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

by Stephen Davis

  Carly had been worried about how James would react to her, but he wasn’t around much until the day of the show, and then he was cordial, if distant. The only problem occurred some weeks later, when Martha’s Vineyard magazine ran Peter Simon’s photo of Carly and James dancing on the cover. Carly was radiant, but James looked like a cretin, with hair akimbo, wiry specs way down his nose, and a crazed grin on his wrinkled features. His mother, Trudy Taylor, saw this and blew up, which got James upset. Carly and her brother were accused of making James look bad. “Other than at Sally’s wedding,” Carly later said, “James has hardly ever spoken to me again.”

  Carly was also blamed for a sleazy magazine profile of her that appeared in Vanity Fair that summer. “I Never Sang for My Mother” was written by an ex-wife of Jonathan Schwartz, so the Simon family’s secrets tumbled out of the glossy monthly like spoiled fruit. The “Ronnie Material” was given a national platform, and the author also implied that Andrea Simon had callously allowed her husband to die alone, which was far from the truth. Carly’s sisters, and her mother’s friends (including Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel), were upset by what they saw as a hatchet job on Andrea Simon. To some, it seemed that Carly was dishing dirt on her family to sell more copies of her new album.

  Autumn 1995. The British music press reported that Tori Amos was performing “Boys in the Trees” in concert and was telling her audiences that she wished she had written the song. Carly worked on Clouds in My Coffee, a three-CD boxed compilation of her top music to date. This involved locating old demo tapes in her basement archive and negotiating with record labels Elektra, Epic, United Artists, Reprise, Angel, and even back-office elements at Arista. (Getting the rights to include “Nobody Does It Better” from UA was a Bond movie in itself.) The package included an essay by a young accountant Carly had met when she started surfing on AOL the previous year. Carly contributed her own notes as well: “Even when I am in a state of self-loathing, I can write something that I fall in love with…. The reasons for choosing the songs I did had to do sometimes with availability. Politics played an unavoidable part. There are songs that are missing, not too glaringly, I hope.” Some of the earlier songs—recorded with tubes and then transistors from 1968 to 1972—were also tweaked by Carly and Frank Filipetti (employing a Neve Capricorn digital desk) at Right Track for sonic equalization in the postmodern age. The Clouds box was released late in the year, and Carly visited radio stations in important markets to help it onto the sales charts. But, she says, there were also some serious reservations about her manager, her lawyer, and her label at the time, and what she described as bad decisions that cost her almost two million dollars.

  October 1995. The president of the United States and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, flew into Martha’s Vineyard to attend the wedding of two island summer celebrities, the actors Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson. Carly wasn’t invited (reportedly) because the bride and groom were friendly with James Taylor. But after the festivities and a few glasses of champagne, on the way back to the plane, Clinton ordered his entourage to detour to Hidden Star Hill, and surprised a delighted Carly Simon with an impromptu presidential visit.

  FILM NOIR

  In early 1996, with Clouds in My Coffee selling well, Carly signed a two-book deal with her father’s old company, Simon and Schuster. The contract called for another children’s book, and then a compilation of lyrics and family photographs. Movie commissions continued, with themes for the Hollywood film Marvin’s Room and an adaptation of Ludwig Bemelmans’s classic Madeline. For the former, Carly wrote “Two Little Sisters” and sang it with Meryl Streep, one of the film’s stars. Carly had also taken up painting as a serious pastime, and that year she visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was inspired by the same arid, southwestern landscapes that had inspired Georgia O’Keeffe and D. H. Lawrence, among legions of other artists.

  Her record company wanted another album, but Carly wasn’t in the writing zone. Instead, she delivered Film Noir, her third album of American songbook classics, a tribute to the music of the genre movies of her childhood: “B pictures” featuring Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, and Lana Turner, among others, which now, in the late twentieth century, had a glamorous retro allure—gangsters, gun molls, and cops—recently repopularized by the American Movie Channel cable TV outlet. Carly plunged into this glam project with fellow Hall-of-Famer Jimmy Webb, who helped choose the songs, played piano, sang, and cowrote the neo-standard title song, “Film Noir.” Van Dyke Parks also helped, with orchestrations.

