More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (23 page)

Carly had brought in a good collection of new songs. “Anticipation” was hopeful about an impending love affair. Paul began it as an acoustic ballad, then brought in drums (later augmented by Jim Keltner) and finished it as a rock song with its electric coda: “And stay right here ’cause
these
are the good old days.” It was Carly’s tribute to her moment, but it also resonated with many listeners wondering what the new decade—the seventies—would mean to their lives.

Like “Anticipation,” Carly’s “Legend in Your Own Time” was written in part about Cat Stevens, although she has said that other factors played in.

Carly: “I was in the passport office, waiting to get one. It was a long line, on a hot day. I was on my way to London to make
Anticipation
. The guy in front of me was reading an article about [the late country music star] Hank Williams. The headline said, ‘A Legend in His Own Time.’ And, somehow, the story of Hank combined in my mind with what would happen to me if I ever became a ‘legend.’ Then I thought of the singer-songwriter stars with whom I was smitten, alone in their hotel rooms after a night onstage, with all the love that had been directed toward them that evening. Then I caught the echo of a room service cart coming down the hall with a piece of burnt toast and an overcooked egg and a pot of cold coffee.

“I thought of the hours before the ‘man on the road, the legend’ gets the room service, and of all the connections he can’t make in the
parties after the show; in the bar after the parties after the show; with the girl he brings to his room who may still be asleep as the cart gets closer to his hotel room with the non-breakfast. How sad—and sadder—for the contrast of what the love onstage had been, and what it had felt like.” Ambition and loneliness often go hand in hand, the song says, with guitars and bongos and close, double-tracked harmonies on the fugitive choruses.

“Our First Day Together” and “The Girl You Think You See” were story songs, the former a folkish ballad, almost an homage to Joni Mitchell; the latter, a funny bit of Broadway-inflected soft rock. The album’s first side would conclude with “Summer’s Coming Around Again,” a pretty bossa nova—the boy from Ipanema—that had been kicking around Carly’s repertoire for years, resurrected here with a soft arrangement for guitar and piano.

Now Carly heard that Mick Jagger was in London, and she told her people that she needed to meet him. Through Elektra’s London office, she received an invitation to the Rolling Stones Records press party for the rereleased single of “Brown Sugar”/“Bitch,” augmented with an extra track, “Let It Rock.” Carly attended this affair with the two Pauls—Samwell-Smith and Buckmaster. Introduced briefly to Mick, she importuned him about singing on her record, but he explained that he was preoccupied with making the new Stones album, and then was swept away. Carly was disappointed, but she felt that now she had at least met the Rolling Stones’ protean front man.

Trident Studios, Soho: July through September 1971. They worked on “Share the End,” with lyrics by Jake, an anthem for an apocalypse. Jake also cowrote “The Garden,” a slightly spooky ballad. Carly wrote “Three Days” about her time with Kris Kristofferson: a short-term reverie and a regretful parting. “Julie Through the Glass” was a piano lullaby for Carly’s niece, Julie Levine: “And we’ll
help you to love yourself / ’Cause that’s where loving really starts.” The album would end with Carly’s version of Kris Kristofferson’s new “I’ve Got to Have You,” a dark song of sheer desire, with a southern accent and a crying, fuzz-toned guitar solo offset by dramatic drum fills and intimations of romantic pain. These were the tracks that would appear later in 1971 on the album
Anticipation
.

“Making that album gave me the best memories of recording—maybe ever,” Carly said later. “The entire album was just me and my band in London. Cat Stevens was the background singer on a lot of the songs, and there were strings on a few songs [arranged by Del Newman], but it was basically the three guys in the band and myself. On the whole it was so sparse, but I loved it.”

In September, Elektra flew Carly’s brother to London to take the album photographs. Peter Simon found his sister holding hands with Cat Stevens and talking quietly with him in the backyard of the house she was staying in. Peter was a massive Cat Stevens fan, and loved that Cat was hanging around the house and the studio, staying as close to Carly as possible. One afternoon they took a taxi to Hyde Park, where Peter posed his leggy sister in a diaphanous skirt, holding on to the park gates like a lioness shaking her cage. Another sequence showed her running through a leafy glade. Carly also did some press interviews while she was in London. The man from
Record Mirror
was smitten: “She has the kind of dark Latin good looks and attractive sultry features which would have left me a mooning adolescent at sixteen and, as it was, left me a mooning thirty-year-old as we sat on the living room couch of her tasteful rented house in Camden Town.”

Carly told writer Keith Altham that working with Paul Samwell-Smith brought out something new in her work. “Paul turned me down at first. He couldn’t tell who or what I was from that first album, but then he came to hear me at Carnegie Hall and I reached him through that. I was so jealous of the Cat Stevens albums he produced; they were so clear and exciting.

