More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (34 page)

Carly was now competing for audience with the resurgent Fleetwood Mac, the English blues band that had moved to California and hired two locals, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and his dervish girlfriend, Stevie Nicks. Their debut album with this lineup had ruled the charts in 1975 and helped usher in the soft rock era (described in
the sales charts as adult contemporary). Their new album,
Rumors,
would soon spawn many hit singles and emerge as one of the bestselling records in history.

Carly spent the first three months of 1976 working on her material with Ted Templeman and some of the best musicians in the country. Five of the album’s twelve tracks were written by Carly alone. Her favorite was “Fairweather Father,” a pretty samba about a husband who doesn’t do diapers. The wife is desperate. Her husband is a prick who ignores her and her child. James sang on “Father,” along with Jackson Browne. (Jazz master Victor Feldman, who famously turned down Miles Davis’s offer to join his band—Herbie Hancock got the job instead—contributed the chiming marimba to the track.) Carly always said that James was
not
the fair-weather father of the song, but of course no one believed her.

“Cow Town” is a narrative about a real French woman (Simone Swan, the mother of Carly’s friend François de Menil) who married into a wealthy Texan family and was now living large on the range. De Menil had told Carly about her over lunch in exchange for a decent steak and a song written about him. (He also took her shopping.) The song could have been a Broadway showstopper, with its lusty chorus and with Little Feat providing the drive. (The real Simone threatened to sue Carly when the record came out, but was talked out of it. Carly: “She wanted to sue me over ‘Cow Town,’ until our mutual lawyer talked her down.”) Carly’s love for Brazilian music is again reflected in “He Likes to Roll,” with lyrics about a woman chasing a man she already owns. The track features some of the best singing on the album, with the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida contributing some tasty guitar fills. Vic Feldman adds more pastel marimba to Carly’s palette, and Bud Shank warbles on a pretty flute. One of the most difficult tracks to record was “In Times When My Head,” a song that was very important to Carly. It is a piano ballad with a confessional tone, what Carly described as “internal, difficult
feelings,” a confidential message to the listener about a marriage with infidelity on both sides. There’s another man in the lyric, the “boy in the backwoods.” (What was this?) Jim Keltner plays drums, and Klaus Voormann reappears on bass. The chorus is sung by Carly with Linda Ronstadt, Leah Kunkel, and Carly’s current best friend, Libby Titus.

Libby, then in her late twenties, was a year or so younger than Carly. She had a powerfully seductive affect and became an important influence on Carly, who called her friend “Leeby.” They had met when Libby was living with Levon Helm and their daughter, Amy, who was two years older than Sally Taylor. Libby had grown up in Woodstock, the beautiful daughter of a Russian immigrant. Her milieu was Catskills bohemia, with entrée into the exclusive worlds of Bob Dylan, the Band, and Carly’s old nemesis, Albert Grossman. Libby had sloe eyes, an alabaster complexion, a head of black curls, and a lively intelligence. She’d had a son with the heir to the Helena Rubinstein cosmetic fortune when she was twenty. She left him and became close to Eric Clapton and other rock heroes. Libby had a pretty singing voice, very fragile, and she was also a talented songster, having cowritten “Love Has No Pride,” a hit record for Bonnie Raitt. Carly loved the ultrasophisticated Libby Titus so much that she wrote about her; “Libby” was the first eponymous song about a real person Carly had ever recorded. The lyrics describe a fantasy journey to Paris with Libby, complete with schmaltzy, cod Française accordions. The song assumes an intimate, sisterly friendship, with Carly confessing to Libby that she is “another passenger, guilty of your crimes.” (Insiders whispered that the song was also something of an apology for an incident that occurred the previous April [1975], when Carly and James double-dated with Libby and Levon. They were driving back from dinner, with Levon at the wheel and the girls in the backseat. They’d all had good wine. According to Libby, Carly leaned into her and, referring to Levon, whispered that he wasn’t good enough for
her. But Levon heard Carly’s remark. He was mad as hell, and reportedly broke up with Libby Titus the next day.)

