Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  It was a strange life—gilded and unstable, lonely and crowded with some of the most accomplished and famous artists in the world. Carrie had her first experiences with drugs when she was thirteen. When Reynolds heard that her fifteen-year-old had been talking about trying LSD, she brought in Cary Grant, who had been part of a medical experiment on the drug in the early 1960s, to give her a stern lecture about its evils. Carrie went ahead and did it anyway, but no amount of drugs could dampen her intelligence or dull her natural talent as an actress. Warren Beatty cast her as Lee Grant’s teenage daughter in Shampoo—her most memorable line, delivered to Beatty’s lothario character, George: “Wanna fuck?”—and it was only a matter of months before Star Wars producer/director George Lucas came calling.

  Young, successful, and witty, Carrie fit easily into the Hollywood-SNL circuit and soon became one of the most sought-after women in their circle. She was already being wooed by Mike Nichols, David Geffen, and Richard Dreyfuss when she met Paul, but once they saw each other, no one else mattered to either of them. And as she prepared to start shooting the next Star Wars blockbuster in London, Paul threw himself into his own movie project in the Central Park West apartment the couple now shared.

  * * *

  Paul’s muse almost always carried him back to the heart of his own existence, so it was no surprise that the character he envisioned for his movie was a man very much like him. A singer-songwriter whose first single had been an enormous hit in the mid-1960s, but instead of following it up with three more hit singles and a decade-long streak of hit albums, the character spends the rest of his career spiraling away from his initial success. As the movie picked up, he’d be in his midthirties and still on the road, struggling to keep his band moving while also tending to the needs of his estranged wife and their small son. Despite the disparity in their commercial achievements, the musician character he named Jonah Levin had the same core conflict that had gripped Paul for so long: an inability to reconcile the needs of his loved ones and closest companions with a rootless spirit that required the thrum of music to stay alive. Jonah would be good at what he did, too, if only because every note he played and sang would come from Paul Simon. Yet hardly anyone in Jonah’s world would be listening—certainly not the men who ran the big music companies. And maybe there was something in Jonah that didn’t want him to be successful.

  To learn more about the club-to-club grind of most working musicians, while also gleaning something about the psyche of a widely admired yet unsuccessful artist, Paul spent time with the singer-songwriter Dave Van Ronk, whose top-rank reputation in Greenwich Village stretched back before Bob Dylan showed up. Dylan had learned from Van Ronk, too. The Minnesotan lifted Van Ronk’s revolutionary guitar arrangement of the blues standard “House of the Rising Sun” for his first record, and was then given the credit, and royalties, when the Animals’ cover of the song became a global hit a year later. Many others followed Van Ronk’s lead as well, but Van Ronk had never moved beyond the middling ranks of touring folk players, and though he complained about being overlooked, he was a hard-drinking rebel whose dogged resistance to the conventions of the music business struck some of his friends as willful self-sabotage. Paul suffered no such conflicts when it came to business, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still taste the ashes that filled Jonah’s mouth, the dread that he’d get up one day and discover that the world had lost interest in him.

  Paul’s work on the script started long before his war with Yetnikoff, but when he started thinking about moving over to Warner Bros., he realized that signing with a label that was a subsidiary of an enormous movie studio could have benefits for a musician eyeing the movie business, particularly for one who had just become the most prized member of its record company’s roster. When Paul’s script went out to producers, the response was positive, to say the least. In the end it turned into an auction between Anthea Sylbert at Warner Bros. and Paula Weinstein, a producer with Paramount. There wasn’t much difference in the money they had to spend, but Weinstein’s offer came with a caveat: she wanted Paul to rewrite the script. Sylbert figured it was fine the way it was, so Paul, who had already revised it a number of times, went with Sylbert.

