More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (17 page)

I
n 1969, Lucy Simon was pregnant with her first child and music was pouring out of her in a torrent of quarter notes. She was setting poems to these melodies, using words by William Blake, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, and Longfellow, among others. Lucy was offered a recording deal with the Columbia Children’s Record Library. Thus were the Simon Sisters reborn, temporarily, in 1969.

Carly and Lucy cut eleven songs with arranger/ conductor Sam Brown early in the year. “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” reemerges in a folksy banjo arrangement and leads off the album. The rest of the songs continue in the Sisters’ chamber-lullaby vein and are mostly vehicles for Lucy’s maturing soprano. Carly is heard best on “The Lobster Quadrille,” and especially as a solo presence on “A Red, Red Rose,” set to the verses of Robert Burns. (Dan Armstrong was at the “Rose” session and suddenly realized he’d been wrong about Carly. Her soft, dusky phrasing caught up with him, and he finally got
it—that his girlfriend could be an important star someday.) The new album would be released later in the year as
The Simon Sisters Sing The Lobster Quadrille and Other Songs for Children
.

One night Carly and Danny walked into Joanna’s darkened apartment. Suddenly the lights came on and Joey’s boyfriend, ballet star Edward Villella, began leaping around the living room wearing only a tiny sock over his privates. This turned out to be a “ball warmer” Carly had knitted for Danny; she’d persuaded Villella to model it for him as a kind of cosmic giggle.

It was around this period that Carly borrowed some money from her mother and rented her first place alone, a sunny one-bedroom flat on East Thirty-fifth Street, not far from the new Murray Hill digs of her now-inseparable friend and cowriter Jake Brackman. Andrea Simon drove in from Riverdale, scoured the apartment, put fresh paper in the kitchen drawers, and changed the locks. Carly Simon now had her own home, at last. Dan Armstrong was getting the uneasy feeling that his days in Carly’s life might be numbered.

Lucy had her baby, a girl named Julie, in June 1969. Carly was overcome with mixed emotions as she stared at her niece through the thick window of the maternity ward. She decided to write a song called “Julie Through the Glass,” about how much this moment had moved her. She felt so confused. On the one hand was a desire for a family and the stability that Lucy had with her husband. On the other was her yearning for artistic recognition and a career. Meanwhile, her louche boyfriend was dealing kilos of marijuana out of her apartment, and he already had a bunch of kids. Carly began easing away from Danny that summer, when man walked on the moon for the first time. She now spent more time collaborating with Jake, trying to get something going with a new melody she was working on.

She had notated the song, as she had learned at Juilliard. The melody had grown out of a freelance job, writing background music for a television documentary,
Who Killed Lake Erie?
She liked the
song, but was completely blocked on the lyrics. She gave Jake a demo tape that had her singing la-la’s instead of words. He thought of the stories Carly had told him about her childhood, and began working with images that had stayed with him: her ailing father smoking in the dark, ignoring her. Her preoccupied mother reading magazines but not forgetting to say good night. Jake and Carly spent hours on her sofa trading lines and lyrics back and forth, deep in the throes of an intensely experienced collaboration. Jake was trying to write for Carly, as he later put it, “like a playwright writing for an actress,” using her biography as a springboard for the lyrics that would define her forthcoming career.

Meanwhile, Carly had another new song, “Rains in My Heart,” which she and Lucy sang on Dick Cavett’s TV talk show after they’d performed “Winkin’” to promote their new record. The sisters wore matching gold dresses, Carly’s offset by a pair of sexy black tights. (She also had a sore on her chin that layers of TV makeup couldn’t hide.) Carly took the lead vocal as Lucy descanted behind her, but the new song was tuneless and sad, not the kind of song to make any impact in the hot summer of ’69.

Carly and Danny didn’t make it to the Woodstock Festival in August. She saw the pictures of naked mud-smeared kids massed at a farm upstate, and decided that it wasn’t for her. Around then, she agreed to become the public face of a fast-food fried chicken company that Jake and some friends were trying to launch, but this opportunity never materialized.

