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

by Stephen Davis

  Ben Taylor’s song “Island” owes a lot to Bob Marley. “Hola Soleil” is a sun-worshipping samba jam with the band and a kids’ chorus. “In My Dreams” is Carly—sounding her age—soloing with Jimmy Webb on cabaret piano. One of the highlights of the set is a cool bossa nova—“When We’re Together”—written by Sally Taylor in the style of the current Brazilian star Bebel Gilberto. Carly’s friend Peter Calo contributes expert and apposite Dobro and guitar.

  Another highlight, and the most typical Carly Simon song on the album, is “So Many People to Love,” a collaboration with Carole Bayer Sager, sung with an endearing stutter that speaks of Carly’s worries about the people she felt were depending on her continued success. A similar sentiment runs through “They Just Want You to Be There,” another musing on adult responsibilities. Jimmy Webb and Carly cowrote “The Last Samba,” actually more a bossa nova, as their shared tribute and soft elegy for the pure pleasures that Brazilian music had brought to their artistic lives. The album concludes with “Sangre Dolce,” a portrait of an immigrant woman stranded between loves and loyalties, and “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” a corny summer carousel with Jimmy Webb on his typically haunting piano.

  For Carly, a lot was riding on her new album in the spring of 2008, and she plunged into promo mode. She played a show for an invitation-only crowd of fans at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. (Introducing her son: “I’m his mother, James Taylor is his father, though James doesn’t always connect the dots.” The audiences laughed, as if they were old friends.) She received a reporter for London’s Telegraph newspaper at her Greenwich Village duplex wearing a stylish pinstriped Ralph Lauren blazer. First stop was the bedroom, with sheer golden and damask drapes hanging from the frame of an antique four-poster. The pale pink quilt, made of silk, had belonged to Carly’s mother. The interview was conducted in the candlelit, piano-equipped library/ bathroom, the reporter seated in a green armchair wedged between an old desk and a claw-footed porcelain bathtub. Carly pulled up a stool. Downstairs, Ben Taylor and David Saw were rehearsing guitar parts for a possible tour to support This Kind of Love.

  When the reporter pointed out that this was Carly’s first album of new songs in eight years (since The Bedroom Tapes), Carly explained, “It’s like meeting a man, this album. As you get more and more into him, it turns out that there’s a chemistry there after all—even though he has shades and tones and attitudes and looks and feelings that were much different from those you were used to.” She explained that her current lover, Dr. Koehler, was a new kind of love for her. “He’s really different from the other men I have known. I didn’t think he was my type, at all.” Then Carly drifted into a lyric: “But I was stranded, with no light home, and we drove the beach road together. He’s the magician who sings the sun down, his face in silhouette.” Carly also noted that her sister Joanna was now living with Walter Cronkite, whose wife had passed away. And that her oncologist had recommended peas as a healthy midnight snack, so she could sometimes be found, late at night, staring at the microwave oven, watching little green cups going around and around.

  May 14, 2008. In New York, Carly appeared on the syndicated TV talk show hosted by Tavis Smiley, looking great in long blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, nursing a mug of tea. Smiley asked about the songs about her children on This Kind of Love. She explained that “Hold Out Your Heart” began when Ben told her he was going surfing at midnight in February, which made her crazy. Then there were difficulties with Sally and her husband she didn’t want to get into. But she allowed there’d been “a recent set of problems with my daughter that really makes it very, very difficult to talk to her about them, because there’s a kind of… vacuum of silence… a kind of impenetrable wall that we can’t seem to blast through. And so I wrote about it in the second verse of that song.”

  June 2008. Copies of the This Kind of Love CD disappeared from Starbucks outlets and were not replenished. The album didn’t chart. Carly couldn’t find out what was going on. Then Hear Music suddenly announced that the company was shutting down. The president of the company and key executives were reportedly escorted out of their offices by security guards. Starbucks announced it was pulling back from the music business, and sales management of This Kind of Love was handed to a partner, the Concord Music Group. Carly Simon was dumbfounded. In her mind, she could once again hear Jackie Onassis saying, “Oh, Carly—you’ve been screwed.”

