More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (27 page)

At the Troubadour, there was a vase with a crimson rose on their table and a note that read, “Love from Carly.”

Backstage, Steve Harris decided not to tell Carly that Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were in the house. Carly came out and nailed
her six songs, expertly propelled through her set by Russ’s steady rhythms. So Carly was surprised, and very pleased, when Steve told her that James Taylor was on the staircase and wanted to say hello. Carly kissed James and Kate. James sat on the floor as Kate and Carly sat on the little sofa. They compared notes on the Vineyard, how their paths had crossed in summers past. Then Joni sent word up to James that it was time to get in the limo, and the meeting was over. Both Carly and James later said it was a fateful evening.

Then James went back on the road with the band, focused on getting through the tour until the last stop in Chicago. Danny Kortch mar: “People were in awe of him, treating him with kid gloves, whispering around him like he was Montgomery Clift, or a prophet who knew everything. He was being pursued—by every chick, by everybody around—to where it was painful for him. By the time we got to Chicago in ’71, he was in bad shape, and we’d wonder if he’d make it to the next show.” Joni Mitchell broke up with him.

This tour was not an artistic success. Reviewers described James as sluggish and distant from his audience. After a Boston concert, his brother Livingston upbraided him about seeming uncomfortable at the adulatory applause he was getting.

James: “And he said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? These people
love
you. Why can’t you
enjoy
it?’ He was really angry at me [about] the way I was coming on. And then I read an article by [critic] Jon Landau [who was producing Liv Taylor’s second album] in which he assumed that the way I had come on was on purpose, that I actually was in control of it. Whereas, I really had…
no control
over it, at all. Sometimes… I just don’t know how to act.”

But James Taylor kept going. He was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. His single version of “You’ve Got a Friend” charted at number one in July and stayed at the top for weeks. (It was the only number one record of his career, to date.)
Mud Slide Slim
was certified a gold album, then platinum. His stage patter was subtle, funny, and self-effacing. He usually introduced “Sweet Baby James” by insinuating
that he didn’t really like children, which made the audiences laugh out loud. Some critics raved about his concerts. By the autumn of 1971, James was the primo male of the American singer-songwriter movement, embodying the popular notion of the singer-songwriters as their generation’s shamanic conveyers of sympathy, sincerity, healing, and trust; bardic harpers whose songs told of the times and mirrored the sensibilities of their audience.

He was also running out of dope on the road. James: “This was the fall ’71 tour, with just myself [onstage]. I found myself on the road with no drugs and quite a habit. So I went to Richmond. The first gig I had was in Williamsburg, and I was sick for the job. And it went lousy. I ran into a chick I knew from London and she took me to Richmond and we copped there from this guy named Hangdown. He sold me enough to keep me going until I got to Chicago.”

In the meantime, James played Carnegie Hall, and then started seeing Carly Simon. He couldn’t tell her about his drug habit, for the shame of it, and he resolved to get off dope when the solo tour wound up. “When I got to Chicago, I got in touch with a doctor who was a friend of mine. And he got some methadone for me, somewhat illegally. He figured it was either he’d break the law, or else I would go down. I stayed on the methadone he gave me for almost a month.”

As they began seeing more of each other in early 1972, James continued to hide his addiction to heroin from Carly. He was good at secreting his stash and his works: needles, spoons, cotton, lighters. He covered up his absences by pretending to rest, or brood, or just be remote. She didn’t understand it, but accepted it as being part of the Taylor’s family back story, as had been reported by the national media over the past year of his success.

“It was a harrowing time for me,” she said a year later. “In the beginning of our relationship I didn’t really understand the extent to which James was addicted, or needed drugs. It just kind of confused me that there was always this… wall up between us. And I didn’t know exactly what it was, because I was never close to anybody who
was really addicted to anything before. There was just this remoteness I was always aware of. I was aware that I couldn’t depend on him either. And at the same time, I wanted him to depend on me more, but there just seemed to be this barrier between us that I could not break through.”

Eventually James told Carly what was going on. She wanted him to get into treatment and said she would do anything in her power to help him. This is what he wanted to hear. She said she needed to know why he got so remote, so far away from her.

“It was partly drug abuse,” James said later. “And it was partly that—instead of communicating what feelings I had—I would get off on a drug instead. My mind was occupied by the drug—even the
idea
of getting off on the drug. The idea of keeping it from Carly was a big part of it. But… I still needed her very much.”

Carly understood this and resolved to stand by James. The needier he became, the more she accepted it.

It was a struggle. James threw out three different sets of “works” (syringes) in the late winter and spring of 1972, each time swearing to himself that his heroin habit was over. He kept reaching out to Carly for support, but it was hard for her. She loved James but now saw the negative aspects of the personality he was submerging under narcotics. To her, he could be many different people, alternately bright, withdrawn, arrogant, romantic, reckless, depressive, cruel, cutting, tender, brilliant. It bothered her that, before their first meeting, he had never heard any of her songs and seemed completely uninterested in her music and career. Sometimes he seemed childish to her, something he readily admitted. “Being a pop star is a very regressive thing,” he said later. “All of a sudden, anything you want to do is allowed. You become a spoiled child when you become a pop star. You really get spoiled, something awful, and it happened to me.”

Meanwhile, both Carly and James had albums to write. They were both contractually obligated to the same media conglomerate, and now both had production deadlines to deal with. Sometime
around April 1972, James replaced heroin with “methadone maintenance,” and began to work on his next album.

Hardworking Carly Simon, meanwhile, was drawing inspiration from her tense, touching, and incredibly exciting romance with superstar James Taylor to write some of the songs that would define her for the rest of her career. The next few months in 1972 would produce some of the premier moments of her life. And then her next hit record would put even her unstable boyfriend’s career firmly in the shade.

