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

by Stephen Davis

  Carly and Jim Hart received the casually dressed Clintons in the driveway of her home. As Hillary Clinton was introducing her daughter, Chelsea, to Carly, the president gripped Jim Hart by the elbow. “I can’t believe you didn’t know who she was,” Clinton whispered.

  Hart was taken aback. Clinton: “I read somewhere that you said that when you and Carly met, you didn’t know who she was.”

  “Actually,” Hart said, “I thought she might have been Linda Ronstadt.”

  Clinton laughed. “I think I read that too,” he said. He went on the say that he and Hillary were big fans of Carly’s. Then, sort of randomly, the president mentioned that they had named their daughter after Joni Mitchell’s song “Chelsea Morning.” At that point Peter asked the two couples to pose together for a photograph. Bill Clinton moved in on Carly, put his arm around her waist, and drew her to him. She edged away for the sake of propriety, but later said she was flattered by the attention. (The next day, Carly’s mother called and said no one she knew could believe that Carly hadn’t invited her to meet the president. Andrea later complained to Lucy that she had missed a golden opportunity to tell Bill Clinton how to save the country.) For the next seven years, through reelection and impeachment, the Clintons returned to the island almost every August and usually exchanged visits with Carly when there was time.

  Carly kept working on new songs for her next album, but her mother was dying and Carly tried to stay as close to her as possible. Andrea Simon fought her cancer with great bravery, but Mrs. Simon and Schuster died in February 1994. The funeral was held on a snowy night a week later at the Riverdale Presbyterian Church. The eulogies hailed Andrea Simon’s work for civil rights and the mental health charity she promoted. Then her three daughters—Joanna, Lucy, and Carly—sang “May the Lord Bless You and Keep You” in the three-part harmonies they had been singing since they were children. When this was finished, an obviously distraught Carly stepped forward and addressed the crowded church. “I j-j-just want to say,” she stammered, “that I feel like my heart has been… torn from my chest.” There was a reception afterward in the Simon house on Grosvenor Avenue, where some guests were deeply touched by the dozens of family photographs that hung on the walls. Many would carry loving memories of the years of parties and laughter and conversation in that house, for the rest of their lives. The three Simon sisters decided they would never sing “May the Lord Bless You and Keep You” ever again.

  But for the four Simon children, the next few months of 1994 were a nightmare of discord. The terms of their mother’s will were shocking to Carly, who had been left less than her sisters and brothers. (Andrea had taken into account Carly’s considerable fortune from her recording career when planning the disposal of her estate.) Then there were the contents of Andrea’s houses—artworks, antiques, rare books, family heirlooms. Andrea’s jewelry was up for grabs, and it didn’t go well, especially between Carly and Joanna. Lucy, always accommodating, wanted only her father’s piano. Carly wanted it, too. In the end, Lucy got the Steinway and Joey got the double strand of Tiffany pearls—and Carly felt that, once again, she had gotten screwed. Relations between the Simon sisters would be strained for the next several years.

  Through all this, Carly occasionally took various medications prescribed by her doctors. One of these was Fioricet, used to control migraine headaches, to which she was prone. After a while the headaches increased, and her husband told her that she was taking too many pills, and persuaded her to enter the Regent rehab clinic affiliated with New York Hospital. Before she checked in, she gave Jim a letter to post to Jackie Onassis across Central Park.

  Carly: “Group therapy at the rehab was me and fourteen ex-cons, all guys, all black. All had awful backgrounds; one had killed his mother. At first they attacked me for being no better than they were, [but] most of them came around and then embraced me as they became my backup singers in the smoking room. I always thought this could be a great premise for a musical, but unfortunately it only lasted six days and I came home to find that Jim hadn’t mailed my letter to Jackie O, which was the only personal thing I’d asked him to do in my absence.”

