More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (43 page)

Epic wanted a “contemporary” sound from Carly, and so she collaborated on several new songs with Peter Wood, an English keyboardist who had worked with Roger Waters, Bob Dylan, and current MTV phenomenon Cyndi Lauper, among others. Wood cowrote (with Carly and Jake Brackman) the album’s first single, “You Know
What to Do,” a slice of synth-driven eighties commercial pop that features the Police’s Andy Summers playing his trademark chiming pop-reggae guitar chords. Wood (whose main instrumental album credit was “Memory Moog”) also worked on “Menemsha,” Carly’s choral tribute to the old Vineyard fishing village where she lived with Nick Delbanco in summers past. (She had also recently bought and renovated a cottage overlooking the hamlet’s impossibly picturesque harbor, Menemsha Bite.) Carly missed terribly having her husband’s distinctive voice on her albums—it had been a vital part of her “sound” for a decade—so now she mustered as many of her children and their Taylor cousins as she could, to sing on the song’s bliss-filled choruses. For her next few albums she would often enlist James’s three brothers (and sister Kate) to add that familial dash of Carolina twang to her songs.

The sessions’ mood of elegy and regret is continued with “It Happens Every Day,” an acoustic guitar ballad recounting an intense love not just twisted, but wrenched into a new reality. The lyrics are sorry for the spying and surveillance that turned him into a liar, a robber. But in the end, the song says, it’s just another divorce. Nothing unusual, it happens every day. (This became a key track in Carly’s career, much anthologized and loved by longtime fans.)

Then there are more songs about Carly’s husband. “Orpheus” is another cri de coeur from an anguished wife. It’s a story of a man’s doubts and lost faith(s), the Orpheus legend recounted from Eurydice’s point of view—in hell. “You said all your songs were gone / And the road back up was too long.” He couldn’t wait, couldn’t save her. But despite the hurt and the disappointment she still adores him, and always will.

James Taylor and his (much older, reputedly
very
bossy) girlfriend figure in another reggae song with Sly and Robbie at the controls. The girlfriend is wearing the pants in the family, and he’s asking for the keys to the car. “He asks for her permission / To get a tan / To play his hand / To blow a grand / To be a man.” Et cetera. This funny
put-down of a controlling shrew then gets a subversive ride-out that seems to linger with a sexy (but wishful) satisfaction. Other tracks include “Damn, You Get to Me,” with youngest Taylor brother, Hugh, subbing for James (and sounding just like him), and another unhappy breakup ballad, “You Don’t Feel the Same.”
Hello Big Man
would eventually conclude with “Floundering,” a self parody of a reggae song about an insecure woman who has put herself through every (expensive) therapy, treatment, spa, cult, exercise, and rehab in the known universe: “Then she sees her Scientologist / Gets fed by her nutritionist… Anna Freud’s analyzed her dreams / And she’s hoarse from primal screams.” But in the end, she’s still floundering away, but at least she’s trying to laugh at herself.

And this wasn’t easy for Carly, because while she was making this album her husband filed for divorce. She was half expecting this, but it came as a shuddering shock to her anyway.

Carly hadn’t wanted a divorce. In mid-1983 she heard that James had gotten off drugs, and she tried several times to get him to come back home. “I beat my head against the wall and begged him to reconsider.
‘Please! We’re affecting the children’s lives here.
’” But James stopped returning her calls, wouldn’t even allow the children to pass her the phone after he had spoken to them. So she called her attorney, and the dismal legal proceedings began. She got the (Vineyard) house and the garden. He got the boys in the band. Meanwhile, to maintain a familial presence on Martha’s Vineyard, James bought some prime (and very private) pastureland on the east shore of Menemsha Pond, in the town of Chilmark, and commissioned a modest, U-shaped house with a mooring and boathouse on the beach, and a long view of the spectacular island sunsets. Eventually he married Kathryn Walker, and lived with her, until their 1996 divorce, near William Styron’s family in rural Connecticut, visiting his magical Martha’s Vineyard house only rarely.

