Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

Toward the end of 1992, Jim’s inability to complete his novel after four years of effort—and four years of Carly supporting him, emotionally and financially—was eating away at their marriage. He gave up on the novel entirely. Despite being “madly in love” with each other, as he puts it; despite a personal intimacy that seemed to have nothing to do with money and résumé, sadly, “the world couldn’t go away in our heads,” he says. “When you marry a famous, relatively wealthy woman and you don’t have money of your own, you’re a bounder. With any relationship that’s this unbalanced, you both withstand a psychological barrage.” Jim moved into a small apartment in a tenement building on the Upper West Side—“the move showed I was a man of integrity”—and went back to selling insurance.

  Carly deeply missed the man who soothed her through her anxieties, and Jim wrote of now being “a spoon without a mate,” aching “for your melody and musk…a tad of linen next to your skin…the timbre of your voice close to my breath.”

  The separation only lasted a few months. Emergency intervened: Andrea Simon was diagnosed with lung cancer. Jim returned to Carly, while Carly cared for her mother on the Vineyard. He secured a position teaching poetry at Harvard with Robert Coles, the noted child psychologist. Eventually, when Coles started a quarterly magazine on the arts and humanities called Double Take, Jim was made editor.

  Carly’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother had always been complicated. She had both rebelled against Andrea (becoming a hands-on, breast-feeding mother rather than relying on nannies, for one thing) and become like Andrea: the witty seductress, the stylish life organizer. As with many psychoanalyzed, feminist women, she had come to view her mother both sympathetically—as a victim of an earlier, sexist age, doing what she had to do to escape husband-borne indignities—and also critically, angrily. One day (before Andrea’s cancer had been diagnosed) Carly dashed off a lyric-metered letter to Andrea about the unresolved issue of Ronnie Klinzing. “Why can’t you apologize / You say it was all Daddy’s fault / He loved Auntie Jo and treated you like a scullery maid…” Still, Carly contended, the victims were her and her sisters. She considered mailing the letter—getting one’s true feelings out was the orthodoxy of the day—but was stopped by a remembered bit of Andrea’s advice: never mail a letter composed in strong emotion. The wise demurral would inspire an album (and title song), Letters Never Sent.

  Even as Andrea’s cancer advanced, “she was still indomitable,” Jim says. “She said, ‘You’ve gotta do this! You’ve gotta do that!’” Carly cared for her frail mother—“carrying Andrea to the ferry,” Jim says, “taking her to the bathroom—this woman who had been such a giant and such a tremendous influence on her daughters.” When Andrea resisted radiation treatment, Carly hired two handsome young actors to escort her mother to the hospital; Andrea rose to the occasion. As 1993 turned to 1994, Andrea’s prognosis dimmed. Carly, Joey, Lucy, and Peter decided not to tell their mother that she was dying. “We knew it was a truth that she did not want to know,” Lucy has said. Instead, they gathered around her bed in the Grosvenor Avenue house and sang to her. In February, she succumbed; Carly was at her bedside, and “I wanted to crawl under the covers with her and go back to the womb,” she told a confidante.

  Instead, she wrote:

  I fought over the pearls

  With the other girls

  But it was just a metaphor for what is wrong with us

  Those three lines are resonant for any adult sisters for whom arguments about material things are merciful proxies for the hurts, hierarchies, and guilts of childhood, which indelibly animate their sisterhood. In the alternately solemn and buoyant “Like a River,” in which she invokes the grand nurturance of the mother she cannot believe is dead, Carly returns to the simile (female = river) she’d coined twenty-two years earlier in “Think I’m Gonna Have a Baby,” but now she shears it of its breeziness. “I’ll wait no more for you as a daughter,” she sings, then turns around and vows, “but I will wait for you for-e-ver, like a river.”