  Then, as the winter of 1994 turned into spring, the lunches and movie dates with Jackie Onassis dwindled and then stopped. Jackie told Carly that her prayers had gone unanswered, but that she still had hope. She often called Carly if she saw James Taylor on TV. Carly: “She would say, ‘You know, he just doesn’t look happy.’ Then she always would ask me, ‘Are you blossoming?’” Jackie kept insisting, “Just four more weeks and I’ll be myself again.” Carly was upset, but the news triggered a creative surge, and she wrote one of her greatest songs, “Touched by the Sun,” as an homage to her editor and friend. At the end of their final lunch together, Carly presented Jackie with the lyrics to the song, which recognized the epic grandeur, the bravery, and the heartbreak of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s life. “This is for you,” Carly said. “You inspired it.” They never spoke again.

  Jacqueline Onassis died in May 1994. A few days later, the Kennedy family held a wake at her apartment at 1025 Fifth Avenue. Carly arrived by herself and was amazed to find a full-blown Irish wake in progress. Jackie’s apartment was packed with people eating and drinking and smoking. Senator Ted Kennedy was holding court by the windows overlooking Central Park, downing cocktails and laughing at old jokes. Carly was taken aback by this irreverent scene. Noting that the coffin was alone in the bedroom, Carly tried to go in, but was told only family members were allowed. She explained that she wanted to place a memento in Jackie’s coffin, but was again told that this was only allowed to members of the immediate family. Carly became distraught, and began to stammer. Caroline Kennedy’s husband took her by the arm, told her it was time for her to leave, and ushered her into the elevator. Once on the street, Carly felt a little better and walked home across the greening park.

  Then she rallied, and went to work. “I had lost the two most important women in my life,” she said later, “my mother and Jackie. I could either fall apart, or I could make the grieving energy into something positive. I wrote ‘Touched by the Sun’ for Jackie when I first heard she was gravely ill. It was based on a wonderful poem by Stephen Spender—‘I think continually of those…’—that supposedly was one of Jack Kennedy’s favorites. Both the words and the music came very quickly, as did ‘Like a River,’ written the same year, after my mother had died. For the first time in many years, I had no trouble translating the emotions I was feeling—and they were intense—into words and music.”

  Carly was on a roll now, writing for her next album, which everyone kept reminding her was overdue. Some of the new songs were informed by the news, brought to her by her children, of a serious rift between James Taylor and his second wife. Neither of the kids gave their father’s marriage much longer to last.

  LIKE A RIVER

  After Andrea Simon passed away, one of the family treasures coveted by her three daughters was the silver-framed photograph of George Gershwin, signed by the composer with a dedication to their father, Richard Simon. (Lucy got it.) Then, later in 1994, it was Carly’s turn to have a run at the Gershwin legacy. She recorded a version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You” for the compilation album The Glory of Gershwin, working with Beatles producer George Martin. She asked the famously protective Gershwin estate to allow her to make a small lyric revision in one verse of the song, and the estate agreed, the only time this request had ever been granted. Then Carly—to her amazement—was inducted to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, whose first inductee (in 1969) had been George Gershwin. Carly thought about her father when this happened, and all the ironies involved, and hoped that he would have been proud that his awkward youngest daughter had been accepted in the same exalted company as his old friend.

  Also in 1994, ex-Brooklyn Dodger mascot Carly recorded “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as the main theme for Baseball, a multipart series produced by Ken Burns and shown on public television that year. In
flected with gospel piano, Carly’s rendition has a smoky quality that goes well with Burns’s use of old photos and newsreels of classic baseball players and home runs.

  After Jackie Onassis died, Carly rallied. She called the builders back to Hidden Star Hill, as her Vineyard property was now called, and ordered a cherry tree moved to accommodate a new conservatory, where she could paint. She commissioned murals and new stained-glass windows depicting Sally and Ben. An addition was built onto the guesthouse that Carly called Honeymoon Cottage. The circular garden was replanted with perennials and annuals, surrounding a core of herbs for the kitchen. She also recorded thirteen new songs with Frank Filipetti in her neighborhood recording studio, Right Track. These were released as Letters Never Sent, Carly’s first album of new songs in four years, in mid-November 1994. The album cover was a Sgt. Pepper’s-like collage of faces compiled by Carly and friend Tamara Weiss, augmented with new photography by Bob Gothard.

