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

by Stephen Davis

  POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS

  Carly Simon’s second album of American songs, My Romance, was released in January 1990 and sold respectably, reaching number forty-six on the Billboard’s sales chart. The record’s sexy retronoir sleeve photos were shot by Bob Gothard. The album was dedicated to Allie Brennan and Frank Sinatra. Arista executives tried to get Carly to make some concert appearances with an orchestra but were turned down. Carly, it was explained, was too busy working on her next album of original songs, her first in four years, after the success of Coming Around Again. Her label settled for a commercial release on VHS video, of a second HBO Special studio concert Carly performed, supported by the New Orleans singer-pianist Harry Connick Jr. (This was titled Carly in Concert: My Romance.)

  Carly spent the winter of 1990 working on songs with producers Paul Samwell-Smith and Frank Filipetti at the Power Station, using Steve Gadd and Will Lee on bass and a cast of New York studio pros. There had been a falling-out with musical collaborator Rob Mounsey, who reportedly felt deprived of credit (and perhaps a share of the Oscar) for “Let the River Run.” Now Carly turned to Swiss musician Matthias “Teese” Gohl, an associate of Andreas Vollenweider. Gohl would work with Carly on her recordings for much of the next decade.

  The new songs were some of her best in years. “Better Not Tell Her” is a subversive song of romantic betrayal, inspired by Carly’s affair with a Manhattan media mogul who was engaged to another woman. Carly: “This guy was courting his next wife, and I thought I would offer him a few words of wisdom even though, frankly, he was not a ‘love’ in any sense. And, more importantly, we never went to Spain like we do in the song. In fact, he went on to become my manager for some short, unworthy span of time, lost me a hundred thousand dollars, and disappeared back into the heavy mogul world.”

  With swirling flutes and Brazilian inflections, Carly reminds a former lover of their former rapture together. Guitarist Jay Berliner plays a Spanish guitar solo that conjures a forbidden tryst in the gardens of ancient Grenada.

  The album’s title song, “Have You Seen Me Lately?,” was recycled from Carly’s rejected movie theme. The mysterious song seems to move in and out of reality as a contented sleeper is reluctantly awakened from dreamtime, the way a recovering addict moves between levels of consciousness. The lyric asks, “Was I crazy?” and the listener already knows the answer before the question is asked.

  The new album’s main anthem is “Life Is Eternal,” a philosophical meditation on approaching death in the raging age of AIDS, written with Teese Gohl. The eighties and early nineties were plague years for homosexual men, with many important artists of the period (among them Queen’s Freddie Mercury and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) dead or dying of an illness that destroyed the human immune system. New retroviral drugs had not yet come online, so hope and prayer were the (almost often futile) attempts to prolong the lives of sufferers whose only fault had been careless love and unprotected sex. Carly’s lyrics had come from discussions with Reverend Bill Eddy, a compassionate Vineyard minister who was friends with Carly. The song featured a synthetic but soulful solo by Michael Brecker and a soaring choral round—aimed at a far horizon—by a choir of Carly, Sally and Ben, niece Julie Levine, and Will Lee. (This song would become a beacon of hope in the nation’s hospices as AIDS continued to be a scourge of the gay community.)

  Carly’s original plan was to name the album Happy Birthday, after one of the early songs she wrote for it. “Happy Birthday” is a bittersweet ditty about aging: feeling unwell, not having much sex, blown-out candles sputtering smoke and spoiling the birthday cake. She name-checks her brother and her mother and complains that now, growing ever older, “we’re too good to be bad.” Other songs include “Waiting at the Gate,” about a woman married to an addict; “Holding Me Tonight,” a Sting-like adultery-contemporary pop song; “It’s Not Like Him,” a New Age soap opera; “Don’t Wrap It Up,” in which a woman asserts her emotional needs, with no apology; “Fisherman’s Song,” featuring Lucy Simon and Judy Collins on backing vocals; and “We Just Got Here,” a sweet lullaby about returning home to an island in hurricane season.

