More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (37 page)

Carly and James celebrated Christmas for the first time at 135 Central Park West. It was a happy time in their occasionally fraught marriage. A week earlier a film crew from one of the syndicated midnight rock programs had caught them in their tiny wooden music
room in the Vineyard house singing James’s “You Can Close Your Eyes” together; James played guitar, eyes mostly closed, sitting between Carly’s sheltering legs. Their new duet, “Devoted to You,” was symbolic of what these two rock stars had been through together, and their hopes for the future.
This
—a creative partnership with an artistic genius whom she really loved—was what Carly Simon had hoped for, from the beginning. All things seemed to be going this proud couple’s way at the beginning of 1978, with the only clouds in their coffee being the persistent fevers and constant upset of their now year-old son.

W
inter 1978. Thumping disco music still rules radio playlists, and the Sex Pistols—filth-spewing avatars of the UK punk movement—have just broken up on their first and only American tour. A new band called Blondie, starring sexy Debbie Harry from New Jersey, is spearheading (along with the Police) so-called New Wave music—pop songs with a fast beat and edgy, self-conscious lyrics.

Elektra is ruthlessly pressuring neurotic, stage-frightened Carly Simon to tour in support of her forthcoming album, and she glumly assents. Arlyne Rothberg books a dozen shows for later in the spring, mostly in the Northeast, supported by David Spinozza and the studio musicians who played on
Boys in the Trees
. James and the children will come along for the ride, and Carly vows to do her best, and not fall apart.

In February the family went on vacation to Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. The rented house was on the beach, on the island’s west end. One day James was taking the meat out of a coconut with
a butcher’s knife when he was distracted by a pelican landing in the water nearby. The coconut slipped out of his hand and the blade sliced his palm; he thought right away it was bad. He knew he had severed a nerve because he had no sensation in his left hand. On the thumb-edge side of his left index finger, it was a minor cut for a civilian, but a major injury for someone who played the guitar for a living. This injury would prevent James Taylor from touring that summer, resulting in what he later called “psychological effects of losing about two years of confidence off my guitar style, because of an accident to my hand.”

While his hand was healing he tried to keep busy. He and Carly sang on Kate Taylor’s first album for Columbia. They sang on three tracks for John Hall’s solo album for the same label. James was asked to contribute a song to a new musical,
Working,
based on Chicago journalist Studs Turkel’s interviews with working people. The song he came up with, “Millworker,” was the first he had ever written from a female point of view. He was so excited when he finished it, well after midnight, that he woke Carly to read the lyric to her. It took her three hours to get back to sleep. “I don’t exactly know who I’m giving this advice to,” James later told an interviewer, “but
never
wake up Carly Simon in the middle of the night.”

Boys in the Trees
was released in April 1978 and became another bestselling record for Carly, reaching number ten on the album chart amid withering competition from disco queens and New Wavers. The “You Belong to Me” single topped out at number six. A twelve-inch remix of the song also sold well and was featured in the adult contemporary charts. A few months later, the “Devoted to You” duet with James stayed in the Top Forty for several weeks. It was a welcome comeback of sorts after the disappointing sales of
Another Passenger
of two years earlier.

In late April 1978, Carly Simon went on tour with her husband, along with their two kids, both of them sick, both throwing up in adjoining suites in rainy Boston’s best hotel. Then Carly started
vomiting as well. This was her first tour with a band in five years, and expectations were astronomical. In the afternoon she went to the Paradise rock club on Commonwealth Avenue for the sound check with her cracking band of New York studio pros, powered by the formidable drummer Steve Gadd, under the direction of David Spinozza, who had his own jazzy album out and would open Carly’s shows with his own music. She canceled a pretour interview with
Rolling Stone
and then telephoned the writer from her hotel bed. “It’s the same thing the children have had for the past two days…
ugh
[gurgle]… I can’t even keep any liquids down… I’m so weak with hunger, I can hardly stand…
Ohhh
… Why did this have to happen—
now?
… I can’t go on tonight, and everyone will think I’m chickening out from stage fright—again.”

