More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon

by Stephen Davis

  Trudy Taylor made the best of her lot, as her husband now communicated with her and the children through letters, mostly long delayed. Still, she took her brood on European summer vacations. Music lessons were important: James had four years of cello lessons and played in his school orchestra. Alex played the violin. Kate had piano lessons and took up the Carolina mountain dulcimer. Liv played the banjo. They all sang in home and at church and learned to vocalize in the characteristic Appalachian accent of the Carolina country singers.

  Dr. Taylor returned to the family after two years, but things were never the same. Much later, James was quoted to the effect that his father came back but never came home. Rather than reintegrate with the family, he built a beautiful modernist house for them in the Morgan Creek Road neighborhood and threw himself into his academic work, eventually becoming the respected dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School. His political liberalism and aura of aloofness made him something of an outsider in his community, but it also served him well as a leader and authority figure. Despite his reputation as a two-fisted drinker, everyone knew they could depend on him. The Taylors entertained a lot as part of their academic world, and music was always a feature of this, much as it was in the Simon family in the same era.

  Also as in the Simon family, the children’s best memories were of family vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, where they had many seasonal friends and the blissful pastimes of sailing, fishing, and swimming. Music was a big draw there, and Jamie Taylor and his siblings almost never missed the hootenannies at the Chilmark Community Center when they were on the island.

  James Taylor at fourteen was over six feet tall, introverted, shy, and under the baleful influence of his older brother, Alex, who was rambunctious, getting in scrapes, and starting a rock-and-roll band. The Taylors decided to send Jamie to one of the great New England boarding schools, where he could grow in a protected environment. They chose Milton Academy, near Boston. Founded in 1792, Milton was then divided into separate schools for boys and girls. Both of President Kennedy’s younger brothers had gone there. James arrived with his cello in September 1962, already very homesick. But he tried to fit in and was given the nickname Moose, because he was the tallest boy in the class. Later that year he got permission from his mother to sell the cello, and bought a guitar instead. “It saved my life,” James has said. He taught himself a personal fingering style, still in use fifty years later. By the tenth grade, Moose was one of the popular boys in school. He could play Beatles songs on his guitar after hearing them once. His was a serious, brooding presence. He told his friends he missed North Carolina all the time, and was trying to write a song about it.

  The summer he was fifteen, he met and started playing music with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard. Danny Kortchmar, or “Kootch,” was a little older than James. His family had a summer house in Chilmark, near where the Taylors stayed, and so there were many opportunities for the two boys to put their guitars together and practice. James had a quirky, very moody personality, and Danny could see that he wasn’t real happy, but he was already a brilliant guitar player. That year, Danny asked James to play the Chilmark Community Center’s annual talent contest with him, which they proceeded to win with a standing ovation.

  During his third year at Milton, James had some health problems. Despite being the star musician of the school’s weekend coffeehouse, he seemed depressed, missed classes, slept all the time. In 2011 he looked back in an interview: “When I was fifteen, I could hardly live inside my skin. It was like I’d been born on the dark side of the moon.” The school decided to send him home for a rest, and he spent the rest of the year recuperating and playing in his delinquent brother’s band, the Fabulous Corsairs. Alex was the lead singer, James the lead guitar; they rocked a lot of dances and frat parties in the Chapel Hill area.

  He tried again in the autumn of 1965 as the Beatles’ new songs blasted on Boston’s WMEX and WRKO. But again he lost his way, settling into a deep depression that unnerved his friends and teachers. You couldn’t talk to Moose. He just looked down at his shoes and retreated into his guitar for solace. Milton was a famous prep school, and everyone in his class was excited about applying to colleges and universities. James was too depressed to bother, because he knew he wasn’t going to college. “It was really just me and my guitar,” he remembered about this painful time.

  Everyone tried to help. One of the guidance counselors asked James if he could put his feelings into words. James described a process that would start with him not feeling well, which then evolved into insecurity, fears—what he called getting the blues. Then came the inexplicable onset of really black moods, and then despair—very deep. This turned into a profound, almost narcoleptic fatigue. By the time school officials intervened, James was sleeping for twenty-hour stretches. He was removed from his dormitory and placed under closer supervision, in one of the masters’ houses. Poor Moose was beloved by many, and his illness was breaking almost every heart at Milton. When he went home for the Christmas break, he resolved not to return to the school. But he could never quite bring himself to tell his parents, who were having trouble with the designated black sheep of the family, Alex.

  Jamie went back to Boston in January, but first crossed the river to Cambridge to talk to Stan Sheldon, a teacher who was married to his mother’s best friend. He told Sheldon that he was afraid he was going to kill himself if he went back to school. Sheldon took him to a psychiatrist, who declared an emergency. The Taylors were called, and James agreed to a voluntary commitment at McLean Hospital, the famous psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. James agreed to go if he could bring his guitar with him, and he spent the next nine months, as he later called it, “knocking ’round the zoo.”

  McLean was basically a luxurious asylum, and very upscale. Detox and rehab were specialties. Famous patients had included Ray Charles, the poet Robert Lowell, and members of the country’s great families. James was enrolled in McLean’s private academy, the Arlington School, from which he graduated in 1966. (This was the end of his formal education. Both his brother Liv and sister, Kate, would follow him to McLean and the Arlington School. None of the Taylor’s five children would attend college.)