  Retirement, Carly realized, had to be indefinitely postponed. And there were financial problems as well. She owed money on her island home, and had tried to sell her Manhattan apartment, without success. Her financial manager, Kenneth Starr, reported losses in the stock market. Hear Music had never paid her the full advance for the album, and there was no lift in catalogue sales or radio royalties that usually come with a successful new album. Carly quietly sold the portrait Andy Warhol had painted of her, and some other things, to cover costs.

  She huddled with lawyers. Then she sued Starbucks for ten million dollars, alleging breach of promise and fraudulent business practices. This case, which made national headlines and was also reported in the European press, dragged on for a couple of years, until a judge ruled that Hear Music had never been a legal division of the giant coffee company, so Carly’s suit against Starbucks had no legal standing. Carly appealed. Her lawyers argued that she had been grossly misled and that facts had been concealed from her. A judge in the appellate court in California ruled against her, based on the wording of contracts and other documents she had signed with Hear Music. (By this time, This Kind of Love had sold about 125,000 copies through normal outlets.) Carly’s high-priced attorneys then filed an amended appeal, and in 2010 another California judge also ruled against her. “We couldn’t break the judge’s heart,” she ruefully told a friend.

  Autumn 2008. Carly’s friend Pam Frank, the photographer who’d shot the cover of the Spy album, married Harry Belafonte. Carly and her band (again without Sally Taylor) played a sold-out show at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City in October. Barack Obama’s campaign was broadcasting Carly’s “Let the River Run” as one of the major themes in his successful run for the American presidency. And, after the election, on November 24, 2008, President George Bush sat down at his desk in the White House and pardoned fourteen individuals, and commuted the prison sentences of two others convicted of offenses related to the sale of cocaine. One of these was identified in the press as John Edward Forté of North Brunswick, New Jersey. Carly’s friend Senator Orrin Hatch had come through for her, after seven years of promises. (New York Post headline: “Rapper Is Free to Yo.”) John Forté was released from prison four weeks later, just before Christmas, and joined his friend Ben Taylor’s household at Hidden Star Hill.

  Carly was flushed by the success of John Forté’s release. She told the Associated Press that Orrin Hatch “is not just a Republican, but a great human being. He was always very impressed with everything I brought to his attention regarding John.” Then Carly’s early hero Odetta died on December 2, 2008. Carly wrote a glowing encomium for one of the last great figures of the civil rights movement of her youth, a fond farewell that was published on the Huffington Post website.

  NEVER BEEN GONE

  In 2009, Carly told The Wall Street Journal that her attempt to make a final album, and then retire, had been a total bust. “My thrilling comeback,” she allowed, “was no such thing.” She told the newspaper that she was in litigation with Starbucks; she claimed that she was three million dollars in the red; and that she was forced, at her advanced age, to keep working. She wanted, she said, to write serious music: concertos and symphonies. Instead, she decided, for business reasons, to rerecord some of her most important songs.

  A lot of her generational peers were doing it, too, because most veteran songwriters didn’t own the master recordings of their old songs. These tapes tended to remain the property of the (often defunct) record labels that originally released the songs, so their creators earned only a relatively small amount from back cat
alogue sales and other revenue streams. Trying to recover master tapes, through legal means, from the giant corporations that had swallowed the original labels was expensive and even risky. But if songwriters such as Carole King, Suzanne Vega, or John Prine rerecorded their old songs, they could retain ownership of these new versions and garner a majority of any future income through licensing and other means. (The Wall Street Journal described this gambit as an astute business move for popular recording artists past their peak, in terms of sales.) Also, Carly was still under a contractual obligation to some now-hated and amorphous corporate entity—Hear Music/ Starbucks/ Concord Music Group/ Universal—not to record any new music until a specified period of time expired. The downside of releasing new versions of old songs is that the original fan base just wouldn’t care enough to purchase them.