  The album leans heavily on songs with strong themes, and works by American masters such as Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, and Hoagy Carmichael. “Lili Marlene” channels Marlene Dietrich with Webb on piano. Carly sings with son Ben—sounding like a clone of his father—on “Every Time We Say Goodbye.” “Last Night When We Were Young” had been almost owned by Frank Sinatra, but Carly and Jimmy give it a spooky, filmic twist of their own. “I’m a Fool to Want You,” cowritten by Mr. Sinatra, was often identified with his love for Ava Gardner, a film noir heroine early in her career. Carly sings the (male-voiced) lyrics of “Laura” as written by Johnny Mercer after the movie Laura came out with its magnificent instrumental theme, here reimagined by Arif Mardin. Noirish 1950s TV is also invoked, in “Somewhere in the Night,” better known as the Naked City theme. Van Dyke Parks arranged and conducted the orchestra in the clever divorce note “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” The album’s highlight is Carly’s duet with John Travolta on “Two Sleepy People,” about lovers too tired to carry on, but too much in love to go back home. It is a passionate performance of one of the greatest songs of its generation.

  Film noir is characterized by suspense leading to violence, always shot in shadowy black and white. The movies are tense and foreboding, often informed by injustice, tragedy, and deceit; populated by jaded femme fatales and a new kind of hero, the anti-hero, who battles criminals, murderers, the police, and existential despair. Carly and Jimmy Webb took this into account with the song “Film Noir,” which became a drama-laden rock ballad, another sad story about a dramatic heroine who loses control and fades to black.

  Film Noir was released by Arista in September 1987, with booklet notes by noir-obsessed director Martin Scorsese and glamorous studio photographs, taken by Bob Gothard, of Carly in the glorious penumbra of black and white. Reviews now ran (highly positive) in fashion magazines, not the rock press. The album sold well and reached number eighty-seven on the Billboard chart. Carly and her label made a short film about the album, Songs in Shadow, which was shown on the AMC channel that autumn.

  Also around this time, Carly published her fifth book for children, and her first for Simon and Schuster. Midnight Farm is a tale (in verse) of a magical farm that comes to life after sunset. Midnight Farm was also the name of a classy dry goods emporium in the town of Vineyard Haven that was a joint venture between Carly and her friend Tamara Weiss.

  October 1997. Carly and her husband were living apart, although she still supported him as he tried to morph into a published poet, having given up on the novel long before. As Carly was working on her new album that year, she noticed that a small lump in one of her breasts was changing. It had been there for some time, but the doctors said not to worry, because they were watching it. Carly: “I didn’t insist on it coming out because I don’t like operations, but toward the end, it [the lump] started to talk to me. I’d be reading Tolstoy or cooking or exercising and I would hear it going, ‘Get me out of here!’… Then one doctor looked at my mammogram and said he’d rather see the lump in a jar than in my breast. So he took it out, and it was cancer. Fortunately it had not spread to my lymph nodes. I was a little angry at myself [for waiting so long].”

  For years, according to Jim Hart, Carly Simon had woken up every morning with the fear that something or someone was trying to cause her harm. And here was this fear, made palpable in her very flesh, in the form of stage-one breast cancer. Something really did want to kill her. But instead of falli
ng apart, Carly decided to fight back. She overcame her fear of surgery and underwent a mastectomy in November 1997. While recovering, she focused on the bravery her mother had shown in her last months. Carly: “My mother was a great role model for me then. I remembered that she’d had severe arthritis in her fingers, even when she was my age. But she used to look at her hands and say, ‘Isn’t this beautiful? Look at the shapes—don’t they looked like gnarled tree trunks?’ And whether or not she really felt that, that’s what she did for us.”

  After the operation, when the dressings were removed, Carly discovered a long scar where her breast had been. She was amazed to see that the scar was shaped like an arrow. In the way she then had of embracing her current reality, she took to the scar immediately. “My scar is beautiful,” she told an interviewer. “I didn’t bother rubbing things into it, or having silicone injections. I just kept it that way, because I liked it.”

