More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (32 page)

While Carly breast-fed Sally in what for her was an ecstasy of maternal satisfaction, and as the Arab oil embargo shook the foundations of the world economy, James began work on his next album,
Walking Man
. He was off methadone now, he said, supported by Carly’s love and a serious course of psychotherapy. It was considered too risky for him to record in Los Angeles with Peter Asher and his L. A. community of friends, so he stayed in New York. His album was produced by David Spinozza, employing some of the musicians Carly had used on
Hotcakes
. (Carly’s longtime drummer Rick
Marotta comes in here.) Carly sang on five of the album’s ten songs, while Linda Ronstadt and Paul and Linda McCartney sang backup on several songs, including “Let It All Fall Down,” James’s comment on the Watergate scandal that was about to undermine Richard Nixon’s presidency. Richard Avedon, then the preeminent photographer in America, took the stark and sober portrait of James that would serve as the album cover.
Walking Man,
downbeat songs by a recovering addict, was finished by April and released in June 1974. Two singles were issued, but neither made the sales charts. No airplay, either. The album reached only number thirteen. There was no gold record hanging on the manager’s wall.

Early that summer, James took Carly and Sally and his band on a month-long tour that crossed the entire country. Many of the concerts had sold out in minutes, and James’s young fans paid rapt attention to his performances and collectively swooned when he played “Sweet Baby James” and (especially) “Fire and Rain.” After breast-feeding baby Sal backstage, Carly joined James for a surprise encore of “Mockingbird.” Almost every night, she waited in the wings to go on, quaking with stage fright, muttering, “I can’t do this… I can’t go on.” James’s audiences would let out a big roar the minute Russ Kunkel started pounding out the song’s familiar rhythm, and then an even louder din when Carly, barefoot and really beautiful, took the stage with her own microphone and danced around her husband with her signature gawky choreography. She did twenty “Mockingbirds” on the road that summer of ’74 and helped establish Simon and Taylor as a major live draw. Concert promoters kept asking for a Carly Simon tour, but Arlyne Rothberg said that Carly was still so fearful about performing that she would have felt like Judy Garland’s manager if she had pushed Carly onstage before she was ready.

Meanwhile, “I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” was released as a single. It played as an anthem on the “adult contemporary” radio format and garnered decent sales as well, reaching number fourteen
that summer. President Nixon resigned in disgrace in August, much to the delight of James Taylor.

Fall 1974. Carly was trying to write songs, but it was hard. Her mind was often elsewhere. She was doing all the parenting. James was no father figure, plus he was also trying to write an album, trying to stay off dope, and, anyway—as he often told his audiences—he wasn’t crazy about children. He was still almost completely indifferent to Carly’s music (and to everyone else’s), and this didn’t do a lot for Carly’s confidence. “James was often silently critical about my music,” Carly recalled. “But he often made it clear that he admired me, and I was proud when I’d catch him humming one of my songs. As for the children, he was supportive when it was convenient for him to be. That sounds like a cruel thing to say, but then, I don’t think men have the same kind of instincts and feelings about children that women do.”

The title track of
Walking Man
was about James’s often absent father, and also about James’s visceral dislike of November, when New England grew colder and leafless. So, in late November 1974, the Simon-Taylor family flew to Los Angeles, where Carly would work on
Playing Possum
and James would record his
Gorilla
album. They rented a comfortable house in Beverly Hills for the winter (at four thousand dollars per month) and Carly leased a Mercedes convertible to get around. That Christmas, she and James were to be found caroling along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, along with Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and other friends.