Three songs on
Another Passenger
have lyrics by Jake Brackman, again writing in the Carly Simon persona, as he saw it. “Half a Chance” opens the album, “packing your bags in a trance,” with smooth jazz, a sax solo, strings, and some passionate singing on the choruses. “Riverboat Gambler” is a piano ballad that pleads for access to a tight-hearted lover, someone like Carly’s remote and preoccupied husband. Those feelings evolve into the conflict of “Darkness ’Til Dawn” (cowritten by Van Dyke Parks). Listeners experience more marital discord here, more quarreling all night, more of Carly thinking (hard) about a lover from another era (often Dan Armstrong). Lucy Simon sings harmony on the track with her little sister.

Carly also cowrote two songs with Zack Wiesner, one of James’s best friends from the days of the Flying Machine. (Zack lived next door on the Vineyard, on land given to him by James for a song.) “Dishonest Modesty” is Carly fronting Little Feat, with Dr. John on rhythm guitar. (Rebennack was now keeping company full time with Libby Titus.) Carly’s brother-in-law Alex Taylor sings with her on the chorus. The song has critical lyrics about a selfish friend with authenticity issues. (Carly commented, with candor, much later: “It was a mean-spirited, nasty song and I was clearly jealous of the person. There is no need to reveal anyone, as the aspiration was not kind and the song is just not that good.”) Zack’s other contribution is the lullaby “Be with Me.” It is light, simple, and very pretty. James plays guitar and Carly sings. They eventually used it to close the album.

Two tracks came through Ted Templeman. “One Love Stand” is a Little Feat song, a generic L. A. shuffle that makes Carly sound like Bonnie Raitt. Michael McDonald’s “It Keeps You Runnin’” had already been a hit for the Doobie Brothers. Now Ted Templeman reframed it around a full-throated, almost operatic performance from
Carly. Her version of “Runnin’” has great energy, and would be everyone’s choice for the album’s first single.

Another Passenger
was finished in March 1976, around the time Carly became pregnant with her second child. The jacket pictures, taken in New York by star photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Carly’s longtime friend, were muted and demure. Carly dedicated the album to her husband.
Passenger
was released in June 1976, at the same time as
In the Pocket
, James Taylor’s last studio album for Warner Bros. Records. So, not for the first time, Carly and James went head-to-head in the commercial marketplace. (Some observers criticized the couple’s management for allowing these simultaneous releases to happen, the theory being that fans of both Carly and James might have limited resources to spend, and so would be forced to choose one over the other.) Neither album scored big. With no concerts to help promote it,
Passenger
got to only number twenty-nine, and the “It Keeps You Runnin’” single topped out at number forty-six. A
Rolling Stone
critic wrote that
Another Passenger
was Carly’s best record and added that she “conveys the monied angst of the leisured classes with moving conviction, something no one else has ever done.”

“Never before have so many women fueled the creative impulses of pop music,” opined the
Saturday Review
. “Of those currently in the top echelon—Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Dory Previn, Carly Simon and Phoebe Snow—Ms. Simon is the most slickly facile, and surely the most accessible to a broad audience.”

James’s
In the Pocket
climbed to number sixteen, his lowest-charting record since his first album. But his wonderful single “Shower the People” (with Carly’s prominent backing vocals) got to number twenty-two on the pop charts that summer, and was a number one adult contemporary hit by September.

Spring 1976. The hottest show on American television was now
Saturday Night,
broadcast live from NBC studios in New York. The cast of young comedians—John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and especially Carly’s former prom date Chevy Chase—were all
on the cutting edge of current satire: very sharp, keen, and funny as hell. Every week,
Saturday Night
showcased a musical guest. The show’s producer, at Chevy’s urging, invited Carly to play a couple of songs during one of the last broadcasts of the program’s first season.

