More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (48 page)

Arista released “Better Not Tell Her” as a single, which reached number four on the adult contemporary chart in October 1990. Carly, wearing a flowing red dress, appears in a flamenco-themed video for the song, which got into “heavy rotation” on VH-1. Early in 1991, “Holding Me Tonight” got to number thirty-six on the adult contemporary chart.

Whatever success the new album achieved for Carly, it was tempered by her daughter’s leaving for boarding school on the mainland. Sally, now sixteen, went off to Tabor Academy on the southeastern Massachusetts coast. This left Carly feeling bereft, and she drew her son, Ben, even closer to her. (Ben, fourteen, was unhappy at the various schools he attended, and would later be diagnosed with
dyslexia.) Carly’s spirits were raised when she was asked to sing with the great operatic tenor Placido Domingo for an album of classic show tunes. She recorded “The Last Night of the World” from the musical
Miss Saigon
with Domingo in New York, and the duet was released on his hit compilation
The Broadway I Love
.

Carly spent much of 1991 working on the music for another Nora Ephron movie,
This Is My Life
. This wasn’t easy, because the story line was weak and Ephron’s script was lightweight. (Mike Nichols had declined any involvement.) Working mostly at home, Carly came up with the main theme, “The Love of My Life” (based on her feelings for Sally and Ben), and various instrumentals inspired by her uncle Peter Dean. These involved Peter’s favorite instruments—ukulele, harmonica, whistling through the teeth—and were intended by Carly as an homage to the uncle who had had the greatest influence on her career. In August 1991, Carly was working on the movie music at home with Teese Gohl, Jimmy Ryan, Will Lee, and Russ Kunkel when the island was slammed by Hurricane Bob, a storm so violent that all the leaves were blown off the trees. The power went out, but Carly had a deadline, so Frank Filipetti ran the gear through a gas-powered generator and the musicians worked by candlelight. Carly told the band about how Uncle Pete had retired as a talent manager at sixty-eight to go back to work as Peter “Snakehips” Dean, performing in clubs and cabarets. They listened to his old albums for inspiration. The songs they worked up on the island were then recorded by Filipetti in New York, including “The Show Must Go On,” a faux-Broadway showstopper (that took Carly three weeks to write), and “The Night Before Christmas,” a Hollywood carol with Sally and Ben chiming in on the chorus. Harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans (who had known Peter Dean well) contributed some of Uncle Pete’s characteristic funkiness.

This Is My Life
was released in early 1992 and promptly bombed. The reviews were gruesome, and the movie studio pulled the film from theaters as an embarrassment. But the legendary producer
Quincy Jones (who had worked with Uncle Pete) had been following the project and released Carly’s soundtrack on his Qwest/ Reprise label in April. The single “Love of My Life” got some airplay and charted at number sixteen, so for Carly the project wasn’t a total loss.

Carly saw a lot of Jackie Onassis in New York that spring. They often met in the afternoon for movie matinees. Jackie, ever shy, would wait for Carly in the ladies’ room if she arrived at the theater first. A couple of times they were spotted and asked for autographs. Jackie always demurred and turned away, while Carly gamely signed and chatted with the fans. When asked when her next album was coming out, Carly replied that any new record was on hold because she was working on an opera.

Actually, Carly and Jake Brackman had been working on this project for about a year, after she had received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera Guild, in association with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D. C. Carly’s brief was to write a family-friendly work that would attract both her fans and especially their children. She and Jake came up with an opera about a child of divorced parents. The libretto, cowritten by Carly and Jake, concerns a twelve-year-old New Yorker, Romulus Hunt, who tries to trick his estranged, incompatible parents into reuniting. Romulus teams up with his imaginary friend, a Rastafarian called Zoogy, who uses his knowledge of Jamaican voodoo to this end. Of course this doesn’t work, but in the end, Romulus earns the love of his feckless bohemian father by making him recall his own father’s indifference.

