More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (47 page)

“Let the River Run” had been released as a single at the beginning of the year. During the sessions for
My Romance,
Carly’s single got to number five on the adult contemporary chart and number forty-nine on the Hot 100.

Carly and Jim went to the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1989. “Let the River Run” had been nominated by the movie industry in the category of Best Song. Carly knew she wasn’t going to win, but everyone insisted that she attend the Oscars. At the hotel, she took a long time dressing and being styled, and in the end wasn’t happy with her hair. But it didn’t matter anyway, because no way did she think she had a chance of winning. On the way into the Shrine Auditorium in Santa Monica, she spied fellow nominee Phil Collins on the red carpet and almost fell over herself telling him that she was unworthy and that he would surely win. Carly later said she had no memory of winning, or of getting to the stage to accept the gold statuette. She managed to thank her husband by name “for the best lines in the song” before the music came up and the presenters led her off to the press room, where flash cameras strobed at her like a million suns.

Carly was dazed and exhausted. Outside the Shrine, Oscar in hand, she sat down on the curb to wait for her limousine and was nearly trampled by hordes of Hollywood types rushing to get to their limos first as the ceremony was ending. “Let the River Run” was the first movie theme to win all three major industry awards. The Oscar, the Grammy, and the Golden Globe all went up on the mantel of the Vineyard house.

Then Mike Nichols called again. He was working on his next film, an adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s 1987 novel
Postcards from the Edge
. He wanted another grand theme from Carly, another compulsively listenable song to play as the credits rolled on a story about fighting addictions (and your mother). Carly came up with the slightly
spooky song “Have You Seen Me Lately?” Meryl Streep recorded the version that was supposed to be used in the film. Nichols liked it, but Carrie Fisher apparently didn’t, and the song was removed from the credit crawl of the (mediocre) movie at the last minute. Carly would use the song as the keystone of her next album of original songs, about which Clive Davis was already pestering her management.

Summer 1989. James Taylor took Sally and Ben on his annual tour of the nation’s “sheds,” outdoor suburban amphitheaters. Fifteen-year-old Sally was singing backup along with James’s famous singers Rosemary Butler and Arnold McCuller. James was now an exercise buff, and he often took the children on hiking or sailing trips, and on yearly vacations to remote locations for exploration and discovery.

On Martha’s Vineyard, Carly had built a large swimming pool, and a party barn for events she hosted to benefit the island’s charities, and an occasional politician (all Democrats). She usually offered herself as a prize in the annual Vineyard Community Services celebrity auction run by the ancient newspaper humorist Art Buchwald. High bidders could buy a day of sailing with newscaster Walter Cronkite on his yacht, get some depressing literary advice from novelist Bill Styron, or Carly Simon would come to their houses and make them lunch. Or sing a song. (Usually both.) Carly’s prizes were often the auction’s top earners. This year, the auction included a tour of the
Ghostbusters II
movie set, hosted by its producer, Dan Aykroyd; a tour of
The Washington Post,
with its owner, Katharine Graham; and a picnic at Chip Chop, a famous Old Vineyard summer house formerly owned by the actress Katharine Cornell, now the seasonal home of Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer.

Carly, looking summery tanned and rail-thin, joined Art Buchwald at the Edgartown hotel podium for the action of the item labeled “Carly Comes to Dinner.” He opened the bidding at three hundred dollars and then coaxed it to five thousand and then ten. Then, cheered on by their attractive blond wives, two youngish Connecticut
businessmen in blue blazers and red flannel trousers went at it hammer and tongs, matching bids until Buchwald stopped the bidding at twenty-six thousand dollars. After consulting with Carly, Buchwald announced that for twenty-six grand apiece, Carly would come and sing three songs in each of their homes. Carly would also bring peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. “It was the least I could do,” she told the venerable
Vineyard Gazette
newspaper.

One afternoon that summer, Carly was having lunch with some people at her mother’s house. The other guests were her mother’s neighbors, plus a prominent Chilmark selectman (a New England town official) and his wife. Andrea Simon was feeling somewhat peevish, and was suffering from diverticulitis, an intestinal disorder. (She wasn’t allowed to eat anything with seeds; this removed strawberries from the menu, which annoyed her.) Someone raised a glass and proposed a toast to Carly for winning the Oscar. Andrea raised her glass and told Carly, “You’re
not
the best singer, you’re
not
the best composer, but you
did
get the Oscar.” Carly was very wounded by this. Later, one of the lingering guests chided Andrea, accusing her of being jealous of Carly. “You’re
damned right
I’m jealous of Carly,” the old woman said with a laugh. She later called her daughter to apologize.

