More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (46 page)

Clive Davis boasted to Arista’s hard-charging promo staff that he could force Carly Simon to tour, but that didn’t happen. Instead Carly was invited by the Home Box Office cable television network to star in one of their “HBO Specials.” Carly didn’t want to leave the
Vineyard, so HBO and an eighty-man production crew built a clever stage set that looked like a fishing shack on a stone jetty overlooking Menemsha Harbor. For two nights in June 1987, Carly Simon (dressed in flowing pastels, bobby socks and sneakers, a white duster, pearl drop earrings, and wampum jewelry crafted by Kate Taylor) performed songs from the new album and some greatest hits with an eight-man band directed by Tom “T-Bone” Wolk, with Rick Marotta on drums. For security concerns, the audiences of invited guests were bused in from island parking lots at the last minute. These were reported to be Carly’s first concerts in eight years.

The weather had been terrible for a week. HBO desperately needed a balmy night in early June on Martha’s Vineyard, a stone rarity. Serious sea fog was more the norm. The first night, the wind blew in hard from Vineyard Sound and the entire taped footage was unusable. It was so cold the musicians’ fingers were cramping. The second night, the atmosphere was still, and the concert was shot in the golden light of a New England summer sunset. Seagulls landed on the set, pink clouds streaked the sky, and fishing boats returning to port glided through the channel behind the stage. Carly asked Ricky Marotta not to rush the beat on the rock songs. Highlights included “Nobody Does It Better,” which opened the program; Jimmy Ryan’s guitar solo on “You’re So Vain” and great singing on “The Right Thing to Do.” Michael Brecker played blistering sax on “You Belong to Me” and “Two Hot Girls.” The capper was “Coming Around Again,” with a troupe of six Taylor children appearing in a coup de théâtre to sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

The HBO special
Carly Simon Live from Martha’s Vineyard
was broadcast later that summer, to unusually high ratings. The following year, eleven songs from the concert were released on VHS video and on Carly’s first ever concert recording,
Greatest Hits Live.

Carly’s uncle Peter Dean died that year. At his funeral in New York, Carly and her sisters were approached by any number of
attractive women of a certain age, many of them African American, who were eager to express their condolences and let the Simon sisters know how close they had been to their wonderful uncle, and how much they had loved him.

Late 1987. Carly and a reporter were walking down Central Park West on their way to an interview lunch. There were giant posters of Carly’s smiling face along the broad avenue and everywhere in New York, an almost surreal effect for her, as the city’s bus stops advertised her endorsement of
McCall
’s,
a venerable magazine for women. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a little man approached Carly carrying a large book. The book was a collection of photographs taken by
Rolling Stone
’s Annie Leibovitz in the seventies, and the man wanted Carly to autograph her page. This was the image of a perspiring James Taylor carrying Carly Simon, piggyback style, neither wearing much, that had been published in
Rolling Stone
in 1979. The little man handed Carly a pen, but as she was about to sign, she noticed that the autograph hound had already gotten to James Taylor. In precise lettering, James had carefully written, “A NARROW ESCAPE,” and drawn an arrow pointing at himself. Carly was flustered at this, but signed the book anyway. (It was a spurned autograph hunter who had murdered John Lennon in the same neighborhood, so she preferred to take no chances.)

She married James Hart at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, on December 23, 1987. The couple honeymooned on the neighboring island of Nantucket. The children celebrated Christmas with James and his wife. Jim Hart kept his small bachelor’s apartment in New York and lived with Carly, mostly on the Vineyard. He resolved to write a novel, befriended Mike Nichols and some of Carly’s other friends, and was quickly accepted into her tight social circle. Carly’s old friends, who had tried in vain to
start conversations with shoe-gazing James Taylor, could hardly get the new guy to shut up.

Carly took a call from Mike Nichols again in late 1987. He wanted her to score an entire film this time.
Working Girl
would star Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith, and Sigourney Weaver. The script was a Cinderella tale of a Staten Island secretary, working on Wall Street, who attracts the company’s boss. (This was Carly’s mother’s story as well.) Nichols wanted another big anthem like “Coming Around Again” and also wordless interludes for moods and scene changes. Carly spent most of 1988 working on the music, coming up with “Let the River Run” as her clarion paean to hope and achievement. Once “the river” in her lyrics had only referred to sexuality and desire. Now the river ran more gently through the experience of life itself. Jim Hart gave Carly the dreamers awakening the nation and the notion of a New Jerusalem, familiar to him from William Blake and almost all the Romantic poets. Producer Rob Mounsey gave the track an urban jungle feeling with big drums and a gospel choir. Big rhythms, rock guitar, and a booming vocal from Carly gave the song incredible momentum and drive. Mike Nichols loved it.

Carly wrote several pretty, sentimental love themes for use in the film, which were orchestrated by Don Sebesky. One of these, “Carlotta’s Heart,” has a wordless Carly vocal as well. Another has Carly singing over the famous boys’ choir of St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue. The
Working Girl
soundtrack is filled out with contributions from pianist Grady Tate, Rob Mounsey, vintage Sonny Rollins, and the Pointer Sisters. There was a last-minute crisis when the studio wanted to replace “Let the River Run” with something by the Eagles. Mike Nichols prevailed, and “Witchy Woman” stayed out of the picture.

Working Girl
arrived in movie theaters in December 1988 and was an instant success, earning more than a hundred million dollars at the box office. The soundtrack was released by Arista in early 1989, and “Let the River Run” was a national hit single. Carly’s
movie music began to attract shiny statuettes: a Grammy and a Golden Globe. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took note and nominated her for an Oscar.

