The issue was left open for the time being. James came to the studio almost every day and played guitar on several tracks, but after he went back to the States, Richard Perry erased the work he had done, so James would only barely appear on Carly’s album.
In early October, Carly and Richard Perry began to work on the album’s vocal tracks. Perry brought in Harry Nilsson to sing the backup chorus on “You’re So Vain,” which they all recognized as the album’s first single and potential radio grenade. Nilsson had written some of the best songs of his generation (“Without You” was the best known), but he was most famous for singing “Everybody’s Talkin’” (written by Fred Neil) from the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. Carly and Nilsson worked hard on “You’re So Vain,” but the song, with what Carly called its “big intervals,” was proving somewhat difficult to sing. After some frustrating first attempts, Richard Perry cut the session short and said they would try a fresh approach the following day.
SON OF A GUN
One evening Carly and Harry Nilsson were working on background vocals for “The Ballad of a Vain Man” at Air Studios in Soho when the phone rang.
Arlyne: “I got a call from the receptionist saying that the Rolling Stones office was on the phone. I thought she meant Rolling Stone magazine, but when I picked up the phone, Mick Jagger was on the line, asking for Carly. I was amazed, almost speechless.”
Jagger had run into Klaus Voormann, who told him Carly was recording in London.
Carly: “I hadn’t seen him in London yet. I was right in the middle of overdubbing the vocals to ‘You’re So Vain.’ I said, ‘Mick, you wanna come over and sing vocals on this song?’ And he came right up.”
Carly was singing with Nilsson when Jagger walked in the studio at eight o’clock in the evening. Richard Perry almost went into shock. Here was the most famous rock star in the world, fresh from a mega-successful U. S. tour, whose face had just been on every magazine cover in America. He was dressed in well-tailored tweed slacks and a collared shirt with a tartan pullover under a sharp single-breasted trench coat. “He was at ease,” Arlyne recalled, “very relaxed and calm, nothing like anyone pictured him. He was very fair, with that great ruddy English complexion. He sang with Carly, and then kept coming to the studio almost every night, even when he wasn’t dubbing ‘You’re So Vain.’ Some nights he just sat quietly and watched the recording. Others nights he spent time teaching Carly some basic rock-and-roll licks. He told her she was a rock-and-roll singer and she shouldn’t be afraid to admit it.”
“‘You’re So Vain,’” Carly has said, “is about a certain type of man—very into themselves—that I’ve been affected by, adversely, in the past. A man who’s more concerned with his image than with a relationship with me.
“Their career was always more important than mine. There were people who treated me in a way that… I felt like a piece of meat. I got knocked about. There’s that line: ‘You gave up all the things you loved, and one of them was me.’ So there is anger in the song, the first bitter song I ever wrote. And I loved writing it, on my aunt’s piano in my old apartment on 35th Street. I was thinking about three or four people—a composite—when I wrote it, and there was an element of vengeance there. And then I loved singing it.”
Richard Perry’s quest for perfectionism was at its most intense during production of “You’re So Vain.” The rhythm track had to be great. Perry recorded three different versions with three different drummers. Carly: “It took a hundred takes to get it right. Three drummers rushed to England from L. A. and then back again. Jim Gordon’s drum part stayed on the choruses, but Jim Keltner and Andy Newmark’s parts are still a little there on the verses. And we’ve got two pianos on that track. Klaus Voormann was—literally—instrumental. We heard him warming up one day, kind of strumming the bass, and to me, it set the mood of a swaggering, self-indulgent man prancing into a room with his hat and his scarf.” This bass guitar figure would provide the intro to the song, over which Carly would whisper, “Son of a gun.”
“That song,” Carly later wrote, “is really a composite of different people. But Warren loves that people think it’s about him because of the apricot scarf.” The line about the yacht came from a party at her sister Joey’s house when Henry Morgan walked in and someone remarked that he was dressed as a yachtsman. “I didn’t know anyone who raced at Saratoga or went to view the total eclipse of the sun,” she later said. “I just wanted to portray someone who thought he was ultra-cool. And then later, James actually did fly up to Nova Scotia, but it didn’t have anything to do with the lyric of the song.”
Carly meanwhile was hanging out with Mick Jagger. She has always denied a romantic relationship with him. They took walks together, had some meals in restaurants. Carly says that this is as far as it went. “Mick and I were acquaintances before London,” she later wrote. “Then, when we were doing background vocals, Mick called the studio to become ever so slightly more acquainted. He came over to Air Studios where we were working, and he and Harry Nilsson and I sang on the choruses. Mick listened to the playback and then worked out his part very quickly. Harry then graciously demurred and said he didn’t think he should get in the way of some obvious vocal chemistry. (More probably, dear Harry just wanted to get out to go to the pub.) So Mick and I finished it together—fabulously, I thought.”
“Yes, Mick and I spent some time together in London,” she told an interviewer, “but it was complicated, because there were other men in my life. Mick was so compelling, and flirty, and charismatic, that it’s hard not to be taken in by him, but James was my love.”
