More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (50 page)

This band also played a late spring show at the Avalon nightclub in Boston, across from Fenway Park. A reporter joined Carly in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel, noting her leather jacket and flowing chiffon skirt. On the drive to the club, Carly explained that she had originally checked into the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, but there was no piano in her suite. At midnight she moved to the Four Seasons, but the suite had no heat. By seven in the morning she was wandering on Boston Common, struggling with a sudden anxiety attack. It hadn’t helped her confidence when she stopped her tour bus in Providence, Rhode Island, to visit daughter Sally at Brown University. Carly was somewhat unnerved at Sally’s dorm room, which displayed dozens of photos of her father, James Taylor, and exactly one of her mother. “I felt so deflated,” she told the reporter.

An hour into that night’s show, Sally Taylor walked onstage and Carly stepped aside as her sexy young daughter belted out Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally.” It was a sassy and funny performance that got the audience up and dancing for the first time that night. After Sally left the stage, Carly spoke to the audience: “I’m happy tonight,” she said. “I’m really happy.”

Carly and her husband attended the 1995 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. That year’s inductees included Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, and the late Frank Zappa, but Carly was there to see her old heroes Martha and the Vandellas safely into musical Valhalla. An old friend asked Carly when she thought her turn would come. She smiled and said, “Probably never.”

Summer 1995. Carly Simon and her band played sixteen concerts
with Philadelphia (blue-eyed) soul singers Hall and Oates opening the concerts. (Carly often joined them for their big hit “Every Time She Goes Away.”) This was her first serious tour since 1981, when she had hemorrhaged onstage in Pittsburgh amid her breakup with James Taylor, and now her fans turned out in droves. The tickets (for mostly club-size venues) were expensive—sixty dollars was typical—but many of the concerts sold out in half an hour. Carly played all the hits—“You Belong to Me” and “You’re So Vain”—and some new songs, including “Touched by the Sun,” which she always dedicated to Jackie. “She was as
exquisite
as you think she was,” she told her audience in Boston. Darryl Hall and John Oates always joined Carly to sing “Anticipation” toward the end of the set. The final shows were in California, with Carly trying to channel Al Green’s impression of cool Memphis soul. The last audience of the tour, in Concord, California, called Carly back for encores three times.

Carly arrived home on the Vineyard on August 25, 1995, and began rehearsing with James Taylor’s band for a benefit concert on August 30. This was Livestock ’95, a big semiprivate concert whose proceeds would help build a new (and sorely needed) hall for the local Agricultural Society. James Taylor had agreed to appear with Carly Simon for the first time since the No Nukes concerts in 1979. A stage was built on the county fairgrounds in West Tisbury. Local musicians were recruited to play. Ten thousand tickets sold out in four hours. National media was blacked out. Both Carly and James performed solo sets as news helicopters hovered overhead and interfered with the sound system. Carly dedicated “Nobody Does It Better” to James. (And Aerosmith’s scarf-laden Steven Tyler popped out to sing Mick Jagger’s part on “You’re So Vain.”) Then Carly joined James for “Shower the People” during his closing set, which ended with Carly and James dancing the Lindy Hop to Russ Kunkel’s pounding beat during a long, rollicking “Mockingbird.”

Carly had been worried about how James would react to her, but he wasn’t around much until the day of the show, and then he was
cordial, if distant. The only problem occurred some weeks later, when
Martha’s Vineyard
magazine ran Peter Simon’s photo of Carly and James dancing on the cover. Carly was radiant, but James looked like a cretin, with hair akimbo, wiry specs way down his nose, and a crazed grin on his wrinkled features. His mother, Trudy Taylor, saw this and blew up, which got James upset. Carly and her brother were accused of making James look bad. “Other than at Sally’s wedding,” Carly later said, “James has hardly ever spoken to me again.”