  Now he had to find a director and actors. Mike Tannen suggested Mike Nichols, but he was busy, and Alan Parker, whose credits included the acclaimed Midnight Express and the popular kid-filled gangster parody Bugsy Malone, had a hard time imagining that Paul would give any director enough creative control to truly direct anything. Eventually Paul settled on Robert Young, most of whose work had been in documentaries and news programs. “His ego didn’t get in the way,” Paul told People’s Jim Jerome when the film was released. Choosing a lead actor came with its own complications. None of the leading stars Paul had approached (Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss, maybe one or two more) could see themselves in the role, and, frankly, Paul couldn’t see them, or anyone else, either. He’d written the movie to include something like half a dozen live performances by Jonah and his band, all of whom would be portrayed by the musicians Paul was recording and playing with at the time. They had already recorded the songs with Paul singing, and as both Hoffman and Dreyfuss figured, it would be ridiculous for anyone to try to lip-synch to Paul’s extremely recognizable voice. And why shouldn’t Paul play the part himself? As he’d proven on SNL, on his own special, and the Oscar-winning Annie Hall, Paul had a natural feel for acting. He’d been a stage performer for most of his life. And the semiautobiographical character Paul had created for the movie would hardly be a stretch.

  So it was settled: Paul would play Jonah Levin. He hired the Method acting teacher Mira Rostova, who counted Montgomery Clift among her earlier students, to help him prepare. Paul also accelerated his campaign to make himself more physically attractive. Already a consistent exerciser who followed a meat-, sugar-, and alcohol-free diet in order to control the calcium deposits in his hands, he now worked his way below 120 pounds. His reduced weight, along with the passing years, removed the baby fat from his face, giving him a leaner, sculpted appearance. Even more noticeably, his hair had made a comeback, his sparse whorls now rich and fluffy, a development that completed his transition from all too human to Hollywood handsome.

  With Mike Tannen serving as the day-to-day producer, the rest of the preproduction details came together smoothly. The rising actress Blair Brown (The Paper Chase, The Choirboys) signed on to play Jonah’s estranged wife, while the character actor Rip Torn took the role of duplicitous record company president Walter Fox, whose inspiration did not require guesswork. Proto-punk musician Lou Reed played against type as a careerist pop record producer, and some soon-to-be-famous names (Daniel Stern, Mare Winningham) turned up in small roles. Paul’s real four-piece band (drummer Steve Gadd, keyboardist Richard Tee, guitarist Eric Gale, and bassist Tony Levin) played versions of themselves, with the outsize Tee, dubbed Clarence Franklin, in the onstage sidekick/offstage protector role that E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons played with Bruce Springsteen.

  Shot largely in and around Cleveland during the winter of 1979, the film suffered the usual complications and setbacks. Blair Brown, in the role of Jonah’s wife, didn’t like how the lighting and staging favored Paul’s appearance, while no one seemed to care how she looked. When a late-night shoot at the Cleveland airport stretched to an overnight ordeal, Paul entertained the throng of extras by leading them in a doo-wop singalong of “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love” between shots. Hoping to attract ten thousand people to fill seats for scenes at an arena show, the team put up flyers for a free Paul Simon concert and attracted only a sparse crowd of thirty-five hundred, a setback that gnawed at Paul’s perpetually fragile self-esteem—perhaps in a good way, since the anxiety gave him a direct line into Jonah’s dread that his next downturn will be the end.

  With his movie scheduled for release in the early fall of 1980, Paul helped design a multimedia publicity campaign of the likes he had never attempted. He gave lengthy interviews to Rolling S
tone, the Washington Post, the Times of London’s Sunday Magazine, Melody Maker, Playboy, and even People magazine, whose celebrity profiles have always revealed all the real-life details Paul had spent his career avoiding. No matter. Paul’s cover story (“Still Creative After All These Years!”) captured it all for public viewing. The ornate tile work on his indoor hot tub, the cost of his in-home gym (five thousand dollars), the make of his car (Mercedes), where he spent his summers (rented homes in the Hamptons), his rigorous diet, his precise weight (117 pounds), and his thoughts on Carrie Fisher, whose second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, had dominated the nation’s movie screens throughout the summer—said Paul, “She’s really got the goods and the Force is with her”—not to mention TV and radio interview shows.

