Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (36 page)

All the British and American rockers and jazz and blues musicians sauntered into Dan Armstrong Guitars (the only one who excited Armstrong was his idol, Wes Montgomery), but only for freshly anointed Zeus-of-the-instrument Jimi Hendrix did he—begrudgingly—keep the store open after hours. The women on his staff were amazed that, for all his trademark pyrotechnics and sexual gestures, the slightly built Hendrix would lope into the store in a shy, pigeon-toed way, as plaintive as when he used to ply sustenance as an impoverished child in Seattle: an otherworldly gypsy—silver-ring-banded Borsalino floating atop his black-cotton-candy hair; Elizabethan blouse billowing out from under an antique embroidered vest; velvet pants tight across his uncommonly thin hips. As he padded around, the women saw what made him so captivating: Hendrix's charisma derived from his
fragility.
Accompanied by Experience mates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell or his friend, drummer Buddy Miles, Jimi would pick up, plug in, and
go at
any custom rarity that caught his fancy—and his keening, twanging, psychedelic talking blues would practically bounce sparks off the glass counters. Then, back down on the sidewalk, Hendrix would make a big shouting scene as he tore up the ticket he'd gotten for parking his Corvette at a hydrant—and zoom away, tires screeching. Danny Armstrong always had to be the king of his store; he pronounced Jimi Hendrix “an asshole.”

One day in 1968 Danny looked up from his desk “and in she strolls, a nice-looking lady in an orange, pink, and yellow print dress. Certainly vivacious. Lots of charm.
Big
smile. Carrying a guitar that needed work.” He recognized her as the Elephant's Memory singer. “She introduced herself. I said, ‘Where'd you get a name like Carly?' and she said, from her aunt. She said she was a singer-musician going to music school”—Carly was taking a notating course at Juilliard. Carly recalls, “Oh, Lord, Danny! What a comely guy, when I first met him in his guitar shop. His face…like Rhett Butler! He had arms that were too short for his body, but I guess that's the price you pay for being so handsome.”

The sexy, charming, “midtown-cool” (as Danny pegged her) girl with the strange first name came back with her guitar a couple more times; she always put a smile on his face. But Armstrong kept his interest low-watt—“I was just being me, not coming on too hard.”

Eventually Armstrong and his wife broke up and he moved his store to a new location, on the newly renamed La Guardia Place (formerly West Broadway) near Washington Square Park. When Carly sailed into his new store one day, he ended up going back to her and Joey's apartment to play guitar while Carly played piano. He sensed she saw her efforts stymied by her privilege (and her race). “To her, and to me, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and Odetta, for her, were the only singers that counted. She said she wished that she could sing like that, but she knew she never could.” Still, he noticed, as Nick had: “Carly always wanted to be a celebrity.”

Their first “real date,” as Danny recalled it (even though “dating” was now a thing of the straight-world past), was a trip, in car-crazy Danny's red 1965 Karmann Ghia convertible, to the Lincoln Continental Dealers Convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Thus would commence an almost two-year-long relationship.

“We were just trotting along together, holding hands; we were just little bells, little playmates—Carly made up a nickname for me, Porcus Pinky. I called her Carl,” Danny said of those first months. “Most things between us were shrouded in a cloud of pot smoke,” says Carly. Carly's neuroses were out of view. “If she was insecure and phobic and all that, she sure hid it from me,” Danny said. “She never hated anything. She never complained about anything. She was a calm, comfortable little playmate. I asked her brother, Peter, one time, ‘Is she always so cheery?' and he said, ‘Yes, but sometimes she's a little sad.' Carly was someone I
never
saw cry. And we never fought.” (“Danny and I did have a fight once,” Carly amends. “He hit me in the face with an open avocado.”)

“We definitely fell in love,” Danny said, and Carly agrees: “I really loved him.” One day when they were driving, Danny turned to Carly and said, “You're all I need to make me happy.” She picked up her guitar and started to turn it into a song.