Carly, pregnant, told her manager she couldn’t do it. She could not appear on live television, coast to coast. It would be too much stress for her, and she was afraid she would miscarry and lose the child. There was a lot of back-and-forth. Elektra was screaming that
Another Passenger
wasn’t selling and needed this enormous publicity boost. Someone suggested that Carly be allowed to tape her two segments. NBC said that
SNL
was, famously, a
live
broadcast. But Carly was adamant, and she won. On the May 8, 1976, show, a frizzy-headed Carly was introduced by host Madeline Kahn and played “Half a Chance” with the house band. The second segment, “You’re So Vain,” was introduced by Chevy, who mentioned that he and Carly went out together when they were kids. He explained that Carly had taped her songs about an hour before the show, the first time a performer hadn’t played live on the show. He then joined Carly’s backup singers, banging a cowbell and sporting a conspicuously apricot scarf around his neck, as if he were the lucky/ unlucky guy sung about in “You’re So Vain.”

N
ow it’s the hot summer of 1976. Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor, is running for president. Stevie Wonder’s
Songs in the Key of Life
is the album of the moment. (Stevie played a classic harmonica solo on James’s “Don’t Be Sad,” on
In the Pocket
.) British rock star Peter Frampton owns the airwaves, but James’s churchy, hymnlike “Shower the People” is everywhere, too. In late July,
New York
magazine sends a writer to Martha’s Vineyard to profile Carly, who picks her up at the island’s airport. Carly is visibly pregnant, her long, voluptuous mane of brunette frizz blowing in the wind as she guns her blue Mercedes convertible back to the house off Lambert’s Cove Road. Carly is deeply tanned “to a handsome red-brown.” She wears a faded blue cotton jersey over red linen pants, and always goes barefoot. She tells the reporter that she has canceled her yoga class and the riding lessons scheduled for that day, and offers a quick tour of the sixty-five-acre property.

“It’s a very domestic scene,” Carly says. “We’re into our garden and the things we’re planting.” The house is covered in Cape Cod
gray clapboard and boasts a forty-five-foot tower. The windows are cheerfully trimmed in bright yellows and pinks. They walk into James’s old house, “originally an Appalachian shack,” Carly says. Today it serves as guest quarters. The cabin James and Russ Kunkel built is now an attached music room and studio. James basically designed the rest of the house, which was built in sections. Sally’s room was finished only a few days before she was born. Her live-in babysitter stays in another cabin, which is soon to become the caretaker’s house. Return visitors often found that bathrooms could disappear and be reconstituted elsewhere.

There’s a large open room with polished wooden floors, almost empty except for a large dining table by the windows. It’s a nice place to sit and look out the windows at chickadees and canary-colored goldfinches nibbling at seed. Sally’s toys are scattered around. The summer sun is flooding the rooms with light. With the lumber joints and trusses showing, the rooms have an airy feel, very open. The walls are almost bare, except for a few family photographs and some drawings by James’s friend Laurie Miller.

The place is surprisingly modest and understated. The master bedroom is upstairs. James’s tarnished silver christening cup is in Sally’s bathroom. Carly says she now needs a room of her own to write in, and she is going to build a “shack” of her own after the new baby comes. (She’s hoping for a boy this time. She and James have a name picked out, but Carly said it might be bad luck to reveal it.) The bedroom is Carly’s lair. It’s a white boudoir with a quilt-covered double bed placed before billowing white curtains. On Carly’s (left) side of the bed is a corner bookcase with a white touch-tone telephone, an old Rolodex card file, silver-framed family snapshots, and a modern stainless-steel lamp. (This is where she talks to friends in the evening, chatting on the phone as the children sleep in their beds.)

A cleaning girl, a young island friend, is polishing the toaster oven in the kitchen. Carly says she loves to cook, chop vegetables, experiment with the herbs they grow. James comes in and is
introduced. He asks Carly if he can go fishing. He tells Carly to only buy sunflower seeds for the bird feeders, because it attracts a higher-quality bird. He has a fading, yin-yang-looking tattoo on his left shoulder.