  At McLean, James underwent daily psychotropic medication. He ate meals with plastic utensils that were counted upon return, and stared out the barred windows while the psychiatrists tried to figure him out. When he was eligible for the draft, he was called for a physical examination by the army, and was literally escorted to the draft board in Cambridge by men in white hospital coats.

  He also wrote some songs, including “Knocking ’Round the Zoo.”

  By September 1966 he felt well enough to check out. He’d had enough. The doctors told him that he was acting “against medical advice,” and that he would have to be observed by staff in a locked ward for three days before they could discharge him. So James hid himself and some of his record albums in the back of a friend’s van and escaped from McLean, hoping never to return.

  He called his friend Danny Kortchmar, who was living in New York with his young wife. “Kootch,” he said, “I’m out!”

  “Come to New York,” Danny said. “Let’s start a band!”

  APPLE CORPS

  While James Taylor was in the hospital, Danny Kortchmar had been working in a New York band called the King Bees, which became the house band at Arthur, the famous disco in Midtown. When James came to New York with some great new songs—“Knocking ’Round the Zoo,” “Carolina in My Mind,” the beginnings of “Rainy Day Man”—Danny knew that an incipient rock star had fallen into his lap. He proposed that James become the lead singer of a new group, the James Taylor Band. James declined this honor, and the group was renamed the Flying Machine. Joel O’Brien from the King Bees was recruited on drums. They taught the bass parts of James’s songs to their Vineyard friend Zack Wiesner (the son of MIT president Jerome Wiesner, who had been an adviser to the late president Ken
nedy). The band rehearsed in the basement of the Albert Hotel in the Village, and eventually got a gig replacing the hit-bound Lovin’ Spoonful as the house band at the Night Owl Café, an old Village landmark. This resulted in James writing another new song, a rollicking R&B number called “Night Owl,” which the band recorded and released as a single that failed to get on the radio.

  This lasted about seven months, well into 1967. Then James started using hard drugs. “Joel O’Brien had been doing heroin,” Kortchmar said much later, “and then one day I realized that James was, too.” This caused a rift in the Flying Machine, and eventually the band disintegrated as James’s habit became more acute. But for James, heroin was a miracle; it actually made him feel better. The drug is a potent analgesic painkiller, and for James it became a highly effective medication against acute depression and the suicidal feelings that continued to plague and frighten him. Heroin’s narcotic euphoria left him free to function, at least creatively, at a higher level than he had ever dreamed of. The downside, of course, was that heroin addiction is an expensive full-time job. After his band fell apart, James could be seen passed out on the benches of Washington Square Park after scoring another fix of the inexpensive Southeast Asian heroin that was flooding America as the Vietnam War continued. Then he turned his apartment into a crash pad for other junkies and some strippers. “I had fallen in with some people,” he said later, “who could have done me some harm. There were warrants out for these two guys, Smack and Bobby, who were staying with me. They were robbing people to get money for dope. I was addicted myself. I was getting desperate. Then I ran out of money, and no one would lend me any.”

  Strung out, sick, hungry, at the end of his rope, James called his father in Chapel Hill. Isaac Taylor listened to his son. He said, “What’s your address? Stay put. I’ll be right there.” Indeed, Dr. Taylor got in the family station wagon, drove straight to New York, and rescued his son from depravity and almost certain death.

  When he felt better, toward the end of 1967, James left for England to seek his fortune there. His model was Jimi Hendrix, who had left New York as an unknown the year before and now was the biggest rock star in the world. James’s intention was to busk in the streets, write some new songs, and get discovered.

  It worked.

  His father’s mother had left him a little money, supposed to go to him on his twenty-first birthday. His parents let him have the legacy early—James was only nineteen at the time—which was enough for him to get to London and buy a car. He packed an old acoustic guitar he’d bought in Durham, North Carolina, when he was fourteen and flew to London, staying with friends in Notting Hill and Chelsea and, indeed, singing for money in busy tube stations with an open guitar case for the coins people tossed in. He bought a little Ford Cortina and took off for Formentera, the idyllic Mediterranean island favored by Europe’s hippies. He met a girl named Karen and together they took the ferry to neighboring Ibiza, where James wrote “Carolina in My Mind.”

  James played some of his songs for friends. A young woman who worked for the BBC and knew people in Soho, where London’s music and film industry was based, encouraged him to make a demo and shop it around. James’s money was running low in early 1968, but for eight pounds (about fifty dollars) he purchased a forty-five-minute block of time in a Soho jingle studio on Greek Street. Playing by himself on a stool, recorded by one microphone, he recorded “Something in the Way She Moves,” “Carolina in My Mind,” “Rainy Day Man,” “Night Owl,” and six other songs. A few days later, he collected them pressed on an acetate disc that timed out to forty-five minutes.

