More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (31 page)

L
ooking back on this time and her marriage to James Taylor from the distance of the twenty-first century, Carly wrote, “Then started a long run of hits, marriage, motherhood, stability, success and fortune. Not much is ever written about those things.”

Carly and James were now beginning their decade of living in a glamorous-celebrity-marriage-and-fame continuum. In these years they would move among New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Los Angeles, where James usually made his albums in the late winter and spring. The summer months were usually spent by Carly on the island with their children, while James went out on the road.

In 1973, the couple moved to a house in a quiet residential block on East Sixty-second Street in New York, where Carly became pregnant in March. The Vineyard house continued as a semipermanent construction project. James and Russ Kunkel built a cabin, which was then merged into part of the house as the ramshackle structure mushroomed (very expensively) over the years with new additions,
wings, guest houses, studios, barns, stables, stained glass, skylights, sunrooms, and outbuildings.

Carly enjoyed pregnancy, she told friends. She wanted a quiet life now, a middle-class life like her mother had had. She got rid of the leeches who’d been hanging around the Vineyard house, James’s old cronies, and she was hated for it. “You’re So Vain” had been the number one record in America for three weeks, but Carly now was semiretired. This was what she had originally wanted: to be a recording artist who didn’t tour or perform much in public. Her husband now needed most of her attention, especially since he had been trying to get off drugs and live a “normal” life after he returned from his Japanese tour an almost completely burnt-out case. While he and Carly were on a brief trip to Europe with friends that summer, James decided it was time to get help. When they returned to New York, he entered a private clinic. Carly, now visibly pregnant, tried to visit him every day.

James’s efforts to get off dope put a strain on the early days of the marriage. Carly did not know James when he wasn’t on heroin or methadone until she was six months pregnant, and he wasn’t easy to live with for the half year in which he was trying to quit. “It was a very hard time. He was very fragile,” Carly remembered. “It was like walking on eggshells—he was in a lot of agony. The beginning of our marriage went through a lot of pain.” Another strain was the relative lack of sales of number four
One Man Dog
compared to number one
No Secrets
. James denied it at the time, but their different levels of success bothered him. Much later, he admitted, “Yeah, it got to me—sometimes.”

Spring 1973. Carly and James were living in New York. One night, they went to see the off-Broadway production of
National Lampoon’s Lemmings,
a Woodstock spoof that launched the careers of young comedians John Belushi, Christopher Guest, and Carly’s old friend Chevy Chase. They didn’t know that James was one of those parodied, along with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and others.
Christopher Guest appeared as a depressed and downcast James, singing, “Farewell to New York City, with your streets that flash like strobes / Farewell to Carolina, where I left my frontal lobes.”

Later, a mortified Guest recalled, “James Taylor came to the show with Carly Simon. She was laughing, but he wasn’t. As a joke, it was a major cheap shot. They came backstage afterward, and I was kind of devastated, because he was such a hero to me. As a satirist, you’re not supposed to care about that, but I did.”

In the summer of 1973, Carly designed a circular garden at the Vineyard house. Her mother bought a house on top of a hill in nearby Chilmark with a million-mile view of the Atlantic. When James saw this, he told his carpenters to build a tower on his no-view property so he could see the ocean, too. Pregnant, with time on her hands, Carly started talking about building a nightclub on the island that would give local talent the same kind of opportunities that the Simon Sisters had found at the old Mooncusser coffeehouse ten years earlier.

While her husband was trying to stay straight, Carly was working on songs for her next record, scheduled to begin production in September. Many of the lyrics (“Safe and Sound,” “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby”) were about the domesticity she was pursuing. (The baby she was carrying jumped inside her when Carly played “Mind on My Man.”) She also had the idea for her and James to remake the classic soul song “Mockingbird” as possibly her next single. But while she was supposed to be working on her music, Carly was distracted by the turmoil at her record label. Jac Holzman was leaving, and to Carly it felt like another paternal abandonment.