  The movie’s soundtrack was a ten-song collection: live performances by Paul, Richard Tee, Eric Gale, Steve Gadd, and Tony Levin and studio recordings of the songs Paul had written to reveal the internal life of his main character. The lead single from the album, a Latin rocker called “Late in the Evening,” represented another leap in Paul’s stylistic meanderings, and a glimpse back to those afternoon dance sessions the Lee Simms Orchestra shared with the Latin bands at the Roseland Ballroom. The song was just as striking on the radio in the summer of 1980, rising to No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and fading off the charts just in time for the release of the title track, “One-Trick Pony,” one of the tunes that was recorded live at Cleveland’s Agora Ballroom. It was just as striking as its predecessor, slithering funk with a throbbing bass hook punctuated by skalike guitar stabs as Paul’s voice traces the image of a performer who can “make it look so easy, look so clean / He moves like God’s immaculate machine.”

  Music itself, its pleasures and its costs, threads through the album, particularly on “Ace in the Hole,” the other track recorded live at the Agora. “Ace” rocks harder than anything else on the album, its central hook coming from Gale’s guitar, with Levin and Gadd locked in tight and Paul sharing the lead with keyboardist Richard Tee’s rumbling baritone, the both of them shouting a musician’s credo with a joy that sounds nearly as sanctified as anything you might hear on a Sunday morning.

  You can sit on top of the beat,

  You can hang from the side of the beat

  You can hang from the bottom of the beat

  But you gotta admit that the music is sweet!

  The rest of the album, by comparison, feels deflated. Paul’s musical inventiveness is deemphasized in favor of a retiring jazz-pop sound meant to direct listeners to the songs’ narratives, all of which describe or comment upon the actions of the movie’s central character, this Paul-but-not-Paul singer-songwriter Jonah Levin. But the light jazz setting of the songs (Gadd brushes the skins, Tee floats pillows from his keyboards, Gale and Levin hang back to make room for the violins, violas, and the occasional bassoon) seem flat in the company of the live tracks. Some of the other songs make bigger waves. “God Bless the Absentee” gets things back on track rhythmically, blending the habitual traveler’s isolation with the frustrations and confusion of the road. Does it seem like an endless party out there? It isn’t. Not even close. “Highways are in litigation, / The airports disagree / God bless the absentee…”

  “Oh, Marion,” sung directly to Jonah’s wife, reveals what he has already concluded: that the real disconnection in their life together resides in Jonah’s elusive heart. His life on the road, and the artifice of performing, is where he goes to hide. His voice, he admits, is a disguise. His lyrics don’t resonate in his soul: mirrors within mirrors within mirrors. The fiction in Levin’s soul reflects the distance between Paul and Levin, the latest in a chain of alternate personae going all the way back to Jerry Landis, whose initials, you might notice, are also those of Paul’s latest alter ego.

  Scheduled to open in the early fall, One-Trick Pony premiered on October 3, 1980, with a murky image. The advertisements and movie posters, like the album cover, featured a big photo of Paul on a city sidewalk at night looking pretty much exactly as you’d expect Paul Simon to look on a winter’s night: a guitar case in one hand, a baseball cap on his head, a zipped leather jacket, his lips drawn tight, a hurt/aggravated cast to his eyes. The tagline at the bottom of the movie ads, “Rock & Roll Will Give You Some Laughs But It Won’t Do You Any Favors,” was both clumsy and confusing. Were they promoting a Paul Simon concert film or an upmarket kind of Elvis movie? Was it a cinéma à clef about the music industry or a modern domestic drama about careers, love, marriage, and family? Not many moviegoers came to find out.

  The film begins with an abstract shot of lights moving across the screen to the hopeful bop of “Late in the Evening.” As the song continues, the verses describing the singer’s lifelong fixation on music are animated with flashbacks. All restage moments in Paul’s life, first as a small boy singing and plunking at a toy piano in his room,* then as a teenage greaser singing doo-wop with his friends in a tiled subway station, then as a long-haired protest singer playing at a 1968 rally for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The lights on the screen are revealed as an airplane descends into the Cleveland airport, and the central action in the film picks up as Paul’s character, Jonah Levin, and the four other musicians in his group move from the terminal gate to the city’s famous Agora Ballroom nightclub, where they are booked to open for the rising (and real-life) new wave band the B-52s. The band goes over well, but the applause they get is no match for the shrill ovation the B-52s earn just by stepping onstage.

