More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon
Stephen Davis
MORE ROOM IN A
BROKEN HEART
ALSO BY STEPHEN DAVIS
Reggae Bloodlines
Bob Marley
Hammer of the Gods
Say Kids! What Time Is It?
Moonwalk
Fleetwood
This Wheel’s on Fire
Jajouka Rolling Stone
Walk This Way
Old Gods Almost Dead
Jim Morrison
Watch You Bleed
To Marrakech by Aeroplane
LZ-’75
MORE ROOM IN A
BROKEN HEART
The True Adventures of
Carly Simon
STEPHEN DAVIS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER SIMON
GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, January 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Davis
Photographs by Peter Simon
All rights reserved
Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Davis, Stephen, 1947–
More room in a broken heart : the true adventures of Carly Simon / Stephen Davis;
photographs by Peter Simon.
p. cm.
EISBN: 9781101554258
1. Simon, Carly. 2. Singers—United States—Biography. I. Simon, Peter,
1947– II. Title.
ML420.S56296D38 2012
782.42164092—dc23
[B] 2011039561
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Sabon • Designed by Elke Sigal
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Dedicated to all Carly Simon fans,
past and present.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART I
____________
LADY OF SPAIN
THE PIANIST
MRS. SIMON AND SCHUSTER
SUMMERTIME
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
THE ARTFUL DODGER
IDYLLS OF STAMFORD
THE RONNIE MATERIAL
ALL SHOOK UP
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
CARLY CARES
AMBITION AND THE DYLAN ENERGY
THE SIMON SISTERS
WINKIN’, BLINKIN’ AND NOD
HOOTENANNY SATURDAY NIGHT
CARLY AND THE VANDELLAS
SWINGING LONDON
THE FEMALE BOB DYLAN
INDIAN HILL
PLAY WITH ME
FEAR OF FLYING
PART II
____________
A GIRL CALLED ELEKTRA
ELECTRIC LADY
THAT’S THE WAY I ALWAYS HEARD IT SHOULD BE
SETTING YOURSELF ON FIRE
THE TROUBADOUR
SILVER-TONGUED DEVIL
STICKY FINGERS
HOW ABOUT TONIGHT?
POOR MOOSE
APPLE CORPS
RAIN AND FIRE
“LOVE FROM CARLY”
BEST NEW ARTIST
ON BEAVER POND
SON OF A GUN
DON’T LET ME BE LONELY
A PIECE OF ASS / A STATE OF GRACE
HOTCAKES
MOCKINGBIRD
SLAVE
WHERE’S CARLY?
ANOTHER PASSENGER
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
THINGS WE SAID TODAY
WHY’D YOU TELL ME THIS?
THE GORILLA IN THE ROOM
WE’RE SO CLOSE
HOT TIN ROOF
STARDUST
BLOOD EVERYWHERE
FOREVER LOCKED INSIDE
PART III
____________
THE SOUND OF HIS VOICE
A SOURCE OF PAIN AND GUILT
COMING AROUND AGAIN
THE SEDUCTION OF CARLY SIMON
DREAMERS WAKE THE NATION
CARLY COMES TO DINNER
POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS
UNSENT LETTERS
LIKE A RIVER
FILM NOIR
BEDROOM MUSIC
CARLY HART
REALITY SANDWICH
INTO WHITE
THIS KIND OF LOVE
NEVER BEEN GONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The great American folk music revival began right after the Second World War. Burl Ives from Indiana was on the radio, singing railroad and cowboy songs. Josh White from South Carolina was a sensation with his blues ballads. The Weavers, with tenor Pete Seeger on banjo, toured the nation with the Okie protest songs of Woody Guthrie. In 1957 the Kingston Trio—calypso collegians from San Francisco—transformed the old Appalachian ballad “Tom Dooley” into a national number one hit single, and commercialized so-called “folk music” took off. Coffeehouses sprouted like toadstools. Guitar sales soared. Most of this music was, in retrospect, insipid. But in 1959 a young Boston University coed named Joan Baez started singing Child ballads, barefoot, at Club 47 in Harvard Square, and caused a sensation with her ungodly vocal range and dark choice of repertoire. Lines went around the block. Her album sold tonnage. Folk began to replace jazz as the cultural expression of younger bohemians and intellectuals. In 1960 a twenty-year-old from Minnesota named Robert Zimmerman changed his name to Bob Dylan and took the Greenwich Village folk scene by storm, becoming the enfant terrible of the clubs along Bleecker and MacDougal streets—the Bitter End, the Gaslight, Gerde’s Folk City, Café Wha?. Then Baez and Dylan joined forces and became the alpha couple of a movement that
mined old American music and new political/ protest songs to create a literate alternative to the surf music and pop that preoccupied the enormous postwar generation in the early sixties. The Newport Folk Festival created new stars every summer, and spawned dozens of similar events that drew thousands of college kids.