September 1989. Mick Jagger was calling. The Rolling Stones would tour America again that fall, after a disagreeable hiatus of eight years. (It had been an incredible
nineteen years
since the founding of the group.) Carly promised Mick she would come to one of the band’s concerts when the tour arrived in New York. But her husband, Jim, had by then heard all the gossipy stories and idle speculation about the fabled relationship between his wife and Mick Jagger. James Hart was as jealous of Mick Jagger as James Taylor had been, if not more so.

Then Mrs. Onassis called. Her son, John Kennedy Jr., then twenty-nine and a recent law school graduate, had just failed the New York State bar exam—for the second time. This wasn’t cool. (
New
York Post
: “Hunk Flunks!”) John was a Rolling Stones fan, and now his mother asked Carly (her author) to take him to the Stones concert and introduce him to Mick Jagger, in the hope that this would pick up JFK Jr.’s spirits. Carly called John, who protested that he was too humiliated to appear in public, but Carly went into her “Auntie Carlton” mode, and persuaded the young Kennedy heir to come to the show.

The Stones’ epochal 1989
Steel Wheels
tour arrived in New York in October 1989. These stadium shows, projected to audiences via immense JumboTron video screens, were a huge comeback for the once self-proclaimed “greatest rock-and-roll band in the world.” Carly rode out to Giants Stadium in New Jersey with her party. A meeting with Jagger before the show had been arranged, but as they moved through the crowded, mazelike corridors of the lower stadium, they were told that only three people—Carly, Ben Taylor, and John Kennedy—would be allowed into Jagger’s dressing room.

Jim Hart waited in the hall outside and fumed. He had an acute sense of social radar, and understood that his exclusion was no accident. He was also frustrated because Carly was supporting him while he was trying to write a novel, and the writing wasn’t going well. “I was out-of-my-mind jealous about Carly being with Jagger,” he said later. He glared at Carly during the show, which disturbed John Kennedy. At the end of the evening, back at Carly’s apartment, Hart raged at her. He had sometimes lost his temper when Carly’s incessant fears and irrational phobias got the better of him, but now Hart was so angry that Ben Taylor, age twelve, dialed 911. Carly locked herself in the bedroom while two New York City cops got her husband to calm down. Carly stopped taking Mick Jagger’s calls—at least for a while.

C
arly Simon’s second album of American songs,
My Romance,
was released in January 1990 and sold respectably, reaching number forty-six on the
Billboard
’s sales chart. The record’s sexy retronoir sleeve photos were shot by Bob Gothard. The album was dedicated to Allie Brennan and Frank Sinatra. Arista executives tried to get Carly to make some concert appearances with an orchestra but were turned down. Carly, it was explained, was too busy working on her next album of original songs, her first in four years, after the success of
Coming Around Again
. Her label settled for a commercial release on VHS video, of a second HBO Special studio concert Carly performed, supported by the New Orleans singer-pianist Harry Connick Jr. (This was titled
Carly in Concert: My Romance
.)

Carly spent the winter of 1990 working on songs with producers Paul Samwell-Smith and Frank Filipetti at the Power Station, using Steve Gadd and Will Lee on bass and a cast of New York studio pros. There had been a falling-out with musical collaborator Rob Mounsey, who reportedly felt deprived of credit (and perhaps a share of the
Oscar) for “Let the River Run.” Now Carly turned to Swiss musician Matthias “Teese” Gohl, an associate of Andreas Vollenweider. Gohl would work with Carly on her recordings for much of the next decade.

The new songs were some of her best in years. “Better Not Tell Her” is a subversive song of romantic betrayal, inspired by Carly’s affair with a Manhattan media mogul who was engaged to another woman. Carly: “This guy was courting his next wife, and I thought I would offer him a few words of wisdom even though, frankly, he was not a ‘love’ in any sense. And, more importantly, we never went to Spain like we do in the song. In fact, he went on to become my manager for some short, unworthy span of time, lost me a hundred thousand dollars, and disappeared back into the heavy mogul world.”

