More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (24 page)

Carly flew back to New York after the Troubadour shows and seriously took up with James Taylor. Jake Brackman noted that all Carly’s romantic liaisons now ceased to exist. Ex-boyfriends and new flames who called her for dates were told, “I’m with James Taylor now.” Then she changed her phone number to an unpublished listing.

James took Carly up to Martha’s Vineyard to show her the house he was building. This proved to be an austere, fanciful, extremely vertical bachelor’s shack, still under construction, on some forested land James had bought with the money he’d earned from the
Sweet Baby James
album. The carpenters included James’s youngest brother, Hugh Taylor; the brilliant local artist Laurie Miller; and Zack Wiesner, who’d been in James’s first band, the Flying Machine. The house’s ground floor was basically a recording studio with a galley kitchen. The upstairs was the bedroom and a mixing board. There was a wood stove, and electric baseboard heat upstairs, but the house was still cold. Little David, James’s German shepherd dog, barely recognized him. The whole scene was very early seventies: communal, rustic, and rudimentary. Carly would wake up in the morning to find the carpenters, roofers, plumbers, electricians, various band members and their girlfriends, plus hangers-on (and delivery men) drinking coffee and having breakfast downstairs. “There were all these people,” she recalled, “and they were eating our food, making coffee all the time.” It was a serious adjustment, but she did her best to accommodate James’s crew. (They called themselves No Jets Construction, after a local campaign to stop commercial jet aircraft flying into the island’s primitive, World War II– era airfield.) With his new wealth, James was a leading source of employment for his
friends, the island’s impoverished young artisans, and Carly decided she had to make the best of her new boyfriend’s Vineyard scene.

Carly, speaking ten years later: “James was the kind of person you looked at and wanted to save. We went to live on Martha’s Vineyard, where I found two years worth of unopened mail, stacked up to the ceiling. I spent the first six months of our relationship going through it. It was a labor of love. I was determined to get James out of this hole of unopened correspondence. And I remember that the house was filled with hangers-on, all the time.”

As for James Taylor, he had fallen hard for Carly Simon. This level of emotion was unusual in his life, and he told friends he was deeply affected by it. He had found someone who would really look after him, something he had always needed. One night, he got into a fight with his sister’s boyfriend, who’d been rough with her. James called him out, and it ended badly. James, extremely upset and fairly intoxicated, disappeared into the woods. Carly went out looking for him, calling his name. It started to rain. Eventually she heard him calling back to her, his disembodied voice echoing through the bare trees. “I
love
you, Carly,” he cried. “I
love
you, Carly.”

On December 18, Carly headlined at the Bitter End. The line to get in ran for a block down freezing Bleecker Street. She was worried because she had a bad cold and a sore throat, but the show had to go on. She climbed on the tiny stage in a high-necked blue dress, crammed in with her band. Her mother was sitting at a table in front. Her brother, Peter, was rushing around with his camera. Her sister Joanna swept in, late, fresh from singing a performance of J. S. Bach’s
Mass in B Minor
at Carnegie Hall. Carly called her very pregnant sister, Lucy Simon, up to the stage and together they sang “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.” This proved a sensation. Down in front, Andrea Simon was pounding the table and shouting for more. The second set was even better than the first.

The next day a reporter asked Carly what she thought her “image” was.

“I don’t think I have any one image, but other people seem to think I do. I’m told they see me as a new kind of woman; very strong; very, very liberated, independent, large, forceful, big smile, lots of teeth…. But I never think of myself as one person. There are so many different Carly Simons. There’s a shy and introverted one, acquiescent, intimidated. Other times, I can be the master of ceremonies, the person bringing everyone else together. Different people bring out different things in me.”

Carly had also started to write songs again, the first new material since she had worked on
Anticipation
the previous summer. One was called “God and My Father,” with a complex lyric about what had happened to her inner self when Richard Simon died. Carly: “One night I was curled up in bed with this new notebook of pages that hadn’t been written on, and I just decided to write and see what came out on paper. The first line I wrote was about hearing God whispering lullabies. I just kept on, not really knowing where I was going. It was a strange sensation.”

At the end of the year, Carly was interviewed by the British music paper
Disc and Music Echo
. She told the reporter that she loved working in London and would definitely make her next record there. She repeated that she liked playing in clubs, and hated concert halls, where she couldn’t see the audience. She said, “My feelings get very hurt if I’m not liked,” so success was very important to her. Asked about her relationship with James Taylor, she allowed, “Let’s just say that it’s not a professional entanglement.”

The year 1971 had been a good one for her, Carly said. “I liked the acclaim [of having a hit record]. It made me feel… in
awe
of myself… for the first time in my life, really. Now I feel driven to get this feeling—again and again.”

N
ow it’s early in 1972 and Carly Simon is supposed to be writing songs for her third album, but she is distracted by various problems, including finding someone to produce it—Paul Samwell-Smith is otherwise engaged—and someplace to live with her new boyfriend, James Taylor. J. T. has made it clear to her that he needs taking care of, and Carly is sure that she’s the woman to do it. It isn’t clear if she even knew at the time that James was using heroin. She is sure that her apartment off Lexington is too small, and his house on Martha’s Vineyard is still under construction—and will remain a work site for the next thirty years. Carly starts to look around someplace familiar—the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zip code 10022—and after a few weeks she finds a place in the East Sixties that will do for the two lovers, at least until they get busy and two turns into three.

