Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  Rickey seems most intent on hurling brickbats—what exactly does she mean by “legitimizing Jewish looks”?—but a few of her punches land. She sees through Paul’s habit of shielding himself within other images and identities. She notes the contradiction of the massively successful rock star making a movie that rails against the same commercial system that fueled his many triumphs over a decade and a half. The previous year had been flooded with films written by and/or starring famous artists whose works seemed deliberately to cloud the difference between author/actor and character. The fame-dodging Woody Allen as the fan-beset comedy writer/director/actor Sandy Bates in Stardust Memories. The recently divorced Dustin Hoffman as the unfairly spurned husband Ted Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer. And now Paul, Jonah Levin, and One-Trick Pony. “Shouldn’t the dramatic catharsis be in the work, instead of in that trivial limbo between reel and real life?” Rickey asked.

  The imaginary Jonah Levin was doing no favors for Paul Simon. The One-Trick Pony soundtrack album stalled at No. 12 on the Billboard charts, the first original studio record Paul had made that didn’t crack the Top 10 since Sounds of Silence in 1966. Even worse, One-Trick Pony the movie was a resounding financial flop, grossing less than $850,000 on Warner Bros.’ $8 million production budget. His autumn-long world tour with Levin, Gadd, Gale, and Tee offered some distraction, but by the time he played his final three dates in London in early November the strain was showing. Accompanying her mother, Judith Piepe, to visit with Paul backstage before a show at the Hammersmith Apollo theater, Ariel Bruce found Paul looking thin and edgy, not an unfamiliar sight among London’s music crowd during the cocaine-dusted early ’80s.

  Part of the reason for Piepe’s visit was to thank Paul for giving her a surprise gift of quite a bit of expensive new furniture, and he was as gracious as ever in receipt of her hug and kisses. Yet Ariel Bruce found the rest of his demeanor unsettling. He asked after Kathy Chitty, the London girlfriend who had so defined his time in the city, and grew particularly exercised as he went along. Where was she now? Did they know how he might reach her? He really wanted to see her again, or at least speak to her. But when Paul left the room for a moment, someone in his management swooped in to ask that Ariel not help Paul in his quest. “It was all a bit unsettling,” she says, adding that what happened next was even stranger. “At a concert a bit later, he said, ‘Does anyone know where Kathy is?’ And the papers got ahold of that … I was then telephoned by Daily Mail, Daily Express for a job: would I find Kathy? And I said no.” No matter, the British papers tracked Kathy down to Wales, camping out on her doorstep until she was close enough to be implored to send a message to Paul in their pages. As independent and willful as ever, Kathy didn’t utter a syllable, and Paul went back to New York to face up to what suddenly seemed like a very chilly future.

  CHAPTER 18

  WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

  When the new year began, Paul gave a hard look at the raw numbers of his ten-million-dollar-plus One-Trick Pony project (production budgets, promotional expenditures, chart positions, units shifted, and tickets purchased) and went to Warner Bros. Records president Mo Ostin to apologize. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, he said. He’d find a way to make it up to them. Ostin smiled and waved his hands; he wasn’t worried at all. Every artist has his ups and downs; he had no doubt that the deal would pay off handsomely in the end. Just let this one go, turn the page, and look to the future.

  Part of the process had started a year or two earlier when Mike Tannen, Paul’s lawyer, friend, and business partner since the mid-1960s, left Paul’s offices for the last time. They’d had a disagreement about Tannen’s role in Paul’s career, and Tannen withdrew from his job soon after. Paul had turned to Tannen to coproduce the One-Trick Pony movie, but with that project finished their day-to-day association ended. In his absence, Paul grew closer to Ian Hoblyn, whose responsibilities in Paul’s publishing company had grown throughout his decade-long tenure. Born and raised in England, Hoblyn spoke with the clipped voice of British authority, an affectation (he was not to the manor born) he made real with his intelligence and exceptional skills as a manager, organizer, and problem solver. Intellectually sophisticated, warmhearted, and outgoing, Hoblyn slipped easily into the roles of Paul’s chief assistant and daily companion. He accompanied Paul through much of his day and was on call twenty-four hours a day.

