More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (2 page)

Hold on.

Two sisters, brunettes. Matching dresses and Martin guitars. Both beautiful. The higher, Highland-sounding voice comes from the girl on the left. Her taller sister has an earthier, lower alto. They’ve put a lilting melody to the old nursery rhyme “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” and they’re singing the stars from the sky. America wakes up, and is then soothed into a restful state by the Simon Sisters’ melodious new lullaby.

I was transfixed.

Later in the program, the Simon Sisters returned with a quietly thrilling duet on “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Pete Seeger’s popular arrangement of a biblical verse. Again I was glued to the screen as the girls seemed to glow with a cathode-ray halo. Everything about the Simon Sisters, especially their perfect harmonies, drew me in until I was hooked. When they finished, the audience gave them an ovation. They made a little bow, and looked relieved. They had made a stunning national debut, and done it with mesmeric cool. They were talked about in my high school the following Monday.

I went out and bought their album,
The Simon Sisters,
a few days later. Although the record was filed in the Folk section of the record store, I quickly realized that what they were doing wasn’t as much folk as it was a collection of art songs. Quite a few tracks were lullabies, soothing music, two young mothers gently crooning to their restive children. I tried to find out as much as I could about the girls, which wasn’t much. Lucy was the pretty soprano. Her taller sister was called Carly Simon. I remember thinking I’d never heard the name Carly before.

Right after this, in February 1964, the Beatles arrived in America—as if in response to an occult summons to lift the grieving
nation’s spirits. They were a smash on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, and the rest is history. Folk music was deported to Squaresville when Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival the following year. Many Village folkies left for Los Angeles and turned into rock-and-roll stars. As far as I could tell, the Simon Sisters disappeared from the waning folk scene that was left behind.

In 1967, I was going to college in Boston. One of my colleagues on the student newspaper was a photographer named Peter Simon. We became friends and shared a lot of experiences during that politically turbulent year, as the Vietnam War heated up and the civil rights movement was moving from nonviolent protest into action and militancy. It was an exciting time.

In November we were on holiday with our families, who lived in New York. Peter invited me to his family’s house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The house was an imposing Georgian-style mansion on a large property in that wealthy neighborhood. Peter introduced me to his mother, Andrea Simon, the widow of the founder of Simon and Schuster, the great New York publishing house. Andrea was beautiful, in her late fifties then, and loved hanging out with Peter’s friends, asking about what was going on in their lives and what they thought of current events. She was active in several organizations involved in mental health and civil rights, and “the Simon House” was the scene of regular parties and concerts benefiting her various causes.

We were talking in Andrea’s sunroom when a tall girl walked in and sat down. She was very pretty, a little chubby, and very sexy, in a tight white sweater and black hip-hugging trousers. She was shy, this girl. She made only the most fleeting eye contact before lowering her intense gaze. Peter said, “This is my sister Carly.” I recognized her immediately: Carly Simon, one of the Simon Sisters. I was taken aback.

“Your sisters are…
the Simon Sisters
?” I managed. They laughed at me.

“I saw you on
Hootenanny
!” I blurted. Carly said that a lot of people had seen that show.

Over cups of tea, Carly told me that the Simon Sisters had stopped performing the year before, and that she was trying to write her own songs and get back into the music business. Right now she was trying to break into the jingle industry, supplying themes and ditties for marketing products. I told her my father was in advertising, and asked if I could hear something. So she played a tape of a song called “Summer Is a Wishing Well” for me.

I totally loved it. “Wishing Well” could have been a Top Forty hit record for the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Mamas and the Papas, or Strawberry Alarm Clock. It had a sweet little melody and a sighing, double-tracked chorus, Carly singing with herself as if her sister Lucy were there.

From that day on I’ve followed Carly’s career, first as a fan, then as a journalist. I watched her struggle with career and family issues until she launched her run for the rainbow in 1970 with her first solo album. The next year I reviewed her triumphant second album for
Rolling Stone
. I went to those early concerts where she opened for star-quality singer-songwriters such as Cat Stevens and Kris Krist offerson as she honed her own songwriting skills. I was one of the first people to hear (in Carly’s bathroom) the early mixes of “You’re So Vain,” which Carly had brought back from London, with Mick Jagger’s uncredited—and unmistakable—backing vocal on the choruses. The single spent three weeks at number one. The album spent five weeks at the top. Suddenly Carly Simon was one of the booming music industry’s most talented and glamorous artists.

Then I watched her try to walk away from it—or at least get it under control. She had married James Taylor, one of the alpha singer-songwriters, in late 1972, and for almost ten years they lived in a celebrity marriage and fame continuum whose ups and downs Carly would chronicle in her heroic run of hit singles and bestselling albums in the seventies.

I didn’t see as much of Carly in those years, because she and James were reclusive—he was a heroin addict throughout their marriage—and she had retired from performing to raise their two children, Sally and Ben. But I stayed in touch, and parsed the lyrics of her latest albums to see what was going on, because Carly has always used the stuff of her life to inform the lyrics of her songs. After her marriage was over and as her children were growing up, Carly went back to work, and has been working ever since. Her output has been prodigious—thirty albums at this writing, not to mention the Oscar-winning film scores, an opera, and five books. She’s still working as I write. She recently told me that she would like to retire, but she can’ t—yet. Legions of people depend on her generosity.