Talking later about her divorce, Carly blamed Kathryn Walker for orchestrating it. Carly was bitter on the subject, according to her
friends. James Taylor’s style was too passive-aggressive for him to have actively pursued a legal divorce. But Walker was tough and determined. She had survived the death of her lover Doug Kinney, one of the founders of the
National Lampoon
comedy empire, who had perished at thirty-two when the cliff he was standing on collapsed in Hawaii a few years earlier. Walker was also sober, and experienced in drug counseling as a member of Al-Anon. James Taylor, it stood to reason in that context, had to jettison his past in order to build his future. “She was fierce,” Carly was later quoted, “a fierce woman, who wanted James at all costs. She knew exactly what she wanted.”

For Carly, the idea of this clever actress succeeding where she had failed was galling. The quasi-popular notion that there was something in the dynamic of their nine-year marriage that made it impossible for James to clean up was an open wound for Carly. Jake Brackman later noted the murderous irony at work. “Carly was trying to [help James] the entire time she was with him. Then Kathryn comes in and—boom!—he’s Mr. Twelve Step. What a hard thing for her to bear, whether it was the fault of their dynamic or not.”

Eventually Carly accepted that James Taylor’s recovery was a blessing for everyone. “The way it happened was one of those annoying things that life coughs up,” she said, sighing. “But it had such a wonderful outcome, so I don’t kick myself about it.”

On the day in late summer 1983 that the divorce was granted, Carly slipped into the downtown Manhattan courtroom and sat behind James and Kathryn. It was the final minutes of their famous marriage, and Carly was deeply moved. “He was sitting in front of me, and I have a picture of his ankle that will stay with me forever… the way his ankle bone turned and where his pant leg stopped, and his sandal.” Her son, Ben, now six, waiting for her at home, had the exact same ankle. “That image—it still stays with me.”

When
Hello Big Man
came out in September, Carly did another round of interviews. Reporters noted the peach-colored walls of massive apartment 6S, with the killer view of New York’s Central Park;
the showy floral displays; the Jane Fonda exercise videos that Carly said she watched but didn’t bother exercising to. She told interviewers that she was on a spiritual path whose end she could not foresee. She said that the song “Floundering” was an accurate description of her current status. And she was often asked about the end of her marriage. She wasn’t shy about letting her fans know that she was still carrying a blazing torch for her former husband. In spite of everything, Carly said, “If James walked into a room, just a look in his eye… his smell… the sound of his voice… could get me going all over again.”

H
ello Big Man
came out in September 1983 and maintained Carly’s position in what one critic called “80s pop oblivion.” The pink-colored album jacket has a pretty black-and-white portrait of Carly by Lynn Kohlman. Peter Simon portrayed the session musicians on the inner sleeve. The back cover is a photo of Carly’s beaming young parents and their dog on the balcony of the apartment building they used to own.

Then Carly’s hopes were dashed. The first single “You Know What to Do” got minimum airplay and stalled at number thirty-six on the adult contemporary chart. The album reached number sixty-nine. The video for “You Know What to Do,” featuring Carly tumbling around the woods of her house, did not make it onto MTV. A second video was made for “Hello Big Man,” based on the many hours of her father’s 8-and 16-millimeter home movies, which Carly had inherited, but the second single was not released, and the video wasn’t seen for decades. Carly appeared on David Letterman’s late
night TV show, but it didn’t help sell her record. Warner Bros. would not be renewing her recording contract.

In this period Carly appeared as a guest on albums by Jesse Colin Young and Nils Lofgren. She also provided a blistering vocal on “Kissing with Confidence,” a track on a New Age album by Will Powers, an alias of photographer Lynn Goldsmith.

By then her romance with Al Corley was cooling off, and she was feeling lonely. Then her manager quit, another blow. Arlyne Rothberg moved to Los Angeles to manage Roseanne Barr’s TV career. After a period of uncertainty, Carly signed a new management deal with talent managers Champion Entertainment. (This had been suggested to her by a close friend, MTV mogul John Sykes.) Other Champion clients included Diana Ross, John Mellencamp, and Hall and Oates. Champion’s president, Tommy Mottola, was a consummate industry insider, expensively tailored, with just the right whiff of intimidating Italian connectedness. (Mottola later ran Sony Music and famously discovered singer Mariah Carey at a cocktail party.) In the late winter of 1983, Mottola and his lawyer Alan Grubman signed Carly to a one-record deal with Epic Records, a CBS subsidiary. Carly spent much of the rest of 1984 working on the album that would be called
Spoiled Girl.