Carly was also blamed for a sleazy magazine profile of her that appeared in
Vanity Fair
that summer. “I Never Sang for My Mother” was written by an ex-wife of Jonathan Schwartz, so the Simon family’s secrets tumbled out of the glossy monthly like spoiled fruit. The “Ronnie Material” was given a national platform, and the author also implied that Andrea Simon had callously allowed her husband to die alone, which was far from the truth. Carly’s sisters, and her mother’s friends (including Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel), were upset by what they saw as a hatchet job on Andrea Simon. To some, it seemed that Carly was dishing dirt on her family to sell more copies of her new album.

Autumn 1995. The British music press reported that Tori Amos was performing “Boys in the Trees” in concert and was telling her audiences that she wished she had written the song. Carly worked on
Clouds in My Coffee,
a three-CD boxed compilation of her top music to date. This involved locating old demo tapes in her basement archive and negotiating with record labels Elektra, Epic, United Artists, Reprise, Angel, and even back-office elements at Arista. (Getting the rights to include “Nobody Does It Better” from UA was a Bond movie in itself.) The package included an essay by a young accountant Carly had met when she started surfing on AOL the previous year. Carly contributed her own notes as well: “Even when I am in a state of self-loathing, I can write something that I fall in love with…. The reasons for choosing the songs I did had to do sometimes with availability. Politics played an unavoidable part. There are songs
that are missing, not too glaringly, I hope.” Some of the earlier songs—recorded with tubes and then transistors from 1968 to 1972—were also tweaked by Carly and Frank Filipetti (employing a Neve Capricorn digital desk) at Right Track for sonic equalization in the postmodern age. The
Clouds
box was released late in the year, and Carly visited radio stations in important markets to help it onto the sales charts. But, she says, there were also some serious reservations about her manager, her lawyer, and her label at the time, and what she described as bad decisions that cost her almost two million dollars.

October 1995. The president of the United States and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, flew into Martha’s Vineyard to attend the wedding of two island summer celebrities, the actors Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson. Carly wasn’t invited (reportedly) because the bride and groom were friendly with James Taylor. But after the festivities and a few glasses of champagne, on the way back to the plane, Clinton ordered his entourage to detour to Hidden Star Hill, and surprised a delighted Carly Simon with an impromptu presidential visit.

I
n early 1996, with
Clouds in My Coffee
selling well, Carly signed a two-book deal with her father’s old company, Simon and Schuster. The contract called for another children’s book, and then a compilation of lyrics and family photographs. Movie commissions continued, with themes for the Hollywood film
Marvin’s Room
and an adaptation of Ludwig Bemelmans’s classic
Madeline
. For the former, Carly wrote “Two Little Sisters” and sang it with Meryl Streep, one of the film’s stars. Carly had also taken up painting as a serious pastime, and that year she visited Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was inspired by the same arid, southwestern landscapes that had inspired Georgia O’Keeffe and D. H. Lawrence, among legions of other artists.

Her record company wanted another album, but Carly wasn’t in the writing zone. Instead, she delivered
Film Noir,
her third album of American songbook classics, a tribute to the music of the genre movies of her childhood: “B pictures” featuring Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, and Lana Turner, among others, which now, in the
late twentieth century, had a glamorous retro allure—gangsters, gun molls, and cops—recently repopularized by the American Movie Channel cable TV outlet. Carly plunged into this glam project with fellow Hall-of-Famer Jimmy Webb, who helped choose the songs, played piano, sang, and cowrote the neo-standard title song, “Film Noir.” Van Dyke Parks also helped, with orchestrations.

