Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  Carly was a music counselor, and one of the first things she did was start a rock group. She was its lead singer and lead guitarist, and she gathered up four male campers—a pianist, bass guitarist, two drummers—who started rehearsing in the barn, providing, as the camp yearbook would note, “a swinging life for the boys.” She named the group Lust for Five and she wrote a song, “Secret Saucy Thoughts (of Suzy),” for them. Lust for Five held forth in the camp’s improvised discotheque, Carly stimulating fantasies in more than a few male campers. In at least one case she returned the favor, harboring a crush on a seventeen-year-old trumpet player, and (shades of Andrea) wondering, could she get away with having a relationship with the kid?

  Rippling through the pines during that first week of camp was anticipation for the delayed arrival of head counselor Jacob Brackman. Popular with the campers from years past, Jake was a tall, handsome twenty-four-year-old Harvard-educated writer who was suddenly a little famous: his just-published New Yorker essay, “The Put-On”—in which he analyzed the new hip form of humor, with examples from Warhol, Dylan, and the Beatles—was the talk of New York’s young intelligentsia, drawing comparisons to Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” which had been published in The Partisan Review three years earlier.*

  Carly and Jake met at the campfire hootenanny. “She seemed like Daisy Mae, in a little denim miniskirt and a halter top and a straw hayride hat—lots of bare arms and legs, very Al Capp-y,” Jake recalls. Something clicked between them, and fortunately it wasn’t a sexual click (though over the course of their friendship, they may have made half-hearted attempts to enter that more predictable precinct), because that might have deprived them of a rich and useful lifelong friendship through which many of the most important breaks and relationships in Carly’s life would materialize.

  While dodging mosquitoes in the pines, and during the bumpy bus rides to Tanglewood (summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and Jacob’s Pillow (outdoor stage to avant-garde dance troupes), Jake became Carly’s confidant. She told him about her crush on the high school student trumpet player—“I was listening to her strategize about whether or not she could put a move on this seventeen-year-old,” he says.

  The last couple of years bumping around had taken their toll on Jake’s new friend. “Carly didn’t have the confidence she would have a year or so later,” Jake says. “She didn’t trust herself in a social situation to say something that just came out of her mind that may be quite funny.” Jake took advantage of her vulnerability. “I was cruel to Carly. I would encourage her to eat fattening things and then make her feel bad for the weight she was gaining.” Later Jake would see that whole sweep of time for Carly this way: “She was in a down period; she had grown up” in a glamorous, accomplished world “and she had lost her rightful place in it. The only way out for her was to become a star.”

  Carly and Jake and the other counselors guided the campers through an ambitious arts gauntlet: stagings of plays by Arthur Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Euripides; readings of Joyce, Sandburg, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Dylan Thomas; dances to Varèse and Schoenberg; recitals of Haydn, Handel, and Mozart. The campers hoisted posters of Yippified Allen Ginsberg in his American flag top hat, drew sketches of John Lennon, wrote poems and essays with the names of Stockbridge favorite son Arlo Guthrie* and Ravi Shankar and Miriam Makeba sprinkled through them, and they “voted” for the legalization of both marijuana and (this was over five years before Roe v. Wade) abortion.

  After Carly hugged her sunburned campers good-bye, she moved back to her bedroom in Joey’s apartment on East Fifty-fifth Street; and Jake, to his borrowed house in Vermont.

  Carly’s crowd, like everyone’s crowd, was living the stoned life now. “Those were crazy, heady, exciting times—no rules and no consequences,” recalls Ellen. Carly was intermittently trying to place her songs (she tried in vain to interest the group Every Mother’s Son in “Secret Saucy Thoughts”), as well as looking for jingle-writing gigs. Ellen’s brother Stephen (brilliant and unstable, he would eventually fall to his death from the rafters of a converted church) came up with a chicken nuggets idea, a precursor to the McDonald’s gold mine, which he wanted to market to dope smokers; Carly wrote a jingle with the hook “Long-term physical effects are not yet known,” implying that the nuggets were psychedelic. Neither nuggets nor jingle got off the ground. (Carly did, however, eventually, get an assignment to write and record a jingle for a Massachusetts bank.)

