Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (22 page)

The P-town audiences were charmed by the Simon Sisters—lovely Lucy, with her long hair and big hoop earrings; strong-featured Carly, with her big, sensual mouth. By summer's end the young women had written more songs—Nick helped on lyrics—and played Village clubs: the Gaslight on MacDougal, the Bitter End on Bleecker.

Given her new downtown performing schedule, Carly, during her sophomore year, was now being castigated by the dorm mother for signing in so often postcurfew, and she was begging her professors for extensions on her papers. The Simon Sisters got a contract with Kapp Records; they recorded their own songs and some folk standards on
Wynken, Blynken and Nod,
with the title song released as a single.
*
(The girls got elite treatment from producer John Court and arranger Gary McFarland. When a still-unknown young keyboard player named Al Kooper arrived at the studio to play on the session, “half of Count Basie's band was in the studio,” he recalls. “I was pretty terrified when I recognized them.”) With flute accompaniment as well as guitar and banjo, the album had the fairy-tale-recast-as-folk-song quality that had paid off for Peter, Paul and Mary on “Puff the Magic Dragon.” “Wynken and Blynken and Nod one night sailed off in a wooden shoe,” the Simon Sisters sang. “They sailed on a river of crystal lights, into a sea of dew…” It sounded virginal, feminine, and melodious.

• • •

The summer of the album's release, 1963, Carly and Nick again played house on Martha's Vineyard, this time renting in rustic Menemsha. Carly and Lucy sang at the popular hangout the Mooncusser, and one of the young patrons who'd stop by and watch her sing was fourteen-year-old Jamie Taylor, the third of five children of Dr. Isaac (Ike) Taylor, dean of the University of North Carolina's medical school, and Ike's strong-willed and stunning wife, Trudy Woodard Taylor.

In an America where the concept barely existed, the Taylors were genuine bluebloods. Ike was of old Yankee and North Carolina stock—his family had sailed over from Scotland in the late 1700s—and his wife's New England roots reached even deeper; the Woodards had left England in the late 1600s. Together, Ike and Trudy had become eccentric southerners: Trudy, a civil rights advocate in a segregated state; Ike, a drinker, womanizer, and adventurer (once, going off on a long medical mission to Antarctica); all the children, musical and rebellious (
none
of them, despite their parents' erudition, finishing college). Their summers at their Vineyard home were full of sailing; Ike, who hailed from a long line of seafarers, instilled a love for the sport and for the island itself into his brood. Son James was on the brink of a stormy adolescence that would include drug taking and emotional breakdown at the elite prep school Milton Academy; after being heard musing about attempting suicide, he would finish the term in the safety of McLean psychiatric hospital. James was a palpably privileged boy—his breakdown was occasioned, he'd later say, while he was starting the process of applying to “colleges like Reed, Harvard, and Swarthmore” and realizing “I couldn't do it because I didn't want to.” But it was precisely that touch of throw-away aristocracy that would leaven his darkness (intensified by his eventual heroin habit) and make him irresistible to young women.

On the Vineyard James began to play guitar and sing, along with his summer best friend, a Westchester County boy named Danny Kortchmar, whose parents, Emil and Lucy—a businessman and writer, respectively—kept a house on the island as well. James was tall and skinny, classically “American”-handsome, wry and langorous. Danny Kortchmar—short and wiry and ethnic-looking; quick on the draw—was coming into an appearance and manner that would eventually have him frequently mistaken for Al Pacino. Danny had grown up regarding the youngest Simon daughter, Carly, as “a weird, gawky kid.”

But Danny was quicker to recognize what he says now was the “tremendous charisma” in the often melancholic James. “James was always an unhappy kid,” Danny told a reporter, right after James became a star, and “he always had the same profound effect on people, especially girls. They always say he's the most honest, sensitive guy they've ever met. They make out he's some kind of messiah, with special wisdom.” James's subsequent stay at McLean would add to the mystique, but even then he operated above his pay grade as a ladykiller: at fifteen, he was, as Danny would put it, “dating twenty-year-old chicks.” Danny—“Kootch,” as he was starting to call himself—was also drawn to James's talent. “We used to hitchhike on the Vineyard. Once, James burst into a Ray Charles song, and I said, ‘Man,
you
can
sing
!” Two years older than James, Danny taught him a great deal about the guitar; and Danny's strong personality—and heavier, R&B-style guitar playing—dominated the group they would eventually form, the Flying Machine.