  Carly also worked on other material in the summer of 1990. “Raining” is a pretty jingle written for her children to sing at the Chilmark Community Center on the Vineyard. (It would later be recorded for inclusion in Carly’s 1995 anthology Clouds in My Coffee.) She and Andy Goldmark wrote “A Man Who Isn’t Smooth” for an album by soul singer Thelma Houston, produced by Richard Perry. And Nora Ephron once again recruited Carly to work on music for the movie This Is My Life, which Ephron was directing, based on her script about another upwardly mobile New York woman.

  Jackie Onassis called Carly late in August and invited her for a swim at her Chilmark estate. Over iced tea and salad, Jackie again pressed Carly for an autobiography, but again Carly explained that revealing her family’s story was too much for her. Later, they were swimming in Jackie’s pool when a helicopter flew over and hovered while photographs were being shot. “I guess they know you’re here,” Jackie quipped.

  Have You Seen Me Lately? was released in September 1990 and was judged a success in terms of sales and reviews, which noted that the new album was better than Coming Around Again. The cable music channel VH-1 sent a crew to interview Carly, who described employing “positive affirmations” to avoid falling into “mental traps” of her own making. Jonathan Schwartz arrived on the Vineyard to interview her for a magazine profile. She explained that she felt most comfortable at home, and was reluctant even to leave her family’s fenced-in compound. “I’ve got a lot of limitations in the outside world,” she told Jonno. “I’m a hypochondriac. I’m claustrophobic. But I have a lot of interior life going, and that’s what saves me.” When Jonno asked about the novel her husband was supposed to be writing, Carly only rolled her eyes. Jake Brackman was also interviewed, and described Carly’s relationships to that of a luxury hotel, where guests could be shuttled between floors at the whim of the management. Friends could find themselves in the penthouse one week and in the basement the next.

  Arista released “Better Not Tell Her” as a single, which reached number four on the adult contemporary chart in October 1990. Carly, wearing a flowing red dress, appears in a flamenco-themed video for the song, which got into “heavy rotation” on VH-1. Early in 1991, “Holding Me Tonight” got to number thirty-six on the adult contemporary chart.

  Whatever success the new album achieved for Carly, it was tempered by her daughter’s leaving for boarding school on the mainland. Sally, now sixteen, went off to Tabor Academy on the southeastern Massachusetts coast. This left Carly feeling bereft, and she drew her son, Ben, even closer to her. (Ben, fourteen, was unhappy at the various schools he attended, and would later be diagnosed with dyslexia.) Carly’s spirits were raised when she was asked to sing with the great operatic tenor Placido Domingo for an album of classic show tunes. She recorded “The Last Night of the World” from the musical Miss Saigon with Domingo in New York, and the duet was released on his hit compilation The Broadway I Love.

  Carly spent much of 1991 working on the music for another Nora Ephron movie, This Is My Life. This wasn’t easy, because the story line was weak and Ephron’s script was lightweight. (Mike Nichols had declined any involvement.) Working mostly at home, Carly came up with the main theme, “The Love of My Life” (based on her feelings for Sally and Ben), and various instrumentals inspired by her uncle Peter Dean. These involved Peter’s favorite instruments—ukulele, harmonica, whistling through the teeth—and were intended by Carly as an homage to the uncle who had had the greatest influence on her career. In August 1991, Carly was working on the movie music at home with Teese Gohl, Jimmy Ryan, Will Lee, and Russ Kunkel when the island was slammed by Hurricane Bob, a storm so violent that all the leaves were blown off the trees. The power went out, but Carly had a deadline, so Frank Filipetti ran the gear through a gas-powered generator and the musicians worked by candlelight. Carly told the band about
how Uncle Pete had retired as a talent manager at sixty-eight to go back to work as Peter “Snakehips” Dean, performing in clubs and cabarets. They listened to his old albums for inspiration. The songs they worked up on the island were then recorded by Filipetti in New York, including “The Show Must Go On,” a faux-Broadway showstopper (that took Carly three weeks to write), and “The Night Before Christmas,” a Hollywood carol with Sally and Ben chiming in on the chorus. Harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans (who had known Peter Dean well) contributed some of Uncle Pete’s characteristic funkiness.

