More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (21 page)

“We went back to the Hyatt House,” Carly recalled, “and ordered room service, the first time I’d ever had room service, ‘poor little rich kid’ that I was. I had a steak and French fries. (I was eating meat in those days.) Russ stayed with us, and we watched some boxing matches in my room with Steve and Jimmy.” Russ had just played on Joni Mitchell’s new album,
Blue,
along with James Taylor, who sang on some of the tracks. Russ talked about his experience with Scientology, and Carly was impressed with his very “clear” persona. Again, she said, “I found hanging out with men who were musicians or in charge of my career to be kind of heady—a new experience, the first sign of life from me that there was going to be something about it that I really liked.

“That evening was the opening, my first opening night—
ever
. The guys left around five o’clock, so I could get ready. Steve Harris said he would pick me up at seven.”

When Harris arrived, Carly was shaking, undergoing a massive anxiety attack. “She was trembling like a kitten; she couldn’t focus, she was stuttering. She could hardly speak. She said it was an old problem, from her childhood.” But she was dressed to kill, in a flowing dress and cool boots, her hair long and shag-cut in the rock star style of the day. Carly trembled all the way to the club, shook while tuning up in the dressing room, hardly made eye contact with the band, who knew what was up but tried to be cool about it. Carly asked how many people were out front, and was told the place was sold out. Cat Stevens was a huge draw, with his heathery singing voice and sweet little songs that could be sung in a twee English nursery. Leon Russell was out front. So was Randy Newman. And Joni Mitchell with James Taylor in tow. Jack Nicholson. Carole King was a maybe. Elektra’s publicists had placed a rose on every table,
with a note: “Love from Carly and Elektra.” She thought that was a nice touch.

Carly was in a state. She asked Steve if she could go down and talk to the audience, kind of make friends. “No, you can’t.” Could they go for a walk? “Yes, we can.” Harris walked the quaking Carly down the stairs, past the Elektra staff waiting to support her, and out the front door. Carly looked so upset that some thought she was leaving for good. They returned through the back door. Carly told Harris: “After the show, if Jac Holzman comes backstage and tells me how wonderful I am… I’ll know I failed. I’ll know he’s faking. I don’t want to hear that, Steve. ‘Carly, you were just fabulous.’ Don’t let him come back and say that to me.”

And then it was a walk out into the colored lights and: “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Troubadour welcome to Elektra recording artist Carly Simon.”

Applause. Carly sat down at the piano, nodded to the band, and went into the first song. The studio microphone produced a vocal tone that someone described as “aqua-luna—moonlight on the water.” Later, Carly told an interviewer what happened next: “I only had to do my six songs. I found myself singing and playing the piano, but the microphone kept slipping away as I was singing into it. It kept veering off to the left, and I’d follow it and, still playing the piano, swing it back in front of me like a typewriter and start again, and then it would go further and further to the left, and the audience was watching me do this. No stage manager, no Doug Weston, no Steve Harris or anybody came up and tightened the mike…. But this preoccupied me so much that it preoccupied me right out of the fear, because I was too concerned with the mechanics of this microphone slipping. It was actually a wonderful thing, a little angel to distract me so I wouldn’t be afraid.

“So I did six songs, and ‘That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be’ was the encore. The band was great. That’s what happened.”

There was long applause, and flowers in the dressing room. Jac
Holzman came back and, of course, said, “Carly, you were
wonderful,
and we’re behind you one hundred percent!” She looked—daggers—at Steve Harris, who headed downstairs to handle the press. When he ran back upstairs to the crowded, smoky dressing room, James Taylor was sitting on the floor talking to Carly. His little sister, Kate Taylor, a beauty of twenty-one, was sitting next to him. James was wearing an old suit jacket over wide-whale corduroy trousers held up by suspenders, very rural-looking, his hair hanging below his shoulders. James had come to say hello to his drummer, and explained to Carly that the reason he wasn’t working that week was because he was helping sister Kate with an album she was making for Cotillion Records. Russ had told James that he was working with this new girl singer called Carly Simon and that he should come by the Troubadour to see the show.

James was very shy, and mostly kept his eyes averted, but he surprised Carly by reminding her that they had previously met on Martha’s Vineyard a couple of summers before. “We passed once in the driveway of my mother’s house,” he told her. “Your brother and you were going to talk to my brother Livingston about a job you were going to do together. I passed you, and said hello. And Peter said hi and introduced me to you. And then I left.”

Steve Harris looked on. Carly and James were locked into each other, amid the bustle of the room. James was telling her about the house he was building on Martha’s Vineyard, while his girlfriend Joni Mitchell was downstairs listening to Cat Stevens sing “Peace Train.”

“They were having this fabulous conversation,” Steve said. “I can see the sparks are flying.” Meanwhile, there was a noisy bunch of young kids from the first show, and they’re calling to Carly from the alley behind the club. So Carly took her guitar and opened the window and played another song to them from the fire escape. Then Joni Mitchell arrived to drag James away, and the moment was over.

Steve: “At that point, I guess, Carly was feeling no pain. She
looked over at the musicians and said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a second show to do.’”