  Immediately after Andrea’s death, Carly’s friend Jackie Kennedy Onassis took a turn for the worse in her battle against lymphoma. Carly had a lunch for Jackie on April 14, 1994—“the last day that Jackie was leading a normal life,” says Joe Armstrong, who was present. “Jackie was just finishing a round of chemo; she was wearing a wig, which was very upsetting and jarring to Carly and me, because we hadn’t seen her in a month or two and she was no longer the strong, vibrant person we knew.” Still, Jackie was upbeat. “She said, ‘Just four more weeks and I get my life back.’” As Carly’s two guests were putting on their coats and leaving, Carly said, “I have something for you,” and she put a tape of a song, “Touched by the Sun,” into Jackie’s hand, explaining that she had written it for her. The song, delivered with Carly’s “You’re So Vain” ferocity, was about a woman living in proximity to greatness—as women of Jackie’s (and Andrea’s) era did—but also living daringly, even foolhardily. (“I need to let them say, ‘She must have been mad.’”) People had thought Jackie Kennedy “mad” when she married homely, crass, foreign Aristotle Onassis and fell off her young-widow-of-Camelot throne. But her quieter audacity was in being, for twenty years, a regular Manhattan working woman, strolling alone through Central Park; trying, with any editor’s limited effectiveness, to get celebrities to pen tell-alls; living happily with a man she wasn’t married to; standing in movie lines like any ticket holder.

  Jackie, Joe Armstrong says, “was bowled over by Carly’s song.”

  At the beginning of the third week of May, when the Central Park outside their windows was freshly abloom, Carly and Joe knew that Jackie was dying. They were on their knees, praying, in Joe’s Upper West Side living room, when the phone rang. It was Marta, who’d been Caroline and John’s nanny, saying, “Come right over.” Jackie wanted to say good-bye. The Fifth Avenue apartment was mobbed with friends, but only women, and few of them, at that, were allowed into the bedroom. “Madam wouldn’t want a man to see her like this,” Marta told Carly, so Joe hung back as Carly entered the bedroom of the most queenly woman in America.

  A day or so later, Carly and Joe returned to the apartment—for Jackie’s wake. “We were just shattered,” Joe recalls. They hadn’t expected “a big cocktail party, people with drinks in their hands, all this noise—and there was Jackie, in the corner, in the casket.” At the funeral, Ted Kennedy humorously orated about his brother—“Jack” this and “Jack” that. It seemed odd to many that the woman who had for decades led such a singular, self-powered life was, in death, reduced to that long-ago stage of her life she had surpassed—being the ornamental wife among young lions. The Camelot images that filled the nation’s TV screens during the tributes to her seemed as knee-jerk and unrepresentative as Joe and Carly felt the wake had been.

  Letters Never Sent was released in 1995, with Carly’s songs to her mother and Jackie on it. But there were no singles, no hits. Carly was now called a “heritage”—read older—artist by Arista. She had passed the fifty-year mark.

  Carly loved Jim; her charming poet was the stallion who thought her a goddess. But for all of that romance, issues remained in their marriage, and Carly and Jim did what so many verbal, middle-aged married people now did: threw themselves into couples therapy. “Carly’s attitude was: ‘I don’t give a shit how much this hurts! We’re gonna get an answer!’” he says. But “two or three” therapists later, they felt fatigued and disheartened. “The last counselor—we’re both crying, walking down the street…and she says, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ And I say, ‘I’m not either.’” They made one last—inventive—stab at counseling. Carly had read that in China, when married couples have problems, they enlist another couple to counsel them. They chose Jim’s good friend, TV writer David Black, and Black’s wife, Debbie, to perform this function. Through their “sessions” with the Blacks—with David heatedly taking Carly’s side and Debbie heatedly taking Jim’s (“she, like me, was trying to be independent within a marri
age”)—they realized one root of their problem: “Carly thinks and feels symbolically, while I think and feel literally.”

  Still, that abstract revelation didn’t solve things. In 1997 Carly and Jim moved into an arrangement they would occupy for the next eight years: they would stay married, remaining “madly in love,” talking many times a day like best friends, keeping the future of their relationship open—but mostly living separately. Of those “many ways to touch,” they’d found an imperfect version they could live with. Carly recorded another album of classic torch songs (“Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” and more) with one original composition, Film Noir. Steeped in emotion over the limbo state of her marriage, she put her heart into the songs; Film Noir is her favorite of her albums. Then again, perhaps all that emotion was her body warning her mind that, after her mother’s death and Jackie’s death and the separation from Jim, an even bigger blow was coming.

  In October 1997, Carly felt a lump in her breast; she went in for a mammogram. Breast cancer awareness was on every woman’s radar screen now. Pink ribbons in October, support groups and foundations abounded; you knew your chance was one in eight. Especially if you were over fifty and thus had beaten those odds for so long, and if you had, as Carly had, thirty-five years earlier, taken those high-dosage Enovid birth control pills, then every time you donned the paper exam gown, your heart skipped a beat. “We all felt, ‘Is this mammography the one?’” says Mia Farrow.