  This Is My Life was released in early 1992 and promptly bombed. The reviews were gruesome, and the movie studio pulled the film from theaters as an embarrassment. But the legendary producer Quincy Jones (who had worked with Uncle Pete) had been following the project and released Carly’s soundtrack on his Qwest/ Reprise label in April. The single “Love of My Life” got some airplay and charted at number sixteen, so for Carly the project wasn’t a total loss.

  Carly saw a lot of Jackie Onassis in New York that spring. They often met in the afternoon for movie matinees. Jackie, ever shy, would wait for Carly in the ladies’ room if she arrived at the theater first. A couple of times they were spotted and asked for autographs. Jackie always demurred and turned away, while Carly gamely signed and chatted with the fans. When asked when her next album was coming out, Carly replied that any new record was on hold because she was working on an opera.

  Actually, Carly and Jake Brackman had been working on this project for about a year, after she had received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera Guild, in association with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D. C. Carly’s brief was to write a family-friendly work that would attract both her fans and especially their children. She and Jake came up with an opera about a child of divorced parents. The libretto, cowritten by Carly and Jake, concerns a twelve-year-old New Yorker, Romulus Hunt, who tries to trick his estranged, incompatible parents into reuniting. Romulus teams up with his imaginary friend, a Rastafarian called Zoogy, who uses his knowledge of Jamaican voodoo to this end. Of course this doesn’t work, but in the end, Romulus earns the love of his feckless bohemian father by making him recall his own father’s indifference.

  Romulus Hunt was an ambitious project and called for more collaboration than Carly had ever been used to. Teese Gohl worked on the orchestration and arrangements. Executives from the record label Angel/ EMI Classics offered suggestions. Director Francesca Zambello and choreographer Carmen De Lavallade worked on the production. Carly consulted her operatic sister, Joanna, on various aspects of the work, and then named Romulus’s mother (a prim Upper East Side matron) after her. When prerehearsal run-throughs began in New York that summer, Carly worried that her main leitmotif, “Voulez-Vous Dancer?”—Rom’s father was a choreographer—sounded tepid. The five singers, none of them opera stars, seemed unsure of themselves. The ten-piece band was having a hard time with the reggae rhythms required for Zoogy’s music. Then came a series of legal skirmishes over who owned the rights to the production, which got the lawyers involved. Despair set in, but Carly was determined to press on and make it work.

  Summer 1992. Carly took a call from her old flame Willie Donaldson in London. Willie, now sixty-two, was a bestselling author in England (The Henry Root Letters) and a columnist for The Independent newspaper. (The column trumpeted his sleazy experiences as a Chelsea pimp and cocaine addict and was very popular with the daily broadsheet’s politically liberal readers.) Willie told Carly that the paper was sending him to New York to cover a benefit at the Ritz nightclub, starring Elizabeth Taylor and the hip-hop group Salt-N-Pepa. Willie invited Carly along as his date.

  Carly replied that she wasn’t able to leave her apartment at the moment because she was waiting for a phone call. She explained that she’d heard that James Taylor was again recovering from some addiction, and was going through the twelve-step recovery program associated with Alcoholics Anonymous. The final step required him to make amends to all the people harmed by his addiction. “I certainly want to be in when he finally gets to me,” Carly told Willie. “I don’t even leave the apartment to go shopping.” When Willie phoned again a few weeks later, Carly reported that James had never called her to make amends.

  Late in 1992, the Christmas holidays were approaching, and the children would be coming home. Carly asked her husband to leave because he was using cocaine and she didn’t want him around the children. He moved to the apartment he had kept in New York until Sally and Ben returned to their schools early in the new year.

