More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (15 page)

Then Lucy closed down the Simon Sisters. She’d started dating her psychiatrist, David Levine. Lucy: “I saw that, as the Simon Sisters, our moment was past. We weren’t selling records or making much money. I wanted to have children and be married. I thought: this is all I’ve wanted to do all my life,
and I want no interference
. Carly, anyway, was the more talented performer, and it was clear that she would go on in the business, and be successful.”

Carly: “My sister was tired of my nerves, and got married.”

So now Carly was on her own. She needed a place to live, and moved into the rear bedroom of her sister Joey’s apartment at 400 East Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan. Joey was still bossy toward her youngest sister, and Carly was often prohibited use of the flat when Joey was entertaining menfriends such as TV panelist Henry Morgan, musician Zubin Mehta, or ballet star Edward Villella. Carly suffered, mostly in silence.

Then she got a call from John Court, who had (maybe) heard of
her from Willie Donaldson. Court invited her to meet his partner, Albert Grossman—Bob Dylan’s manager!—to discuss her career. Carly was incredibly excited and felt her first break as a solo singer might be imminent.

At the time, Albert Grossman was the most important talent manager in the music business. He was forty-ish, corpulent, rumpled, with long gray hair falling below his shoulders and wire-rimmed granny glasses that made him look like Ben Franklin. Grossman was a tough guy, having emerged from the Chicago folk club scene, and had immediate entrée to all the important record companies. Carly met with him at the Grosscourt offices on Twenty-third Street. Carly later wrote about this period:

“Once Lucy was married, I got involved with Albert Grossman. Without my dear sister’s protection, I was a sitting duck. He offered me his body in exchange for worldly success [which Carly found strange, because Grossman was famously married to glamorous Sally Grossman, who lounged in a red trouser suit on the iconic cover of
Bringing It All Back Home
]. Sadly, his body was not the kind you would easily sell yourself for.”

Grossman sized Carly up, listened to her demo tapes, and told her she was a hard sell, that he wasn’t sure what to do with her. She told him about her stage fright and said that her ambition was to write songs and record them, but not to perform in public. He told her flat out that she was a spoiled rich girl with an entitled attitude.

Then he told her about the female Bob Dylan idea. “Albert said, ‘You should get Bob to write a song for you.’ I said that would be great. He said, ‘I’ll get Bob to come over here and meet with you, and you’ll go into the studio with his guys. Let me make some calls and see if I can get Columbia [Dylan’s record label] to pay for the sessions.’”

Carly said okay to this, but felt uneasy. “I thought I was being exploited with this female Dylan thing. These people hadn’t even heard me sing, it was mostly on the basis of my looks. They thought
if I sang Dylan songs I would make it as a female Dylan. In my mind, it didn’t really follow, but I went along at first.”

Carly met with Bob Dylan a few days later, on July 28, 1966. This was almost beyond belief for her.
Blonde on Blonde
was the hottest album in America. The radio blasted out the album’s first single, “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” and its clarion call to anarchy “Everybody must get stoned.” It was like taking a meeting with Jesus.

It didn’t go that well. Dylan hid behind his sunglasses and didn’t make eye contact. He was disheveled, and his hands shook. Carly: “We went into a little cubicle in Albert’s office, and Bob took out an old song and added some new lyrics. I tried to question him, but he was really out of it—very, very wasted… talking incoherently, saying a lot about God and Jesus, and how I had to go down to Nashville.”

Dylan went on: “Hey… you know,… oh… you… Nashville!… the
players
, man… are just… you gotta… just… just believe me…
believe me!”
Dylan stretched out his arms, crucified, repeating “Believe me” over and over. Carly: “It was an odd experience.”

But Bob Dylan, prodded by management, had indeed written some new lyrics, tailored to Carly, for a female version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” which he had performed on his debut album, saying that it had been taught to him by singer Eric Von Schmidt “in the green pastures of Harvard University.” Dylan handed Carly the lyric sheet and left without a farewell. He was driven back to Woodstock, the upstate New York village where he’d found refuge near Grossman’s country home, and a few days later broke some bones in his neck when he crashed his motorcycle into a tree.