James Vernon Taylor was born in Boston in 1948. His father was Dr. Isaac Taylor, originally from North Carolina, lately of Harvard and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Taylor married the beautiful Trudy Woodard, the daughter of a waterman and boatbuilder from
the North Shore of Massachusetts. Their first child, Alex, was born in 1946. James came next, followed by brother Livingston, sister Kate, and brother Hugh. In the early 1950s Isaac Taylor moved his young family from Boston to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he became instrumental in founding the state university’s school of medicine and was a prominent medical educator.

The Taylors of North Carolina were an old mercantile family that went back to Colonial days, blue-blooded American root stock. But recent generations had coped with mental illness and alcoholism, and this extended to James’s father. It led to friction between James’s parents, and this in turn may have contributed to Dr. Taylor’s decision, in 1956, to leave his family for two years to take a post with the U. S. Navy’s mission to Antarctica as chief medical officer of the naval base. (In fairness to Ike Taylor, as he was widely and affectionately known, he had spent World War II in Cambridge, getting his education, and had sat out the 1950– 53 Korean conflict as well. The navy job may well have been his way of fulfilling a desire to do something for his country.) The upshot was that the Taylor family’s father disappeared for two long years, and the five children grew under their mother’s sometimes distracted watch.

Trudy Taylor made the best of her lot, as her husband now communicated with her and the children through letters, mostly long delayed. Still, she took her brood on European summer vacations. Music lessons were important: James had four years of cello lessons and played in his school orchestra. Alex played the violin. Kate had piano lessons and took up the Carolina mountain dulcimer. Liv played the banjo. They all sang in home and at church and learned to vocalize in the characteristic Appalachian accent of the Carolina country singers.

Dr. Taylor returned to the family after two years, but things were never the same. Much later, James was quoted to the effect that his father came back but never came home. Rather than reintegrate with the family, he built a beautiful modernist house for them in the
Morgan Creek Road neighborhood and threw himself into his academic work, eventually becoming the respected dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School. His political liberalism and aura of aloofness made him something of an outsider in his community, but it also served him well as a leader and authority figure. Despite his reputation as a two-fisted drinker, everyone knew they could depend on him. The Taylors entertained a lot as part of their academic world, and music was always a feature of this, much as it was in the Simon family in the same era.

Also as in the Simon family, the children’s best memories were of family vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, where they had many seasonal friends and the blissful pastimes of sailing, fishing, and swimming. Music was a big draw there, and Jamie Taylor and his siblings almost never missed the hootenannies at the Chilmark Community Center when they were on the island.

James Taylor at fourteen was over six feet tall, introverted, shy, and under the baleful influence of his older brother, Alex, who was rambunctious, getting in scrapes, and starting a rock-and-roll band. The Taylors decided to send Jamie to one of the great New England boarding schools, where he could grow in a protected environment. They chose Milton Academy, near Boston. Founded in 1792, Milton was then divided into separate schools for boys and girls. Both of President Kennedy’s younger brothers had gone there. James arrived with his cello in September 1962, already very homesick. But he tried to fit in and was given the nickname Moose, because he was the tallest boy in the class. Later that year he got permission from his mother to sell the cello, and bought a guitar instead. “It saved my life,” James has said. He taught himself a personal fingering style, still in use fifty years later. By the tenth grade, Moose was one of the popular boys in school. He could play Beatles songs on his guitar after hearing them once. His was a serious, brooding presence. He told his friends he missed North Carolina all the time, and was trying to write a song about it.

The summer he was fifteen, he met and started playing music with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard. Danny Kortchmar, or “Kootch,” was a little older than James. His family had a summer house in Chilmark, near where the Taylors stayed, and so there were many opportunities for the two boys to put their guitars together and practice. James had a quirky, very moody personality, and Danny could see that he wasn’t real happy, but he was already a brilliant guitar player. That year, Danny asked James to play the Chilmark Community Center’s annual talent contest with him, which they proceeded to win with a standing ovation.

During his third year at Milton, James had some health problems. Despite being the star musician of the school’s weekend coffeehouse, he seemed depressed, missed classes, slept all the time. In 2011 he looked back in an interview: “When I was fifteen, I could hardly live inside my skin. It was like I’d been born on the dark side of the moon.” The school decided to send him home for a rest, and he spent the rest of the year recuperating and playing in his delinquent brother’s band, the Fabulous Corsairs. Alex was the lead singer, James the lead guitar; they rocked a lot of dances and frat parties in the Chapel Hill area.

He tried again in the autumn of 1965 as the Beatles’ new songs blasted on Boston’s WMEX and WRKO. But again he lost his way, settling into a deep depression that unnerved his friends and teachers. You couldn’t talk to Moose. He just looked down at his shoes and retreated into his guitar for solace. Milton was a famous prep school, and everyone in his class was excited about applying to colleges and universities. James was too depressed to bother, because he knew he wasn’t going to college. “It was really just me and my guitar,” he remembered about this painful time.

Everyone tried to help. One of the guidance counselors asked James if he could put his feelings into words. James described a process that would start with him not feeling well, which then evolved into insecurity, fears—what he called getting the blues. Then came
the inexplicable onset of really black moods, and then despair—very deep. This turned into a profound, almost narcoleptic fatigue. By the time school officials intervened, James was sleeping for twenty-hour stretches. He was removed from his dormitory and placed under closer supervision, in one of the masters’ houses. Poor Moose was beloved by many, and his illness was breaking almost every heart at Milton. When he went home for the Christmas break, he resolved not to return to the school. But he could never quite bring himself to tell his parents, who were having trouble with the designated black sheep of the family, Alex.