More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (53 page)

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.

I
n 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.

Meanwhile, Carly’s brother, Peter, was arrested several times for drunk driving on the Vineyard. Carly dutifully attended his legal sessions at the county courthouse in nearby Edgartown, and supported him as he resolved to get treatment for alcohol addiction. Peter spent that summer in the island’s jail, visited by his sister and various
island luminaries. (When TV comedian Larry David visited Peter [with Alan Dershowitz], he was mobbed for autographs by jail employees.) Sally Taylor was on her honeymoon in darkest Cambodia, sending her worried mother bulletins via e-mail.

Then there was her husband in New York, struggling with drug use and dependent on a network of dealers to keep him going. Needing some distraction from these travails, Carly accepted an offer to appear as herself in a cameo role in the movie
Little Black Book,
for which she’d written some music. The difficult year 2004 ended with two gospel-flavored Christmas concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, with Carly’s children, Lucy Simon, Liv and Kate Taylor, gospel star Bebe Winans, jazz star Christian McBride, and a big, full-throated gospel choir. Carly described the concerts’ atmosphere as uninhibited and the carols this group produced as “rousing.”

Carly Simon pulled out of this period in early 2005 by once again turning to the music of her past. She had been contacted by her old friend Richard Perry, who had produced Rod Stewart’s recent bestselling albums of standards. Perry had a bunch of songs in mind that Stewart hadn’t used, and Carly said she would do them. Perry recorded the orchestra in Los Angeles, and Carly sang her vocals in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard. The songs included classics such as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” a samba-like “Alone Together,” the always spooky “I Only Have Eyes for You,” the Gershwins’ “How Long Has This Been Going On,” and Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.”

“We had fun,” Carly later said of these sessions. “We recorded more cheaply than ever before. Richard and I knew each other well enough to allow the jibes to turn into warmly taken, non-bristly affairs.” The eleven tracks they recorded—Carly’s fourth collection of timeless tunes—were released by Columbia Records in July 2005 under the title
Moonlight Serenade
. Carly appeared on the CD package in elegant silken evening gowns, in photos taken by Bob Gothard.

To everyone’s amazement,
Moonlight Serenade
was an instant smash, hitting the charts at number seven on the day of release. It
was Carly’s first Top Ten recording in thirty years. “I was very shocked,” she told the BBC. “Then incredibly happy, and then I was thinking, ‘I’m only gonna get killed now.’ As soon as you do anything successful, everybody hates you as somebody who has ‘legs’ in their career…. Not that I didn’t call everybody I knew [about the chart position], saying, GUESS WHAT? like a teenage girl.”
Moonlight Serenade
sold well for the rest of the year and was nominated for a Grammy Award. Critics opined that Carly’s success was due to the rapidly aging baby boom generation’s nostalgia for the music of their parents.
New York Times
headline: “Sex Symbols of the 1970’s Doing Lawrence Welk for Hip Seniors.”

Carly swerved when her friend Mindy Jostyn died of cancer in March 2005. This was a terrible time. Peter Simon: “The issue of Mindy’s death that made it so rough on Carly was that Mindy was a practicing Christian Scientist who refused treatment for her cancer altogether. Mindy just asked for prayers, so when she died, there was this terrible feeling of helplessness that just engulfed everyone.”

Mindy’s husband, Jake Brackman, tried to hold things together for their children, but Carly fell apart and stopped eating. When she got down to a skeletal 110 pounds, she was persuaded to enter McLean Hospital for treatment. On the night she checked into the hospital’s unlocked facility for patients who weren’t a danger to themselves, she was told there was a sandwich for her in the refrigerator down the hall. Carly wasn’t hungry, but the nurse said she had to get the sandwich. When she opened the fridge, there was indeed a sandwich with her name on it, next to another one labeled “James Taylor.” Carly froze. But she found out the food was for another patient with the same name. “I think someone just wanted to zap me,” Carly said later. “And no, I didn’t eat the sandwich.”

Later, she heard that her old London flame, Willie Donaldson, had also expired after a long career as a public reprobate. She mourned for Willie, too.

When she felt better and had gained some weight, Carly went to
work promoting her big hit album
Moonlight Serenade
. She gave a lot of interviews and spoke about living in her sixth decade. To the London daily
The Independent
: “It’s very odd turning sixty. I thought I’d be much better about it than I am. I thought that I’d just kind of float into it and be a great older woman—my new identity—and then all of a sudden the shock of the number: SIXTY!”

On menopause: “My mother used to say, ‘It’s such a relief not having that constant thing [menstruation] that makes you feel like an animal in heat.’ If I want to feel sexy, I know how I can feel sexy. But now it’s got to be about someone
very
appealing, because you don’t have random thoughts about sex that—like when you were in your teens or twenties—make you want to get into bed with just about anyone. Actually, for me, that was most prevalent in my forties. I think it was Mother Nature’s way of saying, ‘This is your last chance, so I’ll give you a little bit of extra steam right now.’ So I had a very active love life in my forties.”