  The band members drive from city to city to fulfill their gigs, but it’s clear that the group, like the live music industry, is faltering. When a handful of shows get canceled, Jonah returns to New York to see his son, Matty, while also reconnecting with his not-quite-ex-wife Marion. She loves him but can no longer abide his life as a musician. They clearly love each other, and Jonah is just as clearly a warm and loving father to their five-year-old son, but his fixation on his career overwhelms everything else. When he learns that Walter Fox, the president of a large record label, is interested in signing him to make a new album, he makes tracks for Fox’s office suite, where he finds the clearly Yetnikovian executive (“Fox” is the English translation of Yetnikoff’s Yiddish nickname, Velvel) consulting with the unsubtly named Cal Van Damp, a dim but enormously successful commercial radio consultant.† Fox tells the musician that he’d be willing to pay for him to make a comeback album, but only if it’s filled with songs slick and danceable enough to become hits. Given no alternatives, Jonah agrees, though the rest of the scene exists entirely to reveal how craven Fox, Van Damp, and the commercial music industry they represent have become.

  Fox sets Jonah up with a hot young pop music producer named Steve Kunelian (played by Lou Reed at his aggro-iciest), who wants Jonah to work with studio musicians rather than his own band; Jonah insists on using his guys. His manager calls to tell him that he’s been invited to a high-paying industry showcase meant to create a touring market for oldies acts from the 1960s.* Jonah is wary of pandering to nostalgia, but he’s in good company at the show—Sam and Dave rip the stuffing out of “Soul Man,” the Lovin’ Spoonful perform a perfect “Do You Believe in Magic?”—and the audience is transfixed as Jonah plays his “Soft Parachutes,” the acoustic antiwar ballad that, like Paul’s “The Sound of Silence,” became a definitive document of the 1960s. His appearance is a smash, and the music industry seems to be turning his way again.

  Yet the tragedy of Jonah, the part of him that has no connection to Paul, is his contempt for the industry and, even more, for the part of himself that yearns for success. From there, it’s all downhill. He gets drunk at Fox’s after-show party and insults everyone in sight. He falls into bed with Walter Fox’s wife, then after hearing the producer Kunelian’s slickened production of his songs, he steals and destroys the master tapes. The opening notes of “Late in the Evening” play, the credits roll, and the screen goes dark.

  The early reviews ranged from positive to very good to outri
ght raves. The critic at the Los Angeles Times, the hometown newspaper for the movie industry, celebrated every aspect of the film, citing the “acuteness” in Paul’s “ruthlessly honest” portrayal of the music industry, then praising director Robert Young’s “graceful precision” and his visual portrayal of the industrial Midwest. “One of our most celebrated singer-composers,” he concluded, “has become an impressive actor and screenwriter.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times was less impressed, particularly when it came to the scenes that didn’t involve the music industry. Still, she admired Paul’s acting (particularly the way he used his “innate air of detachment” to dramatic effect). The Christian Science Monitor’s critic called it “a delightful surprise,” while the Chicago Sun-Times’s Roger Ebert, nationally known as the cohost with his Chicago Tribune rival Gene Siskel of what was then called Sneak Previews on PBS, called it “a wonderful movie,” one of the best in what struck him as a thin year for American cinema.

  But all that was swept aside by a torrent of reviews sour enough to make it seem like the critics were talking about a completely different film. Newsweek’s David Ansen described Paul’s acting as a troika of facial expressions: “Poutiness, archness and arrogance.” That last one seemed to be most on Ansen’s mind when he dismissed the entire film as “a vanity production.” There were a lot of takedowns published that fall, but the most hostile came from Carrie Rickey, a movie critic for the Village Voice. A writer with a distinctly political perspective, Rickey built her critique of One-Trick Pony into a harsh analysis of Paul’s role in American culture over the previous fifteen years. The first paragraph focused on his Jewishness, pairing him with Dustin Hoffman, the similarly short, dark-featured actor who had been his cinematic doppelgänger since The Graduate. Separately and together, she wrote, the musician and actor had personified “’60s college-kid alienation, counseling a smug passive resistance to authority,” while at the same time creating a vogue on college campuses for “philo-Semitism,” and for “legitimiz[ing] Jewish looks.”