More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (54 page)

For about a year Carly had been working on a book for Simon and Schuster titled
Lyrics
. She chose about a hundred of her favorite lyrics, and added about as many photographs from her private archive. She found many of the original handwritten manuscripts of the songs, and also wrote a serious introduction concerning her views
on the art of songwriting. Simon and Schuster put
Lyrics
into production and sent proof copies to booksellers and reviewers. When Carly saw the finished copies, she found the production values—especially the inexpensive paper stock and the way the photographs were reproduced—to be way below her standard. It looked to her as if S&S were trying to publish her on the cheap. When the editors said it was too late to change the print run, Carly threatened legal action, which stopped
Lyrics
for good. All available copies were pulped, and a year’s work went for naught.

Autumn 2006. Carly worked with Andreas Vollenweider on a Christmas album,
Midnight Clear,
appearing on four of the tracks.

One day that fall, an old reel of audio tape arrived in the post from Woodstock. Albert Grossman’s widow, Sally, had closed down her husband’s famous Bearsville recording studio. When the studio archive was opened, one of the surprise discoveries was the tape Carly had made with members of the Band when Grossman was trying to brand Carly as the female Bob Dylan. The tape included “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” with lyrics rewritten for Carly by Bob Dylan, and the other demo that had been written by the producer. Carly had been looking for this tape for forty years, and here it was at last: Robbie Robertson’s stinging guitar, Garth Hudson’s droning organ, Levon Helm on drums, and Carly singing from the heart, in the pocket. Everyone Carly played the tape for loved it.

Carly Simon was able to divorce her husband that year because she was involved with a new love. His name was Richard Koehler, a surgeon who had until recently worked at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. Dr. Koehler’s marriage was breaking up, and one day he was talking about his situation to Carly’s brother. Peter suggested that he give Carly a call, since Richard already had her phone number. He called, and they hit it off. He was handsome, blond, charming, attentive, and a decade younger. He was a doctor, and Carly needed a doctor, she told friends, preferably around the clock. Some of their early dates were drives around the Vineyard. One day she
took him up to High Mark, the hilltop house where her mother had lived, to show him the stupendous view of the sea. The present owner was there, and invited them in to see the changes that had been made to the property. A wave of memories washed over Carly, and she was very moved. Outside, she stood between the trees where her mother’s hammock used to be, where she’d rocked for hours with baby Sally in her arms on summer evenings when James was away on tour. She looked at the lichen-covered stones that dotted the lawn. She knew those stones so well, she told her new beau, that she almost remembered their names.

I
n early 2007, Carly Simon sent almost fifty sets of lyrics to Jimmy Webb in California to see what he could come up with. After two successful albums of covers, it was time to make an album of new songs. The problem was that the recording industry was in a state of endemic collapse following the digital revolution, whose file-sharing applications made buying recordings completely redundant. The closing of Tower Records’ flagship store on Sunset Boulevard in 2006 was emblematic of the thousands of other record shops around the country shutting down for good.

In the spring of 2007, Carly joined a few other major artists who were licensing their recordings to Hear Music, a record company whose products were sold exclusively in Starbucks coffee shops nationwide. Hear Music had made a hit out of Paul McCartney’s
Memory Almost Full
album, and Joni Mitchell was currently enjoying success with Starbucks as well. Carly liked her meetings with Hear’s executives, who offered Carly up to one million dollars in advance, and
made her a lot of marketing promises (CDs stocked by the cash registers, album tracks in heavy in-store rotation), and so she decided to sign up with them. She thought she was working with Starbucks, one of the biggest retail chains in America, and the deal had been presented to her as a sure thing. By summer 2007, Carly was planning to make this album, and then she was planning to retire.

In August, she was joined by Sally and Ben Taylor at a campaign event on Martha’s Vineyard for Hillary Clinton, who was running for president. They sang “Devoted to You” for a crowd of almost two thousand.

Then Carly and Jimmy Webb embarked on a working journey to Brazil. Carly had been in love with samba and bossa nova music since she first heard the epic collaborations between Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz in the early sixties. Now she was eager to put a Brazilian spin on her new album, to capture both the ecstasy of the music and its
saudade,
the untranslatable Portuguese term for the feeling of sorrow transmitted through some of tropicalism’s most beautiful songs. The original aim of the Brazilian trip was to link up with Caetano Veloso, the reigning high priest of Brazilian jazz, but Veloso’s schedule was full when they arrived. This was a disappointment but they soaked up as much local color as they could. When they got back to America they began writing songs. By September 2007, Jimmy Webb was recording with Carly and producer Frank Filipetti in her Vineyard kitchen studio, while, in another wing of the house, her daughter, Sally, was beginning to go into labor. Carly Simon’s grandson, Bodhi, was born that month on Martha’s Vineyard.

February 2008. Headline in the scandal sheet
National Enquirer
: “Carly Simon Banned from Seeing Her Grandson/ Feud with Son-in-law EXPLODES.” The article reported that “people close to Carly” said that Sally’s husband was being difficult. The tabloid reported that Carly’s son-in-law became angry when Carly refused to give up some property he wanted. Sally and her family had left Hidden Star
Hill and moved to Boston, leaving Carly somewhat bereft. “I’m sorry,” she was quoted, “but I just can’t comment on any of that. All I can say is that I adore my daughter and cherish my grandson. I only got to hold him once, and that hurts.”