At the very last minute, when it was clear that all was lost, James Taylor told his wife to relax. As the dutiful and uxorious husband that he (ironically) styled himself, he would play the show instead. That night, nobody left the Paradise when the announcement was made that Carly Simon was ill and her husband would perform in her place.

David Spinozza’s soft jazz set left the audience a bit cold, but the band was topflight: Steve Gadd, Tony Levin on bass, Michael Mainieri on vibraphone, Warren Bernhardt on keyboards, and old friend Billy Mernit on piano. Then James Taylor came out to enthusiastic applause, looking pretty wacked, eyes totally pinned in his head. He mumbled incoherently about Carly not feeling well, leaving the audience even more confused than before. He remarked that his guitar strings were unusually loose because he had a bad cut on his fretting hand. Staring (somewhat disconcertingly) straight into the club’s main spotlight, he sang only one original song, the new “Millworker,” and plugged the Broadway show it was written for. The band then joined him for an oldies set: “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Memphis,” “Let the Good Times Roll.” This was completely unrehearsed, and the musicians kept shooting anxious glances at one another as James plowed on. After another golden oldie crash-landed, James looked at his
shoes and murmured into the microphone, “Just because… you’ve never been this close to a big star… doesn’t mean that you can’t shout abuse.”

“Sing some James Taylor songs,” someone yelled.

“I’m sick of that guy,” James replied, and launched into Carole King’s “Up on the Roof.” His encore was “Over the Rainbow.” James’s concert at the Paradise was short, but no one asked for their money back.

Carly was sufficiently recovered to go onstage in Boston the following night. She was still nauseated, and worried that she might puke on the front row. “I hope this is a loose set,” she told the sold-out club. “Anyone can go to the bathroom at any time—and so can I.” The clubs and theaters Carly played on this tour all lit the first ten rows so Carly could make eye contact with the audience. In attendance that night was a large contingent from the Taylor family, including James’s elusive father, Ike Taylor. Dr. Taylor, tall and imposing, was friendly. He drank a lot of beer and told people that, at home, he was known as the Doc of Rock.

Carly, dressed in a simple mauve top and a pair of slacks, frizzy long hair down her back—her body described (in a review) as “somewhere between willowy and skeletal”—opened with “Anticipation.” The crowd was adrenalized by her appearance and sinuous dance moves, and they were cheering her on. Then she moved on to “No Secrets,” the band expertly copying the sound of the records. Carly started forgetting about feeling ill and threw herself into the show. The first new song was “You Belong to Me,” rapturously received by the audience. “De Bat” fell a bit flat, but then James Taylor came out, alone, to give his wife a breather. Again staring directly into the spotlight, he performed “Up on the Roof.” (Reviewers noted that the applause he received for this was almost too thunderous, since it wasn’t his show.) But then Carly took the stage again and performed “You’re So Vain,” as Steve Gadd played some obscenely visceral drums. Now it was a rock concert, and the applause rivaled that for
James. (This was a married couple that, on a good night, could seriously compete for audience adulation, in real time. Carly and James now found themselves in an unintended but brilliant marital game, one that no celebrity couple since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had ever experienced.)

Carly took to the piano for “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be.” The last number of the regular set was “It Keeps You Runnin’,” the band in rock-and-roll mode. Carly walked off with what a reviewer called “a phenomenally sexy bounce.” She came back with James for the encore, “Devoted to You,” and ended the evening with a rousing version of “Goodnight, Irene,” in a rearrangement by James.

In the dressing room, the very relieved band was boozing and listening to James tell Polack jokes. Carly graciously received congrats on her stellar performance. James went out of his way to insult the
Rolling Stone
writer who was following Carly around for a forthcoming profile.

