The lead track, “Our Affair,” is an old-fashioned, seductive Carly Simon song that could have been on No Secrets or Hotcakes. “So Many Stars” is about yearning for love in Manhattan. “Big Dumb Guy” is a loosey-goosey rap, partly on life in front of a computer screen, partly on God knows what. “Scar” is like a mastectomy two-step, with a wonderful chorus about the old wise woman who could have been her mother, Mrs. Onassis, or about Carly herself, now in her mid-fifties. (“Scar,” Carly wrote, took six months to get a complete lyric, and another six months “to make it emotionally true.”)
The album continues with “Cross the River,” a surreal narrative (Carly described it as “South American fantastic realism”) of a boat ride on the Hudson River. “I Forget” is a torch song of illness, anguish, and recovery. “Actress” is pointed and uncomplimentary. The confessional “I’m Really the Kind” has intimations of seriously low self-esteem. The faux-paranoid rock song, “We Your Dearest Friends,” is about the hordes of freeloading guests who descended on Hidden Star Hill every summer: clogging the guest rooms, lounging by the pool, fueled by pills and powders, bugging the staff, charging unauthorized restaurant meals to Carly’s account, and then talking behind her back about how horrible she was. (Friends whispered that the song was partly about Libby Titus, with whom Carly had fallen out, but Carly wasn’t saying.) Mindy Jostyn plays violin on a wistful song, “Whatever Became of Her.” The album ends with Carly’s epochal tribute, “In Honor of You (George),” the song that begins in self-pity and ends in a surge of hope amid the swooning orchestration, courtesy of the track’s producer, Teese Gohl. (When the album was reissued later, it contained two more songs: “Grandmother’s House” and the Brazil-flavored “Sangre Dolce.” In this period, Carly also wrote the lovely song “Amity,” for the movie Anywhere But Here, and recorded it at home with Sally Taylor.)
Clive Davis couldn’t identify a single from the new album, so Arista didn’t release one. There were no concerts, and no video. Carly and Jim Hart took to the road in a van with a driver and did a radio tour of her major markets. She performed “Big Dumb Guy” with Andreas Vollenweider and the house band of David Letterman’s late night TV show on CBS. Album reviews were mostly good, especially for the song “Scar,” but some critics said the album was depressing, and that Carly didn’t sound like herself on some of the tracks. (Although, a prominent English critic called the album a masterpiece.) The Bedroom Tapes stalled at number ninety. Then Clive Davis was fired, and Carly’s years at Arista came to an abrupt end. Carly: “What a fiasco. Here is my personal best, coming off the press, and Clive Davis gets fired from Arista.”
This was another in a long series of traumas. Arista’s parent company, the German-owned Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, and Clive Davis was sixty-seven. When Davis refused to designate a successor, BMG terminated his contract and hired super-hot executive Antonio “L. A.” Reid as president of Arista Records. Reid was known for signing “urban” pop stars and ultracommercial, teen-oriented acts. Carly went to see him, and came away with the distinct feeling that L. A. Reid didn’t care about her. It was a blow. Carly felt that this new collection of songs was extremely important to her because she had been unusually honest in the lyrics, and she also realized that the music didn’t conform to any contemporary modes of what was hip. This, to her, made The Bedroom Tapes even more meaningful.
Carly: “That album was only out a short while when Clive left the label. I made a deal with L. A. Reid for me to take The Bedroom Tapes back, in exchange for the second album due to Arista under that contract. So, it basically cost me—no marketing for the CD and a truncated end to its sales—the reputation of that music and those songs. It’s a reputation which I felt would have flourished had it not fallen into the arms of a silly man—L. A. Reid—and his fragmented, overtaken company—Arista, post Clive—… I still own that album, and someday I’ll re-release it.”
Carly ended her relationship with her then-manager, Wendy Laister, not long after this.