With swirling flutes and Brazilian inflections, Carly reminds a former lover of their former rapture together. Guitarist Jay Berliner plays a Spanish guitar solo that conjures a forbidden tryst in the gardens of ancient Grenada.

The album’s title song, “Have You Seen Me Lately?,” was recycled from Carly’s rejected movie theme. The mysterious song seems to move in and out of reality as a contented sleeper is reluctantly awakened from dreamtime, the way a recovering addict moves between levels of consciousness. The lyric asks, “Was I crazy?” and the listener already knows the answer before the question is asked.

The new album’s main anthem is “Life Is Eternal,” a philosophical meditation on approaching death in the raging age of AIDS, written with Teese Gohl. The eighties and early nineties were plague years for homosexual men, with many important artists of the period (among them Queen’s Freddie Mercury and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe) dead or dying of an illness that destroyed the human immune system. New retroviral drugs had not yet come online, so hope and prayer were the (almost often futile) attempts to prolong the lives of sufferers whose only fault had been careless love and unprotected sex. Carly’s lyrics had come from discussions with
Reverend Bill Eddy, a compassionate Vineyard minister who was friends with Carly. The song featured a synthetic but soulful solo by Michael Brecker and a soaring choral round—aimed at a far horizon—by a choir of Carly, Sally and Ben, niece Julie Levine, and Will Lee. (This song would become a beacon of hope in the nation’s hospices as AIDS continued to be a scourge of the gay community.)

Carly’s original plan was to name the album
Happy Birthday,
after one of the early songs she wrote for it. “Happy Birthday” is a bittersweet ditty about aging: feeling unwell, not having much sex, blown-out candles sputtering smoke and spoiling the birthday cake. She name-checks her brother and her mother and complains that now, growing ever older, “we’re too good to be bad.” Other songs include “Waiting at the Gate,” about a woman married to an addict; “Holding Me Tonight,” a Sting-like adultery-contemporary pop song; “It’s Not Like Him,” a New Age soap opera; “Don’t Wrap It Up,” in which a woman asserts her emotional needs, with no apology; “Fisherman’s Song,” featuring Lucy Simon and Judy Collins on backing vocals; and “We Just Got Here,” a sweet lullaby about returning home to an island in hurricane season.

Carly also worked on other material in the summer of 1990. “Raining” is a pretty jingle written for her children to sing at the Chilmark Community Center on the Vineyard. (It would later be recorded for inclusion in Carly’s 1995 anthology
Clouds in My Coffee
.) She and Andy Goldmark wrote “A Man Who Isn’t Smooth” for an album by soul singer Thelma Houston, produced by Richard Perry. And Nora Ephron once again recruited Carly to work on music for the movie
This Is My Life,
which Ephron was directing, based on her script about another upwardly mobile New York woman.

Jackie Onassis called Carly late in August and invited her for a swim at her Chilmark estate. Over iced tea and salad, Jackie again pressed Carly for an autobiography, but again Carly explained that revealing her family’s story was too much for her. Later, they were
swimming in Jackie’s pool when a helicopter flew over and hovered while photographs were being shot. “I guess they know
you’re
here,” Jackie quipped.

Have You Seen Me Lately?
was released in September 1990 and was judged a success in terms of sales and reviews, which noted that the new album was better than
Coming Around Again
. The cable music channel VH-1 sent a crew to interview Carly, who described employing “positive affirmations” to avoid falling into “mental traps” of her own making. Jonathan Schwartz arrived on the Vineyard to interview her for a magazine profile. She explained that she felt most comfortable at home, and was reluctant even to leave her family’s fenced-in compound. “I’ve got a lot of limitations in the outside world,” she told Jonno. “I’m a hypochondriac. I’m claustrophobic. But I have a lot of interior life going, and that’s what saves me.” When Jonno asked about the novel her husband was supposed to be writing, Carly only rolled her eyes. Jake Brackman was also interviewed, and described Carly’s relationships to that of a luxury hotel, where guests could be shuttled between floors at the whim of the management. Friends could find themselves in the penthouse one week and in the basement the next.