Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (36 page)

We had done a hundred takes of the basic track and at least thirty lead vocals for what we called “Ballad of a Vain Man.” I told Richard we had to stop at a hundred, that I refused to be part of a record that went beyond a hundred takes. It was too expensively embarrassing for anyone but Liberace. Drummers had been flown halfway round the world, more than once, to play on this song that Richard had believed in right from the start. He had asked me to do the harmony parts while a “circle of friends,” as he called them (I called them highly intimidating musicians), listened. I begged Harry Nilsson to sing with me, and he didn’t hesitate to accept. Harry was a close friend of John Lennon’s and was one of the terrific artists who didn’t promote his work by stage performance. He was handsome and tall, wearing sunglasses, and had tawny hair curling around his unmistakable face. We were comfortable enough with each other, and got in a few takes (which means fewer than twenty-five with Richard at the helm) before I got a call on the studio phone and stepped out to take it in the lounge.

“Hallow, is this Caughly?” I didn’t have to ask who it was.

“How did you know I was here?” Had Mick ever not been able to find anybody?

“What aw you doin’?”

I told him I was putting some vocals on a track with Harry and invited him to come. “You know where AIR Studios are, yes? No?”

Mick was there almost instantly, having probably been in a car right downstairs, sussing out his possibilities for the night. Timing is everything. After some hugs and kisses that looked mimed, Richard invited Mick into the recording studio to join Harry and me on the vocals. Harry was already ensconced. Paul and Linda had disappeared momentarily with the elegant George Martin.

Mick and I said hello in front of Harry in the control booth. We kissed each other on the cheek (one cheek, and then the other). Again, it was a little formal.

“Right to it, man,” Harry said, as he shook Mick’s hand and bear-hugged him.

“It’s pretty easy, Mick,” I said, feeling jittery and trying to be calm. “Just sing the melody if you feel like it, or improvise and do any harmony you think of.”

I remember only that after four or five perfectly acceptable go-rounds, Harry said: “You two do
not
need me, you sound as though you’re joined at the hip.” He left for the control booth to find his future in a drink.

Mick and I were alone for the first time since the party in Hollywood, just a few months before. Proust says somewhere that “happiness is the absence of fever.” If true, those forty-five minutes in the glass vocal booth with Mick Jagger were an extreme example of unhappiness. As we sang together—Mick was a natural at singing backup—the energy was choreographed by the heavens, an unexpected fever that was certainly heightened by the music. The song that had been waiting to come to life for so long finally exploded. From the first lines in my notebook, the flight to Palm Springs, the party in New York, and now with Mick’s just happening to drop by at the studio at the very moment I was recording “Ballad of a Vain Man,” it was all, as if by wizardry, coming together.

It felt like everything in my life had led me to this moment. My earliest musical influences—Odetta, the Southern blues singers, the Delta blues of Mississippi, John Hurt and Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and especially Uncle Peter—fused with my jazz and folk roots. I had it all in those loops in my brain and in the twists and turns of my crooked musical ear, and it ran alongside the nearly impossible blending of Lucy and me and our guitars, Joey and Puccini, the Great American Songbook, and all the musicals of the forties and fifties that I studied and sang. Lordy, my parents were part of my performance in the glass booth—Mommy singing “Summertime,” when George and Ira suggested she give it a go, and Daddy’s dedicated long fingers on the keys, his head bent over his Steinway hour after hour.

It was shortly after midnight. Mick and I, we were close together—the same height, same coloring, same lips. I could feel him, eyes wide on me. I felt as if I were trying to stay within a pink gravity that was starting to loosen its silky grip on me. I was thrilled by the proximity, remembering all the times I had spent imitating him in front of my closet mirror. Only now we were both Narcissus, each desiring our reflection in the other; I was moving in step with him. Not trying to, but Richard gave us directions that seemed more football coach than record producer: “Mick, step back just a bit, your voice cuts more than Carly’s. Try doubling your parts and stand a little further away, both of you.”

The farther away we stood, the closer we got. Electricity. That’s what it was. I wanted to touch his neck and he was looking at my lips. The electricity was raw and hardly disguising its power. Having sex would have actually cooled things off.

I started to withdraw, which I thought was the only correct thing to do. It corresponded with Richard’s wanting to listen to a couple of playbacks and then—nobody wanting to miss a chance to see Mick—an opening of the studio door and the appearance of George Martin, Paul, and Linda.

Conversation struck up between the Beatle and the Stone and I went to the ladies’ room to play with my hair, mess it up to be like Mick’s—only mine didn’t fall into the perfect shiny piece of glass that his did—put on some natural lip color, and try to dry off a little. I had taken a swig of Harry’s brandy, but it hadn’t relaxed me at all. It had just made me sweat.

When I went back to the studio, it was empty except for Mick sitting at the piano. I joined him and he asked me to play the chords of the song for him.

“How do you know all those chords?”

“I’m just a stuck-up chick,” I said, and he started fooling around on a song he was working on, “Funny, funny, funny, funny, how love can make you cry.” He looked right at me. Then back at the keys. I could feel my face flushing. I harmonized with him as it became a chorus, an improvisation that was later searched for and never found among the multitracks at AIR Studios.