  Carly was scheduled for a biopsy.

  Jim (who now had a public relations job in Manhattan) had been ready to dash out to the airport for a business trip when his secretary stopped him and said, “Carly’s on the phone, hysterical.” The tumor was malignant. “In the initial shock of diagnosis, I banged my head against the table and said, ‘No! No! No! You’re wrong!’ to the doctor on the phone,” Carly says. Later she e-mailed Mia: “The anvil has fallen.”

  Once the shock wore off, “I just gathered my forces together,” Carly says. “It felt like little people coming out inside me—a phalanx, a Roman army, saying, ‘We’re going to do what we need to do to make you well! Of course, you’re going to beat this!’” “She was remarkable, she was amazing—there was no self-pity; she just said, ‘Let’s go!’” Jim says, adding, “Women are amazing.” Indeed, Carly discovered that breast cancer was “something you pass on, like a sorority sister. Within hours, all these women began to appear—my neighbor Anna Strasberg, and Lucy and Joey and Blue, my assistant, and Marlo Thomas—so many women wanted to support me. Gloria Steinem”—who’d had a lumpectomy—“called me and said she’d been through it and she’d gone dancing afterward.”

  With Lucy’s help, Carly secured the noted oncologist Larry Norton.* The mastectomy was scheduled for November 12. The crucial thing was the sentinel node test that followed, to see whether the cancer had spread. As Carly was wheeled into surgery, she says, “I felt I was under a guillotine.” Waiting for the results, Jim raced to the church across the street from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, fell to his knees at the Shrine for St. Jude, “and prayed my ass off.” Everyone’s prayers were answered. “The words ‘no nodes’ were so powerful—that was my rescue,” says Carly.

  After the surgery Carly took Sally and Ben for a trip to the island of Tortola. Then she started chemotherapy—her hair did not all fall out—and she struck up a telephone friendship with Trish Kubal, a Bay Area–based venture capitalist and mother of four who’d had a mastectomy the previous year. Trish had first spoken to Carly right after her diagnosis, when “she was scared, very frightened, but hungry for knowledge,” Trish says. Now, the two women—survivor and patient—talked almost daily, and Trish passed on to Carly her breast cancer sorority sister life lessons. “One: forget public health statistics; you are a sample of one. You only have your own life; save it. Two: you need to be able to fall apart; you need the emotional freedom. Forget about being a ‘good patient.’ Three: some people are going to be jerks when they hear you have cancer; this is a good opportunity to prune people you don’t need in your life any longer. Four: if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re going to end up resentful. On days you don’t feel like it, don’t get out of your pajamas! Five: you will learn from this. You will realize how important regular life is. In a split second your world has changed,” Trish told Carly. “People will say, ‘Do you want to see the Taj Mahal? Do you want the Hope diamond?’ And you’ll say: ‘No! I want to have a cup of tea at my kitchen table and love my loved ones.’”

  The rules went just so far. After the chemotherapy, Carly entered a depression deeper than any she had ever known. Jim helped her through it, and it was grueling. “We had a lot of trouble,” he sighs. Ironically, or fittingly, in helping Carly through her depression, Jim would prepare for his own, which beset him several years later and which Carly helped him through. “Styron said it well,” Jim says. “Depression is the wrong word—it should be called a shit storm.”

  Carly, who had always leaned on her friends (and given to them), was now in new, dark territory. She’d always been anxious and phobic, but before she was young, and healthy, and famous, and living with a lover—or, at any given time, at least some of those things—when her demons descended. Now she had none of those props. She says, “The one thing anyone knows who has been through a hefty bout of melancholia is that you think it will never end and, therefore, you can’t use up your dance card with your friends. You get good at avoidance and denial and the fake smile.” Only with intimates, like Jim, could she be herself. During this time, Jim says, “She would often say, ‘Why do you put up with me? I’m such damaged goods! What are you doing with me?’ And I would say, ‘Don’t you see? I’m not in love with your success! I’m in love with your struggle.’” Poignantly, he was echoing what she had shouted to him after the Mick Jagger incident at Shea Stadium: I love you for you. Yet the idealistic innocence of that sentiment was hard to maintain in the trenches of complex midlife reality.

