Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  The next key moment in the making of the record was Perry’s happening upon bassist Klaus Voormann, warming up his fingers by doing a fast brush of the strings—Perry seized on that ominous-sounding, minor-mode accidental lick and had Voormann repeat it for the song’s introduction, over which Carly whispers, “Son of a gun.” Finally, when everyone thought they had the track nailed, Perry still felt “it wasn’t 100 percent”; the drumming was good, but not good enough. Jim Gordon (who’d played on Carole’s album with The City, Now That Everything’s Been Said) came in at the last minute and did a run-through—and Perry knew: this was the drummer.* When Carly arrived at the studio the next day and Perry asked her to do the track yet again, she was beside herself. “I thought we had it!” she said, and burst into tears. “Look, you gotta trust me,” Perry pleaded. “This is the one. This is the record we’ve been dreaming about.”

  The cover of No Secrets shows Carly, as Arlyne puts it, as “the epitome of the 1970s educated woman.” Long, layered hair streaming out of the bottom of her wide-brimmed, high-topped hat, she is in errand-doing, lunch-date-going motion in velour jeans, tote bag swinging. Under her long-sleeved tight jersey, her nipples are discreetly visible.

  After recording No Secrets, Carly returned to New York with James. “Mick and I had spent time together” in London, she says (while denying there was an affair between them), “but I really didn’t want to be with anybody but James.” Steve Harris could tell “it had become more serious—there was a we’re-going-to-get-married kind of feeling. Carly wanted it to be permanent.”

  On November 1, the phone rang in Carly’s apartment. It was Bianca Jagger “and she said to James, ‘You know my husband and your fiancée are having an affair,’” Carly recalls, “and James said, ‘That’s not true’; he defended my integrity so beautifully.** (Confirming that she made that call, Bianca Jagger says that she suspected an affair because her husband sang chorus on Carly’s song, and she says she found “a letter from Carly to Mick and a letter for Mick to send to Carly.”)

  Carly says that she and James had, some days before the phone call, planned to marry quickly, but she also says, “There’s nothing that gets men so crazy as other men pursuing their women. Boy, did we decide fast!”

  Two days after Bianca Jagger’s phone call—on November 3, hours before James was to appear at Radio City Music Hall*—an extremely minimalist wedding ceremony was held in Carly’s apartment. Arrangements were so rushed that “certain tests were waived,” Carly says. The only guests were Andrea Simon and Trudy Taylor—the two opinionated matriarchs eyeing each other warily—and Jake Brackman, who served as best man to bride and groom. Just before the judge arrived, Carly called Jessica and Ellen with the happy news so they wouldn’t have to learn it from the media. While Peter Asher was denying to reporters the rumors that a marriage was taking place—because he didn’t know it was happening—James and Carly became man and wife. (However, the Ashers certainly knew the seriousness of the relationship and that a marriage was pending. Betsy—whom Joni had been calling during her months in Canada, playing her her new James-based songs for For the Roses—“was,” she says, “designated to tell Joni that James and Carly were going to get married.” Joni’s reaction, Betsy says, was “‘Oh, okay.’” She concentrated on what she hadn’t liked about James. “James’s Martha’s Vineyard scene was not for her. James had employed the whole island and all his brothers to build his little cottage. They were smoking dope on the roof. She’d passed on that.” Another friend of Joni’s says that by that time it was definitively over with James. “She was ready to let him go.”)

  Later that night, James told his Radio City Music Hall audience that he had just married Carly Simon. Cheers went up. A midnight party followed. Radio deejays announced the marriage—the first between two rock stars—as if it were a union of royalty.