Carly was so available for Danny that even though she was always writing songs, years after the fact, Danny couldn't remember her doing so. But it was he, she says, who suggested she put her Juilliard notating course to use by writing lead sheets of her songs and sending them to artists who might want to record them. She did so—sending her songs, in vain, to Judy Collins, Burt Bacharach, and again to Dionne Warwick.

Danny moved to an apartment over his store, thick in the middle of the action: around the corner from the Dugout, the Tin Angel, and the Bitter End; two blocks from the MacDougal Street folk clubs; and close by the offices of
Eye,
*
a young, counterculture version of
Life,
staffed, at Hearst Magazines' expense, largely by genuine artists and near-hippies, and for which Gerry Goffin wrote a long piece on Aretha, and Steve Katz wrote reviews (as did soon-to-be Warner Bros. executive Andy Wickham).

Carly recalls Danny's apartment as “fairly squalid.” “She'd always say to me, ‘The trouble with you is, you have no taste!'” he recalled, “but I hated the wallpaper she picked out for the bedroom.” Also troublesome were Danny's kids, who regarded Carly with the skepticism that children of divorce often train on their father's new girlfriend. But she got past the taste and the kids; she thought Danny immensely talented as a bass guitarist and was in thrall to him. “Carly was in Danny's store all the time, swooning over him,” says Matt Umanov, Danny's mentee, who opened his own guitar store on Bleecker Street. “Danny, oh my God! Danny was another example,” after Nick, “of the man carrying the creativity and the skill [in the relationship] for Carly; it was
always
about Danny's guitar playing,” says Ellen Questel. Ellen understood Carly's impulse to minimize herself for Danny, because she was doing the same; now that her husband, Vieri Salvadori, was teaching art history, Ellen put aside her own graduate psychology studies to sort index cards for his lectures.

Carly introduced her onetime-polka-guitarist beau to the world of casual wealth and celebrity. Danny spent time at the Riverdale house, looking at its walls covered in pictures of illustrious authors who'd been friends of the family. He kept his middle-class defenses up; he resented her “rich college girl” polish. Curiously, of the young woman perceived by her friends as so vulnerably emotional, “I felt like she was following the directions on life's box. She never cried, or raged, or laughed from down inside.”

Lucy Simon Levine was pregnant. Danny, who definitely did not want a sixth child, felt disapproval from Carly's older sister. “Lucy looked at me as the person who was keeping Carly from an orderly life,” he said. “Lucy's life was orderly and conventional. She was married to a psychiatrist. She was having a baby. Carly's life
wasn't
orderly—she wasn't married, she didn't have a baby. Carly sort of envied Lucy's ability to have her life in order, and I thought that there was pressure on Carly to live like Lucy.”

But far more than even the conflict between orderliness and spontaneity; far more than his girlfriend's good taste, her vivaciousness, or the fact that she could marshal an infinite amount of time to be with him, what struck Danny most about Carly was her intense sexuality. “To put it in one sentence, as bluntly and smoothly as possible: Carly loved sex,” he said. “She
needed
it. I've never known many women who loved sex like that.”

Carly also possessed a kind of mischief Danny had never encountered before. In winter Carly knitted Danny a ball warmer. But making the novel item was only half the gift; the presentation was the other half: Carly had Joey's beau Edward Villella jeté through Joey's living room, naked except for the tiny pink and purple garment. It was the era of scampish young women; whether outlawlike (Faye Dunaway in
Bonnie and Clyde
) or playful (Genevieve Waite in
Joanna
), cheekiness was in order. Still, who but Carly Simon would knit a
ball warmer
and then have a member of the New York City Ballet nude-model it?