  At some point in 1968, Carly contributed a song she had written, based on a Brahms melody, to a project sponsored by the New York Symphony Association, through which rock groups would collaborate on classical music. A pop-rock group called Elephant’s Memory was chosen to play her song at Carnegie Hall. The band needed a female singer; Carly was signed without even an audition. It was a match not made in heaven.

  The jazz-flavored group, which consisted of what Carly has recalled as “very New York street-smart jazz hip people” (they would later back up John Lennon and Yoko Ono), took an instant dislike to Carly. Though they liked her singing and her animated stage presence fine, and they approved of the songs she’d written enough to continue to play them (one, “Summer Is a Wishing Well,” in particular) even after she left the group on bad terms, they were not going to cut the uptown girl a break. They had the same antipathy for her background that Albert Grossman had, except they expressed it more baldly. “They pretty much said, ‘Get off your fat ass and help us carry our speakers,’” Carly has recalled, adding, “I did have a fat ass at that point, by the way.”* Speaking for himself, Myron Yules, who was the group’s trombonist, admits he resented Carly’s air of privilege: “I thought she was a spoiled brat; she didn’t want to rehearse much, she didn’t think I was up to par musically, so I resented that, and I personally didn’t like women standing around and not carrying the mic stand.” One night, when the group was rehearsing at a club named Wheels, a dispute occurred (its source forgotten) and all seven musicians verbally ganged up on the fat-assed rich girl. In return, she boycotted the show that night, which only increased their resentment. In late-1960s rock, it hurt to emanate a certain upbringing. You could only get past your despised caste by turning it into a goof, like cool, sarcastic Grace Slick (who several years but another lifetime ago had walked down the aisle in a white wedding gown in a San Francisco cathedral) did, by bringing Abbie Hoffman to her Finch College reunion to prank-out fellow alum Tricia Nixon. Carly “hated the gigs” with Elephant’s Memory, she has said. But one providential chance encounter grew out of the experience.

  Among the clubs Elephant’s Memory played was the Scene, with a house band led by a longish-light-brown-haired, mustachioed young guitarist named Danny Armstrong. Danny thought Carly was “a good singer, very musical, and she had all kinds of sex appeal.” But Danny was too cool—and too married—to let on that he’d noticed her. Danny Armstrong’s middle-class, Midwestern background and his child-barnacled present made him vastly different from Carly’s more compatible previous beaux, the wealthy, cultured, and unencumbered Delbanco and Donaldson. Danny was an engineer’s son from Cleveland who’d started playing guitar on Ohio’s weddings-and-polka-band circuit and had moved to New York to be a jazz guitarist, working with Kai Winding. Between children he had with his wife and those from a teenage relationship, he had four sons and a daughter.

  Electric guitars were Danny Armstrong’s life. He was gifted not only at playing electric guitars but at designing, constructing, and repairing the instrument that was now the focal point of all rockdom. In fact, playing at the Scene had been a parting-shot gig—he’d become a guitar entrepreneur. The previous year he had opened Dan Armstrong Guitars, on West Forty-eighth Street, and his timing had been dead-on—he had captured an exploding market. As he immodestly put it, in one of a number of interviews conducted for this book before his death from emphysema in 2004, “I was the first and [at the time] only electric guitar specialist in the world, and I knew every big-time guitar player in the w
orld—I just plain owned New York at the time.” When Cream came to town to play concerts featuring their haunting underground hit “White Room,” Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce would sit with Danny in the back of the store, the three playing blues riffs—and, according to Armstrong, “Clapton only knew one way of playing blues riffs and I knew twenty.”