Carly had many collaborators on those sessions, which took place at three different New York studios, mostly in 1984, including Electric Lady and the Hit Factory on West Fifty-fourth Street. Nine different producers were involved in twelve new songs. The only constants in this scattered production were engineer Frank Filipetti (whose work on
Hello Big Man
had appealed to Carly) and the avuncular Epic executive Lennie Petze, who helped her navigate through this confusing period. Carly recalled: “For
Spoiled Girl
, Tommy Mottola et al. decided that I should work with some of the [famous producers] of the day, so I was partnered with the least likely bunch of characters you could ever imagine, and—
only this time
—I didn’t
say anything. You could say it was a character flaw on my part. I let them lead me on. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I didn’t say anything, just did what they wanted. In spite of this there were a few good tracks: maybe two. One of them was ‘My New Boyfriend,’ which got me back together with [
Anticipation
producer and old flame] Paul Samwell-Smith.” This song, written by Carly, was produced by Samwell-Smith as eighties power pop, complete with sequencers and drum machines, making Carly sound something like Grace Jones channeling Duran Duran. Then there was a (Brian) Wilsonian harmonic choir in the song’s bridge, consisting of Carly, her sister Lucy, Samwell-Smith, and Andy Goldmark (who had been involved in Lucy Simon’s 1977 album).

Another new song, “Come Back Home,” was produced by Don Was, of the commercially successful pop group Was (Not Was). A mid-tempo rocker credited to Carly, Jake, and three others, the song contains lyrics that plead for reconciliation: “Now it’s December, cold and dark / No more rainbows over Central Park / In this house no window has a view / There’s no love here without you.” The pleading “Come back home to me” chorus sounded so much like the Doobie Brothers that radio people expected a vocal from Michael McDonald, not Carly Simon.

Carly also cut a pair of tracks with Phil Ramone, a legendary engineer who worked with Simon and Garfunkel, Phoebe Snow, and almost an entire generation of New York artists. “Tonight and Forever” is a quiet ballad, with Russ Kunkel on drums, that Carly sings with a husky tenderness. More upbeat is “The Wives Are in Connecticut,” a topical narrative of bourgeois adultery. The husband is having an affair at the office downtown, but the suburban wife is fucking the entire state of Connecticut behind his back. There’s a funny list of the towns the wife is swinging in: Mystic, New Canaan, Fairfield, etc.

Russ Kunkel cowrote, played on, and produced “Spoiled Girl,” Carly’s song about a woman who has too much, and thinks only of
herself. It’s one of the harder rocking tracks, brimming with staccato sequencer and synths. On the album named for it, “Spoiled Girl” would be followed by “Tired of Being Blonde,” the inverse of the spoiled girl’s situation, in which a newly self-liberated suburban wife leaves the credit cards and the keys to the Porsche and a good-bye note and, tired of being blond, flees a loveless existence dominated by her caddish husband. “Blonde”—a terrific, radio-friendly pop song—was written by Memphis songwriter Larry Raspberry and produced by guitarist G. E. Smith and bassist Tom Wolk, two stalwarts of the
Saturday Night Live
house band.

British producer Arthur Baker, most famous for his work with Queen, supervised two tracks. With Carly he cowrote “Anyone but Me,” which summed up many of Carly’s romantic obsessions and featured Carly Simon Band veteran Jimmy Ryan on guitar. Baker also produced the humorous “Interview” to a Cyndi Lauper rhythm, in which Carly turns the table and seduces her interviewer, even seemingly offering an invitation to outright oral sex. (Carly wrote “Interview” with Don Was, with whom she was close at the time. He was going through a difficult divorce, and Carly was able to console him and also helped him find a new apartment, on Riverside Drive in New York.)