Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (72 page)

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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 usefully 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.

In 2005 Carly recorded her fourth album of standards,
Moonlight Serenade.
It became a huge adult contemporary hit. Many older artists—Rod Stewart and Linda Ronstadt, among them—recorded standards. But for Carly alone they were not a warmed-to novelty, but rather a plumb line to her childhood. She followed up that success in February 2007 with
Into White,
which also invoked the past, its title song written by her old friend Cat Stevens. The most arresting track consists of Carly, Ben, and Sally singing a slow, spectral version of James's achingly beautiful “You Can Close Your Eyes,” which he had written for Joni. James had been a drugged-out, absent father during Sally's and Ben's childhoods, and that fact had anguished Carly. Now, like so many second-chance older dads, the decades-straight-and-sober James Taylor was earnestly arranging play dates for his and wife Kim's young twin sons. A woman
did
have to have the placidity of a river to put up with life's stream of ironies.

In early 2007, Carly and Jim Hart finally divorced. Ending her second marriage, to a man she deeply loved, was crushing. Still, in time, as ever, a new man emerged in her life. Richard Koehler is different from the others: not a musician, not a writer. Rather, he is a (handsome, blond) laparoscopic surgeon and former combat Marine, some years Carly's junior. Additionally, Sally and her husband, Dean Bragonier, moved onto Carly's Vineyard compound, where Ben, too, lives. In early autumn 2007, while Carly was recording a new album of almost all-new songs, Sally gave birth to a son, Bodhi. Thus Carly is now a grandmother, as are Carole and Joni. And so the river flows, the circle game repeats, the rutted road gets easier to walk down.

And that is how it is for all three of these women—all three of these girls like us—who were born into one female culture and changed it—year by year, song by song, risk by risk—so sweepingly and daringly.