Just as Grossman had feared, Bob Dylan retired to recover from his accident and his speedy life since 1963. Dylan would not be touring that autumn (and Dylan wouldn’t tour for another eight years, when he again went out with the Hawks, who had rebranded
themselves in 1968 as the Band). Now Grosscourt Productions needed their female Bob Dylan more than ever.

“So Bob disappeared for a while,” Carly said, “freeing up Robbie Robertson and all the people in his band. So I went up to Woodstock and started working with Robbie on a daily basis”—hammering out an arrangement for the new “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” Carly Simon was about to record a song with America’s hottest working band, Bob Dylan’s band, the Hawks. The producer supervising the session was Bob Johnston, a portly middle-aged Nashville veteran who had worked on
Blonde on Blonde
. Almost at the last minute Carly was teamed with singer Richie Havens, another Grosscourt client, and this ensemble lit into a full-throated version of “Baby” that chimed much like the Byrds’ hit single version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The Carly/ Havens pairing also echoed the sound of Sonny and Cher, another huge folk-rock act that covered Mr. Dylan’s songs.

The session was stressful. Carly was “singing out,” giving the lyric a lusty, full-throated delivery. Carly: “But Albert kept coming into the studio and directing me. I felt like just a piece of meat, actually.” Grossman wanted Carly to slavishly imitate Dylan’s distinctive, breathy/ nasal intonation of the song’s lyrics. Carly gently told Grossman that impressions weren’t really her thing. “It was really meat city, because they made me feel like a sex object, not like a musician at all.”

They also recorded a forgettable song, cowritten by Bob Johnston and Wes Farrell, called “Goodbye Lovin’ Man”—“a song they’d never heard me sing until I got into the studio. It was, ‘Let’s make a B-side quick.’ But the musicians were incredible, super-studded; star-studded: Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Levon Helm. I think Al Kooper was there. And I had a major crush on Robbie Robertson.” Richie Havens sang backup.

But later, after the musicians had packed their instruments and gone home, Bob Johnston told Carly where it was at. She expressed hope that the sessions had gone well, and Johnston told her that if
she were
real nice
to him—and to Carly the implication was unmistakably sexual—he’d make damn sure she got a hit record out of it. He was blatant about it, asking, “What time you want me to come over?”

Carly was shocked. “I’m just not…”—she stammered—“… not that desperate.” Badly shaken, she walked out. Carly: “It was such a typical Hollywood-type casting couch routine that I was amazed to hear it actually come out of someone’s mouth.”

“I went home and sobbed,” she later said, and resolved to quit the music business. “If I’d been a hungry girl from Spanish Harlem, I would have had the same sense of shame, but if I didn’t have my family to fall back on [financially], desperation might have actually led me to sleep with him. I don’t know.” It was a terrible letdown for her.

Carly told Grossman the female Dylan thing wasn’t for her, and her record was shelved, Columbia having passed on releasing it. Then Grossman thought he could sell an act called Carly and the Deacon, the “Deacon” being Richie Havens. Carly liked the idea, and thought it could work with the right songs. Havens had real energy and talent, but Carly and the Deacon never got into the studio.

“Albert said to me, ‘On a one-to-ten scale, as a woman, you’re a nine… But you’ve had it too easy, you haven’t suffered enough, you don’t know what working for a living is like.” Carly thought this was stupid, but didn’t bother arguing with him, “as if you’d had to have ridden freight trains, or sold your body, to have soul.” There was no arguing with Albert Grossman anyway.

Meanwhile, Carly was having a major flirtation with incipient rock star Robbie Robertson (who was actually about to marry his beautiful Canadian girlfriend). Robertson was tall, dark, charismatic, extremely hip, and played guitar with Bob Dylan. For a time, Carly thought Robbie might be her rebound from Willie. They had some furtive lunches together in the Village—Robbie was very cynical
about the music business and told Carly point-blank that it wasn’t for pussies—but the dates never came to anything serious.

