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

by Stephen Davis

  Meanwhile, Carly’s brother, Peter, was arrested several times for drunk driving on the Vineyard. Carly dutifully attended his legal sessions at the county courthouse in nearby Edgartown, and supported him as he resolved to get treatment for alcohol addiction. Peter spent that summer in the island’s jail, visited by his sister and various island luminaries. (When TV comedian Larry David visited Peter [with Alan Dershowitz], he was mobbed for autographs by jail employees.) Sally Taylor was on her honeymoon in darkest Cambodia, sending her worried mother bulletins via e-mail.

  Then there was her husband in New York, struggling with drug use and dependent on a network of dealers to keep him going. Needing some distraction from these travails, Carly accepted an offer to appear as herself in a cameo role in the movie Little Black Book, for which she’d written some music. The difficult year 2004 ended with two gospel-flavored Christmas concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, with Carly’s children, Lucy Simon, Liv and Kate Taylor, gospel star Bebe Winans, jazz star Christian McBride, and a big, full-throated gospel choir. Carly described the concerts’ atmosphere as uninhibited and the carols this group produced as “rousing.”

  Carly Simon pulled out of this period in early 2005 by once again turning to the music of her past. She had been contacted by her old friend Richard Perry, who had produced Rod Stewart’s recent bestselling albums of standards. Perry had a bunch of songs in mind that Stewart hadn’t used, and Carly said she would do them. Perry recorded the orchestra in Los Angeles, and Carly sang her vocals in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard. The songs included classics such as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” a samba-like “Alone Together,” the always spooky “I Only Have Eyes for You,” the Gershwins’ “How Long Has This Been Going On,” and Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.”

  “We had fun,” Carly later said of these sessions. “We recorded more cheaply than ever before. Richard and I knew each other well enough to allow the jibes to turn into warmly taken, non-bristly affairs.” The eleven tracks they recorded—Carly’s fourth collection of timeless tunes—were released by Columbia Records in July 2005 under the title Moonlight Serenade. Carly appeared on the CD package in elegant silken evening gowns, in photos taken by Bob Gothard.

  To everyone’s amazement, Moonlight Serenade was an instant smash, hitting the charts at number seven on the day of release. It was Carly’s first Top Ten recording in thirty years. “I was very shocked,” she told the BBC. “Then incredibly happy, and then I was thinking, ‘I’m only gonna get killed now.’ As soon as you do anything successful, everybody hates you as somebody who has ‘legs’ in their career…. Not that I didn’t call everybody I knew [about the chart position], saying, GUESS WHAT? like a teenage girl.” Moonlight Serenade sold well for the rest of the year and was nominated for a Grammy Award. Critics opined that Carly’s success was due to the rapidly aging baby boom generation’s nostalgia for the music of their parents. New York Times headline: “Sex Symbols of the 1970’s Doing Lawrence Welk for Hip Seniors.”

  Carly swerved when her friend Mindy Jostyn died of cancer in March 2005. This was a terrible time. Peter Simon: “The issue of Mindy’s death that made it so rough on Carly was that Mindy was a practicing Christian Scientist who refused treatment for her cancer altogether. Mindy just asked for prayers, so when she died, there was this terrible feeling of helplessness that just engulfed everyone.”

  Mindy’s husband, Jake Brackman, tried to hold things together for their children, but Carly fell apart and stopped eating. When she got down to a skeletal 110 pounds, she was persuaded to enter McLean Hospital for treatment. On the night she checked into the hospital’s unlocked facility for patients who weren’t a danger to themselves, she was told there was a sandwich for her in the refrigerator down the hall. Carly wasn’t hungry, but the nurse said she had to get the sandwich. When she opened the fridge, there was indeed a sandwich with her name on it, next to another one labeled “James Taylor.” Carly froze. But she found out the food was for another patient with the same name. “I think someone just wanted to zap me,” Carly said later. “And no, I didn’t eat the sandwich.”

  Later, she heard that her old London flame, Willie Donaldson, had also expired after a long career as a public reprobate. She mourned for Willie, too.