Later that spring Carly played her first ever concert in Miami with her son, Ben (who dedicated his song “Island” to his “stubborn sister,” who was absent from the band). The concert was part of a Carly Simon weekend at Florida International University, whose theater department was mounting a full-length revival of Carly’s “family opera,”
Romulus Hunt
, featuring all-local performers. This was paired with a nonprofit care center for abandoned or neglected children, and the two benefit performances were complete sellouts. Carly and her band were putting a lot of new spins on familiar songs such as “You’re So Vain” and “Anticipation.” As she introduced “Coming Around Again,” she told the audience, “These songs have different meanings for me because I’m so old now.”

The new songs Carly put together with Jimmy Webb were released by Hear Music in May 2008, on an album titled
This Kind of Love
. Carly’s hard-won new record was dedicated to the Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, and to Art Buchwald, who had recently died. The music is some of the most eclectic of Carly’s career, the songs reflective of varying colors and shadows in the sixth decade of her eventful life. “This Kind of Love” is another of Carly’s transgressive love ballads, but with a vibrant Brazilian hook at the end. “Hold Out Your Heart” reflects immediate conflicts within Carly’s family, as her children began breaking away from the fierce embrace of their mother’s uber-maternal love. “People Say a Lot” is a sinister funk-rap on the perils of employing personal assistants: initially competent but later unstable personalities who soon might know too much; who might, sometimes, be driven to blackmail and threats.

Ben Taylor’s song “Island” owes a lot to Bob Marley. “Hola Soleil” is a sun-worshipping samba jam with the band and a kids’ chorus. “In My Dreams” is Carly—sounding her age—soloing with
Jimmy Webb on cabaret piano. One of the highlights of the set is a cool bossa nova—“When We’re Together”—written by Sally Taylor in the style of the current Brazilian star Bebel Gilberto. Carly’s friend Peter Calo contributes expert and apposite Dobro and guitar.

Another highlight, and the most typical Carly Simon song on the album, is “So Many People to Love,” a collaboration with Carole Bayer Sager, sung with an endearing stutter that speaks of Carly’s worries about the people she felt were depending on her continued success. A similar sentiment runs through “They Just Want You to Be There,” another musing on adult responsibilities. Jimmy Webb and Carly cowrote “The Last Samba,” actually more a bossa nova, as their shared tribute and soft elegy for the pure pleasures that Brazilian music had brought to their artistic lives. The album concludes with “Sangre Dolce,” a portrait of an immigrant woman stranded between loves and loyalties, and “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” a corny summer carousel with Jimmy Webb on his typically haunting piano.

For Carly, a lot was riding on her new album in the spring of 2008, and she plunged into promo mode. She played a show for an invitation-only crowd of fans at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. (Introducing her son: “I’m his mother, James Taylor is his father, though James doesn’t always connect the dots.” The audiences laughed, as if they were old friends.) She received a reporter for London’s
Telegraph
newspaper at her Greenwich Village duplex wearing a stylish pinstriped Ralph Lauren blazer. First stop was the bedroom, with sheer golden and damask drapes hanging from the frame of an antique four-poster. The pale pink quilt, made of silk, had belonged to Carly’s mother. The interview was conducted in the candlelit, piano-equipped library/ bathroom, the reporter seated in a green armchair wedged between an old desk and a claw-footed porcelain bathtub. Carly pulled up a stool. Downstairs, Ben Taylor and David Saw were rehearsing guitar parts for a possible tour to support
This Kind of Love
.

When the reporter pointed out that this was Carly’s first album
of new songs in eight years (since
The Bedroom Tapes
), Carly explained, “It’s like meeting a man, this album. As you get more and more into him, it turns out that there’s a chemistry there after all—even though he has shades and tones and attitudes and looks and feelings that were much different from those you were used to.” She explained that her current lover, Dr. Koehler, was a new kind of love for her. “He’s really different from the other men I have known. I didn’t think he was my type, at all.” Then Carly drifted into a lyric: “But I was stranded, with no light home, and we drove the beach road together. He’s the magician who sings the sun down, his face in silhouette.” Carly also noted that her sister Joanna was now living with Walter Cronkite, whose wife had passed away. And that her oncologist had recommended peas as a healthy midnight snack, so she could sometimes be found, late at night, staring at the microwave oven, watching little green cups going around and around.

May 14, 2008. In New York, Carly appeared on the syndicated TV talk show hosted by Tavis Smiley, looking great in long blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, nursing a mug of tea. Smiley asked about the songs about her children on
This Kind of Love
. She explained that “Hold Out Your Heart” began when Ben told her he was going surfing at midnight in February, which made her crazy. Then there were difficulties with Sally and her husband she didn’t want to get into. But she allowed there’d been “a recent set of problems with my daughter that really makes it very, very difficult to talk to her about them, because there’s a kind of… vacuum of silence… a kind of impenetrable wall that we can’t seem to blast through. And so I wrote about it in the second verse of that song.”

June 2008. Copies of the
This Kind of Love
CD disappeared from Starbucks outlets and were not replenished. The album didn’t chart. Carly couldn’t find out what was going on. Then Hear Music suddenly announced that the company was shutting down. The president of the company and key executives were reportedly escorted out of their offices by security guards. Starbucks announced it was
pulling back from the music business, and sales management of
This Kind of Love
was handed to a partner, the Concord Music Group. Carly Simon was dumbfounded. In her mind, she could once again hear Jackie Onassis saying, “Oh, Carly—you’ve been
screwed
.”

Retirement, Carly realized, had to be indefinitely postponed. And there were financial problems as well. She owed money on her island home, and had tried to sell her Manhattan apartment, without success. Her financial manager, Kenneth Starr, reported losses in the stock market. Hear Music had never paid her the full advance for the album, and there was no lift in catalogue sales or radio royalties that usually come with a successful new album. Carly quietly sold the portrait Andy Warhol had painted of her, and some other things, to cover costs.