Mick is that genius of an artist who thrives on the dark and the daring. And you could say that the love affair between us that appeared to be brewing contained both of those things. And if Mick could have his way, it would be Romeo and Juliet tragic. We couldn’t have each other. Mick had been married only a short time to Bianca, who was waiting for him in a first-class lounge or hotel suite somewhere not too far away. And more important to
me
, there was the seriousness of my love for James. He wasn’t the horse Mick was, nor was James as naughty or as willing to destroy the status quo. Mick was compelled by a difficult situation as much as anything. He would not have been as interested in me, I believed, if there hadn’t been an insurmountable obstacle between us. That is true for most men.

Funny, funny, funny, funny, how love can make you cry.

It did not end there, though. We spent some evenings together at the studio where he was recording, and some other times in rooms at the Portobello Hotel, which was dangerous and conspicuous. I was genuinely drawn to the part of him that I suspected he didn’t let out for a walk all that often. The only reason that I got what I imagined to be the tender, appreciative side of Mick was that I wasn’t asking for it.

I was holding back with Mick—not giving him exactly what he wanted—but I knew it was still more than James would be all right with. The most touching moment I can remember, almost ever, happened later, the night before James and I actually tied the knot. We were in bed, getting ready for the big day, when the phone rang and James answered. It was Bianca Jagger. She told James that he shouldn’t marry me because her husband and I were having an affair. She muttered some things I couldn’t believe she was saying and James couldn’t quite make out due to the connection and the language barrier.

Then James said, “I’m sure that’s not true. Carly has told me about it and it’s not what you think. I trust my wife-to-be. I trust Carly.”

Following were the complicated, awful, proud, guilty, and life-changing feelings that have remained with me since. I can still wallow in regret to this day about things I did, versions of the truth I perpetrated. James was more than a prince. He was everything that a man could level his woman with. And I loved him miles beyond.

Recording “You’re So Vain” at AIR Studios in London with Richard Perry. Paul and Linda McCartney were in the next studio and stopped by.

“I’m lookin’ forward to lookin’ back from further on down the track together in fact, forever my love.”

—“Forever My Love,” by James Taylor and Carly Simon

CHAPTER NINETEEN

we’ll marry

T
he weekend before I went to London we had spent on the Vineyard. On the plane there, anticipating our imminent separation, James and I went so far as to write an informal prenuptial agreement on a piece of paper. He added his notes in ballpoint pen on both sides of a single lined page, and we both bent down to sign it. “This document will attest that James Vernon Taylor and Carly Elizabeth Simon will enter into a state of wedlock as defined therein…” it began. James’s handwriting was childish, sweet, alternately neat and suddenly impassioned, wilder. All material possessions would be considered common property, and in the event of “the dissolution of this agreement,” all possessions would revert to their original owner. Joint possessions will be distributed equally “to both parties.” As for “divorse” (sp), James wrote that it would be “applied for in writing, listing grievances,” adding, “Waiting period of three months before compliance.” Under the pledge, “I hereby agree to the above stipulations,” we signed our names, James’s signature forky, all bent wire, like a Calder mobile; mine girlish, well behaved, prep-school-like, lined up underneath his. I still have this sweet, sad document.

Looking back, we must have intentionally made our decision to get married only four days before the wedding, leaving us no time to fret about the details. Twenty-four hours before the ceremony, James’s lawyer, Nat Weiss, arranged for the license, the limousine, and the Wasserman test, and James and I made a hurried trip down to City Hall in New York for a stamp here, a stamp there. Danny and Abigale Kortchmar would be our witnesses. Yes, it was a huge decision, but in every way, it felt like the right one, especially when you have only a short time to tear your hair out anticipating and worrying about it. Once we’d signed our names on the City Hall ledger, the four of us celebrated with a drink and chicken wings at a Chinese restaurant.

With only four days until our wedding ceremony, we had to keep accordioning the various steps and rituals. That night after the signing, James and I took a long walk together through the Village, as unprepossessing as any two people could be. It was warm out, and almost dark on Eighth Street, and anyone observing us would have guessed we were just another couple out for a stroll, which, in fact, we were. A door or two off Bleecker Street, on MacDougal, we passed by a jewelry store advertising wedding rings at a discount—
25 PERCENT OFF!
said the sign in the window.

James and I entered and went straight to the full-price ring section. We knew to avoid rings that were on sale—not because they were tawdry, or suspicious, but because of some mutually agreed-upon superstition that they were bad luck. A dark, handsome woman materialized behind the counter. James glanced at her fleetingly, closely, familiarly, before his gaze found his own shoes. The saleswoman was tall, her posture aristocratic, her hair in a severe bun, her white button-down shirt tucked into a black skirt. Her sexy-frosty appearance was in sharp contrast to the tinny, exotic music playing overhead and the flamboyant chains, Indian fabrics, scarves, crystal rings, different-sized Buddhas, incense sticks, and handmade Christmas tree ornaments draped, blinking, gleaming, and zigzagging, around the shop. She looked for all intents and purposes like a Mexican painter—or a Mexican painter’s muse, including the eyebrows.

But before either of us had said a word, James, I felt, had an unspoken moment with her. It was as though the two of them shared a history, or worse, a charmed, short-lasting flicker of a future. Over the course of our marriage I would come up against this same sort of woman, in various forms and guises. But at that moment, she was just a small twitch in my gut.