Autumn 2005. Carly and her daughter, Sally, filmed a special for PBS aboard the Cunard Line’s new luxury ship,
Queen Mary II.
Jim Hart came along, looking elegant in black tie. Carly and Sally were both resplendent in gowns and stoles. A tour was planned for later in the year, so Carly rehearsed with a new band (most had played with James Taylor on his annual summer tours) at the Hot Tin Roof, the Vineyard nightclub she’d founded, and which had been sold out from under her by her business partners while she was in the hospital. (She first heard about this in the local paper, the
Vineyard Gazette
.) Carly had registered copyright for the club’s name, so when it reopened the next summer, it was called Outerland.

The tour began in Boston on November 19, 2005. Every show sold out immediately. The band was hot, and Carly shared the stage with Sally, Ben, and her little dog, Molly. Carly mixed hit songs and deep album cuts with atmospheric songs from
Serenade,
especially “I Only Have Eyes for You,” that brought her ovations almost every night. “Jesse” was a big rocking jam that often got the audiences up
and dancing. Carly’s troupe motored through the tour in a pair of deluxe buses. After the concerts, Carly had the intense satisfaction of trying to go to sleep, as the buses rolled through the night to the next show, with both her children resting in their curtained berths across the aisle from where she lay.

Some nights were funky. Some nights Carly was helped onstage. Backup singer Carmella Ramsey hit the high notes on “Coming Around Again” and other songs. Carly would forget lyrics and appear disorientated. In New York, the drummer motioned to a stagehand to help her get up from the piano. At some shows, people murmured that she seemed medicated. Before some (delayed) shows, Sally told audiences that her mother was very nervous, but would hopefully be joining them soon. Other shows were nailed, almost perfect. In Washington she beamed at a special guest, Senator Orrin Hatch, a crucial ally in the continuing campaign to spring John Forté from prison.

Christmas was weird that year, 2005. Everyone was burnt out. Jake Brackman and his children came to the Vineyard, devastated. Kate Taylor, who’d lost her husband to cancer, came around and looked after everyone. Carly and her people got through the holiday season as best they could.

I
n 2006, Carly Simon divorced her second husband, with whom she remained on friendly terms. She had a spacious new kitchen built at Hidden Star Hill, which still bristled with assistants and caretakers and also served as an upscale boardinghouse for various musicians and friends of her son. Columbia wanted a follow-up to
Moonlight Serenade,
so Carly proposed an album of R&B covers with soul bandleader Booker T. Jones. The label asked for another plan. Carly suggested an album of soothing songs and lullabies, a sort of evening raga, and Columbia gave this a green light.

Carly recorded about twenty songs at home and at local studio Parr Audio that summer. With Jimmy Parr producing, the basic ensemble consisted of Carly, Teese Gohl, Peter Calo, and Ben Taylor’s friend David Saw, one of the property’s resident songwriters. All the songs were important to Carly, emotionally and historically. All had some meaning or intimate connection to her past. Cat Stevens’s visionary “Into White” begins the album. The Beatles’ “Blackbird” has a beautiful cello descant. Carly sings James Taylor’s “You Can
Close Your Eyes” with their children. Her take on Luis Bonfá’s “Manha De Carnaval”—the theme from the movie
Black Orpheus
—is lilting and redolent of a quiet night in Brazil. Lord Burgess’s “Jamaica Farewell,” made famous by Harry Belafonte (and a favorite of the Simon Sisters), has a beautiful Dobro solo and ends with a hypnotic fade into “You Are My Sunshine.” There is an Everly Brothers medley, and a melancholy “Over the Rainbow.”

Stephen Foster’s “O! Susanna” is hushed and very haunting, softly lit by kalimba and flute. The traditional “Scarborough Fair” is given new lyrics by Carly. “I Gave My Love a Cherry” is tucked into bed by a lovely cello played by Jan Hyer. Carly reworked the lyrics to “Love of My Life” from the
This Is My Life
soundtrack. (The reference to loving Woody Allen is changed to loving Mia Farrow, his ex-wife.) David Saw contributed two new songs, “Quiet Evening” and “I’ll Just Remember You.”

Fourteen of these tracks were released late in 2006. The album,
Into White,
received very good promotion from Columbia and entered the sales chart at number fifteen. (A bonus track, “Hush Little Baby”/“My Bonnie,” appeared on CDs sold at the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain.) Carly dedicated the album to Paul Samwell-Smith, her erstwhile producer and friend. Most of the album’s photographs were taken by Sally Taylor. In a booklet note, Carly writes that
Into White
is music of the kind “ grown-ups like me can get a little weepy over.” If the album does its job and lulls the listener to sleep, she hoped that “you won’t notice if you have tears on your pillow.” Explaining the ideas behind the album to an interviewer from a Chicago daily, Carly said, “I’ve reached the age of wisdom, now, and I feel strongly that I want to report on that.”