Carly received the writer at home in New York two days later. It was a spring day in early May and the trees were in bloom outside the living room window of Apartment 6S. The room was dominated by a large painting of a gorilla lounging on a beach chair. James was not in evidence; the children were in Riverdale with Andrea Simon, now “Granny Andy.” Carly served chilled white wine and Perrier.

Interviewer: “A lot of your songs seem to be about adultery, and you take a traditional viewpoint that it’s a bad thing. It’s almost like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

Carly: “No, that doesn’t ring a bell. I don’t consider myself traditional…. But I’ve never bought that open marriage thing. I’ve never seen it work. But then, that doesn’t mean that I believe in monogamy. I don’t believe that sleeping with someone else necessarily constitutes an infidelity.”

Interviewer: “What would?”

Carly: “Having sex with someone else, and telling your spouse about it. [She laughs.] It’s anything you feel guilty about.”

The tour continued a few nights later at the Bottom Line club in Manhattan. A masseur now joined the entourage. Each night before her set, “He massaged me into feeling very much like I was coming out of the Belgian Congo. My hair was wild by the time he had finished with me. I felt that this particular jungle of an audience seemed a lot less dangerous than the one I had just come out of.” James continued to support and sing with her. The tour’s backstage contract rider specified unopened packages of Pampers (disposable diapers) at every show. Arlyne Rothberg rearranged the seating chart so the record execs were on the side and the fans were down front. The audience was largely male, and they cheered everything in the eleven-song set. Carly was “gowned and frizzed like the fairy princess of patrician funk,” wrote one critic. The show was flawless according to
The New York Times
. Billy Mernit did a solo piece mid-set, and James repeated his folksy version of “Up on the Roof.” The two Michael McDonald collaborations got the best response, as “You Belong to Me” was pushing Carly’s latest album into the platinum category.
Rolling Stone
: “She combines perfect elocution, near perfect pitch, and a vibrant, smoky timbre with one of the most powerful deliveries of any woman in rock…. Simon seemed to come close to satisfying her male audience’s fantasies—erotic as well as musical—of what white, middle-class, woman-centered rock could and should be.” After the show, Carly and James autographed unused Pampers for fans waiting at the back door.

A few nights later, at Villanova University, near Philadelphia, Carly was shaking with fright at having to perform before a large, sold-out audience. The massage didn’t help. Carly: “I came up with the idea that I had to take the focus off myself and do something utterly ridiculous that would preoccupy the audience. So when I was introduced I came out onstage completely wrapped in toilet paper. I don’t remember why I told the audience that I was wrapped head to foot in toilet paper. It looked like a Halloween prank, but at least they laughed at me, and that took the edge off it.”

Back in New York, Carly and James taped a duet of “Devoted to You” in a TV studio for Dick Cavett’s talk show. James played guitar and sang with his eyes closed. Carly sang while looking at James. The body language was tense, and it was not a relaxed performance. After the last verse (“Through the years our love will grow / Like a river it will flow / It can’t die because I’m so / Devoted to you”), James looked thoughtful for a moment, and then ad-libbed, “A
sobering
sentiment.”

Carly originally agreed to do seven shows, but then Arlyne booked a few more, until the total was about a dozen. After one of the final concerts, one played without her family in tow, something unusual happened. Carly remembered: “It was Memorial Day, I was up in Woodstock with my band, and I gave [one of the musicians] a ride back to the city because I had a limousine waiting for me.” The limo pulled into a Howard Johnson’s parking lot in the Rockland County town where the musician lived at the time, and where his wife was waiting for him. This woman exploded into a jealous rage when she saw that Carly was in the limo. “And he and his semi-estranged wife started the
heaviest
fight that I’ve ever seen in my life, outside of Madison Square Garden. They were just crazy. It was upsetting and fascinating and confusing and inspiring—all those things. It was an ugly scene, but I was jealous of the amount of passion between them. I was shaking, because I thought I was going to be dragged out of the limo and knocked around, too.”