By 1963 this national phenomenon had gotten its own network television slot. Hootenanny was broadcast on Saturday nights, featuring mostly folk singers and groups, but also blues musicians, old-time country singers, and bluegrass pickers. It was must-see TV back then. Hootenanny was so popular with its young audience that the program was quickly expanded from a half hour to an hour.
A big problem with the show was that the cream of the folkies—Baez, Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger—never appeared. Hootenanny’s stars were mostly from the second tier of folk performers. At the time, we didn’t know that the top echelon of folk singers boycotted the show because of its refusal to invite folk godfather Pete Seeger to perform—for political reasons. So instead of the Kingston Trio, Hootenanny broadcast the Highwaymen, the Limeliters, and the Chad Mitchell Trio. Carolyn Hester instead of Baez. Theodore Bikel instead of Dylan.
I watched Hootenanny anyway. It was still the best music program on TV.
Late January 1964. America was still in a state of shock and disbelief following the bloody public assassination of President Kennedy two months earlier. I was at home watching Hootenanny on a cold Saturday night. The show was filmed at a different college each week, and this night it was at a school in Tennessee. The smirking Smothers Brothers, a fake folk comedy act, were the headliners, so I remember being bored, about to change the channel. Then, in glorious black and white, host Jack Linkletter announced, “Ladies and gentlemen—please welcome, the Simon Sisters!”
Hold on.
Two sisters, brunettes. Matching dresses and Martin guitars. Both beautiful. The higher, Highland-sounding voice comes from the girl on the left. Her taller sister has an earthier, lower alto. They’ve put a lilting melody to the old nursery rhyme “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” and they’re singing the stars from the sky. America wakes up, and is then soothed into a restful state by the Simon Sisters’ melodious new lullaby.
I was transfixed.
Later in the program, the Simon Sisters returned with a quietly thrilling duet on “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Pete Seeger’s popular arrangement of a biblical verse. Again I was glued to the screen as the girls seemed to glow with a cathode-ray halo. Everything about the Simon Sisters, especially their perfect harmonies, drew me in until I was hooked. When they finished, the audience gave them an ovation. They made a little bow, and looked relieved. They had made a stunning national debut, and done it with mesmeric cool. They were talked about in my high school the following Monday.
I went out and bought their album, The Simon Sisters, a few days later. Although the record was filed in the Folk section of the record store, I quickly realized that what they were doing wasn’t as much folk as it was a collection of art songs. Quite a few tracks were lullabies, soothing music, two young mothers gently crooning to their restive children. I tried to find out as much as I could about the girls, which wasn’t much. Lucy was the pretty soprano. Her taller sister was called Carly Simon. I remember thinking I’d never heard the name Carly before.
Right after this, in February 1964, the Beatles arrived in America—as if in response to an occult summons to lift the grieving nation’s spirits. They were a smash on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, and the rest is history. Folk music was deported to Squaresville when Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival the following year. Many Village folkies left for Los Angeles and turned into rock-and-roll stars. As far as I could tell, the Simon Sisters disappeared from the waning folk scene that was left behind.
In 1967, I was going to college in Boston. One of my colleagues on the student newspaper was a photographer named Peter Simon. We became friends and shared a lot of experiences during that politically turbulent year, as the Vietnam War heated up and the civil rights movement was moving from nonviolent protest into action and militancy. It was an exciting time.
In November we were on holiday with our families, who lived in New York. Peter invited me to his family’s house in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The house was an imposing Georgian-style mansion on a large property in that wealthy neighborhood. Peter introduced me to his mother, Andrea Simon, the widow of the founder of Simon and Schuster, the great New York publishing house. Andrea was beautiful, in her late fifties then, and loved hanging out with Peter’s friends, asking about what was going on in their lives and what they thought of current events. She was active in several organizations involved in mental health and civil rights, and “the Simon House” was the scene of regular parties and concerts benefiting her various causes.
We were talking in Andrea’s sunroom when a tall girl walked in and sat down. She was very pretty, a little chubby, and very sexy, in a tight white sweater and black hip-hugging trousers. She was shy, this girl. She made only the most fleeting eye contact before lowering her intense gaze. Peter said, “This is my sister Carly.” I recognized her immediately: Carly Simon, one of the Simon Sisters. I was taken aback.