“On this new album, I’m more naked than I’ve ever been before. It was embarrassing listening to the playbacks at first, rather like looking at yourself without make-up in the mirror for the first time. Most of the material is just me and my guitar. Paul is keeping it very simple. It has a quirky feeling, but as the album progresses I’m beginning to like it, and that’s the secret.”

E
lektra released
Anticipation
in early November 1971, and it was an immediate hit record. Radio had been playing the “Anticipation” single since late October, and the 45 started surging up the sales charts. It stayed on
Billboard
magazine’s Top 40 chart for the next three months. The album sold a half million copies in that period and stayed on the charts until mid-1972. Jac Holzman’s faith in Carly, despite the doubters on his staff, had been validated. (Carly dedicated the album to Steve Harris, Elektra’s star minder, who had held her hand in some of her darkest moments.) Holzman gave some of the credit to the producer, Paul Samwell-Smith. “He made a very caring and lovely record,” the label chief later wrote. “He gave the songs a frame of easy intimacy that helped the listeners to welcome them into their lives.
Anticipation
really consolidated Carly’s position as a writer-singer of enormous craft, imagination and honesty.” Reviews were generally positive and sympathetic.
Rolling Stone
recognized Carly as representative of the new “liberated” woman coming of age in the early seventies, and took her new songs as signifiers of what
progressive women were (really) thinking about. Mainstream American magazines—
Vogue, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal
—said the same thing. (But not everyone bought into this. In New York, the antibourgeois
Village Voice
frigidly dismissed Carly’s songs as simply more pop pabulum for the ruling class.)

On the evening of November 9, Carly went to see James Taylor perform at Carnegie Hall. She had heard the rumors that James had been dumped by Joni Mitchell, who had tired of babysitting a high-functioning heroin addict. Carly noted how fervently and vocally James’s youngish fans, especially the girls, reacted to the despondency of “Fire and Rain”—calling out to him between songs—and how they were then soothed, rapturously, by the lullaby “Sweet Baby James.” This was the first time Carly had seen the essential James Taylor, in full cry. For her, his performance had an endearing, heartbreaking quality that moved her to tears.

Carly knew Nat Weiss, James’s attorney. He offered to take her backstage to see James. When she got there, she found him seated, still holding his guitar, amid a throng of well-wishers, including his sister and brothers. When James saw Carly, he quickly stood up and leaned down to accept her kiss. His demeanor changed markedly, brightening up. Band members Danny Kortchmar and Lee Sklar checked out James and Carly interacting with each other. They both had the same thought: “
Mrs. Taylor.”
Gradually the dressing room emptied out, until it was just Carly and James and a couple of his brothers. As she got up to leave, she told James that if he ever felt like a home-cooked meal, he should give her a call.

James looked at her and asked, “How about…
tonight
?” Everyone else laughed. Carly said she would make him something delicious, and gave him her address. James said he would be over later.

James Taylor arrived at Carly’s apartment a couple of hours after that. She made him some eggs and toast. They stayed up most of the night. He made no move as if he wanted to leave. She said she was tired, and was moving to the bedroom, and he could join her. She
put on something more comfortable and got into bed. James took out his guitar, sat down on the side of the bed, and started playing to her, as she lay with her hair spread on the pillow in the soft pink light of the lamp. He played and played, beautifully, expertly. It was a predawn serenade, a private recital, bold as love. It was beyond touching, beyond moving—James Taylor playing his heart out to Carly Simon. His head was bent low, and his eyes were closed most of the time. James broke Carly’s heart for the second time that night.

A year later, an interviewer asked Carly about that first night with James. “It was great,” she replied. “We went back to my place, and then we went into the bathroom and fucked.” James denied this, and maintained with a straight face that he and Carly didn’t have sexual relations until they were married.

Carly had a gig headlining the Troubadour in Los Angeles beginning November 18. She flew west with Billy Mernit as a traveling companion. As their flight was descending, Billy noticed the reflections of overhead clouds in the cup of coffee on Carly’s tray table.

“Look, Carly,” he said, “clouds in your coffee.”

Carly had sold out the Troubadour. The band was happy that their groupies Hilary and Molly were back with their hash brownies and backrubs. Jake Brackman was in town, doing movie business. Don McLean was opening the shows, about to have a big hit record with “American Pie.” The opening night went well. The crowd cheered for “Anticipation,” and sang along. There were repeated calls for encores, and Carly was flushed with excitement. Later, in the dressing room, she said she wasn’t ready for visitors, but relented when Steve Harris told her that Warren Beatty was waiting on the stairs. He was the biggest star in Hollywood. Carly knew that he was involved with actress Julie Christie, but she also knew that didn’t matter. Warren was very complimentary about her performance, and wanted to know where she was staying.

A few hours later, Carly and Jake were in Carly’s room at the Chateau Marmont, listening to a tape of her performance, when there was a knock on the door, which Jake answered. It was Warren, back again. Jake left. Carly later told Steve Harris that Warren Beatty had been “very, very persuasive” with her.