  Two months after their marriage, Carly and James were the subject of a ten-page Rolling Stone interview, in its January 4, 1973, issue. Writer Stu Werbin referred to them in the article as Mr. and Ms. Simon-Taylor. They were posed, honeymoon style, lei-bedecked, by a boat rail—he in a white suit, she in a bikini bottom and a macramé-backed lei. The elusive, head-in-his-sound-hole James Taylor was remarkably open, declaring, “Carly and I are in love with each other.” (Perhaps fearing he’d gotten too earnest, he also played the tough rocker, adding, “She’s a piece of ass; it bothers me—if she looks at another man, I’ll kill her.”) He revealed that they’d already named what he called their “hypothetical children” Sarah and Ben. (That the naming of his future children had not only been done by the inscrutable, hard-drugging James Taylor but volunteered by him to Rolling Stone was startling. Male rock stars weren’t supposed to be romantic and domestic; this was girl stuff. This interview would lead to Carly and James being called everything from—in The Washington Post— “the Rainier and Grace of Rock” to, negatively, in hard rock circles, “the Ozzie and Harriet of Rock.”) James talked very honestly about his addiction, and, in a remark that would prove more truthful than she imagined, Carly said she was “addicted to James.”

  Then Carly turned the conversation to gender politics, using her marriage as a vehicle.

  Carly voiced concern at the fact that, until No Secrets, James had never listened to her music. He replied that he didn’t ever listen to records, not even his own, but that answer didn’t cut it with her. (She didn’t tell Rolling Stone, but early on he’d told her he didn’t like her songs—and this deeply hurt her). She used the interview to ponder aloud a disturbing realization that she and many other women were having, now that they were analyzing their romantic history through this new lens: “Any male that I’ve been involved with in the past,” she said (silently conjuring Delbanco and Armstrong), “has not liked my success, has not wanted me to be successful, has been threatened by that fact.”

  James came through—sort of. “I’m very much interested in not seeing Carly behind the kitchen stove, because I see females live totally vicariously through their husbands and it drives them crazy and it drives the husband crazy, too.” Still, he was speaking to one easy issue (a woman giving up her career), when she was expressing anxiety about a more challenging one: What if she surpassed him? The much-buzzed-about No Secrets and the meteoric “You’re So Vain” were about to be released. So were James’s less promising One Man Dog and its single “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”

  Carly had made feminist points before, telling the Chicago Tribune’s music critic Lynn Van Matre that, as Van Matre put it, “she’d never liked the term female singer-songwriter, with its implications that there is something unusual or somehow distinct about a woman who writes her own material as opposed to a man who does.” But in the Rolling Stone interview she became most fully what her female fans had approvingly suspected she was: a thoughtful, college-paper-word-using woman, laboring to turn the big ship of man-woman relations right along there with them. She said children should be raised to learn that gender differences don’t mean male “dominance” and female “subservience,” and that “men can be emotional and women can be breadwinners,” that gossip columnists’ interest in her love life rather than her work was “an extension of male chauvinistic pigism.” And she knew what she had to overcome: “My own conditioning is that one voice says to me, ‘Carly, you mustn’t try to dominate the situation…[and] you mustn’t expect James to do the dishes.’” But the other, new voice was saying, “‘I want my musicians to play in a slower tempo and it’s James’s turn to do the dishes tonight.’”

  Carly said that James’s indifference to her work “worried” her “terribly”—it seemed to strike a too-familiar nerve. Looking back today on her sister’s marriage, Lucy Simon thinks she knows why: “James was so similar to our father in terms of looks and brilliance that I think Carly transferred to James the need she felt to prove her worth to our father, who died before she could know he loved her. And,” over the course of the marriage, “she kept on trying to prove something to
him.” Jake makes a similar assessment: “James was not at all delighted with Carly’s creativity. But her dad wasn’t, either. In some way she was looking for that; that was what she knew. A withholding man was familiar.”

  “You’re So Vain” struck like a brick through a window. The star power that early listeners had heard in the song came through to critics and fans alike. Even Ellen Willis, who was to rock criticism what Renata Adler was to film (and whose lower-middle-class background and radical politics had made her resent and distrust Carly’s perspective on previous songs), had to admit, in The New Yorker, that this was “a great rock ’n’ roll song.” Willis likened the lyrics’ “inspired sloppiness” to Dylan’s, and she loved the “good-natured nastiness” of Carly’s delivery. The song’s humor made its feminism an easily swallowed pill, but in the long run it was that aspect of the song that would endure: fifteen years later Stephen Holden would credit the “magnificently vulgar pop masterpiece” with “asserting a new balance of power in male-female relationships.”