  All the British and American rockers and jazz and blues musicians sauntered into Dan Armstrong Guitars (the only one who excited Armstrong was his idol, Wes Montgomery), but only for freshly anointed Zeus-of-the-instrument Jimi Hendrix did he—begrudgingly—keep the store open after hours. The women on his staff were amazed that, for all his trademark pyrotechnics and sexual gestures, the slightly built Hendrix would lope into the store in a shy, pigeon-toed way, as plaintive as when he used to ply sustenance as an impoverished child in Seattle: an otherworldly gypsy—silver-ring-banded Borsalino floating atop his black-cotton-candy hair; Elizabethan blouse billowing out from under an antique embroidered vest; velvet pants tight across his uncommonly thin hips. As he padded around, the women saw what made him so captivating: Hendrix’s charisma derived from his fragility. Accompanied by Experience mates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell or his friend, drummer Buddy Miles, Jimi would pick up, plug in, and go at any custom rarity that caught his fancy—and his keening, twanging, psychedelic talking blues would practically bounce sparks off the glass counters. Then, back down on the sidewalk, Hendrix would make a big shouting scene as he tore up the ticket he’d gotten for parking his Corvette at a hydrant—and zoom away, tires screeching. Danny Armstrong always had to be the king of his store; he pronounced Jimi Hendrix “an asshole.”

  One day in 1968 Danny looked up from his desk “and in she strolls, a nice-looking lady in an orange, pink, and yellow print dress. Certainly vivacious. Lots of charm. Big smile. Carrying a guitar that needed work.” He recognized her as the Elephant’s Memory singer. “She introduced herself. I said, ‘Where’d you get a name like Carly?’ and she said, from her aunt. She said she was a singer-musician going to music school”—Carly was taking a notating course at Juilliard. Carly recalls, “Oh, Lord, Danny! What a comely guy, when I first met him in his guitar shop. His face…like Rhett Butler! He had arms that were too short for his body, but I guess that’s the price you pay for being so handsome.”

  The sexy, charming, “midtown-cool” (as Danny pegged her) girl with the strange first name came back with her guitar a couple more times; she always put a smile on his face. But Armstrong kept his interest low-watt—“I was just being me, not coming on too hard.”

  Eventually Armstrong and his wife broke up and he moved his store to a new location, on the newly renamed La Guardia Place (formerly West Broadway) near Washington Square Park. When Carly sailed into his new store one day, he ended up going back to her and Joey’s apartment to play guitar while Carly played piano. He sensed she saw her efforts stymied by her privilege (and her race). “To her, and to me, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Odetta, for her, were the only singers that counted. She said she wished that she could sing like that, but she knew she never could.” Still, he noticed, as Nick had: “Carly always wanted to be a celebrity.”

  Their first “real date,” as Danny recalled it (even though “dating” was now a thing of the straight-world past), was a trip, in car-crazy Danny’s red 1965 Karmann Ghia convertible, to the Lincoln Continental Dealers Convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Thus would commence an almost two-year-long relationship.

  “We were just trotting along together, holding hands; we were just little bells, little playmates—Carly made up a nickname for me, Porcus Pinky. I called her Carl,” Danny said of those first months. “Most things between us were shrouded in a cloud of pot smoke,” says Carly. Carly’s neuroses were out of view. “If she was insecure and phobic and all that, she sure hid it from me,” Danny said. “She never hated anything. She never complained about anything. She was a calm, comfortable little playmate. I asked her brother, Peter, one time, ‘Is she always so cheery?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but sometimes she’s a little sad.’ Carly was someone I never saw cry. And we never fought.” (“Danny and I did have a fight once,” Carly amends. “He hit me in the face with an open avocado.”)

  “We definitely fell in love,” Danny said, and Carly agrees: “I really loved him.” One day when they were driving, Danny turned to Carly and said, “You’re all I need to make me happy.” She picked up her guitar and started to turn it into a song.

  Carly was so available for Danny that even though she was always writing songs, years after the fact, Danny couldn’t remember her doing so. But it was he, she says, who suggested she put her Juilliard notating course to use by writing lead sheets of her songs and sending them to artists who might want to record them. She did so—sending her songs, in vain, to Judy Collins, Burt Bacharach, and again to Dionne Warwick.

  Danny moved to an apartment over his store, thick in the middle of the action: around the corner from the Dugout, the Tin Angel, and the Bitter End; two blocks from the MacDougal Street folk clubs; and close by the offices of Eye,* a young, counterculture version of Life, staffed, at Hearst Magazines’ expense, largely by genuine artists and near-hippies, and for which Gerry Goffin wrote a long piece on Aretha, and Steve Katz wrote reviews (as did soon-to-be Warner Bros. executive Andy Wickham).