  UNSENT LETTERS

  In February 1993, Carly’s opera, Romulus Hunt, had its first performances at the John Jay Theater, on Tenth Avenue in New York. Carly told friends that the music was by far the hardest work she had ever undertaken, that it had been an honor to have been asked to compose it, and that she really loved (most of) the way it turned out. Carly: “It was a real challenge and it got pretty well panned, except by a very nice man in Stereo Review, who said it was the best American opera since Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This was a man I had paid a great deal of money to.” Other critics were less kind. The New York Times called the opera “a peculiar, well-meaning and misguided failure.” The libretto was described as emotionally pallid and the whole production generally depressing. But the hour-long opera completed its New York run before moving to Washington in April. Teese Gohl and Frank Filipetti produced an album of the Romulus Hunt music, which was released by Angel Records that spring, but it failed to make much of an impression on its own.

  Meanwhile Carly kept working. She recorded the standard “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” for the hit movie Sleepless in Seattle (another Nora Ephron project), and then repeated the song, intercut with “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” with Frank Sinatra for his Duets album. (Carly and Sinatra never met, both recording their parts in separate studios.) When Duets was released that year, Carly’s contribution was critically hailed as the best music on an album that most critics and fans agreed was one of Sinatra’s worst. In this period Carly also collaborated with Andreas Vollenweider, contributing the song “Private Eyes” to his album Eolian Minstrel.

  And Clive Davis was calling. Arista wanted another album of original songs from Carly. Seeking inspiration, she was rummaging in a closet one day that spring, looking for an old notebook, when she reached up and found a cardboard box on a high shelf. It contained a sheaf of notes and letters she had written to various people, including her first husband and some old lovers, but never mailed. She remembered that her mother once told her that a good way to purge negative feelings toward someone was to write to them, but she should never actually mail the letter. Now Carly began to read some of this material, some of it dating back more than twenty years, and she realized that some of the contents could work as song lyrics. But this was derailed when Andrea Simon suffered an aortic aneurism and was hospitalized in Boston. Carly and her sisters camped out by her bedside, and after a few weeks Carly was able to take her mother home to Martha’s Vineyard. They almost made it to the island’s ferry in Woods Hole when Andrea declared a bathroom emergency in the adjacent town of Falmouth. Carly had the driver stop outside a quaint roadside inn and half-carried her mother into the bathroom, “shit stained, if you want to know the truth. I really forgot myself amid her pain and anguish.” As the exhausted pair emerged from a long siege in the bathroom, Andrea called out to the bewildered innkeepers, “Do all of you know my daughter, Carly Simon, the singer?”

  Jim Hart was living with Carly again during the summer of 1993. It was a fraught time for Carly. Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and given about a year to live. This was devastating enough, but then Jacqueline Onassis confided to Carly that she, too, had cancer, but her doctors were more hopeful in their prognosis. Alex Taylor, James’s older brother, drank himself to death the night before entering rehab in Florida. The Taylors, Carly’s children included, went into shock.

  In an attempt to put on
a brave face and salvage the summer, Carly decided to throw a party. Early in July, invitations to “A Moon Party” went out to the island’s elite, from the usual summering celebrities to star-quality local artists, fishermen, lighthouse keepers, and plumbers. Guests were asked to wear only white, since the party celebrated July’s luminous full moon. RSVPs included Mrs. Onassis and her companion, financier Maurice Tempelsman, Katharine Graham, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, every important writer and musician on the island, the entire Taylor family except James, and almost everyone who’d been asked. After cocktails by the shimmering pool and a sumptuous catered dinner in the party barn, several of the guests performed skits at different levels of cringe-worthiness. Then Carly and her increasingly frail mother sang a song, to rapturous applause at the sense of the occasion’s history. Sally and Ben played a duet and got lost in the middle. Then Carly and a band played a relaxed set of oldies while the younger set danced until the full moon sank westward into the Vineyard sound.

  In August 1993, President Bill Clinton brought his family to Martha’s Vineyard for their summer holiday. Clinton had been elected the previous November and was settling into his first term with a large popular mandate. On the Vineyard the First Family settled into a borrowed pond-side mansion and tried to relax. The president told his host that the one person he wanted to meet on his vacation was Cary Simon, so Carly invited the Clintons to a casual dinner. Peter and Ronni Simon were there as well, so Peter could document the visit with his camera. They waited and waited, and eventually the First Family arrived—almost three hours late.