More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (38 page)

In fact, Carly tried to get out of the car to calm things down, but the woman shoved her back into the limo and told her to shut up and get the hell out of there.

“It made me feel, once again, that I’m a voyeur, and a sort of spy. And I’m afraid of anger, of being angry. That if I act out my real feelings, they will overwhelm me. I’ll say something that I will regret for the rest of my life, or blow something terribly badly.”

I
n the summer of 1978 both Carly and James were on the radio, with “You Belong to Me” and “Handy Man.” Carly appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone
in a billowy dress, shot by the Japanese fashion photographer Hiro. The article dwelt on the writer’s astonishment that Carly was breast-feeding Ben (a quite large toddler at eighteen months) during the interviews. It also noted that Ben “cried uncontrollably” when the feeding stopped and Carly left the room. She was also on the cover of
People,
which reported that she lost $75,000 playing intimate venues on her recent tour, and that James Taylor’s hobby was carpentry and he was building an addition to the couple’s Martha’s Vineyard home.

There were new people who wanted to hang out with James on the island. Comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd rented houses that summer, and Belushi especially wanted to befriend James. The irrepressibly vulgar Chicago comic would drop by and take the kids for ice cream, or steal James to go fishing. Carly was both ambivalent
and disconcerted about Belushi. He liked to physically pick up an astonished Carly and spin her on his shoulders. The second time he did this, at a beach bonfire one night, she was dismayed to remember that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

Belushi loved drugs—mostly marijuana and cocaine—and in no time James Taylor was a goner. The
Saturday Night Live
crowd all had JVC video cameras; by summer’s end there were videos floating around that showed James and Belushi with needles in their arms, probably injecting speedballs—an amusingly toxic cocktail of cocaine and heroin. James started to disappear for a few days at a time, going on alcoholic benders with singer Jimmy Buffet, also a visitor to the Vineyard. Carly would be distraught, fearful for James, afraid also to do anything about it. It wasn’t as if she could call the police and report James Taylor as a missing person, but with the current state of her marriage, that’s what he was.

The next few years would be difficult ones for Carly, as her husband gradually submerged himself into old habits. He was often away, touring or recording, and when he was at home, amid the
haut bourgeois
chintz of 135 Central Park West or the spartan, unadorned walls of the Vineyard house, he was often abstracted, sitting in the shadows, looking out the window. Carly told her best friends she was raising their children as a single mother.

After losing control of himself, when he passed out at a party, when he felt he’d made a fool of himself, James would be remorseful, and Carly’s heart would go out to him. “I don’t have any moderation,” he admitted to an interviewer. “I get intoxicated. I lose control. I black out. I make mistakes when I’m too high, which—when I finally come to—I deeply regret.”

“James was an unusually guilty addict,” a member of his band said. “Most drug addicts are either too stoned, or too worried about their next fix, to feel guilty about what they were doing to themselves and the people around them. But we knew that James really suffered because of his addictions.”

Carly’s position was difficult. James liked to snort powders with his manager’s wife. What could Carly say? All these comics who wanted to hang with her husband—Belushi (and his wife), Monty Python’s Eric Idle, Richard Belzer—were into drugs. When the parties got raucous, late at night in New York, Carly would appear in her pajamas and tell James and the partiers that they were waking the children.

“James was dealing with his fame and his career while trying to figure things out,” Carly later recalled. He would say he wanted to quit, to change his ways. “And, in not knowing how to help him, I became even more helpless and foolish, and probably more of a deterrent to his stopping.” Carly increasingly found herself going through her husband’s pockets, flushing drugs, throwing away paraphernalia, checking his eyes. There were tremendous rows. Carly would throw James out of the house, or he would just flee, walking across Central Park, barefoot, and trying to check into the Westbury Hotel on Madison Avenue, where his manager had an account. The hotel would call Peter Asher’s office in L. A. and say that someone—disheveled, with no identification, no shoes—claiming to be James Taylor was trying to check in.

Carly: “I lived in a state of fear—for years, and also in a constant state of denial. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to know how serious it was. I just wanted to help, to do anything for him I possibly could. His needs always came before mine.

“Addiction really takes over everything, and we were in its power…. When James walked in the door, I was examining him, his expression, the size of his pupils, looking for evidence. I was nervous when he went into the bathroom. I was incredibly naïve. I thought I could actually help him. Who was I kidding?”

Eventually, James Taylor’s behavior was something that Carly became accustomed to. Aside from a couple of emergency situations, it was mostly James not feeling well, sleeping late, and the stressful hassle of delayed drug deliveries to the house. Friends who knew the
couple even thought that the situation might have suited Carly, who liked to be the center of attention and related well to weaker personalities.

Carly: “So I became—very much—‘an enabler’ [then an unknown term] and then I became ‘the enemy.’ And it reminded me of how I’d been treated by some of the men in my life, especially my father. It is… so
hard
to break those patterns! I found James incredibly intoxicating and brilliant and funny. What was devastating was how he turned so many of those things against me. And you feel so… responsible.”