  Something great was coming next, Mo Ostin had told Paul, but in the late weeks of 1980 and the start of 1981 he found it difficult to believe. If only because he knew that nothing was coming next. He’d been through it before: the weeks and months of silence; the long, frigid winter of the muse. But it had never lasted as long as this, nor been so obliterating. As if he were being punished for his failures by losing his power to make up for them.

  It continued through the fall of 1980 and into the winter and spring of 1981. Desperate for relief, Paul called Dr. Roderic Gorney, a psychiatrist on the faculty of UCLA whose influential 1979 book The Human Agenda drew on his unique combination of Freudian practice and humanitarian philosophy. That Gorney was the son of songwriter Jay Gorney, who had cowritten the Depression-era classic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” among many other Broadway and pop hits, as well as discovering the talents of Shirley Temple, was an interesting aside. Paul scheduled an appointment and got on the next flight to Los Angeles. Once he cleared LAX, he jumped into his rental car and drove to the doctor’s home office in Brentwood. There he met Gorney, a lanky, gentle-natured man in his midfifties, and considered the doctor’s first question: why had he come to see him? It didn’t take Paul long to answer: it was all he’d been able to think about for weeks. His problem was that his spirit was so very detached from his circumstances. He was young, healthy, talented, rich, and famous. He was free to do whatever he wanted, nearly all the time. So why was he still so very unhappy? And why couldn’t he do the one thing that gave him the most pleasure?

  After decades of study and practice, Gorney knew all about the labyrinth of anxiety, pride, and shame that fed the creative drive. The shadowlands of impulse, primal experience, and unconscious association; the symbolic bonds between what must be done and what must never be acknowledged. Gorney’s signal case had come in the early 1960s, when he was consulting with practitioners in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was known in the Soviet era). He was presented with a widely renowned concert pianist who, at sixty-two years old, had grown so terrified of performing that she could no longer lay her hands on the keys of a piano, not even the one in her private studio. Just the thought of it made her dizzy. When she sat at the keyboard, her heart raced; if she raised her hands, her lungs constricted. Disaster felt imminent, escape a necessity. Gorney had seen the same thing happen to Vladimir Horowitz one night at the Hollywood Bowl—the maestro taking the stage, sitting at the piano, and then, after a torturous few moments, bolting offstage. Horowitz fought his demons with varying degrees of success for decades, but the female pianist had been rendered mute, and her Soviet doctors were unable to help her.

  Realizing that the Soviets weren’t aware of the Freudian principles of psychoanalysis, Gorney helped the pianist uncover a chain of subconscious associations that reached back to when she was nine years old and unexpectedly discovered the tactile pleasure of holding, then swallowing, a gooey raw egg. She had felt ashamed afterward, and got the same feeling at fourteen when her mother gave her a bottle of hand cream as a present. That time, her shame rose almost instantly, and she spent the next fifteen minutes pacing the house with her hands extended away from her body. The primal association, she eventually admitted, stemmed from the pleasure and guilt of masturbation. The egg and the lotion and then the slippery smoothness of the ivory piano keys, the primal joy of creation and the ecstatic release of the music and then the applause, the cheers, the glow in the faces arrayed at her feet—a moment’s ecstasy, but always wrapped around that kernel of humiliation; the shame of emptying herself onstage and not just loving her creation but needing it. So she,
or something in her, shut it down.

  Now Paul, for reasons very much his own, had done the same thing.

