Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (49 page)

The next morning Robert Hilburn gave Carly shared billing with headliner Stevens in his glowing review in the
L.A. Times,
calling them equally “extraordinarily gifted,” predicting that Carly was “destined” to be “acclaimed” and that “[a]s a singer and writer, she has exceptional skills. She's not just a newcomer who is promising; she is, after just one engagement, a new artist who has arrived.” In his
Rolling Stone
review of her album, published almost immediately after the Troubadour engagement, Tim Crouse defended Carly against class-bashing critics like Robert Christgau of
The Village Voice.
Christgau had been pleasingly riveted by the anti-marriage radicalism in “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be” until he learned of Carly's background; then he deemed her voice “pure ruling-class honk.” The “Updike or Salinger short story”–like songs “strike close to a lot of middle-class homes,” Crouse said, and are essentially “dedicated to the proposition that the rich, the well-known, and the college-educated often find themselves in the highest dues-paying bracket.” More, her own feeling that her true self could best come through her own songs was justified; Crouse correctly perceived that Carly was “passionately romantic and cynically realistic” at once.

The Troubadour shows helped catapult “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be” into the Top 10; it would stay in the Top 40 ten weeks.
Carly Simon
would end up selling 400,000 copies.

When Carly flew back to New York, Cat Stevens did too, and he asked Carly out. On the appointed night, she waited and waited, as she had for Robbie Robertson. Cat, who had recently been involved with Andy Warhol actress Patti D'Arbanville, was late. When he did finally arrive, “I was sitting on my bed and really nervous, because we hadn't officially had a date yet. And I picked up my guitar and I tuned the low E string down a whole step to D, and I wrote a song for him, because I was so excited and nervous to see him, and I'd been wasting so much time”
on
those feelings. Echoing the rhythms of Cat's own songs, she wrote “An-ti-ci-pa-tion / An-ti-
ci
-pa-
a
-tion / is making me late / is keeping me wai-ai-
ai
-ai-ting.” “I wrote the whole song in fifteen minutes,” she says.

Cat Stevens reminded Carly of William Blake—“he was extremely airy in that Blake way, and spiritual.
*
And he would look at me and it would be dazzling, the reflection of all things miraculous. He was amazing; sometimes we would sit on his bed for hours; he'd be watching TV and playing the guitar and looking at me at the same time—he could multitask.” A person close to Carly at the time adds that Cat was “confusing to Carly—there were girls and boys” in his world. He remembers wondering: Was Cat
gay
? (“But isn't everyone just a
little
bit gay?” Carly says today, remembering his sweetness.)

Meanwhile, people had been talking about Carly's physical resemblance to Mick Jagger, so she thought it would be fun to interview him. Seymour Peck, the editor of
The New York Times
's Arts & Leisure section, encouraged the idea. Carly called Jagger in the south of France, just before his May 12 marriage to his pregnant fiancée, Nicaraguan beauty, Sorbonne student, and recent girlfriend of Michael Caine, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías. Carly recalls that she and Mick casually flirted through the interview, each saying they'd “really love to meet” the other. The Stones'
Sticky Fingers
had just shot to #1 in
Billboard,
and here was Mick Jagger, the sexiest rock star in the world, ingratiating himself to her. It was a little heady. “Carly was trying to figure out her place in all this,” says Jake Brackman. “Was she in this celebrity world? It wasn't so long ago that she was in the Letters department of
Newsweek.
” (In fact, while Carly's first album and performances were being positively reviewed, residents of central Massachusetts could also hear her, on local radio, singing the jingle she'd written for Worcester Savings Bank.)

The headiness continued. On May 21 Carly opened for Kris Kristofferson at New York's Bitter End. “And this was when Kris was
the
most beautiful man,” says Ellen Questel, who was in the audience, “with that curly hair, and wearing that deep-V-necked semisheer white Indian shirt.” Kristofferson was smitten by Carly when he glimpsed her as they'd both exited their adjacent dressing rooms. “So I went out front to watch her, and I was just knocked out,” Kristofferson says. “She was beautiful. She had this off-the-shoulder kind of peasant blouse on, and she was playin' the guitar and singing her heart out. Her songs were great, and she seemed totally confident. She was pretty hard to resist.” Jake, who was standing next to Kristofferson at the time, heard him mutter a remark about his lust for Carly “which,” Jake says, “is definitely
not
for publication.”

