More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (14 page)

“I don’t know why, but I’ve always had these men that I allowed to tyrannize me, or scare me out of a professional life. ‘Now Carly, you know that isn’t going to make you
happy
. It’ll
ruin
you.’ That kind of thing…. We finally broke up because I went into analysis and I realized that I wasn’t satisfied by being tyrannized. It’s not fair to say that he tyrannized me, but I realized that my will was being thwarted by giving in to him, all the time.”

Nicholas Delbanco’s first novel,
The Martlet’s Tale,
was published two years later, to enthusiastic reviews. The author’s photograph was taken by Peter Simon, and the novel was dedicated to his sister, Carly.

S
ummer 1965. The Rolling Stones’ pop art masterpiece “Satisfaction” (whose main riff is an inversion of “Dancing in the Street”) is the number one song in America. The Simon Sisters have some possible gigs in England, so Carly leaves for London to follow a charming British shoe salesman with whom she’s been infatuated in New York. Things don’t work out with the shoe guy, so instead she falls, quite madly, in love with the Simon Sisters’ potential English booking agent, the notorious London rake Willie Donaldson.

Willie was thirty but looked forty with his thinning hair and baggy suits. He was a popular, semisuccessful figure in London’s entertainment world, centered in Soho. He’d gone to a good public school, then to Cambridge, and then gravitated to the theater; he’d been one of the producers of the brilliant review
Beyond the Fringe,
which had launched the careers of Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett in London’s West End before migrating to a long run in New York. Willie had also been involved in bringing Bob Dylan to England for the first time, in 1964 (and can be seen in
the background of the documentary
Don’t Look Back,
which documented Dylan’s 1965 UK tour). Willie was tall, blond, charming, and utterly hilarious. Long divorced, he was well-bred, but raffish and louche, unburdened by any great reputation for financial probity, and when he met Carly he was about to be dumped by his girlfriend, the actress Sarah Miles, who specialized in slatternly roles in noir British films such as
The Servant
. But Willie Donaldson’s most recent productions had flopped in London, and when Carly came into his life he was on something of a downward spiral. Anyone who knew Willie would have told Carly to stay away, far away, but she fell for him.

She first contacted him at his office at the Players and Writers Agency. Her diary noted that on July 14 she visited him at Sarah Miles’s apartment on Hasker Street. Carly herself was living in a small flat on Wilton Street for ten shillings a week, rolling her drying hair over beer cans so it would be straight like the actress Julie Christie’s. She was attracted to Willie immediately, as he had many of the physical attributes of her father, including the thinning hair and slightly stooped bearing. Having broken up with Nicky and lost interest in the shoe salesman, as she noted on July 20, “I feel very close to Willie, even if he does call me ‘Simon’s Sister.’”

Carly was flattered that Willie seemed interested in her. He was the funniest man she’d ever met. “We were instantly attracted to one another’s wit, Willie’s being far more everything than mine, but me being a great audience for him.” Her diary for July 26 mentioned that Sarah Miles had kicked him out of her house and that he had moved into 6 Wilton Street, across from where Carly was staying. Diary entry from the end of July: “Willie has the body of an old man. What is it that I want?
Oh Carly—watch out!
”

By early August, Carly and Willie Donaldson were glued to each other. On the night of August 3 they roamed the streets of Mayfair and Soho in an all-night walk as Willie showed Carly around. With the summer sun rising over leafy St. James Park, Willie confessed to
Carly that something in him was very damaged, but he felt that her love was helping him recover. Carly loved this. Nick had always been her protector, but now she felt she could heal Willie’s psychic wounds with her love, and this meant a lot to her. Willie was big on nicknames. He started calling Carly his “little frog footman,” for reasons she never quite understood. Then he asked her point-blank, half in jest, if she would marry him, and Carly immediately said yes, she would.

Carly was, as Donaldson later wrote, “the answer to any sane man’s prayers: funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented.” He was as besotted with her perfume as she was with his.

The affair, for Carly, was naked and sexual. Donaldson had been the lover of innumerable actresses, starlets, and harlots, and was very experienced. Carly has described him as being very tender with her, and adorable in every sense. “It’s pretty amazing that an affair can be so intense as to…
halt me—
in that way,” she told Willie’s British biographer many years later. “We had a wonderful sex life, although, like me, he was shy about the way he looked, and didn’t want to be seen in the light.” Willie took Carly on a nostalgic visit to Cambridge, where they viewed his old rooms at the university. “He was very sentimental about this,” Carly recalled.

Willie wanted to launch the Simon Sisters in England, so Carly called Lucy in New York and told her about him, saying that he would pay her airfare to London; but Carly actually paid Lucy’s way, just to get her to London so her older sister could see what was going on between her and Willie. He took the two sisters to tea at Fortnum & Mason, and Carly was startled to realize she became almost insanely jealous every time Willie even looked at Lucy. The girls moved into lodgings in Cadogan Square, a grand old house Willie dubbed Toad Hall, as in (when putting the girls into a taxi): “Take the Simon Sisters to Toad Hall!” He then arranged London auditions for them at Take One, and at the Rehearsal Room, above the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.

