More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (51 page)

Carly’s oncologist advised her to try to forget about the surgery, and not even speak about it for a while. So, before the onset of a year of chemotherapy, Carly took Sally and Ben for a winter vacation on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. (Jim Hart’s support of Carly had reportedly been less than heroic during the cancer ordeal, and the couple never really lived together after that.) The rest of 1998 was spent in a fever of chemotherapy and severe depression, a slough of despond the depth of which Carly had never experienced, a mental illness that famously depressed Bill Styron described as a “total shit storm.”

To get through it, Carly knew she had to keep working. Living
large, between two households, meant that she had a legion of people—assistants, household staff, gardeners, caretakers—who were financially dependent on her continuing largesse. She made a deal with Clive Davis for another album, which she decided she would record herself, at home, where she was comfortable. Frank Filipetti helped her install a digital recording studio in the living room of her place in New York.

One day in this period, Carly was having tea with a friend, a fellow cancer survivor, at the Carlisle Hotel on Madison Avenue. She and the friend had both decided to have reconstructive surgery, and were feeling upbeat and hopeful. Then Carly ran into Warren Beatty in the lobby. They spoke for a moment, and Carly told him about the cancer and the surgery. Beatty turned a little gray, mentioned he had an appointment, and was out of there. Cancer, someone told Carly, let you know who your real friends were.

Then she lost her inexpensive, rent-stabilized apartment on Central Park West, when the landlord was able to prove that the massive flat was no longer Carly’s primary home. Carly was forced to vacate. Her furniture and instruments, the recording gear, and the children’s belongings were packed up and shipped to Hidden Star Hill. Carly took this traumatic excision from her past very hard. The loss of apartment 6S, the home she’d shared with James Taylor and their children, was almost as much a loss to her as her breast.

W
hile Carly was installing a home studio in Sally’s old bedroom upstairs in the Vineyard house, Sally Taylor was releasing albums herself.
Tomboy Bride
and later
Apt #6S
were indie CD productions recorded in Colorado, where Sally had settled after college. Ben Taylor had released his first single a year earlier, and was recording demos with friends in New York. Then a nineteen-track compilation from
Clouds in My Coffee
was released in Europe by Warner Global as
Nobody Does It Better: The Very Best of Carly Simon,
and sold well in European markets where Carly had never performed.

Carly also sang the vocal on “Your Silver Key” on Andreas Vollenweider’s
Cosmopoly
album.

In mid-1999, Carly was recovering to the extent that she started recording demos of the songs she had written during the long days of chemo and depression. Her favorite new song was a tribute to George Gershwin as a beacon of inspiration and hope. Later she wrote that she had been in a miserable state of writer’s block and had all but decided to give up writing songs. One day, she was in the Lee
Side tavern in Woods Hole, waiting for the ferry to the Vineyard, when Gershwin’s classic “Embraceable You” came on the jukebox. She imagined the young Gershwin writing timeless music on Riverside Drive in New York. For a melody, she chose a reverie-like variation on the chorus of “Embraceable You.” Carly’s lyrics described “one note that weeps the truth / And makes my life mean something.” Carly titled the new song “In Honor of You (George).” Carly: “It may have been the process of writing and arranging the song with Teese Gohl that got me unblocked. I’m not exactly sure, as everything was complicated by the emotional requirements of being a patient during that whole period.”

Carly spent eight months working on her next album—usually alone. The instruments and microphones were in Sally’s room because they didn’t fit in Carly’s bedroom, down the hall. The small space was filled with guitars and machines, lyrics written on scraps of paper, phone messages, bits of clothing. No one was allowed to clean. Carly learned to program the drum machines. Musician neighbors, including Jimmy Parr, helped install a recording studio in the basement. Carly grew to be fond of this arrangement, where she was able to experiment in private. “I could fail—over and over,” she remembered. There were no label executives or hired producers suggesting that she sound more like Christina Aguilera, Natalie Imbruglia, or Debbie Harry. Carly realized that she was writing the way she’d begun in 1970: “Making sounds that I liked. Not thinking in an orthodox way about the songs.” In this period, she wrote about twenty new songs, and recorded them as demos on her 8-track-tape machine.