  Carly may have been grieving for her mother and her friend, but she managed to channel her emotions into some stirring original songs. “Letters Never Sent” (written with Jake Brackman) is about lingering regrets, with a dreamlike middle section and rhythmic voodoo chanting. “Lost in Your Love” is an Arif Mardin production, an homage to the late Otis Redding, with his sons on backing vocals. Then came “Like a River,” an extremely touching letter addressed to Carly’s late mother.

  The genesis of the song was “the grab,” the dividing of their mother’s things with her sisters at the emptied Riverdale house. Afterward, Carly returned to her own apartment, feeling ripped off, and then ashamed that she was preoccupied with material things more than with the loss of her mother. She sat on the plush maroon velvet-covered sofa in the apartment’s big living room. The lights of Fifth Avenue twinkled across the darkened park. Carly remembers her mother trying to breathe in the final stages of lung cancer. Then, possessed by an urgency to write something, she took up her pen and wrote the first verse of “Like a River.” The verse describes her mother’s empty house and the empty feeling of being in it. She asks her mother questions about the next world, and describes how she fought over the pearls with the other girls. Carly read this over and then called her sister Lucy and said, “I’ve written something I want you to hear.” Encouraged to keep writing, Carly questions Andrea in the afterlife. “Have you reconciled with Dad?” she asks her mother’s spirit. Is Andrea dancing with her idol Benjamin Franklin on the face of the moon? The song began as a stately kind of funeral march and then swelled with thrilling chord progressions and even hard rock. (The song’s coda quotes from Romulus Hunt’s theme, “I’ll Never Turn Away.”)

  “Time Works on All the Wild Young Men” is a forty-four-second interlude between tracks, sung with her son, Ben Taylor. It is followed by the resounding tribute to Jackie Onassis, “Touched by the Sun.” This fierce paean, ambitious and epic in scale, deploys Rick Marotta’s volcanic drums as the lead instrument of the recording ensemble, and a Carly Simon vocal that goes over the top, sounding a little crazed, as if she were grieving at a private wake of her own.

  Letters Never Sent continues with “Davy,” a collaboration with Andreas Vollenweider’s transcendent electric harp, and “Halfway Round the World,” a sailors’ song performed with blues singer Taj Mahal and Dave Stewart of the Scottish band Eurhythmics. Carly is hot and in heat on “The Reason,” a rock song about courtship featuring the great session drummer Steve Ferrone, coproduced by Danny Kortchmar. “Private” is another unsent letter that is sung falsetto, something of a departure for Carly. “Catch It Like a Fever” is a bongo beatnik song that seems to be about a sex act beloved of many males of the species. “Born to Break My Heart” is a great country/ pop song done with Roseanne Cash, a portrait of a maturing woman “cursed to seek love again from another cold heart.” That woman reappears in the album’s finale, “I’d Rather It Was You,” a George Harrison homage with Jimmy Ryan on guitar.

  With its brief, quirky interludes between longer songs, and no obvious singles, Letters Never Sent was released in late November 1994. The label didn’t release a single, despite a certain amount of agitation for “Born to Break My Heart.” Carly couldn’t get Arista to fund a new video. (She heard that one of the label’s executives was referring to her as a “heritage act,” and this bothered her.) The album barely sold enough to chart, reaching number 129 early in 1995. Now Clive Davis told Carly she had to tour that summer and make other appearances. New manager Brian Doyle told her that her career was at risk if she refused. Reluctantly, Carly Simon agreed to form a band and face the music.