B
y early 1972 Jac Holzman thought the singer-songwriter movement was already passé. He noticed that a lot of the good ones really wanted to be in a band and play rock and roll. But Elektra signed Harry Chapin on the strength of his songwriting. The label passed on unsigned Bonnie Raitt because she didn’t write her own songs. Holzman talked to Carly about this, because she was looking for a producer for her third album, and Holzman wanted something very different from
Carly Simon
and
Anticipation,
which was still in the Top Ten album chart.

Carly had ideas of her own. She wanted to be produced by Paul Buckmaster, the dashing young British arranger who had worked with the Rolling Stones and Elton John.

She made a two-song demo with Buckmaster in New York, played on by James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar. The highlights of this tape were an earthy version of John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” and an old song by Carly, “I’m All It Takes to Make You Happy.”

She played the tape for Holzman, who was polite but firm. Paul Buckmaster was out. Holzman insisted that Carly’s new record be made by mainstream pop producer Richard Perry. He wanted Carly to make a record for the massive rock music audience, not the post-folk singer-songwriter crowd. “I wanted fresh producer meat,” he later wrote, “someone born in the studio, with solid arranging skills, a person who would push Carly and not flinch when she pushed back, as I knew she would. My candidate was Richard Perry.”

Perry, thirty-two, was one of the most successful producers of pop music. Recent projects had included bestselling albums by Barbra Streisand and singer Harry Nilsson. Carly listened to these records and just didn’t get it. She thought they sounded slick, glossy, overproduced. But she also wanted something different this time. “I was tired of the whole self-pitying thing that was going on in many of my songs,” she said later. “I didn’t like to see myself talking about disenchantment as much as I had. [
Anticipation
] was about things that never quite turned out the way I’d wanted them to. Things that were disillusioning. I wanted to wipe out all that melancholia and come up with something more positive, more interesting, subjects that haven’t been…
delved
into.”

She told herself she had to stay positive, because the spotlight was really on her now. “Going into it, I felt a lot of pressure on me, that it had to be good. It’s a show business syndrome that you get caught up in; that you must surpass yourself all the time to stay in the ballgame.

“So I went into that album quite frightened of working with somebody that I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I would get along with him, in part because he’s from a different borough [of New York City]. He’s from Brooklyn and I’m from the Bronx. I’m not joking about the boroughs…. I was against the idea. I thought he was too slick for me. Barbra Streisand—I didn’t want to have that kind of sound.”

Elektra prevailed. Carly would make
No Secrets
in London, at
Trident Studios, with Richard Perry and the crew of star-quality English musicians who had just worked on Harry Nilsson’s album
Nilsson Schmilsson
. Now she just had to write the songs—and get Mick Jagger to sing on her album.

In early January 1972, Carly flew to Los Angeles, and then to Palm Springs for Elektra’s sales convention, where she was due to perform for the company. When she arrived she was informed that the airline had lost her luggage, which was never seen again. Missing or stolen were all her jewelry and the American Indian long chamois dress she wore onstage. Carly: “But the thing that killed me was my journal was gone. It was a black leather Gucci notebook with loose-leaf pages. My whole first smell of success, my opening at the Troubadour, that whole year—James Taylor—was all in my journal. It also contained all my lyrics up to that time, all the different versions of all the songs. All gone. I was sick.”

Carly went shopping with Steve Harris’s wife, Nicole, and found a dress she could perform in. She had to follow Elektra’s new signing, Harry Chapin, who knocked ’em dead with his pianism and dynamic songs. Jac Holzman was the master of ceremonies, and he told his staff, “Remember our success last year with Carly Simon. Harry Chapin is this year’s Carly Simon.”

Carly, before she started her set, leaned into the mike and said, “Harry, if you’re this year’s Carly Simon, you must have had some very interesting boyfriends over the past twelve months.” The whole room laughed at this, and gave Carly a heartfelt ovation when she finished with “Anticipation.”

Then Carly and Arlyne decided that Harry should open concerts for Carly later in the month. The first was at Symphony Hall in Boston on February 12. When Carly’s audience gave Harry a thunderous ovation at the close of his set, Carly wondered about the wisdom of having a tough act to follow. She went on and played a concert that was criticized by the local press for being nervous and shallow.

February 1972. “Anticipation” is the number four record in
America. Harry Nilsson’s bombastic “Without You” (produced by Richard Perry) is number three. Don McLean’s “American Pie” is number two. Al Green is on top. Carly flew to Los Angeles to play the Troubadour, this time as the headliner. (Don McLean opened for her.) There, despite the reassuring presence of Warren Beatty at the club, Carly had a weekend-long panic attack. She discounted the pleas of her manager and her record label; these Troubadour shows would be her last public performances for several years.

In March the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced their annual Grammy Awards. Carly Simon won for Best New Artist. James Taylor won Best Pop Vocal Performance (Male) for “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was also voted Song of the Year. Carole King and her
Tapestry
album won most of the other major awards.

In April, Warren Beatty called Carly in New York and said he was working to get George McGovern the Democratic nomination to run for president against Richard Nixon later in the year. Beatty wanted James Taylor’s phone number so he could importune him to play benefit concerts to raise money for McGovern. Carly gave Warren James’s number on Martha’s Vineyard, where James was working on his house and making his next record. A few weeks later James and Carole King headlined a benefit concert with Barbra Streisand in Hollywood that raised a quarter million dollars for Senator McGovern’s campaign. Over the next six months, James and (occasionally) Carly would appear at McGovern benefits in Massachusetts and New York in an effort to get rid of the hated Nixon, whom they regarded as crazy and a crook.