  Carly recalls Danny’s apartment as “fairly squalid.” “She’d always say to me, ‘The trouble with you is, you have no taste!’” he recalled, “but I hated the wallpaper she picked out for the bedroom.” Also troublesome were Danny’s kids, who regarded Carly with the skepticism that children of divorce often train on their father’s new girlfriend. But she got past the taste and the kids; she thought Danny immensely talented as a bass guitarist and was in thrall to him. “Carly was in Danny’s store all the time, swooning over him,” says Matt Umanov, Danny’s mentee, who opened his own guitar store on Bleecker Street. “Danny, oh my God! Danny was another example,” after Nick, “of the man carrying the creativity and the skill [in the relationship] for Carly; it was always about Danny’s guitar playing,” says Ellen Questel. Ellen understood Carly’s impulse to minimize herself for Danny, because she was doing the same; now that her husband, Vieri Salvadori, was teaching art history, Ellen put aside her own graduate psychology studies to sort index cards for his lectures.

  Carly introduced her onetime-polka-guitarist beau to the world of casual wealth and celebrity. Danny spent time at the Riverdale house, looking at its walls covered in pictures of illustrious authors who’d been friends of the family. He kept his middle-class defenses up; he resented her “rich college girl” polish. Curiously, of the young woman perceived by her friends as so vulnerably emotional, “I felt like she was following the directions on life’s box. She never cried, or raged, or laughed from down inside.”

  Lucy Simon Levine was pregnant. Danny, who definitely did not want a sixth child, felt disapproval from Carly’s older sister. “Lucy looked at me as the person who was keeping Carly from an orderly life,” he said. “Lucy’s life was orderly and conventional. She was married to a psychiatrist. She was having a baby. Carly’s life wasn’t orderly—she wasn’t married, she didn’t have a baby. Carly sort of envied Lucy’s ability to have her life in order, and I thought that there was pressure on Carly to live like Lucy.”

  But far more than even the conflict between orderliness and spontaneity; far more than his girlfriend’s good taste, her vivaciousness, or the fact that she could marshal an infinite amount of time to be with him, what struck Danny most about Carly was her intense sexuality. “To put it in one sentence, as bluntly and smoothly as possible: Carly loved sex,” he said. “She needed it. I’ve never known many women who loved sex like that.”

  Carly also possessed a kind of mischief Danny had never encountered before. In winter Carly knitted Danny a ball warmer. But making the novel item was only half the gift; the presentation was the other half: Carly had Joey’s beau Edward Villella jeté through Joey’s living room, naked
except for the tiny pink and purple garment. It was the era of scampish young women; whether outlawlike (Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde) or playful (Genevieve Waite in Joanna), cheekiness was in order. Still, who but Carly Simon would knit a ball warmer and then have a member of the New York City Ballet nude-model it?

  “Carly was game; she would do things on a dare. Being cool mattered to her,” Danny said. Danny parked a kilo—$5,000 worth—of grass in her bedroom closet at Joey’s, and he sold the lid, brick by brick, to musicians for a happy profit. Once, when Danny and Carly got into a taxi, he dared her to have sex with him, right then and there, as they hurtled along the avenue, in earshot of their cabbie and in possible view of the other riders and drivers. Carly’s reaction? Danny recalled: “‘No problem.’” Another time, “I said, ‘I bet you wouldn’t fuck me under one of those pedestrian bridges in Central Park.’ And she did, of course.” Her security with her innate respectability; her parents’ seamless meld of unconventional paramours with high intellectual standards, worthy causes, and impeccable social standing: all of this made sexuality for Carly Simon not what it might be for other girls—not a barricade to be stormed, not a potential retractor of virtue (there were no “gentle relations with names they must call me,” as there were for Joni, or, as Carole had feared, children who might do the math on their parents’ months of marriage at the time of their birth), not even anything earnest. Danny put it this way: “Carly wasn’t bohemian, and she wasn’t rebellious.” After a pause: “She didn’t have to be.”

  In early 1969, the focus shifted, from Carly and Danny to Carly and Jake—from Carly the available girlfriend to Carly the songwriter and potential performer.

  Jake had moved into an apartment in Murray Hill. Soon after, Carly moved out of Joey’s place and signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment just around the corner from Jake, on Thirty-fifth Street, between Park and Lexington avenues.