Late 1969. There was a much-anticipated total eclipse of the sun in the Northeast. It was considered a special cosmic event. Carly’s younger brother and his friends were repairing to the tip of Cape Cod to experience near totality. Some of Jake’s friends were talking about chartering a plane to fly to Nova Scotia, where the observer would achieve total totality.

Carly stayed in New York, in part because she had started to see a new therapist, someone she thought could really help her find her
way. The immediate symptom was Carly’s morbid fear of flying. She simply could not get on an airplane without acute panic attacks. She then explained that she felt blocked and constrained in almost every area of her life. The therapist told her he thought he could help her look at things in different ways, and that with sufficient treatment he knew she could move forward. This is what Carly desperately needed to hear, and she saw Dr. Willard Galen, on and off, for the next seventeen years.

Early in 1970, Jake Brackman got Carly together with Jerry Brandt, who was moving into managing talent. Carly played some of her new music for Brandt, who was especially interested in “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” This song had a pretty tune and lyrics, by Jake, that expressed a young woman’s frustrations with the limited opportunities for her generation of women—highly educated and ambitious, yet expected to naturally fall into the socially correct roles of wives and mothers. The chorus went, “But you say it’s time we moved in together / And raised a family of our own, you and me / Well, that’s the way I always heard it should be / You want to marry me—we’ll marry.” It was obvious that this song could reverberate within the emerging movement for women’s rights—“women’s liberation”—and be a commercial hit as well. Brandt told Carly he was completely sure he could get her a record deal. He said he would love to manage her, and those magic words: “I’ll put up money for you to do a demo.”

Carly signed up with Jerry Brandt’s management company, and he funded a five-song demo tape produced by musician David Bromberg, a sort of protégée of Bob Dylan’s. Brandt took the tape to Clive Davis at Columbia Records, who was selling millions of Janis Joplin and Sly Stone records and was looking for the next big thing. Later in the day, Brandt told Carly that Clive had listened to the tape and then thrown it across the room, asking Brandt, “What the hell do I want with a Jewish girl from New York?”

Jerry Brandt’s next try was Jac Holzman, who’d founded Elektra
Records, the country’s premier folk music label, twenty years earlier. Elektra’s roster was eclectic, from ur-folkies such as Jean Ritchie and Josh White to blues shouters such as Koerner, Ray and Glover. Elektra was big on songwriters—Phil Ochs, Tom Rush, Tim Buckley. The label had branched out to rock with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and then the Doors, whose mega-selling albums had changed Elektra from a small label to a corporation. The queen of Elektra was Judy Collins. Carly was thrilled that she might be in such lofty company.

“From the time I was in high school, all the records I liked were on Elektra. It was such an appealing label. They had artists I liked—Theo Bikel, Judy Henske singing ‘Wade in the Water.’ I loved her. And the Butterfield Band. And Judy Collins, who I admired so much. I emulated her, copied her songs. That she was on Elektra meant a lot to me. Plus Elektra had Nonesuch [the label’s classical music division], and I had a big library of Nonesuch albums. So this was great for me. Elektra had good taste, and seemed to have real values. And I’d heard that Jac Holzman was terrific, a good person.”

Jac Holzman: “Jerry Brandt, who was sidelining into management, brought me a tape and said, ‘Look, I think this girl is rather unusual. Her name is Carly Simon.’ I asked if she was one of the Simon Sisters, because one of my favorite songs was a little lullaby called ‘Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.’” Holzman explained that he was taking his son Adam to Japan to visit Expo ’70 in Osaka, and that he would listen to the tape over there. “So I’m staying near Lake Hakone in a little inn with paper walls, sleeping on a futon; it’s four in the morning, and I haven’t adjusted to the time difference, so I slip on the Carly Simon tape and listen through headphones.” Jac Holzman loved what he heard. “So there I was in the Japanese countryside, no phone at the inn. I don’t even know how to dial a phone in this country. And I am going to lose this artist! A few days later, back in Tokyo, I call Jerry and tell him I love the tape and definitely want to work with Carly.”