Mick and Carly cut several versions of the “You’re So Vain” chorus. Listening to the playback later, she could scarcely believe her ears, because it sounded so great. It was a gas to have his help in the studio. “Mick was very devilish and sexual,” she said later, “but he was not so vain. He wasn’t worried about how his voice would sound; he didn’t ask to listen to it afterwards in the control room. He just had the confidence of a racehorse that had won many races.”
Mick Jagger’s only stipulation was that he appear uncredited on “The Ballad of a Vain Man,” as the song was still called (and would remain so until Carly thought of “You’re So Vain” after the record had been mastered).
Later Carly would often be asked if “You’re So Vain” was written about Mick Jagger. “It certainly wasn’t lyrically about Mick,” she wrote a friend. “I’m sure something inspired me. It was usually the Stones or Cat Stevens in those days, if it wasn’t James. If there was a single inspiration for that song, it must remain mysteriously shrouded in my robust ego which tells me that I MUST keep a secret. Those who think they know, don’t.”
Mick kept telling Carly she was a natural rock singer, so she decided to let it rock the night they put the vocals on “Night Owl,” which had appeared first on James’s Apple album. The instrumental tracks had been recorded at Trident. One night, Mick brought horn player Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins—both performed with the Stones on tour—to Air Studios to hear the vocal sessions. Keys, who’d memorably played the sax solo on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” unpacked his horn and played a typically blustery solo. Nicky Hopkins put some of his barrelhouse piano on the track as well.
Carly: “It was about two in the morning and we’d been discussing the vocal backups for ‘Night Owl.’ Paul and Linda McCartney came by from their own recording session, and we had Doris Troy and Bonnie Bramlett there, too, for the backups. Nicky Hopkins was on piano and Jim Keltner on drums. Klaus, Mick, Paul Buckmaster—they were just sitting around, to be there.
“Then Paul said, ‘Can I sing on the vocals, too?’ So it started with Bonnie and Doris and myself, and Paul and Linda, and Jimmy Ryan and a few others doing vocals, like eight of us. It was completely crazy, like too many cooks and everyone wanted a part, so I decided to bow out so it would be easier to record. The result was fantastic. Everyone was just grooving. The vibes were so high. It was the highest night I ever spent in a
studio, anywhere.”
When Carly finally made it back to her hotel, the sun was streaming through the wide French doors that opened into a little garden. Exhausted but still burning with the evening’s intensity, she got some sleep, and then frantically wrote another song, “Waited So Long.” They recorded it the next morning, just under the studio deadline, and Carly raced to Heathrow airport to catch her plane back to New York. Two days later she flew to Los Angeles with James for the album’s final mixing. (James dubbed his “she’s no virgin” line into “Waited So Long.”) Carly finished the album, literally days before the record would be pressed. And, at the very last minute, she changed the name of the song to “You’re So Vain.”
The first people in America to hear “You’re So Vain” were the guests at a Saturday afternoon tea at Andrea Simon’s house in late October 1972. The party was for Joanna Simon’s birthday and the launch of Peter Simon’s first published photography book, Moving On, Holding Still. The listening session was in the Simon family’s large upstairs bathroom with its great acoustics, Carly and Peter having managed to synchronize two battery-powered cassette recorders so a few guests could enjoy an exclusive preview in a reasonable facsimile of stereo. Among those crowded into the bathroom were writers from Rolling Stone magazine and executives from Elektra and Asylum Records. (These two companies were about to be folded into one, much to the consternation of Carly.) After the first play of “You’re So Vain,” the Asylum promo guy said, “That backup singer on the chorus sounds exactly like Jagger.” Carly winked. Someone said, “Carly, you’re kidding.” She just smiled. “Is he credited on the record?” She replied that he didn’t want to be. One of the Rolling Stone writers asked her how she got him to sing with her, and she answered, “It was all hormonal,” and everybody laughed. Then everyone demanded to hear “You’re So Vain” again, and three more times after that. Afterward it was agreed that this was a historic recording, an incredible coup, and the record would be a chart-busting hit.
But James Taylor was conflicted when he heard Mick Jagger’s vocals on “You’re So Vain,” and Carly’s version of his own “Night Owl,” which now sounded like an outtake from Exile on Main St. Mick Jagger had left his scent on Carly’s record like a dog on a hydrant. This put James Taylor in a complicated position. Mick Jagger never did this for anyone, and no one who heard “You’re So Vain” didn’t believe that Carly and Mick had had a sexual relationship. Then, on November 1, 1972, James answered the phone at Carly’s apartment.
It was Bianca Jagger, and she was hopping mad. She told James, “You know, my husband and your fiancée are having an affair.” James told her he didn’t think it was true, and ardently defended Carly’s virtue. Bianca told James that they must have had an affair because Mick sang on her song and he never did this for anyone. Carly, she reasoned, had seduced Mick. She also told James she had found a provocative letter from Carly to Mick, and a letter from Mick to Carly that she had intercepted before it could be mailed.
Carly told her boyfriend that she hadn’t been with the other guy, and that she loved only him, which was good enough for Jim. Two days later, on November 3, 1972, Carly Simon and James Taylor were married—in a civil ceremony by a judge, with only their families present, in Carly’s snug apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street.