  At the end of the first session, Gorney asked Paul to write at least a few lines of a song about his problems. When he demurred, saying he hadn’t brought a guitar with him, Gorney loaned his patient his. Paul couldn’t bring himself to touch the instrument on the first night, but the more he unspooled his problems, focusing eventually on his suspicion that his work had no real value to anyone, let alone to society as a whole, the psychiatrist held up his hand. What I’m telling you, he said, is that the way for you to contribute is through your songs. And it’s not for you to judge their merits. It’s for you to write the songs. “For me that was brilliant. And liberating,” Paul said a few years later. When he got back to the hotel that evening, he picked up Gorney’s guitar, played two or three jagged chords, and found a melody to skitter across a fistful of words.

  My hands can’t touch a guitar string,

  My fingers just burn and ache

  My head intercedes with my bodily needs

  And my heart won’t give it a break.

  It was the start of “Allergies,” a song that, just as Gorney had suggested, transfigured Paul’s anxieties into music. They continued the intensive therapy for a little longer, but once the doctor helped him kick open his creative logjam, Paul went on a songwriting jag that carried him through the year and into the start of a new album. In the mood to shake things up, he asked Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker, Warner Bros. staffers who had together and separately produced some of the best albums of the previous two decades, to work on the record. They got started in Los Angeles, and had a few basic tracks recorded when Paul got a telephone call from New York concert promoter Ron Delsener. The promoter had just been on the phone with the city’s parks commissioner, who told him about the launch of the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit group that some of the city’s wealthiest residents had formed to return the park to something like the clean, well-tended public space it had been before urban became best known as a modifier for blight. Now the group wanted to launch its campaign with a high-profile event that would draw citizens back to the park while also focusing attention on the new organization. Its leaders had come to Delsener with a special request: could he ask his friend Paul Simon to play a free concert in the park? Paul agreed instantly. He lived across the street from Central Park, and his apartment had an unrivaled view of the place. They talked a bit longer, then Paul rang off and started pondering the best way to pull it off. And that’s when he got worried.

  * * *

  Paul had wanted to give a reunion with Artie a chance back in 1975. Writing “My Little Town” for him, then recording it together had been in large part an experiment. Could they work together again? Would they be able to find a new creative balance that would give Paul the control he needed while not shoving Artie completely out of the picture? When they recorded that song, they billed it as they always had, Paul and Artie coproducing, this time with Phil Ramone replacing Roy Halee as the third leg of the stool. But as Artie recalled in the early 1990s, Paul had no intention of allowing his former partner to have any real control over how the track would sound. Artie was welcome to be in the studio and even toss in a thought or two, but mostly his job was to stay out of the way until Paul said it was time for him to sing. Artie, who had hit songs on the charts for much of the seventies, whose 1973 debut solo album, Angel Clare, jumped to No. 5 on the album charts, and whose second, the 1975 release Breakaway, notched No. 9, had become used to having near-complete control over his solo records, so he chafed against the new arrangement. He did make a few suggestions here and there but kept most of his thoughts to himself. Even that had been too much for Paul, though, as Artie learned when the song was finished and they were flying back to New York. So did you like that balance of authority, Artie asked. Paul shrugged. “Nah. I thought you spoke up too much.”

  Still, Artie had been happy to join in for the Saturday Night reunion, and when Melody Maker asked if the success of “My Little Town” might lead to a new Simon and Garfunkel album, Artie didn’t disagree. “Yes, it would seem to indicate that,” he said. “There is a chance that we might get together to record an album, but I really can’t say any more because there is no more answer. [But] it was good to work with him again because I like him and I think he’s talented.” There was always something off when they talked about each other in public—the faint praise, the patronizing observation, the elbow in the gut, the constant switchback between their brotherly bond and the urge for escape. The burst of cooperation in 1975 ended by early December, and by mid-1977 they could barely look at each other when they sang “Old Friends” on a British music awards show. When a technical screwup made it necessary for them to repeat their three-minute performance, the tension between them eased only because both could turn their ire onto Bunny Freidus, the Columbia Records publicist who had urged them to do the show.