The Woodstock adventure had been a hassle for Carly, a bummer. “I was terribly disappointed,” she said a few years later. “I let myself get brought down a lot, thinking that they didn’t like me, that I wasn’t worth much. Al Grossman had led me to believe I was hot shit, but they thought they could just…
mold
me into whatever they wanted. I tried it, out of desperation, because I so wanted to be wanted by these people. But I was
not
ready to be molded by anyone else.”

S
o now Carly Simon retired. She gained weight. Peter Simon, her brother: “We were quite close in this era, the late sixties. She had tried to go solo, and project herself, alone, in order to gain attention from the record companies and the public, and it wasn’t working. Carly became very down on herself, and very negative about her chances of making it. These were some difficult years—between 1967 and 1970—when she was bouncing around New York, on the fringes of the music business, mainly writing and recording commercials and jingles, and just in general feeling very depressed about her career.”

“During that time,” Carly has said, “I worked as an overweight secretary for a production company. I pretended to type while extending my lunch hours to drown my sense of failure in puff pastry and pudding.” An executive, Len Friedlander, whose wife was a childhood friend of Carly’s, assigned her to one of his company’s TV programs,
From the Bitter End
. She was in charge of the green room, taking care of the talent. She made tea for Peter, Paul and Mary. She looked after Richie Havens, who was breaking through with a
brilliant album,
Mixed Bag
. She met sixteen-year-old Janis Ian, whose interracial love song, “Society’s Child,” was a national hit record. “I took care of the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Staple Singers, many others, and didn’t try to sell them my songs. I was happy to be around this incredible group of performers, getting them cough drops.” One day, Motown star Marvin Gaye came in to lip-sync his latest record.

“In the case of Marvin Gaye, I went into his dressing room to ask if he wanted something to drink, and he said, ‘Can you please stick out your tongue for a minute?’ So I stuck out my tongue, and he grabbed it with his mouth… I couldn’t release my tongue for a while, because he was sucking so hard—an experience never to be forgotten. I was so naïve, really; essentially puritanical like my father, so I was confused by Marvin’s behavior.”

Meanwhile, sensational sounds were beaming in from California. The Doors, from L. A., were dominant with “Light My Fire.” Jimi Hendrix, a new guitar warlock out of London, literally was on fire. The San Francisco bands—the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother—were changing popular music. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Janis Joplin of Big Brother and the Holding Company were proving that women could more than hold their own fronting a modern rock band. Carly found this encouraging.

Her sister Lucy married Dr. David Levine in March 1967. It was a low-key wedding, held in the sunroom at Riverdale, with only family present. After the ceremony, the Simon sisters repaired to Joanna’s apartment on East Fifty-fifth Street and opened some champagne, without their mother.

For Carly, her sister’s marriage coincided with an onset of fears and phobias. She could hardly explain it to her therapist, but she knew she felt weird, as if she’d lost her best friend and protector. She kept telling herself that she didn’t want to be “in show business,” but that she was somehow, irresistibly, perhaps fatally, attracted to its dangers. Her image of herself was as a songwriter who recorded
her own music, but not a performer who put herself on the line, every night, for her audience. That was more stress than she could imagine.

Summer 1967. Carly wanted out of the city, and took a job teaching guitar at Indian Hill, an upscale arts camp near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Emanuel Ax ran the chorus. Andrew Bergman did drama. Carly loved the piney woods of the camp, and spent the summer walking around barefoot. Her campers, boys and girls, totally adored her. One was Ellen Epstein:

“I was fifteen years old, from New Rochelle, when I went to camp and Carly Simon was my counselor. She took me under her wing, taught me a lot about the guitar—it was totally thrilling. She was this totally attractive and sparkling presence, and everyone wanted to be around her. She molded the camp rock-and-roll band—Lust 4 Five—around her music [including a young piano player named Billy Mernit]. She was always working on new songs, especially one called ‘Secret Saucy Thoughts of Suzy.’ We spent that summer working on my solo showcase for the talent show, an arrangement of ‘The Water Is Wide’ that Carly wrote for me to sing. I loved Carly so much that when camp was over my parents engaged Carly to give me private guitar lessons that branched into things like wardrobe and even cooking. Carly Simon could make a mean chicken fricassee. Then she fixed me up with her brother, who became my boyfriend, and so we were like family in those days.”