“Your sisters are… the Simon Sisters?” I managed. They laughed at me.
“I saw you on Hootenanny!” I blurted. Carly said that a lot of people had seen that show.
Over cups of tea, Carly told me that the Simon Sisters had stopped performing the year before, and that she was trying to write her own songs and get back into the music business. Right now she was trying to break into the jingle industry, supplying themes and ditties for marketing products. I told her my father was in advertising, and asked if I could hear something. So she played a tape of a song called “Summer Is a Wishing Well” for me.
I totally loved it. “Wishing Well” could have been a Top Forty hit record for the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Mamas and the Papas, or Strawberry Alarm Clock. It had a sweet little melody and a sighing, double-tracked chorus, Carly singing with herself as if her sister Lucy were there.
From that day on I’ve followed Carly’s career, first as a fan, then as a journalist. I watched her struggle with career and family issues until she launched her run for the rainbow in 1970 with her first solo album. The next year I reviewed her triumphant second album for Rolling Stone. I went to those early concerts where she opened for star-quality singer-songwriters such as Cat Stevens and Kris Krist offerson as she honed her own songwriting skills. I was one of the first people to hear (in Carly’s bathroom) the early mixes of “You’re So Vain,” which Carly had brought back from London, with Mick Jagger’s uncredited—and unmistakable—backing vocal on the choruses. The single spent three weeks at number one. The album spent five weeks at the top. Suddenly Carly Simon was one of the booming music industry’s most talented and glamorous artists.
Then I watched her try to walk away from it—or at least get it under control. She had married James Taylor, one of the alpha singer-songwriters, in late 1972, and for almost ten years they lived in a celebrity marriage and fame continuum whose ups and downs Carly would chronicle in her heroic run of hit singles and bestselling albums in the seventies.
I didn’t see as much of Carly in those years, because she and James were reclusive—he was a heroin addict throughout their marriage—and she had retired from performing to raise their two children, Sally and Ben. But I stayed in touch, and parsed the lyrics of her latest albums to see what was going on, because Carly has always used the stuff of her life to inform the lyrics of her songs. After her marriage was over and as her children were growing up, Carly went back to work, and has been working ever since. Her output has been prodigious—thirty albums at this writing, not to mention the Oscar-winning film scores, an opera, and five books. She’s still working as I write. She recently told me that she would like to retire, but she can’ t—yet. Legions of people depend on her generosity.
During those years, tho
se decades, I’ve kept watch—sometimes with amazement. It has been a special experience for me to see how the shy ingenue—my friend’s sister—matured into one of music’s most influential and beloved singer-songwriters, one who was even inducted into the exclusive Songwriters Hall of Fame. (George Gershwin—who was friends with Carly’s parents in the 1930s—move over.) I sometimes played a minor role here and there: writing about Carly, interviewing her for a special program on the cable channel VH-1, writing the booklet notes for her 2004 release, Reflections: Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits.
What has always drawn me to Carly’s music was an acute and critical (and self-critical) intelligence, and an almost therapeutic ability to conjure empathy and compassion via the popular ballad. And it’s not just me and her other fans who feel this way. Carly’s masterpiece “Let the River Run” has become a bipartisan national anthem, used by the government to calm the nation after September 11, 2001, and later to inspire hope and action during Barack Obama’s own run for the rainbow in 2008.
Carly Simon has had a life and career that need to be documented while most of the dramatis personae are still around. Carly’s story is a page-turner—one of ambition overcoming severe neuroses, of continuing survival of the many battles that life makes us fight: stage fright, addiction, marriages; loss of loved ones, serial heartbreak, death by cancer; corporate incompetence, corruption, and greed; the sense, at a certain age, that time is closing in.
One of the things I do is work with rock stars on their memoirs, and for many years I’ve been trying to work with Carly in this way, but she has always held back. Someday she will probably write her own story, but until then, this book hopes to be a record of the true adventures of Carly Simon, in her time. This version must recommend itself as “unauthorized,” although Carly—generous in spirit—has occasionally helped me with matters of description and accuracy. Despite her jealously guarded wish for privacy, if you have her e-mail address, she’s a sucker for provocation, and will probably reply.
The epochal era of the rock star is winding down now. Most of the gods and goddesses have been celebrated and elegized, but not all. If you, like me, feel that you’ve been touched by her sun, Carly Simon’s music will live on, as long as it remains in the keeping of those who understand its value, its deeper meaning, and the transcendental distinction of her wonderful songs.