  When she felt better and had gained some weight, Carly went to work promoting her big hit album Moonlight Serenade. She gave a lot of interviews and spoke about living in her sixth decade. To the London daily The Independent: “It’s very odd turning sixty. I thought I’d be much better about it than I am. I thought that I’d just kind of float into it and be a great older woman—my new identity—and then all of a sudden the shock of the number: SIXTY!”

  On menopause: “My mother used to say, ‘It’s such a relief not having that constant thing [menstruation] that makes you feel like an animal in heat.’ If I want to feel sexy, I know how I can feel sexy. But now it’s got to be about someone very appealing, because you don’t have random thoughts about sex that—like when you were in your teens or twenties—make you want to get into bed with just about anyone. Actually, for me, that was most prevalent in my forties. I think it was Mother Nature’s way of saying, ‘This is your last chance, so I’ll give you a little bit of extra steam right now.’ So I had a very active love life in my forties.”

  Autumn 2005. Carly and her daughter, Sally, filmed a special for PBS aboard the Cunard Line’s new luxury ship, Queen Mary II. Jim Hart came along, looking elegant in black tie. Carly and Sally were both resplendent in gowns and stoles. A tour was planned for later in the year, so Carly rehearsed with a new band (most had played with James Taylor on his annual summer tours) at the Hot Tin Roof, the Vineyard nightclub she’d founded, and which had been sold out from under her by her business partners while she was in the hospital. (She first heard about this in the local paper, the Vineyard Gazette.) Carly had registered copyright for the club’s name, so when it reopened the next summer, it was called Outerland.

  The tour began in Boston on November 19, 2005. Every show sold out immediately. The band was hot, and Carly shared the stage with Sally, Ben, and her little dog, Molly. Carly mixed hit songs and deep album cuts with atmospheric songs from Serenade, especially “I Only Have Eyes for You,” that brought her ovations almost every night. “Jesse” was a big rocking jam that often got the audiences up and dancing. Carly’s troupe motored through the tour in a pair of deluxe buses. After the concerts, Carly had the intense satisfaction of trying to go to sleep, as the buses rolled through the night to the next show, with both her children resting in their curtained berths across the aisle from where she lay.

  Some nights were funky. Some nights Carly was helped onstage. Backup singer Carmella Ramsey hit the high notes on “Coming Around Again” and other songs. Carly would forget lyrics and appear disorientated. In New York, the drummer motioned to a stagehand to help her get up from the piano. At some shows, people murmured that she seemed medicated. Before some (delayed) shows, Sally told audiences that her mother was very nervous, but would hopefully be joining them soon. Other shows were nailed, almost perfect. In Washington she beamed at a special guest, Senator Orrin Hatch, a crucial ally in the continuing campaign to spring John Forté from prison.

  Christmas was weird that year, 2005. Everyone was burnt out. Jake Brackman and his children came to the Vineyard, devastated. Kate Taylor, who’d lost her husband to cancer, came around and looked after everyone. Carly and her people got through the holiday season as best they could.

  INTO WHITE

  In 2006, Carly Simon divorced her second husband, with whom she remained on friendly terms. She had a spacious new kitchen built at Hidden Star Hill, which still bristled with assistants and caretakers and also served as an upscale boardinghouse for various musicians and friends of her son. Columbia wanted a follow-up to Moonlight Serenade, so Carly proposed an album of R&B covers with soul bandleader Booker T. Jones. The label asked for another plan. Carly suggested an album of soothing songs and lu
llabies, a sort of evening raga, and Columbia gave this a green light.

  Carly recorded about twenty songs at home and at local studio Parr Audio that summer. With Jimmy Parr producing, the basic ensemble consisted of Carly, Teese Gohl, Peter Calo, and Ben Taylor’s friend David Saw, one of the property’s resident songwriters. All the songs were important to Carly, emotionally and historically. All had some meaning or intimate connection to her past. Cat Stevens’s visionary “Into White” begins the album. The Beatles’ “Blackbird” has a beautiful cello descant. Carly sings James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes” with their children. Her take on Luis Bonfá’s “Manha De Carnaval”—the theme from the movie Black Orpheus—is lilting and redolent of a quiet night in Brazil. Lord Burgess’s “Jamaica Farewell,” made famous by Harry Belafonte (and a favorite of the Simon Sisters), has a beautiful Dobro solo and ends with a hypnotic fade into “You Are My Sunshine.” There is an Everly Brothers medley, and a melancholy “Over the Rainbow.”