  The band was drummer Rick Marotta, Teese Gohl, T-Bone Wolk on bass, Peter Calo on guitar, and Curtis King on vocals. A friend of Carly’s, Dirk Ziff (who was investing in her Vineyard nightclub), also played occasional guitar with the band. One of their first gigs—augmented to twelve musicians, with Doug Wimbish on bass—was a late-morning set in April 1995, on a stage built over the west stairs of the main hall of Grand Central Station as bemused travelers streamed through the terminal and spring sunlight seeped through the massive eastern windows. Carly was performing in a white shirt and a small black skirt over her long legs. This show, Live at Grand Central, was filmed for broadcast on the Lifetime cable channel. The band, augmented by Jake Brackman’s charismatic fiddler wife, Mindy Jostyn, burned through “Touched by the Sun,” “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” “Letters Never Sent,” “I’ve Got to Have You,” “Anticipation” (huge cheer from the commuters); the upbeat, clapping energy of “Jesse”; “Coming Around Again,” with its emotional surge; “That’s the Way” (Carly on electric piano); “Let the River Run”; and “No Secrets.” Toward the end of the set, Carly’s voice gave out, and she had to dub in her vocals later. After the last song, Carly told the crowd, “We gotta go, we gotta make our train.” Later the film editors realized that Mindy Jostyn—given a broad mandate to entertain the crowd by stage-shy Carly—had completely stolen the show. Mindy figured in almost every good shot, so veteran video director Andy Dick had to work overtime to produce a film that ensured that Carly was the only star of her own show.

  This band also played a late spring show at the Avalon nightclub in Boston, across from Fenway Park. A reporter joined Carly in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel, noting her leather jacket and flowing chiffon skirt. On the drive to the club, Carly explained that she had originally checked into the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, but there was no piano in her suite. At midnight she moved to the Four Seasons, but the suite had no heat. By seven in the morning she was wandering on Boston Common, struggling with a sudden anxiety attack. It hadn’t helped her confidence when she stopped her tour bus in Providence, Rhode Island, to visit daughter Sally at Brown University. Carly was somewhat unnerved at Sally’s dorm room, which displayed dozens of photos of her father, James Taylor, and exactly one of her mother. “I felt so deflated,” she told the reporter.

  An hour into that night’s show, Sally Taylor walked onstage and Carly stepped aside as her sexy young daughter belted out Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally.” It was a sassy and funny performance that got the audience up and dancing for the first time that night. After Sally left the stage, Carly spoke to the audience: “I’m happy tonight,” she said. “I’m really happy.”

  Carly and her husband attended the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. That year’s inductees included Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, and the late Frank Zappa, but Carly was there to see her old heroes Martha and the Vandellas safely into musical Valhalla. An old friend asked Carly when she thought her turn would come. She smiled and said, “Probably never.”

  Summer 1995. Carly Simon and her band played sixteen concerts with Philadelphia (blue-eyed) soul singers Hall and Oates opening the concerts. (Carly often joined them for their big hit “Every Time She Goes Away.”) This was her first serious tour since 1981, when she had hemorrhaged onstage in Pittsburgh amid her breakup with James Taylor, and now h
er fans turned out in droves. The tickets (for mostly club-size venues) were expensive—sixty dollars was typical—but many of the concerts sold out in half an hour. Carly played all the hits—“You Belong to Me” and “You’re So Vain”—and some new songs, including “Touched by the Sun,” which she always dedicated to Jackie. “She was as exquisite as you think she was,” she told her audience in Boston. Darryl Hall and John Oates always joined Carly to sing “Anticipation” toward the end of the set. The final shows were in California, with Carly trying to channel Al Green’s impression of cool Memphis soul. The last audience of the tour, in Concord, California, called Carly back for encores three times.

  Carly arrived home on the Vineyard on August 25, 1995, and began rehearsing with James Taylor’s band for a benefit concert on August 30. This was Livestock ’95, a big semiprivate concert whose proceeds would help build a new (and sorely needed) hall for the local Agricultural Society. James Taylor had agreed to appear with Carly Simon for the first time since the No Nukes concerts in 1979. A stage was built on the county fairgrounds in West Tisbury. Local musicians were recruited to play. Ten thousand tickets sold out in four hours. National media was blacked out. Both Carly and James performed solo sets as news helicopters hovered overhead and interfered with the sound system. Carly dedicated “Nobody Does It Better” to James. (And Aerosmith’s scarf-laden Steven Tyler popped out to sing Mick Jagger’s part on “You’re So Vain.”) Then Carly joined James for “Shower the People” during his closing set, which ended with Carly and James dancing the Lindy Hop to Russ Kunkel’s pounding beat during a long, rollicking “Mockingbird.”