  One night, while she was recovering, James Taylor came to see her in their old apartment. Their children urged him to visit Carly, and he did. At the age of fifty, James now lived somewhat more easily within himself, and was courtly and encouraging to Carly, having been divorced by his second wife. As he was leaving, she asked him to give her a call if he ever thought of her, and James replied that if he called her every time he thought of her, there wouldn’t be time for anything else.

  Carly’s oncologist advised her to try to forget about the surgery, and not even speak about it for a while. So, before the onset of a year of chemotherapy, Carly took Sally and Ben for a winter vacation on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. (Jim Hart’s support of Carly had reportedly been less than heroic during the cancer ordeal, and the couple never really lived together after that.) The rest of 1998 was spent in a fever of chemotherapy and severe depression, a slough of despond the depth of which Carly had never experienced, a mental illness that famously depressed Bill Styron described as a “total shit storm.”

  To get through it, Carly knew she had to keep working. Living large, between two households, meant that she had a legion of people—assistants, household staff, gardeners, caretakers—who were financially dependent on her continuing largesse. She made a deal with Clive Davis for another album, which she decided she would record herself, at home, where she was comfortable. Frank Filipetti helped her install a digital recording studio in the living room of her place in New York.

  One day in this period, Carly was having tea with a friend, a fellow cancer survivor, at the Carlisle Hotel on Madison Avenue. She and the friend had both decided to have reconstructive surgery, and were feeling upbeat and hopeful. Then Carly ran into Warren Beatty in the lobby. They spoke for a moment, and Carly told him about the cancer and the surgery. Beatty turned a little gray, mentioned he had an appointment, and was out of there. Cancer, someone told Carly, let you know who your real friends were.

  Then she lost her inexpensive, rent-stabilized apartment on Central Park West, when the landlord was able to prove that the massive flat was no longer Carly’s primary home. Carly was forced to vacate. Her furniture and instruments, the recording gear, and the children’s belongings were packed up and shipped to Hidden Star Hill. Carly took this traumatic excision from her past very hard. The loss of apartment 6S, the home she’d shared with James Taylor and their children, was almost as much a loss to her as her breast.

  BEDROOM MUSIC

  While Carly was installing a home studio in Sally’s old bedroom upstairs in the Vineyard house, Sally Taylor was releasing albums herself. Tomboy Bride and later Apt #6S were indie CD productions recorded in Colorado, where Sally had settled after college. Ben Taylor had released his first single a year earlier, and was recording demos with friends in New York. Then a nineteen-track compilation from Clouds in My Coffee was released in Europe by Warner Global as Nobody Does It Better: The Very Best of Carly Simon, and sold well in European markets where Carly had never performed.

  Carly also sang the vocal on “Your Silver Key” on Andreas Vollenweider’s Cosmopoly album.

  In mid-1999, Carly was recovering to the extent that she started recording demos of the songs she had written during the long days of chemo and depression. Her favorite new song was a tribute to George Gershwin as a beacon of inspiration and hope. Later she wrote that she had been in a miserable state of writer’s block and had all but decided to give up writing songs. One day, she was in the Lee Side tavern in Woods Hole, waiting for the ferry to the Vineyard, when Gershwin’s classic “Embraceable You” came on the jukebox. She imagined the young Gershwin writing timeless music on Riverside Drive in New York. For a melody, she chose a reverie-like variation on the chorus of “Embraceable You.” Carly’s lyrics described “one note that weeps the truth / And makes my life mean something.” Carly titled the new song “In Honor of You (George).” Carly: “It may have been the process of writing and arranging the song with Teese Gohl that got me unblocked. I’m not exactly sure, as everything was complicated by the emotional requirements of being a patient during that whole period.”

