More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (28 page)

Spring 1972. Carly was writing. She was still working on the song “God and My Father,” hoping to make it a big statement on her next album, but she was having trouble getting the right connections within a difficult song about feeling abandoned by God when her father died. “I realized I had my father confused with the Devil, and I was writing things I didn’t understand myself. It was as if someone
was dictating the verses to me and I was writing it down.” At one point she called her manager from the Vineyard and sang the song over the phone. Arlyne Rothberg said that this moved her to tears.

It was easier for Carly to find inspiration in her love for James Taylor, especially when she flew up to visit him on the Vineyard. James was using his considerable new wealth to buy more land on the island, and also in Nova Scotia, where old farms were selling for a song. Carly wrote most of the song “No Secrets” on the Vineyard after a long talk with (a mostly reluctant) James about his previous love life. (Unlike Carly, who tended to stay friendly with former lovers, James wanted nothing to do with his ex-girlfriends.)

Flying back from the Vineyard to New York, Carly wrote “The Right Thing” in the back of an Air New England DC-3 plane in celebration of her affair with James. She had a cassette recorder with her, and by the time the plane landed, she had developed most of the structure of the song. She had recently seen the film
The Last Picture Show,
and “loving you is the right thing to do” came from a line in the film. Carly: “It actually was one of my absolutely undisputed songs about James, written three months into our relationship.”

Carly also had strong hopes for a new narrative song, “His Friends Are Fond of Robin,” which described in detail someone much like a character in a J. D. Salinger short story. But her most important new song was still in her new journal. It had begun in the old one, the one that was lost, under the title “Bless You, Ben.” The lyric was about “an imaginary man who came into my life.” But the lyric seemed morose to her. Then the song shifted focus as Carly thought about some of the men she’d been with, and how some of them had treated her. She’d had a line in her notebook for about a year: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.” The title of the song now shifted to “Ballad of a Vain Man.” It had a killer hook of a chorus, and in her head Carly could hear herself singing on it—with Mick Jagger.

How to get to him? “I got this idea to do an interview with Mick
Jagger. Arlyne mentioned it to an editor at
The
New York Times
. He said if Jagger was willing, it would be great. We got in touch with Chris Odell, who worked with the Stones.” Mick liked the idea; he had a new album—
Exile on Main Street
—coming out, and said he could use the publicity. Carly: “So last May [1972] I casually went out to L. A. and ended up hanging around waiting for Mick to show up—for five days. When he finally arrived he had been on airplanes for thirteen hours and was exhausted. All we talked about that night was how much we hated flying. It was very strange, that first meeting, because I expected to look so much like him. People were always commenting on the resemblance. I expected to walk into a mirror. But then, I didn’t think we looked anything alike.

“Mick was wearing a cotton suit in turquoise, very short white socks, and saddle shoes. And he kept apologizing about how tired he was. And then I had to leave for New York the next morning. I saw him again when I was in L. A. in June, but by then we had become friends and I felt it would be too difficult to write an objective piece.”

Carly’s career in journalism was now over, but the ploy had produced the desired result. Mick Jagger told Carly Simon that if he survived the Rolling Stones’ North American tour that summer, he would try to be in London when she made her record in September.

I
n June 1972, Carly flew to Los Angeles to meet her new producer. Richard Perry was tall, bushy headed, with a long face and a prominent nose. Carly had been romantically involved with both her previous producers, but this was not to be the case with Perry. They met at Elektra’s studio on La Cienaga. She sat at a piano and played some of her new songs for him. When she sang out the “you’re so vain” chorus, he was ecstatic. Perry knew a hit song when he heard one, and he told Carly that their creative collaboration was going to work really well.

While she was in L. A. Carly met with some movie people who were interested in her. There was buzz in the industry about Carly—successful, single, available, hot, a potential new star. There was talk of her being (type)cast in the film
Fear of Flying.
What no one knew was that Carly’s stammer, which could still surface when she was anxious, would keep her from accepting the films that would occasionally be offered to her.

Carly also saw Mick Jagger again, just before the Stones went on tour. He told her that he hoped no one died, as they had the last time the Rolling Stones came through. Mick’s wife, Bianca, he said, was jealous and didn’t like her husband consorting with Carly. Bianca told her friend Andy Warhol that “the only girlfriend of Mick’s she ever got jealous of was Carly Simon, because Carly is intelligent and has the look Mick likes—she looks like Mick and Bianca.”

Carly spent the rest of that summer commuting among New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Los Angeles. “Ballad of a Vain Man” was in development. (When Carly musically annotated the song, she titled it “You’re So Lame” on the score.) “God and My Father” was now called “Nighttime Songs.” She was tinkering with the material constantly, sometimes unsure of herself. James kept telling her to hold back and not give too much of herself away.