  They weren’t done with each other, though, not even close. Paul joined James Taylor as a guest on Artie’s slowed-down remake of Sam Cooke’s “(What a) Wonderful World.” The record hit the top of Billboard’s adult contemporary charts, though it peaked at only No. 17 on the Hot 100, and Artie appeared in Paul’s TV special at the end of 1977, singing a much more cordial version of “Old Friends” and playing in a sketch that ended with Paul alone with an overbearing director (played by Charles Grodin), who takes the opportunity to set him straight. “You know, the sound of you and Artie singing together is so much better than the sound of either one of you singing alone that whatever petty differences you have had in the past, I strongly urge that you take a long, hard look at them.” Paul, who had written the sketch, thought it was hilarious. But he also knew how much more beloved Simon and Garfunkel was than either of their solo work, even given his own trail of hit singles and albums. Though it was entirely coincidental that Artie’s latest movie, Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession), had been released in the fall of 1980—and Nicolas Roeg’s dark psychosexual thriller had nothing in common with One-Trick Pony—some theaters booked the films as a double feature, figuring that billing the show as an evening with Simon and Garfunkel would attract larger audiences.

  The whole point of the Central Park show was to attract a large audience. Being at the center of an event that size was part of what made it so irresistible to Paul. He could do something public-spirited while also scrubbing the sour taste of One-Trick Pony off his and the audience’s tongues. He could play his biggest songs, and the people could remember why they had loved him in the first place. But that would happen only if the show turned out to be as grand an event as he hoped it might be. If anything went wrong, if the show went badly—or, worse, if New Yorkers just weren’t interested enough to come out of their apartments for a free Paul Simon concert—that could be fatal. Just imagine the next day’s headlines: THE SOUND OF SNORING: SIXTIES IDOL BOMBS IN THE EIGHTIES. The dressing room lecture Paul had written for Charles Grodin in his 1977 TV special didn’t seem quite so hilarious anymore.

  It didn’t take long for Paul to realize that Garfunkel—actually Simon and Garfunkel—had to be in the show somewhere, but how would that work? Paul had little doubt that Artie would be happy to do it—he’d been having a tough go of it over the last few years, too, due in part to the commercial and critical drubbing Bad Timing had received. But Artie had been most devastated by the 1979 suicide of the actress Laurie Bird, who had been his live-in girlfriend for several years. He’d been working on the film when she died, and returned to an apartment filled only with absence and grief. It was almost beside the point that his latest album, Fate for Breakfast, released a few months before Bird’s death, was his first to miss Billboard’s Top 40 (though it did hit No. 2 in the United Kingdom). Artie could use a professional triumph even more than Paul, and when Paul called he signed on without reservation. They still needed to work out the specifics, and agreed to work together to make the reunion as smooth as possible.<
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  Paul’s first thought was to structure the show chronologically, starting with a set of Simon and Garfunkel tunes, then coming back to do the second half by himself. But as he talked it through with Lorne Michaels, he realized that wouldn’t make any showbiz sense—the crowd’s excitement would peak during the first set, and Paul’s solo set would be an anticlimax. Yet flipping the sets would mean that Paul Simon would be the opening act for Simon and Garfunkel, and Paul couldn’t imagine doing that. Then Michaels proposed something else: why didn’t he make the whole concert a Simon and Garfunkel reunion? It would be their first full-length performance since the final Bridge Over Troubled Water show at Forest Hills Stadium in 1970, guaranteeing the show’s monumental status as a full-fledged cultural event. Michaels’s production company could capture the whole thing on video, and do an audio recording, too. Maybe they’d get a broadcast deal out of it, and if the show turned out well, they could always release a live album.

  Then it was settled. The concert promoter Ron Delsener was delighted, and the parks commissioner and the leaders of the Central Park Conservancy were beside themselves. They set September 19 as the date, and all pledged to keep it a secret until closer, maybe much closer, to the show. Paul and Artie got together to talk through how it should all go, and that’s when the disagreements started.