During those years, those decades, I’ve kept watch—sometimes with amazement. It has been a special experience for me to see how the shy ingenue—my friend’s sister—matured into one of music’s most influential and beloved singer-songwriters, one who was even inducted into the exclusive Songwriters Hall of Fame. (George Gershwin—who was friends with Carly’s parents in the 1930s—move over.) I sometimes played a minor role here and there: writing about Carly, interviewing her for a special program on the cable channel VH-1, writing the booklet notes for her 2004 release,
Reflections: Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits
.

What has always drawn me to Carly’s music was an acute and critical (and self-critical) intelligence, and an almost therapeutic ability to conjure empathy and compassion via the popular ballad. And it’s not just me and her other fans who feel this way. Carly’s masterpiece “Let the River Run” has become a bipartisan national anthem, used by the government to calm the nation after September 11, 2001, and later to inspire hope and action during Barack Obama’s own run for the rainbow in 2008.

Carly Simon has had a life and career that need to be documented while most of the dramatis personae are still around. Carly’s story is a page-turner—one of ambition overcoming severe neuroses, of
continuing survival of the many battles that life makes us fight: stage fright, addiction, marriages; loss of loved ones, serial heartbreak, death by cancer; corporate incompetence, corruption, and greed; the sense, at a certain age, that time is closing in.

One of the things I do is work with rock stars on their memoirs, and for many years I’ve been trying to work with Carly in this way, but she has always held back. Someday she will probably write her own story, but until then, this book hopes to be a record of the true adventures of Carly Simon, in her time. This version must recommend itself as “unauthorized,” although Carly—generous in spirit—has occasionally helped me with matters of description and accuracy. Despite her jealously guarded wish for privacy, if you have her e-mail address, she’s a sucker for provocation, and will probably reply.

The epochal era of the rock star is winding down now. Most of the gods and goddesses have been celebrated and elegized, but not all. If you, like me, feel that you’ve been touched by her sun, Carly Simon’s music will live on, as long as it remains in the keeping of those who understand its value, its deeper meaning, and the transcendental distinction of her wonderful songs.

A few months after I met Carly, I accompanied her mother and brother to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Cape Cod, where her family had spent many summers of her childhood. Andrea Simon wanted to buy a house on the island, and Peter and I kept her company while she was shown various properties. This was early June 1968.

One day we were swimming at a spectacular beach called Zack’s Cliffs, then owned by the Hornblower family. Peter was trying to tune in a New York Mets baseball game on his portable radio when we heard a bulletin that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles while running for president. Suddenly a beautiful day turned into something else.

That night we were all exhausted, and Peter went to bed early. Andrea and I stayed up, talking about what had happened that day.
We were smoking, taking cigarettes from her pack of Kools on the kitchen table.

“Andy,” I said, “I thought only black people smoke Kools.”

Carly’s mother looked at me and laughed.

“Why, dahling,” she said with a laugh, “don’t you know?—I
am
black.”

I asked her to explain, and for the next hour or so Andrea Simon told me a story, a fantastic tale, about her mysterious grandmother, and the king of Spain.

I
n the time of King Alfonso XII, in the 1870s, a young Moroccan girl was working in one of the palaces in Madrid when a member of the royal family got her with child. No one would say who the father was. The king’s own legitimacy was often questioned, since his mother, Isabella II, had reputedly been profligate with her guardsmen before she was driven into exile.

As often happened in cases where the royal family required discretion, the young maid was spirited out of the realm, in her case to Cuba, Spain’s thriving colonial possession across the Atlantic. There she gave birth to a daughter, and disappeared from history. The little girl was put up for adoption at a Catholic orphanage. Only the name her mother had called her, Chebe, and her nameless mother’s registered identity, “a Moor,” were left as clues as to whose child she was. (“Chebe” is very close to
cheba,
an endearing term for a young girl in Moroccan Arabic.) But the nuns gossiped that the little Moorish maid had indeed told them who the baby’s father was. The Mother
Superior in Havana let it be known that the Sisters had something really special for the right family seeking to adopt a child.

In any event, this possibly royal child was adopted in Cuba by a family called Del Rio and taken by steamer to New Orleans. Her name was now officially Elma Maria Del Rio, but somehow, inexplicably, the name Chebe stayed with her. Around the turn of the twentieth century, she grew into a beautiful young woman with curls around a cherubic face. By the time she was sixteen, she could speak five languages, not all that unusual in polyglot New Orleans. Before she was twenty she was married (or married off, thinks her eldest granddaughter) to a man from Philadelphia named Heinemann, who took her to live in that city’s leafy suburb Germantown.

Chebe, as she was still called, then produced two sons, Fred and Peter. In 1909 her daughter, Andrea, was born. The family, nominally Catholic, lived with little money in a state of shabby gentility, and then was abandoned by Mr. Heinemann when Andrea was three years old. Genteel poverty followed, but Chebe insisted on certain standards, and while sometimes there wasn’t enough food on the table, they always had tickets to the opera and properly stylish clothes to wear. Sheebie was extremely secretive about herself, and where she came from. She told her children about the connection to a royal person of Spain, glamorizing her origins, but would never say anything more, possibly because that was all she’d learned, or could remember. (One family legend has her born in Valencia, Spain. In this telling, a maid was ordered to throw her off the ship carrying her and her mother to Cuba. The maid refused, or hid the child, and then presented her to the Cuban nuns.) When Andrea and her brothers begged for more information, Chebe would only smile and tell them, “When I die, you will know
nothing
about me. But…
nothing
!”