That summer there were so many carpenters and craftsmen working on James’s property that the couple decided to get away awhile. James acquired a mobile home, and he and Carly and his dog, David, drove around New England for a couple of weeks. While they were staying in the Berkshires, Carly suggested they visit her brother on his communal farm in southern Vermont. James was amenable. Peter Simon: “Somehow James managed to get this huge Winnebago down our mile-long dirt road and into the driveway. They stayed all afternoon, and seemed to really enjoy the quiet of Vermont. I took them up the hill to show them our beaver pond. James needed a cover photo for his next album, so he went back to their motor home and put on a fresh shirt and a tie, which gave him a formal, sort of preppie look.” Peter asked him what the title of the record was, and he said that he had briefly considered
Farewell to Showbiz
and also
Throw Yourself Away,
but no one liked these titles. Then he chose
One Man Parade,
but changed his mind and was calling the record
One Man Dog
. “So I got him out on the pond with his dog in this aluminum boat we had, and I shot the photo from the shore.
I found the tie to be a little strange, but the photo was also about James’s general isolation—a man and his dog against the world. He must have liked it, because it was on the sleeve of
One Man Dog
when it came out later in the year.”

Late in August, Carly was back in Los Angeles, staying at the Hotel Bel-Air. “Every time I come to Hollywood,” she told an interviewer, “I move up a rung in the hotel game. I don’t know how I ended up at the Bel Air, but now that I’m here I don’t know where I can go next.”

She bridled at another reporter who wanted to know about her love life. “That’s all she seemed to want to know about. I was offended by the way she rattled them off. ‘And just how long did your affair with
him
last?’ So I asked why she wanted to know, and she said, ‘Well, that’s what the public wants to know about, more than anything.’

“Then I thought, ‘Well, what is my private life?’ In a sense it is my public life, too. In the last two years [the media] needed a hook on me. It made me more interesting when I was going out with someone famous, but sometimes they made more of things than there actually was, and it embarrassed me to have these things so distorted. What I need to do now is develop a proper self-censorship method, so I don’t blurt out the truth all the time.” She added that James Taylor was helping her with this.

On a Saturday in early September, Carly flew to London with Arlyne, Jimmy Ryan, and drummer Andy Newmark. Carly and Arlyne checked into the Portobello Hotel, while the two musicians were installed in a nearby flat. Arlyne recalled that Carly was under serious pressure now. “She had two months to finish the album so it could be out for the Christmas rush, and she was working with a producer she’d never worked with before.”

The first sessions at Trident Studios began on the following Monday, and were discouraging. Carly and the musicians were jet-lagged, and nothing seemed to go right. Richard Perry came on, Carly
thought, like a film director: barking orders, full of high-voltage energy, very opinionated. Carly was frustrated. She didn’t want a director; she wanted an interpreter. She tried to call Jac Holzman to complain, but the switchboard at Elektra said he was traveling and couldn’t be reached. (“I’d heard there were problems in London,” he said later, “but I decided to let them sort them out.”)

Carly: “Richard Perry was trying to do the same thing I was, which was calling all the shots. But he had more endurance and perseverance than I had. But when I sang the way he wanted me to, it sounded forced and unnatural. He would realize this and say, ‘I’m sorry, go back and sing it the way you feel it.’ And that would always end up the right way. Almost all my vocals [on
No Secrets
] are original—I did them when the original track was being laid down. I wasn’t thinking about how I was singing them, and they turned out to be the most ‘honest’ vocals we had.”

The problems continued for a few days. Carly was unhappy with what she considered Perry’s overuse of orchestration, feeling that it marred the simplicity and sincerity of some of the songs. “I doubted myself, my judgments, an awful lot,” she remembered. Her frequent calls to James on the Vineyard left her feeling lonely and confused. James was into musical minimalism, and kept telling Carly to hold back in her music, not let everything come blasting out.

The sessions improved by the second week, as the new songs began to coalesce. Laying down the tracks for songs such as “No Secrets” and “Loving You” was exciting, as Carly could see how Richard Perry was building a cohesive sound that took her music into another level of sonic sophistication. But now it didn’t sound slick to her, just up-to-date and “adult contemporary,” as the format was known at the time. Perry got some of the best musicians in London to play on the tracks, including Beatle-affiliated bassist Klaus Voormann, American drummers Jim Gordon and Jim Keltner, and Ray Cooper, who played percussion in Elton John’s band.

James Taylor came to London during the third week, and Carly
was elated. They spent most of their time in Carly’s suite, did some sightseeing, and cuddled in Soho’s atmospheric pubs. She told Arlyne that James had visited her mother in Riverdale to formally ask Andrea Simon for Carly’s hand in marriage. Carly: “I mentioned one morning to James in London that I thought we should get married. And he said, ‘Oh well, there’s really no reason to get married. We love each other and we’ve been living together.’ Later in the afternoon James said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe we should get married.’ I said, ‘Well, what happened between this morning and this afternoon?’ He said, ‘This afternoon it was my idea.’”

The issue was left open for the time being. James came to the studio almost every day and played guitar on several tracks, but after he went back to the States, Richard Perry erased the work he had done, so James would only barely appear on Carly’s album.

In early October, Carly and Richard Perry began to work on the album’s vocal tracks. Perry brought in Harry Nilsson to sing the backup chorus on “You’re So Vain,” which they all recognized as the album’s first single and potential radio grenade. Nilsson had written some of the best songs of his generation (“Without You” was the best known), but he was most famous for singing “Everybody’s Talkin’” (written by Fred Neil) from the 1969 film
Midnight Cowboy.
Carly and Nilsson worked hard on “You’re So Vain,” but the song, with what Carly called its “big intervals,” was proving somewhat difficult to sing. After some frustrating first attempts, Richard Perry cut the session short and said they would try a fresh approach the following day.