DON’T LET ME BE LONELY
Carly Simon’s marriage to James Taylor had some of those close to her scratching their heads. The marriage looked great on paper—two of the stars of the American singer-songwriter movement joining creative (and reproductive) forces. But everyone knew also that there were bound to be some serious issues. Carly was older than James, who was openly struggling with the downside of national stardom at the age of twenty-four. Drugs—heroin and cocaine—were part of the burden that Carly took on when she accepted James’s heated proposal after Bianca Jagger’s upsetting phone call.
“I was afraid of drugs,” Carly said of this later, “and extremely naïve about it all. I just didn’t know what people were doing in the bathroom with needles and white powder. And [James] was very clever about hiding it. But once I realized that James was addicted, I became terribly afraid—for his life. I started realizing he was quite different when he was using, and I could tell when he was using this or that. But being so naïve, I thought that the love I felt for him would help him get better, because it had to. That’s how I felt at the time.”
Some people close to Carly reflected that the careers of the two stars might be about to diverge, with Carly’s star ascending while James’s was going down. His (low-key, totally brilliant) album One Man Dog—eighteen short songs in thirty-seven minutes—was released in November 1972, but didn’t sell as well as his previous records, despite a huge budget and an impressive roster of talent. The single “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” would only reach number four in January 1973. Meanwhile, insiders realized that No Secrets and “You’re So Vain” were about to propel Carly to the highest levels of their profession. Some worried the effect this might have on the marriage, since James Taylor was known to be quite competitive in his professional life.
Meanwhile, Joni Mitchell had just released For the Roses, an entire album about her relationship with James. For the Roses was immediately recognized as a pinnacle of the singer-songwriter era, an important and beautiful work of art that would prove to be one of the great albums of the century. The songs dealt frankly with James’s heroin addiction and the difficulties and heartbreak of living with it. Some of the lyrics bitterly described James’s underdeveloped personality, annoying personal habits, and his continual and often desperate search for drugs. Other songs remembered the beautiful and tender side of him—“while the song that he sang to soothe her to sleep / runs all through her circuits like a heartbeat.” If listening to this utterly thrilling new music, explicitly about her troubled young husband, gave Carly Simon any pause, she never mentioned it to anyone.
Andrea Simon, at home in Riverdale, had been expecting the call from Carly saying that there was to be a wedding, but she wasn’t expecting to be told the wedding was the next day. On November 3 she arrived at Carly’s apartment with as many autumnal chrysanthemums as she could round up for a proper floral display. She asked Carly what she wanted for a wedding present. Carly said that there was a piece of furniture in Riverdale she’d always loved. Andrea was a bit taken aback by this. “But, Carly, darling,” she said, “don’t you know—that’s a real antique.” The subject was dropped for the time being.
The wedding was in the late afternoon. That evening James was playing a sold-out midnight concert at Radio City Music Hall, in Rockefeller Center. Afterward, Warner Communications, which had both bride and groom under contract, would throw a post-midnight party for James in the Time-Life Building, just across Sixth Avenue.
The guest list was small: Andrea Simon and Carly’s sisters, James’s mother and siblings, Jake Brackman (semicatatonic, unable to speak for reasons unknown), and the judge. Peter Simon documented the wedding with his camera: his sister barefoot, with flowers in her hair; the groom exceedingly calm in a loose-fitting suit, his long hair recently trimmed. The atmosphere in the apartment was crowded and tense, almost like something was happening under pressure. There weren’t many smiles. Afterward the judge who married them told Trudy Taylor, “This was a ceremony of hope.”
Halfway through his concert that night at Radio City, James stopped the show. A girl shouted, “We love you, James!”
He said, “Well, I got married this afternoon.” There were loud screams and applause. The adoring girls seated down front started yelling, “Who? Who did you marry?” James looked down at his shoes and softly answered, “Carly Simon.” More screams, more applause. James played his new song “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”
The party started at three in the morning, in the Time-Life Tower Suite. Guests were delighted that the corporate event had turned into a wedding celebration. James asked Joe Smith, the affable president of Warner Bros. Records, to give the toast
. As he raised his glass, Smith later wrote, he noted the contrast between the two families: “with the aristocratic German-Jewish Simon family on one side, and the [hairy-hippie] Taylors from North Carolina, complete with everything but livestock, on the other. I was touched by being asked to give the toast, because James was very vulnerable, and you always wanted to repay that trust with sensitivity.”
James Taylor, when asked later about the day he married Carly, played a concert, and partied all night, replied, “Well, it was a… full day.” Andrea Simon’s wedding present to Carly and James was a vintage set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. A few days later, Richard Nixon buried George McGovern in the landslide 1972 presidential election. (The only state McGovern carried was James’s native Massachusetts.) James was bummed. “I really loved George McGovern,” he told an interviewer.
A few days later, Carly and James drove up to Martha’s Vineyard, where James stayed on methadone maintenance and continued to saw boards and drive nails in his rustic cabin, which the locals were now calling Woodhenge, or Shingle Mountain, since it looked like a cottage somewhere in Middle Earth. Their real honeymoon would take place later in Hawaii, when Carly accompanied James on his first tour of Japan in early 1973.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 20