More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (41 page)

The reviews of
Come Upstairs
were indifferent. Critics who had once championed Carly as an original now complained she was trying to be trendy, and that it wasn’t working. Others said that the album was depressing, that Carly’s audience wanted good news, not bad.

June 1980. Ben Taylor was now three years old and had been sickly all his life. He still cried a lot and ran fevers, and none of the doctors could explain why. The enormous child was still at Carly’s breast. When teased by her friends, she answered that lactation made both mother and son feel better. But then the boy’s fevers got worse, especially at night. In one account, James Taylor called his father in North Carolina. Ike Taylor called a friend at Columbia Presbyterian in New York, and Ben was finally seen by doctors who provided an accurate diagnosis: Ben had a dysplastic kidney, one that had developed abnormally and was leaking toxins into his body. The doctors wanted to remove the diseased kidney without delay, and Ben was rushed into what amounted to emergency surgery.

Carly handled this situation as best she could, since James was nowhere to be found. No one knew where he was. Arlyne Rothberg rushed to the hospital and found Carly shaking uncontrollably and in tears. Soon Andrea Simon arrived and urged Carly to pull herself
together and comport herself with dignity. Arlyne called James’s management, let them know that Ben was being operated on, and demanded they track James down. John Travolta tenderly comforted a distraught Carly and kept her company during the week Ben was in the hospital.

James eventually arrived at the hospital, but he didn’t go up to see his family until Arlyne discovered him outside on the street—disheveled, glassy-eyed—sitting on a bench. Arlyne started shouting at him to go to his family, but James just sat there, ignoring Arlyne as if she didn’t exist. Eventually he made his way upstairs and was told that the operation had been a success. Carly was furious, and felt even worse when James explained his absence by saying that he’d driven his girlfriend, a dancer, to the airport and hadn’t known about the surgery. He was also playing benefits for politician John Anderson. When Ben woke up he had a fit because he couldn’t find his penis, which had been taped to his body during surgery. James immediately dropped his trousers, tucked his penis into his legs, and told Ben he couldn’t find his, either. Ben Taylor thought this was pretty funny and stopped crying.

Carly wanted to forgive James for his behavior, but she was so angry with him that her heart wasn’t in it. When James was in residence in Apartment 6S, neighbors in the old, thick-walled building could sometimes hear the shouting. Carly wanted to hurt James so badly, really wound him, that during one battle she told him that his decade of suspecting that she had had an affair with Mick Jagger had been right all along. She regretted this almost immediately, tried later to take it back, to say it wasn’t true, but the body blow had landed accurately.

One night in this period Carly and James had a fight and he stormed out of the house. Arriving at Trax, a popular Midtown musicians’ hangout, he announced to his pals, “Jezebel done kicked me out, so I’m up for grabs.” As for Carly’s relationship with John Travolta, she told
People
magazine later that year, “John has an almost
magical way of knowing when I am in need. When James couldn’t be there, John came to me during that week Ben was in the hospital. [John] is sensitive, loving and very immediately there.”

But when things calmed down, Carly and James stayed married for the sake of the children, although the couple was separated in all but name. Carly was privately mortified that their public image was a sham. Her once-tight bond with her husband was coming unglued, and she felt her father’s abandonment returning in spades. She already realized that patching up the marriage was not going to work.

In October, Carly was on the cover of
People
. “We were both really traumatized,” she was quoted regarding Ben’s surgery. “I tend to get hysterical, while James is clinical and then tries to escape.” After showing the reporter around the Vineyard property, as usual a bustling construction site, she allowed, “James and I have built a fairy tale house, but we don’t live fairy tale lives. We were both programmed into conventional male-female roles, and we are always struggling with those. I just wish that he would do as much fathering as I do mothering.” Carly’s friend Libby Titus was even more revealing about the troubled marriage. “Their ship has sprung some leaks,” she said, “and now they’re deciding whether to patch things up or abandon ship and take to the lifeboats. The anger and frustration are just beginning to come out.”

As for James Taylor, he was in L. A. making his next album with Peter Asher from September 1980 through January 1981. When production was finished, he didn’t come home.

When she signed with her new label, Carly had reluctantly agreed to go on tour to promote
Come Upstairs
. This was supposed to happen during the summer, but Ben’s recuperation pushed the fourteen-city tour into the autumn. The band comprised many of the musicians who worked on
Come Upstairs,
and the tour played mostly theaters. Carly was depressed, had lost twenty pounds during Ben’s illness, and her nerves were shattered by the progressive unraveling of her
marriage, but she tried her best to pull the tour off because people were depending on her and she’d said she would do it. Lucy Simon came on the tour to help her sister, and somehow Carly got through eight concerts in late October before arriving in Pittsburgh, where—like Three Mile Island—her cooling systems failed and she suffered a partial core meltdown.

She later described the first of two scheduled Pittsburgh concerts as the bottom of her performing career. The opening numbers went well, but then her legs wobbled and she was having trouble staying upright. Then she lost her breath and couldn’t catch it. Her breathing slowed and she felt a strong series of chest palpitations. She suddenly began to menstruate prematurely, a condition related to stress. “I couldn’t get the words out,” she recalled. “I seemed to go to pieces in front of the audience. There was blood everywhere.”