“Carly was game; she would do things on a dare. Being cool mattered to her,” Danny said. Danny parked a kilo—$5,000 worth—of grass in her bedroom closet at Joey's, and he sold the lid, brick by brick, to musicians for a happy profit. Once, when Danny and Carly got into a taxi, he dared her to have sex with him, right then and there, as they hurtled along the avenue, in earshot of their cabbie and in possible view of the other riders and drivers. Carly's reaction? Danny recalled: “‘No problem.'” Another time, “I said, ‘I bet you wouldn't fuck me under one of those pedestrian bridges in Central Park.' And she did, of course.” Her security with her innate respectability; her parents' seamless meld of unconventional paramours with high intellectual standards, worthy causes, and impeccable social standing: all of this made sexuality for Carly Simon
not
what it might be for other girls—not a barricade to be stormed, not a potential retractor of virtue (there were no “gentle relations with names they must call me,” as there were for Joni, or, as Carole had feared, children who might do the math on their parents' months of marriage at the time of their birth), not even anything
earnest.
Danny put it this way: “Carly wasn't bohemian, and she wasn't rebellious.” After a pause: “She
didn't have
to be.”

• • •

In early 1969, the focus shifted, from Carly and Danny to Carly and Jake—from Carly the available girlfriend to Carly the songwriter and potential performer.

Jake had moved into an apartment in Murray Hill. Soon after, Carly moved out of Joey's place and signed a lease for a one-bedroom apartment just around the corner from Jake, on Thirty-fifth Street, between Park and Lexington avenues.

Danny and Carly were more or less engaged now—
he
thought. According to Danny, they'd planned to have a wedding “in a pine forest somewhere.” They were looking at houses; “we even found one in Silver-mine, Connecticut.” Lucy had her baby—a daughter, Julie—“and that put more pressure on Carly,” Danny observed. “Women are programmed to fall apart over babies, and Carly was falling apart over this baby.”

At the same time, however, Danny could feel Carly's priorities shifting. “When she moved into the new apartment, I suspected she had intentions of forming a new sort of base of operations,” he said. During this period “Jake and I became inseparable,” Carly has said. Carly had had years of talking to therapists about her childhood. Now she shared the stories with Jake, and to his fresh ear the “rich girl's problems” that had been deemed meritless by the reverse-snobbish times achieved a universal poignance. An image stayed with Jake: Richard Simon, in failing health, silent in the dark; Carly yearning for his attention.

One day Carly handed Jake a notated melody she had written months earlier but for which she couldn't come up with lyrics. The melody's opening bars, shifting back and forth between two minor-mode sequences with close dissonances, were so tensely poignant that
Village Voice
rock critic Robert Christgau would later, upon hearing them on the car radio, be “grabbed” by their “calculated drama.” She had composed the melody as the soundtrack for a proposed TV documentary called “Who Killed Lake Erie?”—one of her freelance jobs—but nothing had come of it, “and I was stuck,” she remembers; in writing songs by herself, it was easiest for her to start with the lyric, not the melody. “So I had that melody for so long that I was blocked.” When Jake came over, “She gave it to me with
la-la-las,
” Jake recalls.

Thinking of what Carly had told him about her father, Jake wrote: “My father sits at night with no lights on / His cigarette glows in the dark.”

Jake used that childhood view of the sadness of marriage as a bridge to skepticism about friends from college being married. “They have their houses and their lawns.” Jessica, Ellen, and Lucy were happily married, but the larger point was that young women had suddenly stopped seeing marriage as the ultimate event of their early twenties. Two souls huddled against the world—the romantic image that had prevailed when Carole and Gerry had gotten married—was an archaic position. There was too much
in
this new world; romance, belonging, and ecstasy literally flooded the senses. Sometimes it seemed to require a lack of imagination for a couple to stay together.

Danny initially worried that Jake was “putting moves on” his girlfriend, but he quickly saw that their intimacy was not physical. They were partners. “I wrote lyrics for Carly,” says Jake, “like a playwright writing for an actress.” It would take the first step of this partnership to boost Carly to a point where she'd start writing a stream of her own songs, increasingly prolific, well crafted, and era-defining—all of this so near but far from the scene Danny saw, of Carly and Jake, “sitting on the couch, talking over phrases, talking them into lyrics,” he recalled. “She'd say, ‘This isn't quite what I wanted to say here…' She brought him the melodies, and a lot of the ideas for the songs were hers. Jake would be like a blacksmith and hammer the songs together, and she'd steer him; she'd turn the songs in her rich-college-girl direction.”