N
ow it’s late March 1975 and the Vietnam War is almost over. Everyone is talking about Patricia Hearst, the newspaper heiress kidnapped by crazy radicals. Led Zeppelin is playing sold-out shows in Los Angeles, and the Rolling Stones are about to tour America. Disco music is all the rage. There’s a new high-camp singing sensation from New York called Bette Midler, and Linda Ronstadt is at the top of her game. Bob Dylan’s
Blood on the Tracks
is a big hit. The best band in L. A. is Little Feat. The best band in America is the Meters, from New Orleans. People are talking about this new thing from Jamaica, reggae music, and about Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Carly Simon is still in Los Angeles, having just finished her new album,
Playing Possum
. When a reporter catches up with her, she is in an erotic art gallery in Beverly Hills trying to buy a present for her producer, Richard Perry, with whom she had spent the past three months battling over almost every aspect of the album.

Carly knew she hadn’t done her best work, but she made it clear to everyone that she found motherhood very distracting, and she just
wasn’t up to actually living in the studio, the way she used to. The biggest battle was over the choice of her next single. Carly wanted a new song, called “Slave,” an anthemic, embarrassing de-affirmation of everything the women’s movement of the seventies stood for. The lyrics expressed total devotion for her love, a “burning, yearning” desire for voluntary servitude, and an expression of sexual hunger and longing that was unusual, even for a Carly Simon song. And there was, indeed, a feeling of hypersexual torch carrying in many of Carly’s new songs. Sally was weaned now, and Carly had gotten her body back. She described the spirit of the new music as a “renewal of the lust.” She said the new songs such as “Slave” and “Waterfall” (about the female orgasm), and even “After the Storm,” were about regaining the woman she was when she first fell in love.

But nobody else “got” “Slave.” The lyrics were banal and cringe-worthy. Carly’s manager hated the song, and so did her label, which preferred the dance-floor-ready “Attitude Dancing,” with Jake Brackman’s proto-New Age lyrics. In the end, the company said that issuing “Slave” as a single was career suicide, and Carly was overruled. Most people didn’t even want “Slave” on the album, despite James’s star turn on guitar.

Carly had worked on the record at Sound Lab Studios and Sunset Sound. Richard Perry was using cocaine, so the atmosphere was weird. The sessions were star-studded, with James on lots of guitar, Ringo Starr on drums, and input from Dr. John and Carole King, among others. Cocaine (lots of it) was their drug of choice. (Carly tried cocaine a few times with James, but she was already so adrenalized making this record that she didn’t think it did much for her.)

At the gallery, Carly chose a sexy portrait of a woman not unlike herself, with long flowing hair, as Perry’s present. As the print was rolled into its carrying tube, Carly told the gallerina that she loved art, but that her husband wouldn’t let her have any pictures in the house. “He doesn’t like anything up on the walls,” Carly said.

Carly and the reporter had lunch at Mr. Chow’s in Beverly Hills.
Carly liked the famous restaurant’s hybrid Chinese/ Italian cuisine. She whispered, “They give you very small portions here, and charge you a lot.” On the verge of a steak-and-grapefruit diet, she ordered egg noodles and white wine. The new album was sexy, she averred. “My body began to assume its former shape. There was this sort of, ‘Oh, my god. Here’s
this body
again,’ and I sort of got…
turned on
by it.” She talked about her problems with David Geffen and noted that her new contract with her label remained unsigned. She talked about “Slave” being rejected as a single. “The song says, ‘I’m just another woman, raised to be a slave.’ And they’ll say, ‘How
dare
she do that, she’s supposed to be a liberated woman, and here’s she’s talking about being a
slave
?’”

Asked about James Taylor’s fathering skills, Carly smiled and said, “He’s a great…
appreciator
.” But she allowed that, once in a while, he got up early to take care of his daughter. She mentioned that she had joined James in the studio and sung on a new version of the old Marvin Gaye song “How Sweet It Is,” which looked to be James Taylor’s next single.

The stage fright was still there. But she said she was thinking about trying to play small places in the autumn. “My idea would be to perform under an assumed name—‘Fraulein Himmel’—at a small club where nobody knew me and I could sing my ass off, just sing great in a situation like that. Nobody expected anything of me, nobody came in loving me, or wanting me to fail…. Last year, on tour with James, the crowd was so excited, there was this kind of
roar
when I stepped onstage [for “Mockingbird”], and it was precisely
that
exhilaration that frightens the hell out of me.”