  Spring 1968. James Taylor called his friend Danny Kootch on a hunch he might have a connection into the London scene, and of course he did. Danny read Billboard, which had announced that Peter Asher, late of hit-making British Invasion stars Peter and Gordon, had taken a job with the Beatles’ record label, Apple, as a talent scout and A&R executive. Peter and Gordon had a run of fourteen hit singles in America during the previous three years, including a number one in 1964 with “A World Without Love.” (Peter and Gordon’s hits had all been written by Paul McCartney, whose girlfriend Jane Asher was Peter’s sister.) The King Bees had toured with Peter and Gordon as their American backing band—connection made. Danny gave James a number for Peter Asher. Asher picked up the phone. He told James Taylor, “I’m listening to everything.”

  James: “I went in and played ‘Something in the Way She Moves’ for Peter Asher. Then Peter played my acetate for Paul and John [Lennon], and suddenly I was on their label. It was my big break. It was like a door opened, and the rest of my life was on the other side.”

  Paul McCartney: “I heard [James’s] demos. Peter played them for me, and I heard his voice and his guitar, and I thought he was great. And then Peter brought him round, and he played live [for Paul and George Harrison at Apple’s headquarters on Baker Street], so it was just like: ‘WOW! He’s great.’ And he’d been having troubles. Peter explained that he’d just got clean off drugs and was in a difficult time in his life. But he was playing great, and he had enough songs for an album.” George Harrison loved “Something in the Way She Moves” so much that he later stole the title for his song “Something.” James Taylor, after only a few months in London, became the first American musician signed to Apple Records. Somewhat in a state of shock, he called his parents in North Carolina and told them that everything was going to be fine because he was working with the Beatles now.

  James needed a recording band. Peter Asher took out ads in Melody Maker and New Musical Express. They were given an attic loft at Apple and held auditions for people who answered the ads. Musicians were hired, and Joel O’Brien came from New York to play the drums. Soon James was drinking codeine cough syrup. Then he was smoking opium. Then he got back on heroin, plentiful in London’s music world. Then he was injecting speedballs, a hot combo of heroin and amphetamine. His first album, the brilliant James Taylor, was recorded under the influence, at Trident Studios, between July and October 1968, while the Beatles were making their double White Album. Paul McCartney played bass on “Carolina.” George Harrison and Peter Asher contributed background vocals. These luminaries were “the holy host standing around me” that James sings about on “Carolina in My Mind.”

  It’s not hard to know how he felt. The Beatles were angel-headed hipsters, avatars of their age, and here was James in their midst, at the zenith of their career, sponsored by them at the beginning of his. He would come into the studio as they were finishing for the day, and listen to early versions of “Hey Jude” and “Helter Skelter.” He held on to his chair while listening to the spiraling sonic vortex of “Revolution 9.”

  While James was working at Apple, he was trying to stay afloat mentally, but he was, as he later said, “in disarray.” This was some heavy stuff he was living through, in his twentieth year. “I was changing houses every two weeks—high rent, too much noise—while I tried to keep to the recording schedule and fullfill Peter and Paul’s faith in me.” His girlfriend from New York, Margaret Corey, was staying with him. Her brother Richard, a friend of James’s, was around. (Their father was the comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey, a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.) In New York, James had become close to one of their friends, another troubled young soul named Suzanne Schnerr. “I knew Suzanne well in New York,” James said later. “She was from Long Island. We used to hang out together and get high.” But Susie Schnerr had committed suicide after James moved to London, and his friends let him know about it only once the Apple album was complete. James was very upset that they hadn’t told him. “Margaret and Richard and Joel [O’Brien] were all really close to Susie Schnerr. But they were also excited for me having this record deal and making this album, and when Susie killed herself, they decided not to tell me about it until later because they didn’t want to shake me up.” The day after learning of his friend’s death, fighting despair, James wrote the first verse of a new song called “Fire and Rain” in his base
ment flat on Beaufort Street in Chelsea.

  He was using the British equivalent of methadone to combat withdrawal from heroin, but it wasn’t working well. His album complete, he flew back to New York in late November 1968, checked into a Manhattan hospital for detoxification, and called his mother. There he wrote the second verse of “Fire and Rain.”

  Trudy Taylor came to New York. A few days later, mother and son drove to western Massachusetts, where James Taylor signed himself in to the Austen Riggs Center, a private psychiatric hospital in the village of Stockbridge, amid the wintry Berkshire hills. It was there he wrote the third and final verse of “Fire and Rain.”

  RAIN AND FIRE

  Apple Records released James Taylor in December 1968, about a month after The Beatles (aka “The White Album”) came out. But James was in rehab in Massachusetts and the album didn’t sell. The American release of James Taylor in February 1969 barely made the charts. But at least the treatment he was receiving was beginning to work.

  Austen Riggs went deeper into a patient’s problems than merely “curing” addictive behavior. Using the psychiatric model, therapists probed into patients’ lives to discover the underlying emotional problems that caused their self-destructive behavior. In James Taylor’s case, he was helped to uncover a sense of rage—inexpressible, nonspecific anger—that might have been fueling his urge for oblivion through heroin. He may have been helped in this therapy by the timing of his parents’ divorce in 1969. Isaac Taylor’s alcoholism had become so acute that Trudy divorced him that year, which sent their five children into varying degrees of grief.