Carly later wrote that those days—in 1999 and 2000—were the hardest times of her life. She didn’t want to invite her fans to a pathetic pity party, she said, but at the very least she’d learned that she “had the ‘stuff’ to travel alone, and lightly.” She remembered the long, dark nights of terror when she was able to go into Sally’s room and lose herself in her music. Not everyone had wanted to go through this with her, she said. Her raw emotionality produced what she described as “turmoil” in everyone around her. She felt guilty about this. Certain friends disappeared and were no longer friends. She told people close to her that she could have become quite bitter, but felt that bitterness was “all too predictable.” She’d rather be like the guy on the Vineyard who’d been attacked by a shark, and survived, and then had become an implacable advocate for not killing them.
CARLY HART
One day in the summer of 2000, Ben Taylor’s friend John Forté was arrested at Newark International Airport with a briefcase containing $1. 5 million worth of liquid cocaine. The federal narcotics agents told him he was entitled to one phone call, and Forté called Carly Simon.
Carly took the call on her cell phone as she and her husband were riding home from her radio tour promoting The Bedroom Tapes. After she found out where Forté was being held, she told the driver to pull over, and was sick to her stomach. The next day, she and Jim went to the jail, where Forté tried to make them believe that he thought the briefcase contained only money. (Jim Hart later remembered that the only time Carly had ever used her married name—“Carly Hart”—was when she and he were signing into various jails and prisons to visit Forté.)
Carly told Forté she would do everything she could for him, but he was quickly tried and convicted of massive cocaine possession and conspiracy with intent to distribute. Due to the large amount of drugs involved, the sentence was a mandatory fourteen years under the Reagan-era “War on Drugs” legislation that removed a federal judge’s discretionary powers in a major case. Forté was sent to prison in Pennsylvania, while Carly desperately tried to call in favors. She lobbied the Clintons, then still in office, to no avail. The Kennedy family was of no help, either. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said sorry. She asked her friend Alan Dershowitz, the famous attorney and Harvard law professor, to look into the case, but he reported that there was simply not much that could be done.
Eventually Carly was steered to Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican from Utah who was (famously) an aspiring songwriter, and an admirer of Carly. Hatch was also the chairman of a senate committee on prisons, and it was presumably his considerable influence that caused Forté’s transfer to a minimum-security prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 2001. For the next seven years, Carly continued to lobby for a lesser sentence and better prison conditions for John Forté, and eventually her tactics and stamina would result in an outcome that many regarded as a miracle.
In 2001, Carly appeared on Janet Jackson’s All for You album, which sampled “You’re So Vain” in a new mash-up called “Son of a Gun.” She sang on Mindy Jostyn’s album Blue Stories. After the murderous jetliner attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, which killed more than three thousand Americans, Carly allowed the government to use “Let the River Run” in a national public service TV advertising campaign to raise public morale in the wake of 9/ 11 and the subsequent anthrax poisonings that had killed several postal workers. Carly’s dramatic anthem was seen as a fitting balm for the grievously wounded American spirit, at the dawn of the new millennium.
Carly celebrated Christmas 2001 at home on the Vineyard with her children and close friends. Something about Christmas that year—the season, the music, the national traumas, the ghosts of Christmases past—was very moving for her, and she resolved to make a new album of songs that would reflect her own, often wistful, take on the spirit of the closing days of the year.
January 2002. Carly was in Los Angeles to sing with Ben Taylor at
a party for the Winter Olympics, held in Utah that year. Afterward, not really wanting to return to an empty house, she called her old friend Don Was and asked him if he wanted to help her make a Christmas album. Don explained that he was leaving for Paris in five days to produce the new Rolling Stones album. Carly said she could do the album in four days. Soon Don Was arrived at the Peninsula Hotel, where Carly was staying, and turned her room (number 139) into a modern rehearsal hall merely by opening his laptop computer. Engineer Bob Clearmountain arrived a day later with some microphones. Carly and Don went to Tower Records on the Sunset Strip and bought every Christmas album they could find. For the proper atmosphere, Don’s wife, Betty, decorated the room with twinkly lights, stuffed Santas, plastic elves, and jingle bells. To get in the proper mood, Carly went shopping at some of her old Beverly Hills and Melrose Avenue haunts for a new wardrobe. Over the next three days, many of L. A.’s great session musicians—plus Willie Nelson and entourage—trooped through room 139 to play on the tracks. After the fifth day, Don Was vanished into the Stones’ milieu, and Carly mixed the album later on Martha’s Vineyard with friend Jimmy Parr.