Jacqueline Onassis called Carly in early 1988 and invited her to a business lunch in Manhattan. She described to Carly her harrowing experience with Michael Jackson, then the biggest star in the world, who seemed to be reneging on a deal to publish the ghostwritten memoirs that Jackie had commissioned. Mrs. Onassis asked Carly for advice on how to deal with Jackson and his management. (Jackson’s book,
Moon Walk,
was published in 1988 and became an international bestseller.)

Jackie explained that, as an editor at Doubleday, she had mostly published books about the fine arts, ballet, and décor. But her bosses were asking her to acquire autobiographies by celebrities, and Jackie said that she had a feeling that Carly had an incredible story and a great book in her. Carly later wrote: “I didn’t say ‘no,’ but I didn’t mean ‘yes.’ In fact, I tried because it was Jackie.” In a flurry of concentrated remembrance that summer, Carly wrote eighty pages of a memoir about her parents and their family. Then she tore the pages up in a burst of self-recrimination about what she was revealing. “I could talk about my own life, with all its long and shortcomings, but not those of other people. It was impossible.”

Next Jackie suggested to Carly that she write a children’s book, or a series of books, that drew on her experiences as a child and the stories she had told her own children. So Carly wrote a text about a little girl who couldn’t get to sleep and eventually came up with a solution that magically let her (and her mother) get some rest. Doubleday gave Carly twenty-five thousand dollars as an advance. Carly gave half of the advance to Margot Datz, a Vineyard artist who had painted murals at Carly’s house and her nightclub. As Carly began working with Jackie they became good friends, sharing working lunches, occasional movies in New York, cigarettes, and confi dences. (Jackie had a major crush on Massachusetts senator John
Kerry, who reminded her of Jack Kennedy if he had lived longer.) Carly found Jackie, then sixty, to be reassuring and fascinating, an idealized paradigm of her own mother. Jackie moved around Manhattan in taxis and town cars, incognito, with no bodyguards or the Secret Service protection to which she was entitled as a former First Lady. When discussing Carly’s book project, Jackie made clever suggestions about the text and illustrations in a soothing, collaborative manner that Carly found flattering. Carly felt that Jackie was trying to almost bond with her imagination, because all her comments were so insightful.

Carly later said she thought Jackie was sympathetic to her because she was so incapable of hiding her feelings that Jackie could be herself—“the eighth grader she really was”—when she was with Carly. “I wasn’t deferential to her. I would swear and cuss. Jackie loved naughtiness.” But at first this insouciance came with a price. “I tried so hard to act the part of being relaxed around her that I would come home with a stiff neck and a migraine headache. After a while, it became much easier, especially on the Vineyard. I have a circular garden, and we would sit there and have little sandwiches—smoked salmon, watercress. Jackie loved to eat.”

Carly’s first book,
Amy the Dancing Bear,
was published in 1989 and sold unusually well, reportedly over a hundred thousand copies. Doubleday then asked for another book from Carly and Margot, again offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which Carly accepted. The next time they met for lunch, Jackie asked how much the company had paid her. When Carly told her, Mrs. Onassis took off her sunglasses, looked wide-eyed at Carly, and whispered, “ Carly—you got
screwwwed
!”

Carly recalled, “All the children’s books had fragments of my life, to be sure. (My life as a bear, for instance.) Jackie was a wonderful editor. Over the years I did four books with her.” The second book,
The Boy of the Bells,
a Christmas story, was published in 1990 and concerns a boy who enlisted Santa Claus’s help in helping his
mute sister regain her voice.
The Fisherman’s Song
(1991) is about a girl whose lover (the illustrations made him look a lot like a young James Taylor) sadly leaves her alone on a far-off island. The final book in this collaboration,
The
Nighttime Chauffeur,
is about a boy named Ben who wants to drive the Central Park carriages all night. Carly has said that the books she wrote for Jackie were high points in her career, and ended only with Mrs. Onassis’s death in 1994.

In the summer of 1988, Carly took her children out of the Manhattan schools and moved the family to Martha’s Vineyard full time. She and her husband redesigned the vegetable garden that she and James Taylor had planted fifteen years earlier, in 1973. A doctor diagnosed Carly’s stage fright as an inner ear disorder and prescribed low doses of Inderal, one of the so-called “beta blockers” designed to combat anxiety and panic disorders.

In September, Sally Taylor went off to boarding school in Massachusetts while Ben, now eleven, was sent through the island’s public school system. Jim Hart, who was now attending AA meetings, was attentive and helpful; there was little drama between Carly and her second husband, which is perhaps one reason why the next few years were very productive for her.

C
arly worked on two albums in 1989. The first was
My Romance,
her second album of standards from the American songbook. Clive Davis wanted an album of new songs, but Carly was written out from the
Working Girl
project. So Arista agreed to a svelte album of classic songs instead.

My Romance
was recorded with a live orchestra at the Power Station in New York during two weeks in January. Carly worked on the vocal arrangements at the piano in her Manhattan apartment with arranger Michael Kosarin before the sessions, and gave the tapes to the legendary Marty Paich, who wrote the orchestrations. Most of the songs were downbeat and torchy, inspired by the albums Frank Sinatra made with Nelson Riddle in the fifties. Carly chose familiar songs by Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Howard Dietz, and Arthur Schwartz, as well as “Danny Boy” (dedicated to Allie Brennan, who, Carly wrote, “lullabyed me with ‘Danny Boy’ when all else failed to pacify me”). Carly wrote one original song, “What Has She Got?” with Jake Brackman and Michael Kosarin,
about being envious of a female rival. The recording ensemble included drummer Steve Gadd, two bassists, and a forty-piece orchestra.