Meanwhile, the single “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” was taking off, and Lucy had talked Carly into dropping out of Sarah Lawrence before the start of her junior year so the Simon Sisters could gain a following through touring. Jessica Hoffmann Davis believes that Carly didn't want to drop out of college but did so for Lucy's sake. Lucy and the newly disenrolled Carly were in a plane one November morning, on their way to one of their concerts, when Carly's already significant fear of flying was exacerbated by the voice over the intercom: “This is your captain speaking.” As dreaded as the expected warning of turbulence would be, the actual news was worse: the president had been shot.

The confirmation of Kennedy's death came soon after a trembling Carly and Lucy touched down in Massachusetts. Their concert was canceled, of course, and they took the next flight home. An emotional Nick picked the distraught sisters up at the airport, and everyone watched the unfolding events at the house in Riverdale, flanking despondent Andrea, who had viewed John Kennedy as a friend to the civil rights movement. Watching newly widowed Jackie stoically exiting the plane that carried her husband's body—her husband's bloodstains on her pink suit—Carly could not have imagined that in two decades she and the First Lady would form a deep and playful friendship.

Now that Carly was no longer encumbered by college, Nick moved ahead with renting a house in the village of Châteauneuf de Grasse in the south of France. He had just finished a graduate fellowship at Columbia University and procured an advance from the publisher Lippincott for his first novel, ambitiously set in Greece, which he would title
The Martlet's Tale.
*
He'd brought the Simon Sisters' record on his trip to Europe, along with the press photos of Carly and Lucy, looking tawny and twinlike with beads over Mexican blouses, open-mouthed at the microphone; but the record, Nick has recalled, was already “worn thin with use, smooth with repetition.” Nick “yearned for…the actual skin of my darling instead of promotional photos.” (Not that he wasn't also happily screwing around in Europe, according to Carly.)

When the plan was set for Carly to join him, Carly's friend Jessica Hoffmann, now a student at St. John's College in Maryland, thought it was “over-the-top romantic” that Carly was dashing off to live in a remote French village with her writer-lover.

Carly flew to London on a winter day in early 1964. Nick met her at the airport and they took a train to Milan, where she bought a tape recorder for any new songs she might compose, and they rented a midnight-blue Alfa Romeo convertible and headed for the Riviera: Nick wielding the stick shift, Carly's long hair blowing in the breeze, her sunglasses properly sophisticated, her guitar on her lap. But they were still American barely-postadolescents in a foreign country: Nick, nervous about the speeding
autostrada
drivers; Carly, full of phobias and, thanks to Nick's recent activity, the imminent recipient of, as she wryly recalls, “three different kinds of venereal diseases.”

Carly was homesick and confused, and would be every night of their six-month stay. First of all, Chibie—the grandmother to whom she felt so close, the fount of all that Heinemann-woman charisma—had recently died. Second, she was skipping out on a career opportunity; “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” was proving to be a surprise hit, quickly climbing to #76 on the
Billboard
chart and inching even higher in a few markets. The Simon Sisters' manager, Harold Leventhal—who had managed the Weavers (virtually becoming blacklisted along with them), was a close friend of Woody Guthrie, and just the past year had presented Dylan in his first Town Hall concert—wanted Carly to be able to fly home if touring or promotion were in order. But to Carly, love mattered more. The romantic dream of supporting a creative man was supposed to be the signal aspiration of women of her station. But did that shoe fit?