But Carly’s main project that year was compiling, and remixing, back catalogue songs for a new compilation album, her greatest hits on digital compact disc. This had been a project for Rhino Records, a respected independent label that had evolved from a famous record store in L. A.’s Westwood section, but it had since been subsumed by Warner Music. Rhino’s market research had identified Carly’s core audience as millions of soccer moms in CD-equipped SUVs and minivans who loved her music but no longer had record players to access the music at will. The result was the Anthology album, released in November 2002. It contained eighteen digitally remastered versions of Carly’s songs, some of them cleverly sourced from the rare, radio-friendly versions of hit singles such as “Anticipation” and “You’re So Vain.” These were generally “brighter” (and slightly shorter) versions; punchier, with the drums more prominent, plus new echo and reverb. Anthology was the first time some of these tracks had appeared on compact disc, and the set sold well in the run-up to Christmas 2002.
Carly played the Christmas music she’d recorded for Rhino executives, and the label agreed to license the album for release that year. Carly and her team (barely) made Rhino’s deadline for the new seasonal album, Christmas Is Almost Here. But Carly’s was a different kind of Yule fare, which usually relied on hoary clichés about the religious events of late December. Instead, Carly’s album falls into the bohemian tradition of Miles Davis’s classic “Blue Christmas”—recognizing that the holidays were a difficult, lonely, and (sometimes) despondent time of year for those without love or familial comfort in their lives.
Christmas Is Almost Here proved to be one of Carly’s most interesting (and personal) recordings. The title track is a duet with its composer, Livingston Taylor, the singers seeking solace in the short days of the winter solstice. The folkloric “O Come, All Ye Faithful” features Bon Jovi’s ace guitar hero, Richie Sambora, on electric Dobro. Another original song, “The Land of Christmas” (written during a migraine headache the night before the recording began), is a prayer to the Blessed Mother for pain relief. “Silent Night” features Ben Taylor in a quiet madrigal, hymnal and incantatory, with a beautifully hummed third verse. “The Gates to the City” is pure soul-gospel, with legendary Stones/ Beatles collaborator Billy Preston on organ. Lucy Simon’s beautiful song “Heaven,” written much earlier, is emblematic of the idea—important to both Carly and Don—that the Christmas spirit is not for Christians only.
The old standard “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” has additional (wistful) lyrics by Carly. Star L. A. session drummer Jim Keltner helps Carly with a reggae-informed “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” “Pretty Paper” is a clever/ corny duet with its composer, country star Willie Nelson. The album ends with a version of John Lennon’s “Happy X-mas (War Is Over).”
Christmas Is Almost Here was released in December 2002. Critics described it as a sophisticated, if unusually somber, variation on the traditional Christmas album. Rhino was good with promotion, and in New York that month Carly sang carols (with Ben Taylor and Mindy Jostyn) on NBC television during the lighting ceremony for Rockefeller Center’s iconic Christmas tree. Christmas Is Almost Here (with some saucy photos by brother Peter Simon) was released too late in the season to make the sales charts, but Anthology did very good business, and repositioned Carly’s music into America’s digital culture. (The Christmas album was reissued the following year with two more tracks: “White Christmas,” with Burt Bacharach; and “Forgive,” a new song by Carly and Andreas Vollenweider.)
In 2003, Carly worked on songs (again in Sally’s bedroom) for Piglet’s Big Movie, the Walt Disney Company’s latest animated exploitation of Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne’s beloved children’s stories. The soundtrack CD, featuring the voices of Carly, her children, the opera star Renée Fleming, and a full orchestra, was released later that year on the Walt Disney Records label.
In 2003, Carly’s husband, Jim Hart, had been absent from her for some time. She knew that he was using cocaine when he was at home in New York. She told him that she needed more love and affection in the marriage. He admitted that this was difficult for him after her illness and surgeries. But he also said he was now more interested in leading a gay lifestyle. This was rough for Carly. Later she confided to a reporter for a London newspaper, “I can tell you that being married to a gay man made me feel unattractive again.”