Gradually the chemotherapy ran its course, and Carly’s energy began to return. She missed having an urban base now, so in 1999 she bought an early nineteenth-century Georgian house on Beacon Hill, Boston’s most historic and exclusive residential neighborhood. The old house on West Cedar Street needed extensive renovation, and Carly figured that the project would be a welcome distraction from working, and an outlet for her fervid interest in home design
and décor. In the winter, she thought, the cozy Boston house, with its many fireplaces, would be a welcoming retreat from the damp Vineyard.

But the renovation problems started right after the deal closed. The builders told her that the main staircase was two hundred years old and rotten. The house’s original sash windows were crumbling and were replaced by modern French windows. A roof deck was installed to provide stunning views of the Boston skyline and the Charles River Basin. Carly shopped for furniture at her favorite stores on Newbury Street, and the house was expertly fitted with sofas and antiques that reminded old friends of her mother’s rooms in Riverdale. It took a full day for workmen to get the piano into the house.

Finally, Carly moved in. One day she threw open the French windows, sat at the piano, and started to sing. The neighbors thought this a nuisance and called the police, who were polite but firm: no singing. Then the building inspectors swarmed. The roof deck was a code violation and had to go. The new French windows contravened Beacon Hill’s rules for building exteriors in the historic district and had to be replaced. Carly tried to light a fire on a chilly morning, and the house filled with smoke because the chimneys had been plugged years before, when the city banned working fireplaces on the densely populated hill. The final straw may have been the three rats found cavorting in the fruit bowl when Carly came down to breakfast one morning. She put the house on the market, moved everything she wanted to the Vineyard, and was relieved to be exiled from Beacon Hill. Later on, she remembered, “chemotherapy
paled
in comparison to the problems I had with that house.”

In the new year, 2000, Carly began production on the new album she was calling
Manhattan Was a Maiden,
after a new song that was eventually left off the record. Drummer Steve Gadd was reenlisted, along with bassists T-Bone Wolk and Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan’s musical director (and a Vineyard neighbor). Teese Gohl was orchestrating three of the songs, including the big Gershwin finale.
Microphones were installed in Carly’s barn, and Mindy Jostyn arrived to play her fiddle and sing backup. There was a long weekend when the Irish singer Liam Ó Maonlaí and the Rankin Sisters sang backing vocals. These musicians ended up on seven of the eleven tracks of the album called
The Bedroom Tapes
.

Carly’s tapes were mixed at Right Track Studios in New York by Carly and Frank Filipetti. Instrumental and vocal tweaks were added for new colors, but Carly wanted most of the album to be true to the original concept of her working alone in Sally’s bedroom. One night, she needed some funky backing vocals for the song “Big Dumb Guy” (said to be about a Boston newspaper reporter). Ben Taylor brought along his friend John Forté, twenty-five, a talented black musician from Brooklyn, who had won a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy and then produced tracks for the multiplatinum group The Fugees, and other hip-hop luminaries. Carly and Forté became good friends—he called her “Mama C”—and Forté often stayed with Ben during long sojourns on the Vineyard. The boys nailed the vocal in a couple of takes, after they were able to stop laughing at the song’s goofy lyrics.

The Bedroom Tapes
compact disc was released in early May 2000. The new music spoke to the trauma of postcancer therapy and the (for Carly) joyous release of retail therapy, or shopping. The CD booklet was photographed by Bob Gothard and contained a short essay by Carly thanking all the producers she had worked with, by name, for inspiring her to produce this new album, by herself.

The lead track, “Our Affair,” is an old-fashioned, seductive Carly Simon song that could have been on
No Secrets
or
Hotcakes
. “So Many Stars” is about yearning for love in Manhattan. “Big Dumb Guy” is a loosey-goosey rap, partly on life in front of a computer screen, partly on God knows what. “Scar” is like a mastectomy two-step, with a wonderful chorus about the old wise woman who could have been her mother, Mrs. Onassis, or about Carly herself, now in
her mid-fifties. (“Scar,” Carly wrote, took six months to get a complete lyric, and another six months “to make it emotionally true.”)

