guy in Journey. The album was filled out with the torchy “You Have to Hurt” and Herman Hupfeld’s 1931 “As Time Goes By,” immortalized in the film Casablanca. This chestnut was produced by Ron Mounsey, a talented musician and arranger who worked on many of the album’s tracks, and then began to play an increasingly crucial role in Carly’s music. The album, like Heartburn, would conclude with the spider, still trying to get up the water spout. The kids’ chorus included Sally and Ben Taylor and their cousins Alexandra and Isaac, children of James’s brother Hugh.

  When the new album was finished, so were Carly and Russ Kunkel. The engagement was called off. Nobody had really expected her to marry him anyway. There was a major cultural gap between the songwriter and her handsome drummer. Leah Kunkel later said that, with Carly Simon, her ex-husband was in over his head. Carly’s publicist issued a statement.

  Also, Carly had recently met someone else.

  She’d taken the Metro North train that ran up the east bank of the Hudson River to work on lyrics with Jake, who lived upstate. He was married to a charismatic musician, Mindy Jostyn; they had a couple of kids, and Carly felt comfortable there. Carly and Jake worked on lyrics, and on Sunday evening Jake drove her to the train station. Also waiting for the train to Manhattan was a friend of Jake’s, a thirty-seven-year-old insurance salesman and aspiring poet (shades of Wallace Stevens) named Jim Hart. When the train pulled into the station, Carly and Jake said their good-byes and Carly boarded the train. Jim Hart was intrigued. (He later claimed that he hadn’t known who Carly was, explaining that he wasn’t a music fan. Another time, he said he thought she might have been Linda Ronstadt.) A few minutes later, Hart found Carly seated in the train reading a book. He asked if he could join her, and began chatting away.

  She checked him out. He was tall, balding, quite good-looking. He was a brilliant conversationalist, with a self-deprecating Irish gift of gab. He had an ex-wife and a severely disabled child, whom he had been visiting when they were introduced. He’d studied to be a Catholic priest. He was a recovering alcoholic. His father had been some kind of gangster. He wanted to write. She took to him immediately. So did her mother, who flirted with him outrageously. Jake Brackman told Carly that Jim Hart was a good guy. Carly told her astrologer that sex with Jim was better than good. He was tall, balding, and also named James. Years later, Hart remembered that fateful journey by train: “I s
educed Carly Simon. Pretty cool, eh?”

  DREAMERS WAKE THE NATION

  Arista Records released Coming Around Again in April 1987. The title song got on the radio, surging to number five on the adult contemporary chart. The album sold in the millions, Carly’s first record in nine years to reach platinum status. Three Top Ten chart singles followed: “Give Me All Night” (number five), “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of” (number eight), and “All I Want Is You” (number seven). Conventional wisdom was that Carly Simon’s star had faded, but now it shone once again. This new success, in her early forties, reinvigorated Carly’s muse, gave her serious new street cred in the music industry, and also firmly established her credentials as a writer whose contributions to the American songbook had to be taken seriously.

  Clive Davis boasted to Arista’s hard-charging promo staff that he could force Carly Simon to tour, but that didn’t happen. Instead Carly was invited by the Home Box Office cable television network to star in one of their “HBO Specials.” Carly didn’t want to leave the Vineyard, so HBO and an eighty-man production crew built a clever stage set that looked like a fishing shack on a stone jetty overlooking Menemsha Harbor. For two nights in June 1987, Carly Simon (dressed in flowing pastels, bobby socks and sneakers, a white duster, pearl drop earrings, and wampum jewelry crafted by Kate Taylor) performed songs from the new album and some greatest hits with an eight-man band directed by Tom “T-Bone” Wolk, with Rick Marotta on drums. For security concerns, the audiences of invited guests were bused in from island parking lots at the last minute. These were reported to be Carly’s first concerts in eight years.

  The weather had been terrible for a week. HBO desperately needed a balmy night in early June on Martha’s Vineyard, a stone rarity. Serious sea fog was more the norm. The first night, the wind blew in hard from Vineyard Sound and the entire taped footage was unusable. It was so cold the musicians’ fingers were cramping. The second night, the atmosphere was still, and the concert was shot in the golden light of a New England summer sunset. Seagulls landed on the set, pink clouds streaked the sky, and fishing boats returning to port glided through the channel behind the stage. Carly asked Ricky Marotta not to rush the beat on the rock songs. Highlights included “Nobody Does It Better,” which opened the program; Jimmy Ryan’s guitar solo on “You’re So Vain” and great singing on “The Right Thing to Do.” Michael Brecker played blistering sax on “You Belong to Me” and “Two Hot Girls.” The capper was “Coming Around Again,” with a troupe of six Taylor children appearing in a coup de théâtre to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”