  Carly spent eight months working on her next album—usually alone. The instruments and microphones were in Sally’s room because they didn’t fit in Carly’s bedroom, down the hall. The small space was filled with guitars and machines, lyrics written on scraps of paper, phone messages, bits of clothing. No one was allowed to clean. Carly learned to program the drum machines. Musician neighbors, including Jimmy Parr, helped install a recording studio in the basement. Carly grew to be fond of this arrangement, where she was able to experiment in private. “I could fail—over and over,” she remembered. There were no label executives or hired producers suggesting that she sound more like Christina Aguilera, Natalie Imbruglia, or Debbie Harry. Carly realized that she was writing the way she’d begun in 1970: “Making sounds that I liked. Not thinking in an orthodox way about the songs.” In this period, she wrote about twenty new songs, and recorded them as demos on her 8-track-tape machine.

  Gradually the chemotherapy ran its course, and Carly’s energy began to return. She missed having an urban base now, so in 1999 she bought an early nineteenth-century Georgian house on Beacon Hill, Boston’s most historic and exclusive residential neighborhood. The old house on West Cedar Street needed extensive renovation, and Carly figured that the project would be a welcome distraction from working, and an outlet for her fervid interest in home design and décor. In the winter, she thought, the cozy Boston house, with its many fireplaces, would be a welcoming retreat from the damp Vineyard.

  But the renovation problems started right after the deal closed. The builders told her that the main staircase was two hundred years old and rotten. The house’s original sash windows were crumbling and were replaced by modern French windows. A roof deck was installed to provide stunning views of the Boston skyline and the Charles River Basin. Carly shopped for furniture at her favorite stores on Newbury Street, and the house was expertly fitted with sofas and antiques that reminded old friends of her mother’s rooms in Riverdale. It took a full day for workmen to get the piano into the house.

  Finally, Carly moved in. One day she threw open the French windows, sat at the piano, and started to sing. The neighbors thought this a nuisance and called the police, who were polite but firm: no singing. Then the building inspectors swarmed. The roof deck was a code violation and had to go. The new French windows contravened Beacon Hill’s rules for building exteriors in the historic district and had to be replaced. Carly tried to light a fire on a chilly morning, and the house filled with smoke because the chimneys had been plugged years before, when the city banned working fireplaces on the densely populated hill. The final straw may have been the three rats found cavorting in the fruit bowl when Carly came down to breakfast one morning. She put the house on the market, moved everything she wanted to the Vineyard, and was relieved to be exiled from Beacon Hill. Later on, she remembered, “chemotherapy paled in comparison to the problems I had with that house.”

  In the new year, 2000, Carly began production
on the new album she was calling Manhattan Was a Maiden, after a new song that was eventually left off the record. Drummer Steve Gadd was reenlisted, along with bassists T-Bone Wolk and Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan’s musical director (and a Vineyard neighbor). Teese Gohl was orchestrating three of the songs, including the big Gershwin finale. Microphones were installed in Carly’s barn, and Mindy Jostyn arrived to play her fiddle and sing backup. There was a long weekend when the Irish singer Liam Ó Maonlaí and the Rankin Sisters sang backing vocals. These musicians ended up on seven of the eleven tracks of the album called The Bedroom Tapes.

  Carly’s tapes were mixed at Right Track Studios in New York by Carly and Frank Filipetti. Instrumental and vocal tweaks were added for new colors, but Carly wanted most of the album to be true to the original concept of her working alone in Sally’s bedroom. One night, she needed some funky backing vocals for the song “Big Dumb Guy” (said to be about a Boston newspaper reporter). Ben Taylor brought along his friend John Forté, twenty-five, a talented black musician from Brooklyn, who had won a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy and then produced tracks for the multiplatinum group The Fugees, and other hip-hop luminaries. Carly and Forté became good friends—he called her “Mama C”—and Forté often stayed with Ben during long sojourns on the Vineyard. The boys nailed the vocal in a couple of takes, after they were able to stop laughing at the song’s goofy lyrics.

  The Bedroom Tapes compact disc was released in early May 2000. The new music spoke to the trauma of postcancer therapy and the (for Carly) joyous release of retail therapy, or shopping. The CD booklet was photographed by Bob Gothard and contained a short essay by Carly thanking all the producers she had worked with, by name, for inspiring her to produce this new album, by herself.