A few months earlier, Warner Communications had merged Elektra Records with David Geffen’s Asylum Records. David Geffen would run Elektra/ Asylum Records while Holzman joined Warner as a senior vice president for technical affairs (where he would do pioneering work in developing home video and cable television systems). Carly now felt like “the ugly step-daughter,” as she put it, at the new label. She and the newly signed English band Queen were
Elektra’s major assets. Asylum had a powerhouse talent roster that included the Eagles, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell was Asylum’s reigning queen, and Carly realized that her position would always be secondary to Mitchell’s at the new company. Elektra’s roster was now drastically trimmed, and some of the executives Carly had worked with lost their jobs. Even worse, it got back to Carly that David Geffen had made disparaging remarks about her in staff meetings. So began a series of business-related struggles that Carly later described as “eight months of mayhem” that would come to a head when her next record was released.

Carly made Richard Perry beg for the job of producing
Hotcakes.
She thought he’d been too rough with her in London, had bullied her, and she let him know she was shopping around. Perry took her to lunch at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, in early June. She let him plead awhile, and said she would think about it. Eventually he got the job. James and Carly flew to Los Angeles in September to begin production, living in a rented house in Malibu and building the new songs at the Producers Workshop in L. A. In October, they returned to New York, and the sessions began at Jerry Ragovoy’s Hit Factory, the top Manhattan recording studio, on West Fifty-fourth Street.

From day one, they got word that David Geffen was complaining that Carly’s album was too expensive. But they plunged ahead, working with some of the top musicians in New York. James Taylor was sober now, and not a little shaky, but he played his usual deft guitar in the sessions and impressed people with how clear-eyed he looked, for a change. Also noted was the intense, familial closeness between him and Carly, like a firewall of passion around the couple.

And they worked hard on this album. It had to be better than good. Something in Carly’s voice had also changed. Her burnished low tones sounded richer and more passionate than ever. (Some fans think Carly’s singing on
Hotcakes,
while she was pregnant, was some of the best in her career.) “Safe and Sound” would open the album with
a wordy Brackman song about incongruity and a nice Carly chorus. “Mind on My Man” was conga-flavored, with James on acoustic guitar and some great jazz players: bassist Richard Davis and Bucky Pizzarelli. Drummer Jim Keltner gave a Band-like kick to “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby,” with its career ennui, perhaps a not-so-subtle message to David Geffen. James also played on “Older Sister,” Carly’s piano-based memory of wearing her sisters’ handed-down, patched, and rehemmed dresses. (The electric lead guitar on this and other tracks was played in New York by David Spinozza, a musician and arranger whose tasty playing was appreciated by Carly and especially James.) “Just Not True” was almost operatic, an abject love theme sung with James and illumined by Paul Buckmaster’s light-classical strings and woodwinds. This was the first time Carly had sung with James on one of her songs, and the studio staff remarked on how incredible they sounded together. The title track, “Hotcakes,” was a fragment featuring jazz-rocker Billy Cobham on drums, Howard Johnson on tuba, Bobby Keys on tenor sax, and a couple of horn players, all arranged and conducted by James.

“Misfit” was a total Richard Perry production, L. A. pop more worthy of Streisand or Dory Previn: a heavily orchestrated, hip-to-be-miserable song. Carly and James collaborated on writing “Forever My Love,” a hopeful ballad about their marriage. James played on it, with his drummer Russ Kunkel and bassist Klaus Voormann flown in from London for the sessions.

The recording of “Mockingbird” was all-star, and more than captured the spirit of “Night Owl” from
No Secrets
. Dr. John, aka Mac Rebennack, played piano. The Band’s Robbie Robertson contributed his chicken-scratch guitar. Bobby Keys played the big baritone sax, but the tenor sax solo was done by Michael Brecker, a young jazz musician beginning to make his name in New York. The rollicking original song, a hit for Inez and Charlie Foxx in 1960, was given additional lyrics by James on the “She’s gonna find me some piece of mind” verse. When they listened to the playback at the end
of the evening, Carly knew they had her next single and it was going to be a big hit.