  According to Carly, it was her son Ben who suggested, “Let’s make an album at home for no money.” This took much of 2009. Carly: “We forged ahead in fits and starts. Ben would go on tour and then come back, and we’d do some things. And for a lot of the recording I was saying, ‘Huh? What is this going to be about? I’m dealing with a lot of other things in my life, and this isn’t necessarily something I need.’” Ben Taylor, then thirty-two, was trying nothing less than to reimagine his mother’s major work with new arrangements, different rhythms, and resettings of Carly’s classic material. Mother and son fought over the direction this new music was taking, but both also described themselves as “serial capitulators” in the creative process. Carly said later that they must have spent a thousand hours working on the new “Boys in the Trees” alone.

  Summer 2009. Jim Hart’s son, Eamon, died, and Carly was affected. Eamon had never lived with Carly and Jim, but he had been her stepson for eighteen years. Carly got back in touch with Libby Titus after hearing that Libby’s son, Ezra, had also died. A guy who claimed he had fixed the fence around Carly’s property was sending her hate mail. In August, President Obama brought his family to the Vineyard, but Carly had had enough of politicians by then. She sang onstage with Ben and John Forté at her old nightclub and was dazzling. Then she appeared at a book signing party at the Midnight Farm store looking glazed over and unsteady. In fact, she really wasn’t feeling well at all, and was occasionally hospitalized for various ailments. She probably had some work done on her facial presentation. A British writer who’d published a book about Willie Donaldson approached Carly with the idea of writing her biography. Carly e-mailed back that he’d be wasting his time. To another would-be biographer she wrote, “I would pity you, having to re-live my experience, I would say, 89% of which was painful. There’s very little of show business that is fun for anyone who doesn’t have the cunning of Anne Boleyn’s father. (You could substitute that with Beyoncé’s father.)” At the end of August she traveled with her completed tapes to Portland, Maine, where they were mastered by Bob Ludwig, the legendary recording engineer who always completed the final stages of turning Carly’s late-period music into a finished product.

  Carly was fighting with Simon and Schuster. Her father’s old firm was demanding twenty-six thousand dollars in production costs for the pulped Lyrics book, and no way was Carly going to pay. S&S was also turning down Carly’s ideas for another children’s book, which would have completed her deal with them. She told friends that problems with Simon and Schuster was like being rejected by her father all over again. She also said she was being victimized by a financial manager who operated in the mold of the notorious schemer Bernard Madoff and was in the process of losing millions of her money. On September 11, 2009, Carly sang “Let the River Run” with Sally and Ben at a memorial at the site of the former World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

  Never Been Gone, the album of rebooted Carly Simon songs, was released in October 2009 on Iris Records, a label partly owned by her son, which licensed the tracks from Carly on a temporary basis. Carly described the album as “the gateway to the rest of my life” and she dedicated it to her lyricist, alter ego, and friend Jacob Brackman. The new versions of the old songs were chiming, shining, tingling: the old analog music buffed for the digital age. “The Right Thing to Do” is all sweet and lulling acoustics and new, passionately jamming lyrics. “It Happens Every Day” has a funky R&B tempo. Teese Gohl plays piano on the title track, from a foxtrot to a waltz. “Boys in the Trees” has a spooky orchestration and Sally Taylor and John Forté on vocals. “Let the River Run” has buttery new, choirlike vocals. “You’re So Vain” is a mash-up of bass elements with (Brian) Wilsonian variations.

  “You Belong to Me” is transformed by her son and John Forté into cool, adult-oriented hip-hop. The heavily orchestrated “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” seems both haunted and haunting, as its ancient suburban values are exposed to the light of a new century, and much newer attitudes. Carly wrote an intense new verse for “Coming Around Again,” now presented as more of a meditation on the broken heart than the anthem of romantic hope it once was. David Saw’s resetting of “Anticipation” is somewhat tepid, and the album concludes with the obscure “Songbird,” with the twin images of a young Carly Simon at her piano and the current model dealing with aging and maintaining a reckoning with the world: stoic, always heroic.

  Carly went to work that autumn, promoting her album on TV’s Good Morning America and Jimmy Fallon’s late night comedy show. Carly and the band worked up a hot slice of “You Belong to Me” with John Forté rapping and DJ Logic scratching. “You’re So Vain” was given an updated, staccato feel. Carly’s team also worked on maximizing her online presence at her website (carlysimon. com), enticing her fans with impromptu home performances, personal observations, and funny video blogs. Her son told The Boston Globe, “We mean to go micro, and make her own universe so provocative that every Carly Simon fan wants to go there and have a more personal connection. She’s used to such a different paradigm, a big corporate music situation, and we had to keep spelling it out. She kept saying, ‘Do I really get to keep 60 percent of everything?’”