  One day, after an appointment with Dr. Norton, Carly met Ellen for a drink at the Carlyle Hotel. She was planning on getting breast reconstruction (she eventually did), her depression had lifted, and she felt buoyant and hopeful. As if on cue, who should enter the bar but Mr. “You’re So Vain” himself: Warren Beatty! “Oh, how wonderful that you’re in town [from the Vineyard],” the charming lothario said. “Why are you here?” Carly told him: for an appointment with her oncologist. “And she felt the warmth in his voice disappear,” Ellen says. Beatty quickly exited. Trish had been right—cancer involved pruning people from your life on the basis of character.

  On the other hand, James had come through. One night, when Carly was midway through her chemo, he’d visited her in her New York apartment. As he was leaving, she said, “If you ever think of me, just give me a call. Even if we’re just silent on the phone together, that would be so nice.” Carly remembers that he replied, “If I called you every time I thought of you, there would be little time for anything else.”

  Still, despite that sweet exchange, in late 2000, Carly was without a record label, hitless, motherless, a breast cancer survivor, and past fifty-five. Her grown children were off on their own. Jim was living apart from her, and James would soon marry his third wife, Kim Smedvig. Carly was at a point in her life when, she has said, “I had to fight being discarded like an old dog.” She moved a drum machine into Sally’s old bedroom at the Vineyard house; she taught herself how to lay out eight tracks and mix them. And, working from nine p.m. until dawn, she self-recorded an album of songs that came from the heart, The Bedroom Tapes.

  She wrote and sang about her deep depression and about her fear that she was viewed as a has-been, with her big hits and glamorous men all in the past. The centerpiece of the album was the song “Scar,” about the lessons that breast cancer had taught her. Though she didn’t name him, Warren Beatty’s recoiling at the news of her cancer was a “gift in disguise,” she sang, implicitly revealing how much more useful
ly brambled her journey was than his emotionally cosseted one (“that poor little puppy, so scared of misfortune and always on guard”). Women of her generation had had the more challenging journey—and that had paid off in wisdom.

  Don Was, who’d had such success with Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time, and who’d been one of Carly’s producers on 1985’s Spoiled Girl, visited her during this time. When Carly had entered his life at the beginning of the 1980s, she had taken him—“a bum with bad credit from Detroit,” as he puts it—under her wing. She had helped him pick out a present that would make the woman he was in love with agree to marry him, and she had used her charm and connections to install him into David Susskind’s old apartment. Now he listened to The Bedroom Tapes, and, he recalls, “They were incredibly personal and unslick. With her unfounded humility, Carly doesn’t know how magnificent she is.”

  The album wasn’t perfect. Other than the wise, forgiving “Scar,” with its great hook line, “And a really big man / loves a really good scar,” most of the songs were subpar for Carly, but they were a hand grenade against profound despair. That’s what counted.

  After her chemotherapy was finished, Carly sprang to the rescue of Ben’s close friend and Exeter classmate John Forte. Forte, the Fugees’ producer, had been staying with Carly during the recording of The Bedroom Tapes. Like Marc Cohn, John Kennedy Jr., and Don Was, Forte became one of the younger male mentees in her life. He called her “Mama C.” In the same way that Andrea had been infuriated by the inability of her friends Jackie and Rachel Robinson to be able to buy a house in Connecticut, Carly was infuriated by how John—black and dreadlocked—was always getting stopped by cops for no reason. (Once, only her presence in the car spared him a bogus interrogation. “I look so damn above-the-law—an older white woman who couldn’t be hiding anything more interesting than a thermos full of lemonade.”) In July 2000, John Forte was arrested at Newark Airport, where he’d agreed to pick up a package (he thought it contained cash) that proved to be full of narcotics. He was sentenced to fourteen to twenty years in prison. Carly put up $250,000 of Forte’s $650,000 bail—and she made justice for John Forte her personal mission. She has bankrolled his appeal and has spoken out against the onerous Rockefeller drug laws. Over the last seven years, a good hunk of her time has been spent meeting with Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and anyone else of influence to get John’s conditions improved (she managed to have him moved from a Texas prison to a Pennsylvania prison, so his family could visit him) and to try to get his sentence reduced.