The reporter recounts the current rumors about Carly in Hollywood: that she has been offered several roles opposite Robert Redford; that she has been approached to star in a remake of
A Star Is Born
with either James Taylor or Kris Kristofferson; that she turned down
Fear of Flying
; that she can’t act. “All true,” she said, laughing. She said she was thinking of writing a screenplay with Jake Brackman
in which she could play a part. “But you know, to be frank, I would feel guilty, because there are so many really fine actresses. I think I’d feel that I would be cheating someone out of a part.”

After lunch, Carly did a little window shopping on Rodeo Drive. She slipped into a boutique to try on an outfit by Chloe; “I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” was playing on the shop’s sound system. She passed on the expensive dress, but paid for a $135 salmon-hued Christian Aujard blouse with her credit card. The reporter than followed Carly’s Benz convertible back to the house she was sharing with James, Sally, and an au pair. As they pulled into the driveway, James was leaving for the studio. “Goodbye, Himmel,” Carly called to him. “See you tonight, Himmel,” James replied. She watched his car vanish down the drive and said, “He goes away forever, every day.”

Carly gave a birthday party for James around that time at their rented house in Coldwater Canyon, but it didn’t go well. There was already some friction between the two because Carly’s brother, Peter, was in town, working on a book for publisher Alfred A. Knopf about Carly’s career (and also taking pictures of Led Zeppelin, part of their entourage). James complained to Carly that Peter was hanging around too much, and that more privacy was required. Carly also suspected that James was using drugs at the studio, because much of the time after he came home from there, he was such a cipher—sitting, staring, out of it. James denied using, and said he was merely exhausted at the end of the evening. They got through the birthday party, but when the last guest had driven off, they engaged in such a terrible row—said to have been about Joni Mitchell—that the baby woke up and started crying. Carly was so upset that she fled the house and checked into a hotel for the rest of the night.

Carly’s most recent album cover,
Hotcakes,
had featured her as a demure, pregnant princess of pop. This time the art director wanted something racy. Norman Seeff was a photographer who specialized in jellied, soft-focus, black-and-white portraits. Carly liked him, liked the fine California wine in his studio, liked the hip dance music he
was blasting. Off came her clothes, revealing the famous little black lingerie and the high black boots. “I had bought a number of different changes of clothes and I was wearing that black chemise under a dress. When I took off the dress, someone said, ‘Let’s do a couple in this [chemise].’ They had to go out and get some darker stockings because my skin looked too white next to the black chemise. It wasn’t anything planned, like I wanted to appeal to the S&M crowd.” Soon Carly was on her knees, hooting and posturing, her mouth in a sexy moue. Snap, snap: a famous—and soon to be notorious—album jacket.

There was a new presence in the studio while Carly made her record. This was Andrew Gold, a talented musician and songwriter admired by Richard Perry and signed to Asylum. (He was the son of Marni Nixon, the great singer famous for overdubbing vocals for movie stars in film musicals.) In his early twenties, he was a major player in the L. A.-dominated pop rock of the seventies. He’d helped arrange Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 breakout album,
Heart Like a Wheel,
and was also working with James, Maria Muldaur, and Jackson Browne. Gold played on many of Carly’s tracks and contributed to the glossy, polished sound that Richard Perry was after. Much later Gold described a memorable day at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles: “I was playing drums on Carly Simon’s
Playing Possum
album, the one with her wearing a negligee on the cover. And she had just come back from that photo session. We were working and it wasn’t really happening, so then Carly came in, and she’d had a couple of drinks. She wasn’t drunk, just feeling kind of gay, in the old version of the word. She had this big fur coat on, and she said, ‘I think I’ll give them some inspiration.’ So she came in the studio and stripped off the fur coat and started dancing around in this shimmering little negligee. She was hilarious, and it
was
an inspiration.”