Carly wanted to buy a place to hang her hat in Manhattan. An apartment was available in the Dakota, the exclusive gothic pile on Central Park West where John Lennon had lived and been murdered in 1980. Carly enlisted her sister Joanna, now a prominent real estate executive, in a campaign to get past the cooperative building’s notoriously difficult vetting committee. A letter to the Dakota on Carly’s behalf was sent by legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite, supposedly one of the most trusted men in America, who described Carly as “an ideal neighbor and co-op member.” A similar encomium was written by Joanna’s friend Beverly Sills, then chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera. But Carly’s bid was rejected anyway, without explanation.
Instead, she bought two apartments in an antique building in the West Village, near where she had first lived with her family on West Eleventh Street. This she turned into an eccentric Village duplex apartment, with a couple of bedrooms, a piano in the bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, and it became her favored pied à terre when in New York.
Spring 2003. Sally Taylor—now almost thirty years old—told her mother that she was going to marry her model-handsome beau, Dean Bragonier, in September. Carly envisioned a ceremony on her rose-covered bridge, over the stream by the gazebo. She was “crushed,” she told friends, when Sally said that wouldn’t work for her father, and that she was planning to marry at James’s house in Chilmark, overlooking Menemsha Pond, at sunset on Labor Day weekend. Carly seethed about this all that summer.
Carly did her bit at the island’s celebrity charity auction that summer. The high bidder for her prize would be told, by Carly, whom “You’re So Vain” was about. Then the person would pledge to keep the identity secret. The high bidder was Dick Ebersol, a sports executive at NBC television. On the appointed day for the revelation, Ebersol arrived at Carly’s house with six friends. Carly thought this rude, but told them some version of the secret. If it got out, she said, she would simply deny it. Later she told an interviewer that Dick Ebersol was a jerk.
Sally’s wedding was a big deal. At James’s house, Carly sniffed at the gauche line of portable toilets for guests. The lawns had been mown too short and had turned brown. Poison ivy trailed through the property, which was mostly unoccupied, since James Taylor now lived with his third wife, Kim Smedvig, and their kids in western Massachusetts. (He and his wife had met ten years earlier, when James was performing at Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where Kim Smedvig worked as a publicist. They marri
ed in 2001 and had twin sons—half brothers to Sally and Ben.) Wedding guests were shown down a path to the shoreline of Menemsha Pond, where they waited with their backs against the sun. Carly: “The father and I led the magnificent Sally down to her husband-to-be and the rest of the wedding party. Then there was dancing and a modicum of alcohol. Spirits were high—a nice chance to get together with both the Simon and Taylor families.” James Taylor was careful to introduce his wife to Carly’s various siblings and cousins.
There were many toasts as the sun sank into the Vineyard Sound and the champagne flowed. Livingston Taylor got up and offered a heartfelt appreciation of the mother of the bride. Then Carly delivered an impassioned toast/ screed that was in turn passionate, articulate, stammering, and cringe-worthy. She sat down to prolonged applause and general relief. The party then turned into a bonfire on nearby Lobsterville Beach, and the happy couple was reportedly not seen for several days.
This was, in 2003, the last time Carly Simon spoke to James Taylor.
REALITY SANDWICH
In 2004, Carly edited another compilation of her songs, Reflections, a joint enterprise between the Bertelsmann Music Group, which had swallowed Arista, and Warner Music, which had subsumed Electra Records, Carly’s original label. This was a single CD, and therefore required considerable pruning of Carly’s oeuvre. Don Was helped produced the song “Amity,” which Carly had recorded with Sally Taylor some years earlier. Carly dedicated the album to all the various drummers she had known, been inspired by, and in some cases loved. Released in May 2004, the compilation was a success for Carly, reaching number twenty-two on the Billboard chart. A slightly different version of Reflections was released in June, mostly for the British market, and sold well in European markets as well.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 36