  Nevertheless, sales of Never Been Gone were initially disappointing.

  Thanksgiving 2009. In New York, Carly rode on the Care Bears float in the Macy’s parade, which she used to watch with her kids from their perch at apartment 6S, on Central Park West. When Carly’s float reached the main department store on Thirty-fourth Street, she lip-synced “Let the River Run” for the huge national TV audience. Then she took the rest of the year off. She sometimes scrubbed with her surgeon boyfriend, and then sang loving songs to his recovering patients at the Plymouth, Massachusetts, hospital where he operated.

  In March 2010, Carly and Ben flew to England, where Never Been Gone had just been released. She played her first-ever concert in the UK, at the BBC’s Maida Vale studio, and chatted about some of the stories behind the songs. Asked by several British interviewers who “You’re So Vain” was about, she replied, tongue in cheek, that the song was about David Geffen. Asked about James Taylor, she answered, “He won’t talk to me.” She told another reporter that her children weren’t allowed to give her James’s phone number. “But I don’t have many regrets,” she added. “I chose pain, too, and I don’t blame James for any part of it.”

  By Easter 2010, Carly was back on the Vineyard and being more of a grandmother to Sally’s little blond boy, Bodhi, having reconciled with his father and mother.

  In May, Kenneth Starr, who managed Carly’s financial affairs, was arrested in New York by government agents. They found him hiding in a closet in his multimillion-dollar apartment, his shoes sticking out from under the door. Carly was among his celebrity clients, who included Sylvester Stallone and photographer Annie Leibovitz. He was charged with stealing fifty-nine million dollars from his clients and was imprisoned. One source estimated that Carly possibly lost several million dollars. Asked by a reporter how she could credit Starr’s standard promise of 28 percent returns, she replied, “I’m just that naïve and stupid. I thought that it was possible.” About her Vineyard estate
: “If I sold this house, which is our family compound, if I sold that and lived in a trailer, we would have plenty of money.” Asked why she hung on with Starr after allegations had been made against him, she replied, “I remember thinking that they wouldn’t dare fool with me, because now they’re under investigation.”

  June 2010. James Taylor and Carole King were touring together in a nostalgia bath of singer-songwriterness. Almost every arena their Troubadour Reunion tour played sold out. (It was the second biggest grossing tour of the year, after Bon Jovi’s.) Judy Collins played her cabaret show at the Café Carlisle for five weeks, also a near sellout. Carly Simon was added to three concerts of the revived Lilith Fair, a woman-centric traveling summer festival, but had to pull out when she injured her foot. One day that summer, she appeared at the island’s ferry landing handing out a two-song CD from Never Been Gone as a teaser to the tourists.

  That summer she worked with the Brazilian soccer hero Pelé on a project related to the 2012 Olympic Games. In September she appeared onstage with her son and John Forté in a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Earl, which actually failed to reach Martha’s Vineyard. She and her children sang at a memorial service for the actress Patricia Neal, a longtime Vineyard resident. She lost her final appeal in the lawsuit against Starbucks. Guests at Carly’s Christmas Eve party included Sally and her family, Ben and his girlfriend, her niece Julie Levine, Peter and Ronnie Simon, David Saw, and Jake Brackman and his children.

  In January 2011, Carly signed a half-million-dollar music publishing deal with the Bertelsmann Music Group. She accepted an award from Our Time, a charitable foundation dedicated to those who stutter and stammer. (The recent film The King’s Speech had brought massive attention to this malady.) On March 2, she saw on the news that President Obama had bestowed a National Medal of Arts on James Taylor at a White House ceremony. The next month James, now sixty-three, played four sold-out nights at Carnegie Hall. (James at the White House: “I always felt like such an outsider. There’s an element of alienation in my approach. I wonder when all this stuff is going to sink in.”) That summer, Ben Taylor opened shows on his father’s annual tour.