  Stephen Foster’s “O! Susanna” is hushed and very haunting, softly lit by kalimba and flute. The traditional “Scarborough Fair” is given new lyrics by Carly. “I Gave My Love a Cherry” is tucked into bed by a lovely cello played by Jan Hyer. Carly reworked the lyrics to “Love of My Life” from the This Is My Life soundtrack. (The reference to loving Woody Allen is changed to loving Mia Farrow, his ex-wife.) David Saw contributed two new songs, “Quiet Evening” and “I’ll Just Remember You.”

  Fourteen of these tracks were released late in 2006. The album, Into White, received very good promotion from Columbia and entered the sales chart at number fifteen. (A bonus track, “Hush Little Baby”/“My Bonnie,” appeared on CDs sold at the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain.) Carly dedicated the album to Paul Samwell-Smith, her erstwhile producer and friend. Most of the album’s photographs were taken by Sally Taylor. In a booklet note, Carly writes that Into White is music of the kind “ grown-ups like me can get a little weepy over.” If the album does its job and lulls the listener to sleep, she hoped that “you won’t notice if you have tears on your pillow.” Explaining the ideas behind the album to an interviewer from a Chicago daily, Carly said, “I’ve reached the age of wisdom, now, and I feel strongly that I want to report on that.”

  For about a year Carly had been working on a book for Simon and Schuster titled Lyrics. She chose about a hundred of her favorite lyrics, and added about as many photographs from her private archive. She found many of the original handwritten manuscripts of the songs, and also wrote a serious introduction concerning her views on the art of songwriting. Simon and Schuster put Lyrics into production and sent proof copies to booksellers and reviewers. When Carly saw the finished copies, she found the production values—especially the inexpensive paper stock and the way the photographs were reproduced—to be way below her standard. It looked to her as if S&S were trying to publish her on the cheap. When the editors said it was too late to change the print run, Carly threatened legal action, which stopped Lyrics for good. All available copies were pulped, and a year’s work went for naught.

  Autumn 2006. Carly worked with Andreas Vollenweider on a Christmas album, Midnight Clear, appearing on four of the tracks.

  One day that fall, an old reel of audio tape arrived in the post from Woodstock. Albert Grossman’s widow, Sally, had closed down her husband’s famous Bearsville recording studio. When the studio archive was opened, one of the surprise discoveries was the tape Carly had made with members of the Band when Grossman was trying to brand Carly as the female Bob Dylan. The tape included “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” with lyrics rewritten for Carly by Bob Dylan, and the other demo that had been written by the producer. Carly had been looking for this tape for forty years, and here it was at last: Robbie Robertson’s stinging guitar, Garth Hudson’s droning organ, Levon Helm on drums, and Carly singing from the heart, in the pocket. Everyone Carly played the tape for loved it.

  Carly Simon was able to divorce her husband that year because she was involved with a new love. His name was Richard Koehler, a surgeon who had until recently worked at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. Dr. Koehler’s marriage was breaking up, and one day he was talking about his situation to Carly’s brother. Peter suggested that he give Carly a call, since Richard already had her phone number. He called, and they hit it off. He was handsome, blond, charming, attentive, and a decade younger. He was a doctor, and Carly needed a doctor, she told friends, preferably around the clock. Some of their early dates were drives around the Vineyard. One day she took him up to High Mark, the hilltop house where her mother had lived, to show him the stupendous view of the sea. The present owner was there, and invited them in to see the changes that had been made to the property. A wave of memories washed over Carly, and she was very moved. Outside, she stood between the trees where her mother’s hammock used to be, where she’d rocked for hours with baby Sally in her arms on summer evenings when James was away on tour. She looked at the lichen-covered stones that dotted the lawn. She knew those stones so well, she told her new beau, that she almost remembered their names.