Romulus Hunt
was an ambitious project and called for more collaboration than Carly had ever been used to. Teese Gohl worked on the orchestration and arrangements. Executives from the record label Angel/ EMI Classics offered suggestions. Director Francesca Zambello and choreographer Carmen De Lavallade worked on the production. Carly consulted her operatic sister, Joanna, on various aspects of the work, and then named Romulus’s mother (a prim Upper East Side matron) after her. When prerehearsal run-throughs began
in New York that summer, Carly worried that her main leitmotif, “Voulez-Vous Dancer?”—Rom’s father was a choreographer—sounded tepid. The five singers, none of them opera stars, seemed unsure of themselves. The ten-piece band was having a hard time with the reggae rhythms required for Zoogy’s music. Then came a series of legal skirmishes over who owned the rights to the production, which got the lawyers involved. Despair set in, but Carly was determined to press on and make it work.

Summer 1992. Carly took a call from her old flame Willie Donaldson in London. Willie, now sixty-two, was a bestselling author in England (
The Henry Root Letters
) and a columnist for
The Independent
newspaper. (The column trumpeted his sleazy experiences as a Chelsea pimp and cocaine addict and was very popular with the daily broadsheet’s politically liberal readers.) Willie told Carly that the paper was sending him to New York to cover a benefit at the Ritz nightclub, starring Elizabeth Taylor and the hip-hop group Salt-N-Pepa. Willie invited Carly along as his date.

Carly replied that she wasn’t able to leave her apartment at the moment because she was waiting for a phone call. She explained that she’d heard that James Taylor was again recovering from some addiction, and was going through the twelve-step recovery program associated with Alcoholics Anonymous. The final step required him to make amends to all the people harmed by his addiction. “I certainly want to be in when he finally gets to me,” Carly told Willie. “I don’t even leave the apartment to go shopping.” When Willie phoned again a few weeks later, Carly reported that James had never called her to make amends.

Late in 1992, the Christmas holidays were approaching, and the children would be coming home. Carly asked her husband to leave because he was using cocaine and she didn’t want him around the children. He moved to the apartment he had kept in New York until Sally and Ben returned to their schools early in the new year.

I
n February 1993, Carly’s opera,
Romulus Hunt,
had its first performances at the John Jay Theater, on Tenth Avenue in New York. Carly told friends that the music was by far the hardest work she had ever undertaken, that it had been an honor to have been asked to compose it, and that she really loved (most of) the way it turned out. Carly: “It was a real challenge and it got pretty well panned, except by a very nice man in
Stereo Review,
who said it was the best American opera since Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
. This was a man I had paid a great deal of money to.” Other critics were less kind.
The New York Times
called the opera “a peculiar, well-meaning and misguided failure.” The libretto was described as emotionally pallid and the whole production generally depressing. But the hour-long opera completed its New York run before moving to Washington in April. Teese Gohl and Frank Filipetti produced an album of the
Romulus Hunt
music, which was released by Angel Records that spring, but it failed to make much of an impression on its own.

Meanwhile Carly kept working. She recorded the standard “Wee
Small Hours of the Morning” for the hit movie
Sleepless in Seattle
(another Nora Ephron project), and then repeated the song, intercut with “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” with Frank Sinatra for his
Duets
album. (Carly and Sinatra never met, both recording their parts in separate studios.) When
Duets
was released that year, Carly’s contribution was critically hailed as the best music on an album that most critics and fans agreed was one of Sinatra’s worst. In this period Carly also collaborated with Andreas Vollenweider, contributing the song “Private Eyes” to his album
Eolian Minstrel
.