The album continues with “Cross the River,” a surreal narrative (Carly described it as “South American fantastic realism”) of a boat ride on the Hudson River. “I Forget” is a torch song of illness, anguish, and recovery. “Actress” is pointed and uncomplimentary. The confessional “I’m Really the Kind” has intimations of seriously low self-esteem. The faux-paranoid rock song, “We Your Dearest Friends,” is about the hordes of freeloading guests who descended on Hidden Star Hill every summer: clogging the guest rooms, lounging by the pool, fueled by pills and powders, bugging the staff, charging unauthorized restaurant meals to Carly’s account, and then talking behind her back about how horrible she was. (Friends whispered that the song was partly about Libby Titus, with whom Carly had fallen out, but Carly wasn’t saying.) Mindy Jostyn plays violin on a wistful song, “Whatever Became of Her.” The album ends with Carly’s epochal tribute, “In Honor of You (George),” the song that begins in self-pity and ends in a surge of hope amid the swooning orchestration, courtesy of the track’s producer, Teese Gohl. (When the album was reissued later, it contained two more songs: “Grandmother’s House” and the Brazil-flavored “Sangre Dolce.” In this period, Carly also wrote the lovely song “Amity,” for the movie
Anywhere But Here,
and recorded it at home with Sally Taylor.)

Clive Davis couldn’t identify a single from the new album, so Arista didn’t release one. There were no concerts, and no video. Carly and Jim Hart took to the road in a van with a driver and did a radio tour of her major markets. She performed “Big Dumb Guy” with Andreas Vollenweider and the house band of David Letterman’s late night TV show on CBS. Album reviews were mostly good, especially for the song “Scar,” but some critics said the album was depressing, and that Carly didn’t sound like herself on some of the tracks. (Although, a prominent English critic called the album a masterpiece.)
The Bedroom Tapes
stalled at number ninety. Then Clive Davis was fired, and Carly’s years at Arista came to an abrupt end. Carly: “What a fiasco. Here is my personal best, coming off the press, and Clive Davis gets fired from Arista.”

This was another in a long series of traumas. Arista’s parent company, the German-owned Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, and Clive Davis was sixty-seven. When Davis refused to designate a successor, BMG terminated his contract and hired super-hot executive Antonio “L. A.” Reid as president of Arista Records. Reid was known for signing “urban” pop stars and ultracommercial, teen-oriented acts. Carly went to see him, and came away with the distinct feeling that L. A. Reid didn’t care about her. It was a blow. Carly felt that this new collection of songs was extremely important to her because she had been unusually honest in the lyrics, and she also realized that the music didn’t conform to any contemporary modes of what was hip. This, to her, made
The Bedroom Tapes
even more meaningful.

Carly: “That album was only out a short while when Clive left the label. I made a deal with L. A. Reid for me to take
The Bedroom Tapes
back, in exchange for the second album due to Arista under that contract. So, it basically cost me—no marketing for the CD and a truncated end to its sales—the reputation of that music and those songs. It’s a reputation which I felt would have flourished had it not fallen into the arms of a silly man—L. A. Reid—and his fragmented, overtaken company—Arista, post Clive—… I still own that album, and someday I’ll re-release it.”

Carly ended her relationship with her then-manager, Wendy Laister, not long after this.

Carly later wrote that those days—in 1999 and 2000—were the hardest times of her life. She didn’t want to invite her fans to a pathetic pity party, she said, but at the very least she’d learned that she “had the ‘stuff’ to travel alone, and lightly.” She remembered the long, dark nights of terror when she was able to go into Sally’s room
and lose herself in her music. Not everyone had wanted to go through this with her, she said. Her raw emotionality produced what she described as “turmoil” in everyone around her. She felt guilty about this. Certain friends disappeared and were no longer friends. She told people close to her that she could have become quite bitter, but felt that bitterness was “all too predictable.” She’d rather be like the guy on the Vineyard who’d been attacked by a shark, and survived, and then had become an implacable advocate for not killing them.