Around this time, Danny Armstrong rang the bell at Carly’s
apartment on Thirty-fifth Street. The door was opened by a younger guy, only half dressed—actually Kim Rosen, her brother’s best friend, with whom Carly was having an affair. Sorry, Kim said, Carly wasn’t home. Dan went back to his place and left some messages with Carly’s answering service, but his calls were not returned.

When Jac Holzman returned to New York, he played Carly Simon’s tape for his A&R staff. No one liked it. Carly: “Even though his whole staff had vetoed signing me, Jac was willing to override them. I was signed to Electra Records in 1970.”

“I’d begun therapy,” she said later, “because I was stuck. I wouldn’t fly. I was in love with a man who was degrading, and demoralizing my entire existence, but I felt I’d die if I left him. Then I went into therapy with the genius man of all time. He just moved me so fast from A to B to C… Got me out of living with Joey, where I was so aware of her as the all-powerful big sister, where I was stuck in the same family role I’d been in my whole life, where it was better to be defeated than to be successful. I moved out. I broke up with the creep, got a band together, got a recording contract, even started to fly! It was the most acceleratedly productive period…
of my life
.”

S
ometime in the spring of 1970, Carly Simon hailed a taxi to the Gulf and Western tower at 15 Columbus Circle. She rode the elevator to near the top of the building and walked into the outer office of Elektra Records and told the receptionist that she had an appointment with the company’s president, Jac Holzman. She was told to take a seat and that Mr. Holzman would see her shortly.

She was a bit on edge because the meeting was about who would produce her album for Elektra, and it was crucial to find the right person to help choose the songs, hire the studio, find the musicians, and often arrange the actual music, and supervise the recording and mixing sessions. Carly had only met Holzman when she signed the Elektra contract; this would be their first working meeting. Suddenly she felt a slight sensation, as if the floor were moving under her feet. She quickly suppressed a panic attack. Then she felt it again. Was it dizziness, vertigo?

She stood up and must have looked alarmed; the receptionist told her not to worry, because the Gulf and Western building was so tall
that its upper floors actually swayed when the wind blew hard across Central Park.

Elektra Records had been founded in 1950 in the back room of Jac Holzman’s folk music record shop in the Village and had since come a long way, having sold millions of albums by the label’s rock bands, especially the Doors. As Carly was joining the company in 1970, it was being transformed from a successful indie label into a division of corporate entertainment. This happened when the three top independent labels in the recording industry—Elektra, Atlantic, and Warner/ Reprise—were purchased by the Kinney National Company, a parking lot giant run by mogul Steve Ross. Kinney retained the services of the label’s founders (Holzman, Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin) and merged them into a conglomerate called WEA to compete with industry titans EMI, Columbia, and RCA. The sale of the company allowed Elektra to expand further into rock while retaining its folkish allure and its Nonesuch label, one of the first to explore what came to be called world music. Jac Holzman, who’d started as a hi-fi nut, was building a state-of-the-art recording studio for his company in West Hollywood, which he now suggested Carly might use for her first album.

Carly had other ideas and wanted to talk about them. She found Holzman sympathetic, if somewhat remote. He spoke in carefully composed sentences. He had what she called “leadership quality.” He was tall, straight, impersonal, intense. She told people he was like a machine, but with a fluid, imaginative style. He was a doctor’s son, raised in Manhattan. His social geography was similar to hers.

At first Holzman told Carly he thought she was an interpretive singer, not a writer. He gave her albums by Elektra singer-songwriters—Jeff Buckley, Paul Siebel—and said he thought she could cover their songs. He also mentioned Tim Hardin and Donovan. Carly replied that she was interested in writing and presenting her own material, and songs she was working on with Jake Brackman. She mentioned Carole King, a writer more than a performer,
as a model for what she wanted to do. She told Holzman that she saw herself as a singer who recorded her songs, not as an interpreter. “If I did that kind of record,” she said later, “I’d have to go out and promote it, but I was too scared of getting on stage. I
hated
to do that. But I hadn’t really discussed this with Jac or with Jerry Brandt. I almost hadn’t discussed it with myself. It was just more panic.”