And Clive Davis was calling. Arista wanted another album of original songs from Carly. Seeking inspiration, she was rummaging in a closet one day that spring, looking for an old notebook, when she reached up and found a cardboard box on a high shelf. It contained a sheaf of notes and letters she had written to various people, including her first husband and some old lovers, but never mailed. She remembered that her mother once told her that a good way to purge negative feelings toward someone was to write to them, but she should
never
actually mail the letter. Now Carly began to read some of this material, some of it dating back more than twenty years, and she realized that some of the contents could work as song lyrics. But this was derailed when Andrea Simon suffered an aortic aneurism and was hospitalized in Boston. Carly and her sisters camped out by her bedside, and after a few weeks Carly was able to take her mother home to Martha’s Vineyard. They almost made it to the island’s ferry in Woods Hole when Andrea declared a bathroom emergency in the adjacent town of Falmouth. Carly had the driver stop outside a quaint roadside inn and half-carried her mother into the bathroom, “shit stained, if you want to know the truth. I really forgot myself amid her pain and anguish.” As the exhausted pair emerged from a long siege in the bathroom, Andrea called out to the bewildered innkeepers, “Do all of you know my daughter, Carly Simon, the singer?”

Jim Hart was living with Carly again during the summer of 1993.
It was a fraught time for Carly. Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and given about a year to live. This was devastating enough, but then Jacqueline Onassis confided to Carly that she, too, had cancer, but her doctors were more hopeful in their prognosis. Alex Taylor, James’s older brother, drank himself to death the night before entering rehab in Florida. The Taylors, Carly’s children included, went into shock.

In an attempt to put on a brave face and salvage the summer, Carly decided to throw a party. Early in July, invitations to “A Moon Party” went out to the island’s elite, from the usual summering celebrities to star-quality local artists, fishermen, lighthouse keepers, and plumbers. Guests were asked to wear only white, since the party celebrated July’s luminous full moon. RSVPs included Mrs. Onassis and her companion, financier Maurice Tempelsman, Katharine Graham, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, every important writer and musician on the island, the entire Taylor family except James, and almost everyone who’d been asked. After cocktails by the shimmering pool and a sumptuous catered dinner in the party barn, several of the guests performed skits at different levels of cringe-worthiness. Then Carly and her increasingly frail mother sang a song, to rapturous applause at the sense of the occasion’s history. Sally and Ben played a duet and got lost in the middle. Then Carly and a band played a relaxed set of oldies while the younger set danced until the full moon sank westward into the Vineyard sound.

In August 1993, President Bill Clinton brought his family to Martha’s Vineyard for their summer holiday. Clinton had been elected the previous November and was settling into his first term with a large popular mandate. On the Vineyard the First Family settled into a borrowed pond-side mansion and tried to relax. The president told his host that the one person he wanted to meet on his vacation was Cary Simon, so Carly invited the Clintons to a casual dinner. Peter and Ronni Simon were there as well, so Peter could document the
visit with his camera. They waited and waited, and eventually the First Family arrived—almost three hours late.

Carly and Jim Hart received the casually dressed Clintons in the driveway of her home. As Hillary Clinton was introducing her daughter, Chelsea, to Carly, the president gripped Jim Hart by the elbow. “I can’t believe you didn’t know who she was,” Clinton whispered.

Hart was taken aback. Clinton: “I read somewhere that you said that when you and Carly met, you didn’t know who she was.”

“Actually,” Hart said, “I thought she might have been Linda Ronstadt.”

Clinton laughed. “I think I read that too,” he said. He went on the say that he and Hillary were big fans of Carly’s. Then, sort of randomly, the president mentioned that they had named their daughter after Joni Mitchell’s song “Chelsea Morning.” At that point Peter asked the two couples to pose together for a photograph. Bill Clinton moved in on Carly, put his arm around her waist, and drew her to him. She edged away for the sake of propriety, but later said she was flattered by the attention. (The next day, Carly’s mother called and said no one she knew could
believe
that Carly hadn’t invited her to meet the president. Andrea later complained to Lucy that she had missed a golden opportunity to tell Bill Clinton how to save the country.) For the next seven years, through reelection and impeachment, the Clintons returned to the island almost every August and usually exchanged visits with Carly when there was time.