  THIS KIND OF LOVE

  In early 2007, Carly Simon sent almost fifty sets of lyrics to Jimmy Webb in California to see what he could come up with. After two successful albums of covers, it was time to make an album of new songs. The problem was that the recording industry was in a state of endemic collapse following the digital revolution, whose file-sharing applications made buying recordings completely redundant. The closing of Tower Records’ flagship store on Sunset Boulevard in 2006 was emblematic of the thousands of other record shops around the country shutting down for good.

  In the spring of 2007, Carly joined a few other major artists who were licensing their recordings to Hear Music, a record company whose products were sold exclusively in Starbucks coffee shops nationwide. Hear Music had made a hit out of Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full album, and Joni Mitchell was currently enjoying success with Starbucks as well. Carly liked her meetings with Hear’s executives, who offered Carly up to one million dollars in advance, and made her a lot of marketing promises (CDs stocked by the cash registers, album tracks in heavy in-store rotation), and so she decided to sign up with them. She thought she was working with Starbucks, one of the biggest retail chains in America, and the deal had been presented to her as a sure thing. By summer 2007, Carly was planning to make this album, and then she was planning to retire.

  In August, she was joined by Sally and Ben Taylor at a campaign event on Martha’s Vineyard for Hillary Clinton, who was running for president. They sang “Devoted to You” for a crowd of almost two thousand.

  Then Carly and Jimmy Webb embarked on a working journey to Brazil. Carly had been in love with samba and bossa nova music since she first heard the epic collaborations between Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz in the early sixties. Now she was eager to put a Brazilian spin on her new album, to capture both the ecstasy of the music and its saudade, the untranslatable Portuguese term for the feeling of sorrow transmitted through some of tropicalism’s most beautiful songs. The original aim of the Brazilian trip was to link up with Caetano Veloso, the reigning high priest of Brazilian jazz, but Veloso’s schedule was full when they arrived. This was a disappointment but they soaked up as much local color as they could. When they got back to America they began writing songs. By September 2007, Jimmy Webb was recording with Carly and producer Frank Filipetti in her Vineyard kitchen studio, while, in another wing of the house, her daughter, Sally, was beginning to go into labor. Carly Simon’s grandson, Bodhi, was born that month on Martha’s Vineyard.

  February 2008. Headline in the scandal sheet National Enquirer: “Carly Simon Banned from Seeing Her Grandson/ Feud with Son-in-law EXPLODES.” The article reported that “people close to Carly” said that Sally’s husband was being difficult. The tabloid reported that Carly’s son-in-law became angry when Carly refused to give up some property he wanted. Sally and her family had left Hidden Star Hill and moved to Boston, leaving Carly somewhat bereft
. “I’m sorry,” she was quoted, “but I just can’t comment on any of that. All I can say is that I adore my daughter and cherish my grandson. I only got to hold him once, and that hurts.”

  Later that spring Carly played her first ever concert in Miami with her son, Ben (who dedicated his song “Island” to his “stubborn sister,” who was absent from the band). The concert was part of a Carly Simon weekend at Florida International University, whose theater department was mounting a full-length revival of Carly’s “family opera,” Romulus Hunt, featuring all-local performers. This was paired with a nonprofit care center for abandoned or neglected children, and the two benefit performances were complete sellouts. Carly and her band were putting a lot of new spins on familiar songs such as “You’re So Vain” and “Anticipation.” As she introduced “Coming Around Again,” she told the audience, “These songs have different meanings for me because I’m so old now.”

  The new songs Carly put together with Jimmy Webb were released by Hear Music in May 2008, on an album titled This Kind of Love. Carly’s hard-won new record was dedicated to the Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, and to Art Buchwald, who had recently died. The music is some of the most eclectic of Carly’s career, the songs reflective of varying colors and shadows in the sixth decade of her eventful life. “This Kind of Love” is another of Carly’s transgressive love ballads, but with a vibrant Brazilian hook at the end. “Hold Out Your Heart” reflects immediate conflicts within Carly’s family, as her children began breaking away from the fierce embrace of their mother’s uber-maternal love. “People Say a Lot” is a sinister funk-rap on the perils of employing personal assistants: initially competent but later unstable personalities who soon might know too much; who might, sometimes, be driven to blackmail and threats.