The album leans heavily on songs with strong themes, and works by American masters such as Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, and Hoagy Carmichael. “Lili Marlene” channels Marlene Dietrich with Webb on piano. Carly sings with son Ben—sounding like a clone of his father—on “Every Time We Say Goodbye.” “Last Night When We Were Young” had been almost owned by Frank Sinatra, but Carly and Jimmy give it a spooky, filmic twist of their own. “I’m a Fool to Want You,” cowritten by Mr. Sinatra, was often identified with his love for Ava Gardner, a film noir heroine early in her career. Carly sings the (male-voiced) lyrics of “Laura” as written by Johnny Mercer after the movie
Laura
came out with its magnificent instrumental theme, here reimagined by Arif Mardin. Noirish 1950s TV is also invoked, in “Somewhere in the Night,” better known as the
Naked City
theme. Van Dyke Parks arranged and conducted the orchestra in the clever divorce note “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” The album’s highlight is Carly’s duet with John Travolta on “Two Sleepy People,” about lovers too tired to carry on, but too much in love to go back home. It is a passionate performance of one of the greatest songs of its generation.

Film noir is characterized by suspense leading to violence, always shot in shadowy black and white. The movies are tense and foreboding, often informed by injustice, tragedy, and deceit; populated by jaded femme fatales and a new kind of hero, the anti-hero, who battles criminals, murderers, the police, and existential despair. Carly and Jimmy Webb took this into account with the song “Film Noir,” which became a drama-laden rock ballad, another sad story about a dramatic heroine who loses control and fades to black.

Film Noir
was released by Arista in September 1987, with booklet notes by noir-obsessed director Martin Scorsese and glamorous studio photographs, taken by Bob Gothard, of Carly in the glorious penumbra of black and white. Reviews now ran (highly positive) in fashion magazines, not the rock press. The album sold well and reached number eighty-seven on the
Billboard
chart. Carly and her label made a short film about the album,
Songs in Shadow,
which was shown on the AMC channel that autumn.

Also around this time, Carly published her fifth book for children, and her first for Simon and Schuster.
Midnight Farm
is a tale (in verse) of a magical farm that comes to life after sunset. Midnight Farm was also the name of a classy dry goods emporium in the town of Vineyard Haven that was a joint venture between Carly and her friend Tamara Weiss.

October 1997. Carly and her husband were living apart, although she still supported him as he tried to morph into a published poet, having given up on the novel long before. As Carly was working on her new album that year, she noticed that a small lump in one of her breasts was changing. It had been there for some time, but the doctors said not to worry, because they were watching it. Carly: “I didn’t insist on it coming out because I don’t like operations, but toward the end, it [the lump] started to talk to me. I’d be reading Tolstoy or cooking or exercising and I would hear it going, ‘Get me out of here!’… Then one doctor looked at my mammogram and said he’d rather see the lump in a jar than in my breast. So he took it out, and it was cancer. Fortunately it had not spread to my lymph nodes. I was a little angry at myself [for waiting so long].”

For years, according to Jim Hart, Carly Simon had woken up every morning with the fear that something or someone was trying to cause her harm. And here was this fear, made palpable in her very flesh, in the form of stage-one breast cancer. Something really did want to kill her. But instead of falling apart, Carly decided to fight back. She overcame her fear of surgery and underwent a mastectomy
in November 1997. While recovering, she focused on the bravery her mother had shown in her last months. Carly: “My mother was a great role model for me then. I remembered that she’d had severe arthritis in her fingers, even when she was my age. But she used to look at her hands and say, ‘Isn’t this
beautiful
? Look at the shapes—don’t they looked like gnarled tree trunks?’ And whether or not she really felt that, that’s what she did for us.”

After the operation, when the dressings were removed, Carly discovered a long scar where her breast had been. She was amazed to see that the scar was shaped like an arrow. In the way she then had of embracing her current reality, she took to the scar immediately. “My scar is
beautiful,
” she told an interviewer. “I didn’t bother rubbing things into it, or having silicone injections. I just kept it that way, because I liked it.”

One night, while she was recovering, James Taylor came to see her in their old apartment. Their children urged him to visit Carly, and he did. At the age of fifty, James now lived somewhat more easily within himself, and was courtly and encouraging to Carly, having been divorced by his second wife. As he was leaving, she asked him to give her a call if he ever thought of her, and James replied that if he called her every time he thought of her, there wouldn’t be time for anything else.