Carly’s “Grownup” was another memory song, written before her daughter’s birth. It was as if her pregnancy were sending her back in time, distilling images and feelings from her sometimes difficult childhood. The album would end with “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” a collaboration with Jake, who wrote the line “Suffering was the only thing made me feel I was alive.”

Carly (writing in 2004): “Jake wrote the words of this song after experiencing Arica training, a Sufi tradition modernized by Oscar Ichazo. The song is clearly spiritual and with very little human intervention. I set the words to melody in Malibu, California, during the time just before recording
Hotcakes,
when I was preggers with Sal… I must say that it is one of the least interesting songs, to me, that I’ve ever been a part of. It seems trite in retrospect and the heavenly or devotional aspect of it was Jake’s trip and not mine.” (But “Pain”—perfect EST-era pop, with Paul Buckmaster’s pretty string concerto tacked on to the end—would touch a nerve in Carly’s mostly female audience, and become a crucial part of her music. Today, one still hears it played much more than anything on, say, Joni Mitchell’s
Court and Spark
.)

Carly and Richard Perry finished
Hotcakes
in late November 1973. Ed Caraeff took the jacket photo of a pregnant Carly in a white room in a cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, flashing a big, toothy smile. The interior snapshot, of Carly four months pregnant, was taken in Italy by Vieri Salvadori, who had been with Carly and James in Europe earlier in the year. Elektra Records released
Hotcakes
in January 1974, around the time Carly’s first child was born.

C
arly gave birth to Sarah Maria Taylor on January 4, 1974, and immediately fell in love with her little girl, known as Sally. Suddenly there was a new light in Carly’s life; in her diary she wrote, “
This
is what I’m here for.” But she also acutely experienced the changes in her body and mind, postpartum. She told an interviewer, “I definitely went through a period of post-partum depression, and I thought I’d never work again. I didn’t want to do anything else but devote myself to raising this child—this miracle. So, out of a sense of utter joy—and utter panic—I sold the song ‘Anticipation’ for $50,000 for a ketchup commercial. And of course—even though it was well done and funny—I’ve regretted doing it ever since.

“Of course I did go back to work after Sally was born, but I had problems with subsequent albums because when I was in the studio, my mind wasn’t a hundred per cent on my music. I was thinking, ‘Oh my god. I want to get home, give Sally her dinner, put her to bed.’ It wasn’t like before, when I used to spend twelve hours in the studio and that was the point of my day.”

Elektra released
Hotcakes
the same week that Sally was born. Radio started playing the funny, rocking “Mockingbird” single, credited to “Carly Simon and James Taylor,” which shot up to number five in February 1974. The album faced major competition and made it only to number three, a disappointment for Carly. “I was distraught for a while,” she allowed. “I thought this meant that I was slipping.” As she had feared, there was even competition within her label, which released Joni Mitchell’s
Court and Spark,
and
Planet Waves,
a new album by Bob Dylan and the Band, at the same time as
Hotcakes
. Mitchell’s album happened to be brilliant, and Dylan was back on tour with the Band and making history in an enormous burst of media frenzy.
Hotcakes
quickly sold nine hundred thousand copies, but it was hard to get attention amid all the hoopla for Carly’s label mates. David Geffen had assured Carly that she was going to have a solo release and it would be promoted individually, but it didn’t happen. (Geffen said later that he’d been distracted in this period by his torrid romance with Cher.) Depressed and displeased and feeling overshadowed, Carly told Arlyne Rothberg (herself a new mother) that she wanted to leave Elektra/ Asylum and make a fresh start. Arlyne foresaw a lengthy legal war and persuaded Carly to let her renegotiate her contract instead. But the damage had been done. Carly’s relationship with her record company was now described by her manager as “a suspicious, careful one, that’s a bit like a re-marriage.”