The Carly Simon Band persevered for the three-night stand, two sets a night. Two girls, Hilary and Molly, teenage fans from the first show, started coming around with brownies and other stuff for the sweaty band while they hung out between shows, and the guys were pleased to have (platonic) groupies of their own. Carly also had a few L. A. dates (mostly lunch) with the successful physician/ novelist Michael Crichton, whom she dubbed “Big Boy” because he was six foot four.

But there was a strong undercurrent now, a premonition Carly had after talking with James Taylor at the Troubadour. “I had this strange, prescient, almost eerie feeling that we were going to be together. Every time I saw a picture of him, even before I met him, I’d think:
That’s my husband
. I’d see a picture of him with another woman, and I’d get upset. I’ve never had that with anybody else. It wasn’t good or bad, but somehow, I saw it coming.”

Still, Carly was also enraptured by Cat Stevens. She watched his fervently performed sets several times, and became enchanted by his beautiful songs: “Moon Shadow,” “Wild World,” “Morning Has Broken,” “Into White.” “Wild World” was a hit single, and Stevens was huge on American radio. His presentation was wispy, almost feminine, light as air. When he asked Carly for her phone number in New York, she gave it to him in total anticipation.

Carly Simon’s Troubadour shows were a smashing success. She was in instant demand for interviews and Hollywood dinner parties. She cajoled the press with humor and intelligence, charming reporters and radio deejays with jokes and offhand remarks. Photographers clambered for her, this new, sexy young woman of the seventies. The radio was playing album cuts as if they were singles. Magazines began to do spreads on Carly’s look, her songs, describing hers as a new female energy for the coming decade. Pop music critic Robert Hilburn praised her in the
Los Angeles Times
: “Carly Simon is one
of those individualistic singer-writers that one immediately associates with such artists as Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, and Joni Mitchell.” Carly did a session with photographer Jack Robinson for
Vogue,
all long dresses and cross-gartered sandals, which left dents in her legs. “I dressed real hippie,” she said recently. “Still do. I wore Indian skirts, or jeans, Indian tops, long earrings, open-toe high heels. I still have clothes from those days, and I still wear them.

“I was the new girl in town,” she said. “And you can only be the new girl in town once. I never remembered being so popular in my life as then…. It was like a swarm of bees. People invited me to their house. Men fell in love with me that wouldn’t have looked at me twice before. Songs were written about me, people at the dressing room door, flowers, drugs offered… I
really
felt it at Elektra. Everybody’s rooting for you, everyone’s plugging for you in a way that they never will again.”

Now Arlyne Rothberg began to take some serious phone calls. Country music star Kris Kristofferson had seen Carly play and he wanted her to open for him at the Bitter End in May. She was invited to open for Cat Stevens at Carnegie Hall in June. Carly’s career now took off.

Carly recalled this era with great affection: “You know, there are certain periods in your life when a lot of events come together and they influence the rest of your life. The year I met Jake Brackman was very important to me. And April 6, 1971, was a confluence of a lot of people and energies—Cat Stevens, meeting James, the success at the Troub—those three nights changed my life.”

“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” was number twenty-five on the charts when Carly played the Troubadour. Sales continued to build over the new several weeks, and eventually the single would get to number ten with a bullet.

M
ay 1971. Carly opens for Kris Kristofferson at the Bitter End, an old haunt from the days of the Simon Sisters. To Carly, Kristofferson is something else. A thirty-five-year-old former Rhodes Scholar, army helicopter pilot, and, later, a sex symbol and movie star, Kristofferson writes what
Time
magazine called “bluntly sexual protest songs that have made him the most controversial songwriter-singer of the day.” He wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” for his girl pal Janis Joplin, who had a national hit record with the song after she died of a heroin overdose in 1970, a month after Jimi Hendrix. Other songs included “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Tall, bearded, and craggy, Kris performed in a sexy chamois suit, leather soft as butter. He was going around the country promoting his new album,
The Silver Tongued Devil and I,
and he was weary and really hitting the bottle. The first night, he called Carly back to the stage after his regular set and they sang together, to the delight of the packed Bitter End. It was Local Girl meets New Nashville, big time—a sensation. The next night,
they went back to his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel and he played a new song, inspired by Carly: “I’ve Got to Have You.”

Carly took him home another night. Kris was pretty drunk. He looked around the place: chintz-covered sofas, good furniture, flowers, and shawls. He kept repeating, “Carly,… you have… the most… beautiful… the most beautiful…
kitchen
.” She was telling him her life story when she noticed he had passed out. She kept calling her manager, asking what to do. Arlyne told her to let him sleep it off.

Another night, Kris brought Bob Dylan over to Carly’s place. She wasn’t surprised that Dylan couldn’t recall their business meeting of five years earlier, in Albert Grossman’s office. Then major league songwriters John Prine and Steve Goodman turned up. Everyone got drunk. After Dylan left, Carly’s guitar got passed around, as the four songwriters tried out some new things on one another. Carly turned on her Wollensak tape machine and made a clear recording of that “magical evening with the four of us” on East Thirty-fifth Street.

“My relationship with [Kris] was kinda stormy,” Carly said a few years later. “It lasted around six months, with like a five-month hiatus within that time. We were hot for each other, but he made me feel insecure. I always felt I could be booted out at any moment. But it probably turned out more songs than any other relationship I’d had to that time.”