Desperate to avoid panic, Carly pondered her options. She could either cancel the concert or tell the audience the truth. She stopped the show and stammered that she was suffering from acute anxiety. Fans were shouting they were with her all the way and to keep going. She felt a little better and tried another song, but then another wave of palpitations overwhelmed her. She told the audience that she might feel better if people came onstage, and several dozen fans joined her, incredibly supportive, rubbing her back, legs and shoulders, telling her to take her time. People in the balcony were yelling encouragement, an extraordinary scene. With this support she (barely) finished the first show and staggered into the dressing room in a state of emotional collapse. Lucy Simon, appalled at what had happened to Carly, took her by the hand and said, “Carly, you don’t need to do this anymore. There’s no real reason why you have to put yourself through this—ever again.” The second Pittsburgh show and the rest of the
Come Upstairs
tour was canceled, and Carly returned home a broken and humiliated woman in her mid-thirties, convinced beyond hope that her career was in acute jeopardy. Her doctor weighed her
at 114 pounds and checked her into a Manhattan clinic, where she was fed and hydrated intravenously. She started seeing a psychiatrist again. The tour promoters sued her for canceling the final shows.

“Each person breaks down in different ways,” Carly later remarked. “You could call what I had a breakdown, sure. In retrospect, it was foolish to do that tour. So, I decided that at this time of my life, when things were so difficult for me in other ways, I shouldn’t aggravate my nervous system anymore by performing onstage.” The Pittsburgh show would be her last for more than ten years.

Late in 1980, both Carly and James worked on
In Harmony,
an album of mostly original children’s songs that Lucy Simon produced for the TV program
Sesame Street
. Carly sang, poignantly, on her own “Be with Me.” James and daughter Sally contributed a very funny “Jelly Man Kelly.” Lucy Simon, Kate, and Livingston Taylor all contributed, as did Bette Midler, Linda Ronstadt, Libby Titus, and Dr. John. The Doobie Brothers even covered “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.”
In Harmony
was released in 1981 and was hugely successful, winning a Grammy Award the following year.

On December 8, John Lennon was murdered in front of his apartment building by a deranged fan. Many neighbors on Central Park West (including Carly Simon) thought they heard the shots as they were fired into Lennon at 11:00
P. M.
For Carly, it was the final blow of another extremely trying year. “It was the end of an era,” she sadly remembered—ten years later. “We said goodbye to Ben’s kidney, to our marriage, to hit singles. Then we moved on.”

I
n 1981, Carly Simon and James Taylor both released albums that described in varying ways the final year of their marriage. James’s came out first, in March. The album’s title,
Dad Loves His Work,
was perhaps an ironic explanation to his children of why he was rarely around. The eleven songs were full of (seemingly) sincere heartache and recrimination, and many longtime Taylor fans think that
Dad
is his saddest, and hence (for them) most beautiful album. “Hard Times” tells of an angry man and a hungry woman in a last-ditch plea for stability and acceptance. “Her Town Too” (written and sung with sexy Texan troubadour J. D. Souther) describes a phobic woman, afraid of her own shadow, someone given to backbiting and gossip “on the grapevine.” “She gets the house and the garden / He gets the boys in the band” was a lyric that accurately described the settlement Carly sought in an (unannounced) formal separation. James would later on swear that “Her Town Too” was about Peter and Betsy Asher, but few believed him, considering the ardent fervor
of the song’s cherishing last words. “Somebody
loves
you… Somebody
loves
you.”

It went on from there. “Hour That the Morning Comes” is another vignette of the stilted family life James had been living in: he’s “kacked” (junkie slang) on the sly; she’s in denial that he’s stoned. This puts him into despair. “I Will Follow” wants forgiveness for unforgivable transgressions. There are moody chanteys written with Jimmy Buffett and the nostalgic “London Town,” about a younger man busking in tube stations, a seeker full of hope. The album ends with “That Lonesome Road,” in which the singer expresses deep remorse for the way he has, for some inexorable reason unknown to himself, behaved.
Dad Loves His Work
was a farewell not only to his marriage, but also to his recording career, as Dad’s work was now done, and amazingly, this prolific songwriter wouldn’t make another record for almost five years.

Carly Simon, who now had no husband and two children to look after, was in no emotional shape to write an album of original songs, so she “answered” her husband’s record with a compilation of standard “torch” songs that was released by Warner Bros. in the summer of 1981.

Torch songs were an enduring artistic legacy of the Roaring Twenties. “Carrying a torch” for a lost lover was a “modernist” female thing, a romantic agony personified by singers such as Libby Holman (1904– 1971) who famously married the heir to a Carolina tobacco fortune and then accidentally shot him to death as he was trying to break into his own house when he’d been locked out. Torch songs were retro-noir, semidesperate expressions of female disappointment and lust, and Warner Bros. executives were understandably reticent about Carly Simon making an album of them that would be called
Torch
. They told Carly, “This is
not
your fan base. This is going to ruin your career.” But she insisted, held her ground, and recorded at the Power Station, with Mike Mainieri again producing. She chose most of the classic ballads herself, occasionally contributing new
lyrics of her own. She channeled her old hero, Frank Sinatra, on songs he previously owned: Alec Wilder’s “I’ll Be Around,” and Hoagie Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” Saxophonist David Sanborn’s urgent, ungentle alto sax, with a tone between human crying and a bitter sob, is the prominent instrumental voice on the album. Orchestration is back, on Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and “Blue of Blue.” Jazz players—Phil Woods, Eddie Gomez, Warren Bernhardt—are featured on “Body and Soul” and the disconsolate Rodgers and Hart classic “Spring Is Here.” Carly sings “What Shall We Do with the Child” as a guilt-provoking tearjerker. Her one original song, “From the Heart,” is about the cold war of a failing relationship, but also carries with it a flickering ember of hope. The album ends with Stephen Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By.” Obviously moved by the song’s sentiment—“I’ll die, day after day after day”—Carly sings in an unusual trembling vibrato, really conveying the tortured emotions of the song. The track finishes with a final orchestral orgasm, arranged by Don Sebesky.