On their way to the south of France, Carly and Nick managed to find a village hotel whose proprietor did not frown suspiciously at the different last names on their passports. The next morning they drove the Grand Corniche, and then through a long olive grove, to their terracotta-tile-roofed, wood-shuttered stone farmhouse. The landlady—a stooped, elegant Joan of Arc scholar—served them tea and handed them the house key. They walked around the drafty abode, locating nooks and pulleys and provisions (“two children playing house,” as Nick put it), and from the second-floor windows glimpsed Provence's undulating hills and the twinkling lights of Cannes in the distance.

Aside from the embarrassment of getting her VD antibiotics prescriptions noisily translated into French and filled at the local pharmacy, “it was wonderful,” Carly recalls. “You had to boil water on the stovetop just to take a bath, and there was a mimosa tree right outside the door and a pool, all covered with leaves, where I tried to get a tan in March, sitting there reading
The Red and the Black.
” While Carly read Stendhal and sang new melodies into her tape recorder, Nick worked on his novel, intuiting the feelings of his fictional dying Greek matriarch, with her secret cache of money near her house in Rhodes. In their life together, the couple appropriated the intensity of Nick's prose. Nick photographed a pensive Carly in a sweater and Courrèges-style skirt, her back-combed long hair riffled by the breeze in the field, braced by spindly winter trees. And every night they toasted each other with the local red wine. Once in bed, however, Carly's anxiety attacks would descend like clockwork—night shakes so intense that she was certain she was having a nervous breakdown. Today Carly believes the shaking attacks were a combination of a later-proved allergy to the wine
and
the enormous dose of estrogen in her daily Enovid.

Every woman who took Enovid back then was, by today's standards of drug approval, a guinea pig. Enovid had been approved by the FDA during the last naïve and lax moment in the agency's history—two years
before
the dangers of thalidomide (an anti-nausea agent for pregnant women that turned out to cause severe physical malformations in babies) forced a tightening of clinical trial standards. Not only had Enovid essentially slipped through that approval crack (in fairness, been
pushed
through because women
wanted
a birth control pill, desperately), but no one knew exactly what the side effects might be if, for the first time in history, so many people—7.5 million by 1969—ingested a medication daily, for so long, for something
other than
to treat a disease. When it came to drugs for women, the medical establishment, including obstetrics and gynecology, was overwhelmingly male, and women were not included in clinical trials for medications appropriate for both sexes, so there was no reliable data on how such drugs would affect female bodies. This solipsism led to naïveté at best—for years, drug companies didn't believe women would even
want
to take a pill to not have babies—and, at worst, it led to danger. High-dose Enovid was thought to cause thromboembolism and obstructions of blood vessels leading to crucial organs, a risk substantially reduced by lower-dosage versions of the Pill in the early 1970s. But a possible link to the early Pill and breast cancer has never been disproved, and this would later prove significant for Carly.

Still, despite Carly's night shakes (and her VD), day-to-day life was romantic. Carly picked the tulips, irises, and anemones in the fields and watched the fruit trees ripen. She and Nick entertained their—
très
impressed—school friends who flew over to visit; they strolled to town for baguettes and cheese, the
International Herald Tribune
and
Nice Matin,
and were soon on gossiping terms (who in town was a drunk and who wasn't?) with the post office matron and the grocer.

Nick worked on his novel every day, but Carly grew confused about what exactly she was doing there. She wrote to Jessica letters that combined “a sort of adolescent angst, on the one hand—she was far away from her all-time-favorite vanilla milk shakes—with this luscious, brave woman in love on the other,” Jessica recalls. She slept late, descending from the bedroom “catlike,” Nick has said, turning the radio to France-Musique as page after page of the saga of Orsetta Procopirios and her grandson Sotiris issued forth from Nick's Olivetti roller. While there was plenty for a novelist to do in this secluded house, for Carly “there was no one to listen to her sing,” Nick says, “except the occasional shepherd.” Nick had planned the trip according to his own needs and agenda, and he expected Carly to fit into it. Was it petulant for her to feel disaffected? Nick could see Carly the performer chafing for an audience. “A career like hers doesn't happen by accident,” he says today. “She worked very hard for it.” He now sees the idyll to France as “the beginning of the end for me and her.”