  “You’re So Vain” hit #1 as soon after its release as a single could. (“The Right Thing to Do” and “We Have No Secrets” also became hits.) No Secrets also hit #1, a rare double jackpot. Carly now had the success that no one would have predicted for her three years earlier. Now, as she neared thirty, it was time to have that little Ben or Sarah. Carly and Arlyne both became pregnant in spring 1973, “when no one else was,” Arlyne says, only slightly exaggerating. In feminist ground zero New York, marriage and motherhood were now considered retro and suspect and, by Me Decade values, the package was unappealingly self-limiting. Carly and Arlyne combed the unpromising maternity clothes racks together, two plumped-up women in a sea of svelte self-actualizers. Carly wrote “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby” about how not-the-thing-to-do it was to be knocked up in I Am Woman 1973. The song would be the centerpiece of her next album, Hotcakes, which would show a glowingly pregnant Carly, in a gauzy caftan, sitting by a kitchen window in the town house she and James had bought on East Sixty-second Street.

  And as she, who’d been “just a little too free” for so long, settled into domesticity, across the country a woman who’d been just a little too sensible for so long was poised for a leap. The estimable Ellen Willis once wrote that the coming-toward-middle-age members of the 1960s generation had trouble eventually grasping 1980s “identity politics” because identity politics glamorized that which you were born as, which was exactly counter to the ’60s dream of becoming the opposite of what you had been born as. Sometimes this transformation happened by bonding with the Other so deeply you became a “new” person in attitude, passion, geography. The 1960s were over and that romance was fading; still, such a transformation would come—late but very hard—to the woman who everyone thought was the steadiest: Carole.

  PART FIVE

  “we just come from such different sets of circumstance”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  carole

  1972–1984

  On a damp twilight in late May 1973, Carole—in a blue and white tunic over jeans, her hair newly short—strode onto the stage in Central Park’s Great Lawn and even before she hugged Mayor John Lindsay (who’d proudly introduced her), the more than 70,000 assembled fans let out wild, grateful cheers. “We love you, Carole!” “Sing ‘Natural Woman’!” “You’ve got a friend, Carole!” they shouted. Carole surveyed the small city of euphoric faces and reminded them: “It was supposed to…”—spelling the word, so as not to tempt fate—“R-A-I-N.” Laughter and more cheers—yes, despite the forecast, they’d camped out on the moist grass for hours. In the VIP section sat Jack Nicholson—and Joni: living in Bel Air now (and feeling “really uncomfortable” wearing Yves St. Laurent pants at a rock concert) and having recently had a brief fling with the ubiquitous Warren Beatty, Joni had been absorbed into young A-list Hollywood, though she still retained her artistic bohemian heart. “This and the Ellsberg trial* are the only two events it’s proper to be seen at in public,” Nicholson told reporters at the concert.

  As Carole sat down at the grand piano (which Genie had fretted might not have been properly tuned) and curled her hands over the keys, the noise receded to cricket-hearing silence. Two years after its release, Tapestry officially stood as the biggest-selling rock album in history and was still as well loved now as when it had freshly hit the airwaves, and this was Carole’s first hometown performance since the scope of her triumph had seeped into the city’s jaded consciousness. As she pounded out the opening chords of “Beautiful,” the audience went crazy—applause and whoops rippling like a great aural wave from the penthouse tops of Fifth Avenue to the penthouse tops of Central Park West. During this and her next nine songs—amplified by a five-piece band (with Charlie on upright bass) and six-man horn section—the fans tossed bouquets, pushed at the stage fencing, and had to be chased down from some of the 200-odd scaffolding frames that held the speakers aloft. Unlike every other concert on this twelve-city tour, tonight’s was free, Carole’s “small way of giving something back” to the city, she said. It rated reporting (“Carole King Draws 70,000 to Central Park”) on page one of The New York Times the next day, side by side with the lead story about hazards for the astronauts on America’s first space station and major news in the Watergate scandal: “Prosecution Is Said to Link Haldeman and Ehrlichman to Ellsberg Case Break-In.”