Lucy indeed saw that Carly was really in love with this suave, swinging Englishman. Lucy: “Willie was charming, elegant, intelligent, and best of all he was able to make Carly relax. He really brought out her humor. They were talking very seriously about marriage, which surprised me quite a bit at the time. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

At the end of August 1965, Lucy heard there was work for the Simon Sisters at home, and the girls booked passage for New York on the ocean liner S. S.
United States
. After a river of tears, Carly left England under the firm impression that she was going to wind up her life in America, return to London, and be married as the second Mrs. William Donaldson. Once aboard the ship, she opened a telegram that read, “
LITTLE FROG FOOTMAN COME BACK SOON.
”

Sailing from Southampton, the girls noticed actor Sean Connery boarding the ship on his way to another film role as James Bond, agent 007. After they checked into their stateroom, Carly sent a note to Connery, who read it on the massage table. Ten minutes later he knocked on their door, his hair still unctuous from massage oil. For the next few days, Carly says, James Bond gently pestered the sisters for sex. “He tried to persuade Lucy and me to do things we’d never even heard of.” But on their last night at sea, Carly decided that if Sean called, she would visit him in his deluxe penthouse suite, putting aside her troth to Willie for one memorable night. But she was in the bathroom when the phone rang, and Lucy answered it instead.

Asked what happened next, Lucy allowed only that she’d had a “fascinating” supper with Mr. Connery that evening.

Carly arrived at her mother’s house in Riverdale on September 8, 1965, and announced her marriage plans. Andrea Simon was taken aback. Other family members were worried for her. Then Willie’s letters started arriving, and Carly read aloud his amusing declarations of love for her, and her family began to understand why she found this older man so dazzling. Carly wrote to him every day,
expressing her thrilled anticipation of their forthcoming marriage. She wrote a couple of new songs inspired by Willie: “You’re the One” and “The Best Thing.”

Then Willie’s letters stopped. Carly was shocked at first. She tried phoning him, but he was never in, never returned her calls. She became frantic, then devastated as she realized the truth. On October 24 a letter arrived from Willie. Sarah Miles had taken him back; with deep regret, he informed Carly, the marriage was off.

Carly was crushed. “It was terrible,” Peter Simon remembers. “My sister couldn’t stop crying, really blubbering, almost deranged. Then she started to stammer again and we knew she was seriously bereft.”

Carly has admitted that she never really got over her affair with Willie Donaldson. She said much later that it still made her sad that she could never seem to get back to that sense of herself that Willie fell for, and found so attractive. Carly Simon would love other men, but perhaps none with the ferocity of what she felt for Willie.

As for Willie, he went on the skids soon after dumping Carly. Sarah Miles left him, in turn, for the screenwriter Robert Bolt, whom she later married. Homeless, Willie found work as a pimp and moved into a brothel. Then he spent a decade addicted to cocaine. He turned his hand to writing, churning out comic novels, essays, and newspaper columns. When he died in 2005, the London
Daily Telegraph
hailed him as “a pimp, crack fiend, sex addict, and a comic genius.”

In his memoirs, Willie Donaldson wrote about his affair with Carly in the summer of 1965:

Carly Simon says that this and most of the other details concerning her in Willie Donaldson’s various writings are fiction, because they never happened.

M
eanwhile, in Woodstock, Bob Dylan was burned out.

This was 1966, late winter, early spring. The previous year, flying on speed, Dylan released the two albums that signified his radical turn to electric rock and roll.
Bringing It All Back Home
had “Gates of Eden,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which basically invented the new genre of folk-rock. A few months later came
Highway 61 Revisited,
which had “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row.” In 1966, Dylan went to Nashville and cut the fourteen songs about to be released on his epochal double album
Blonde on Blonde
. He toured constantly with his band, the Hawks, telling his managers to keep them on the road; he needed the money.

But Dylan’s management team was worried. To Albert Grossman and John Court, the principals of Grosscourt Productions, it was obvious that their star client was burning out and had to crash, sooner or later. If Dylan stopped touring, a big money flow would dry up. It was John Court, apparently, who had the notion that they had to find a female Bob Dylan. If Dylan crapped out, or retired
awhile, the female Bob Dylan could go out on the road with the Hawks, singing Dylan’s songs, and maybe it could be a blast and at least there would be a revenue stream. Court said that he’d heard about a girl who might just fill the bill.

It took Carly Simon a long time—well into 1966—to get over being jilted by Willie Donaldson. She told friends that it had been a fantastic romance; she had been ready to marry this man. “I got a terrible Dear John letter from him,” she told an interviewer much later. “That was my first hard lesson in love, and… the first cut is the deepest.”

Yet once she regained some form of psychic normalcy, with the help of her therapist, Carly picked up her guitar and began to write again. Carly: “It wasn’t until my first real—I mean,
real
—heartbreak, that I began writing the kind of songs that, to this day, I find the most gratifying. The ones that… allowed me to see things in the third person, almost like reportage. That insight about writing was the only beneficial effect that heartbreak ever had on me.”