In November 1978, Carly was in Texas to perform as a guest vocalist at a gala concert given by the Houston Symphony and Burt Bacharach, one of Carly’s songwriting heroes. Channeling Dionne Warwick, most of whose hit songs were written by Bacharach, Carly sang “I Live in the Woods.” This was one of her first public ventures into the world of balladic standards, but the audience gave her an ovation at the end, and she was reassured.

The following month Carly began work on her next album.
Spy
would again be produced by Arif Mardin at Atlantic Studios, on Broadway, a short walk from Central Park West. She worked there through the end of the year and the first four months of 1979, composing a topical album of new songs about a failing marriage through the eyes of an angry, seriously neglected wife and mother not unlike her.

James Taylor decamped by himself for Los Angeles, where he spent that winter working on his new record,
Flag
. He didn’t like talking on the telephone, and rarely checked his messages, so Carly felt more alone than she had in years. She was also suffering from severe migraine headaches. When she tried to call her husband to tell him how she was feeling, the phone on the other end just rang and rang.

The Woman Scorned is a powerful trope in art and literature, and Carly now made the most of this persona. “Vengeance,” the energized
rock song that begins the album and would be its first single, is a woman’s yearning to be free and vowing retribution if her yearnings are stifled. Ian McLagan, who played with the Faces and the Stones, came in to play rock-and-roll piano on the verses. John Hall put on a rock guitar solo, and the full-blast horn section was the Brecker brothers and David Sanborn. Carly wanted this track to really thunder, so Steve Gadd was joined on drums by Rick Marotta, who sometimes played with James on tour. The British actor Tim Curry sang with Carly on the choruses: “That’s vengeance—
vengeance
—she said—that’s the law.”

Carly later called “We’re So Close” the saddest song she ever wrote. The lyric to this bathetic piano ballad is about a lover who takes her for granted, who meets none of her needs for intimacy or even friendship. “He says: we can be close from afar / He says: the closest people always are / We’re so close that in our separation / There’s no distance at all.” Carly was now mining her difficult marriage for its most private and difficult material, with unusual candor.

“Just Like You Do” is a high-gloss Arif Mardin production with horns and orchestra that plead for a return to the “brave innocence we once knew.” Jake Brackman’s lyrics for “Never Been Gone” concern the emotional ties to Martha’s Vineyard felt by Carly and her family. “Coming to Get You” is an atypical narrative about some unexplained legal situation in an Arkansas family court, certifiably one of the strangest songs in Carly’s career. (The back story of the lyrics was Libby Titus’s struggles with Levon Helm over custody of their daughter, Amy.)

“Pure Sin” is another big dance-rock production, a verbal threat display from a woman who won’t be contained or kept down much longer. Carly wrote “Love You By Heart” with Libby Titus and Jake Brackman, and the lyrics seem aimed at a specific character: “Your habit is old / You don’t need it anymore / Go on and kiss it goodbye / ’Cause you got me.” James Taylor and Arif Mardin helped Carly with “Spy,” a four-on-the-floor disco song. And Carly wrote
“Memorial Day” by herself. The song is a lovely and graphic account—in the form of musical episodes—of the tooth-and-nail fight she witnessed between her musician friend and his wife the year before: “Well, they bellowed / And they hollered / And they threw each other down.” If all the elements of this mini-opera didn’t all quite congeal, they expressed a writerly take on action and experience typical of Carly’s work in this period. Steve Gadd finishes the track with a drum solo that’s like a blow-by-blow reprise of the physical fight itself.

When James returned from California, he joined his wife in the studio and sang on “Love You By Heart,” “Never Been Gone,” “Spy,” and “Just Like You Do.” But, perhaps reflecting the somewhat diminished role James was playing in Carly’s life in those days, engineer Lew Hahn mixed James’s vocals much farther down in the track, so his voice would not be as prominent in Carly’s music as in the past.

Carly wanted
Spy
’s lyric sheet to carry an epigraph from the writer Anaïs Nin: “I am an international spy in the house of love.” She dedicated the album to her producer. The noirish black-and-white jacket and sleeve photographs—Carly in a slouchy secret agent’s fedora—were taken by Pam Frank, a friend from the Vineyard and New York.

The album’s release was set for June 1979. “Vengeance” was chosen over “Just Like You Do” as the first single release from
Spy.

B
y 1979 many of the survivors of the American protest movements of the sixties had coalesced around the antinuclear energy issue. Atomic power was hailed as the major energy source of the future, and the government was licensing large corporations to build new nuclear power plants, some of them in risibly dangerous locations, near major population centers, especially in the Northeast. Many local alliances had sprung up to challenge the nukes, especially in rural areas where they would otherwise have been welcomed for the jobs they provided. The antinuclear activists maintained that an accident was inevitable. The government and the corporations maintained that nuclear energy was safe, period. Then, as now, nuclear energy was a controversial, contentious issue.

Later, after the accident happened in southwestern Pennsylvania, the farmers said the cows knew about it first. At dawn on March 29, 1979, dairymen found hundreds of cows lined up along fences five miles north of the Three Mile Island nuclear power station. Following no apparent signals, the cattle faced the site of the reactor hidden
from view by a bend in the Susquehanna River. Later the farmers told investigators that if the cows began to bolt, they were out of there, too, no matter what the government said.