  Carole hadn’t toured since giving birth to Molly. She’d turned down almost every publication, even declining the cover of Life magazine—and her stiff refusal to give interviews during this current tour seemed too curious for the press to miss. The Washington Post’s Tom Zito noted: “Carole King, who has sold more than 15 million albums in the past three years, would rather not talk about it. ‘Carole is basically a woman with two children and a new baby and she’s got a home life,’ says…her manager’s publicity man. ‘She just feels it’s a lot easier if her life isn’t reviewed every time she performs,’ says manager Lou Adler. ‘She has her private life and she wants to keep it that way.’”

  The reason for the diffidence? She loved Charlie deeply, and her fame “was a tremendous burden and challenge for them,” says a close observer. “It was a terrible struggle for her,” trying to uphold the equilibrium of her marriage through the stress of maintaining the level of success to which she had skyrocketed. Carole’s getting all the attention unintentionally became “like a smack in the face to Charlie; if she introduced him” during a concert or event “he would thank her for acknowledging him; he would feel she was only doing so to [make him feel important], that her fans didn’t care about him.” When people noticed Carole in public “sometimes the timing was all wrong,” the observer continues, “and it was very upsetting to her, especially when Charlie was there.”

  It’s not that Charlie was temperamental or demanding. He was supportive, but that was the problem. Says John Fischbach, “There was nothing wrong with Charlie Larkey; he was a normal guy. It just would have been very difficult for any man in that situation to be ‘Mr. King’; you pay for that.’” Especially if you’re an unproven musician. “Being married to Carole wasn’t good for Charlie’s career,” says Danny Kortchmar. “He hadn’t made his bones”—established respect as a musician—before becoming involved with her. “People thought he was just getting hired because he was married to Carole. And he was overshadowed—Carole was a very strong and determined woman.”

  Carole had made two albums since Music. Rhymes & Reasons was released at the end of 1972, quickly shot to #2 on the Billboard chart, and stayed there for five weeks. Her significance to the culture was expressed through its large, grainy, close-up cover shot: Carole in profile, almost expressionless: her frizzily curly hair and prominent nose filling the cardboard square. She’d become America’s sweetheart despite physical attributes she’d once despaired of but which she (along with an evolved public) now embraced.

  Like much of Music, Rhymes & Reasons has a noncommercial, almost piano-bar feel, and Carole’s voice has an und
ertone of vulnerability, even weariness. Four of the album’s songs were cowritten by Toni, and in these Carole, who had never lived alone, gains an alter ego in Toni, who, as an adult, had lived only that way. From a distance of over three decades, these then somewhat overlooked songs (critics tended to lump them in with Carole’s solo compositions as being optimistic friendship songs—they were actually more sophisticated) seem like time capsules of how it felt to be a single woman holding her own in a time and town where sensitivity was valued in the political and spiritual abstract but not practiced in the male-to-female interpersonal. “Come Down Easy” is the breezy plaint of a post-1960s woman for whom “enough space…enough time…pieces of fruit and glasses of wine” are happy compensation for being alone. The heroine of the dolorous waltz “My My She Cries” disappears—what effort it takes to stay balanced, confident, and visible in the brand-new normal of extended female independence. “Peace in the Valley”’s narrator duns herself for gossip (indulging in “talk that kills for fun”) and self-absorption (“I know that man’s my brother / and that I’m the selfish one”), indirectly revealing that altruism is the luxury of the securely situated. The infectious “Feeling Sad Tonight” (which Carole set to a counterintuitive, thumping stridence) features an everywoman on a barstool, “always feeling half right and half safe.” “Half right and half safe”: it was that so-well-put sense of marginalization and risk that the innately conventional, always domestically occupied Carole had avoided all her life. “The First Day In August” is a love song Charlie and Carole wrote together—he, the words; she, the melody. “And nothing will come between us,” they vow, against substantial odds.