Kristofferson, thirty-five—Rhodes scholar, ex-army pilot—had been hailed ten months earlier by
The New York Times
as “the hottest thing in Nashville” and the voice of “the new Nashville.” He had been having, as he puts it, a “roller coaster” of a year. “It was heaven in one sense, because after struggling for five years, I got my foot in the door.” After haunting the Village clubs with buddies Shel Silverstein and Bobby Neuwirth, he had finally become a sensation, giving his mentor Johnny Cash a hit with his “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Sammy Smith a hit with “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and his close friend Janis Joplin a #1 hit with “Me and Bobby McGee,” among others. But the overdose deaths of Joplin (who'd been enamored of him; they'd traveled together much of the last year of her life) and his new friend Jimi Hendrix had emotionally thrown him. During the subsequent months, “I worked solidly either in film”—Dennis Hopper's (disastrous)
The Last Movie
et al.—“or on the road,” he says, trying to avoid his grief, anger, fear, and exhaustion. When he appeared as a headliner at the Bitter End, he was only sober when he had to be, which meant, not a whole lot of the time.

After Carly's set—in which she sang the new song she'd written for Cat Stevens without acknowledging its inspiration (it was then called “These Are the Good Old Days”)—Kris brought Carly out to sing duets with him. Everyone in the audience witnessed their chemistry. “It was a full-blown version of seeing her onstage with Timmy Ratner in
Girl Crazy,
” says Ellen. Arlyne recalls, “It was just romantic as hell. He was gorgeous. He was a vision. I remember”—later on—“seeing him coming up Carly's stairs, all in chamois, with the guitar, and I was: Oh my God, I've never seen anything like that! With all that charm!”

After they took their bows, Kris and Carly went back to his suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He began writing a growling, lusty song for her, “I've Got to Have You,” and they embarked on what would be a summer-long love affair. So recently an office worker, camp counselor, and jingle writer, Carly would marvel, “‘Kris Kristofferson
likes
me!'” Steve recalls. “She loved it that he knew Dylan; that, through him, she met musicians and was treated like a fellow artist. We'd walk down the street and she'd say, ‘People are saying hello as if they
recognize
me' and I'd say: ‘They
do
recognize you, Carly.'”

The next week Carly opened for Cat Stevens at Boston's Symphony Hall. Kris sent her roses before the show (though it was Cat with whom she'd rendezvous afterward). Carly would fall hard for Kristofferson, but the relationship would prove challenging. “Kris was an alcoholic at the time,” Arlyne says, “but Carly, with her sense of humor, could see the ludicrousness in her situation,” attempting emotional intimacy with him. As Kris got drunker and drunker, Carly would file phone dispatches with Arlyne. “She'd call me and say, ‘Just as I was telling him about my life and my problems, he
fell asleep
!'” And Kristofferson could be gruff. Flying back to New York from a performance in Delaware, “Carly was scared to death on the airplane,” Kris recalls. “Oh, man, she almost got sick from it. I don't think I was a help in any way—I said, ‘Buck up! Get tough.'” Looking back on the romance, Kris says, “I was pretty self-absorbed in those days. Carly was funny and really smart—she had more brains than I did. I have a hard time now believing she tolerated my company.”

Still, he dropped her. After that bumpy flight back from Delaware, “Kris didn't want to see me for a while,” remembers Carly. Jake says, “The romance was a bigger deal for her than it was for him.” In subsequent months, Kris became involved with his next co-performer, Rita Coolidge, and when he brought Rita out to do closing duets, Carly was hurt “that she slipped into my shoes so easily. I thought, ‘Oh, God, we're completely interchangeable here.'” (Kristofferson and Coolidge were married in 1973.) Ellen Questel says: “I can't tell you how very often I've seen it that the expectation Carly has had about somebody has not been reciprocated. I've seen this over and over and over. She's not without humor and wit about these things. I don't want to portray her as a defenseless babe, because she's not, but I wish I'd seen it less.”

Throughout the romantic whirlwind, Carly continued to write new songs—not just “Anticipation” about Cat but “Three Days” about Kris. The intensity of her feeling for him is reflected in the first lines, “If I have known you only three days, then how will I remember you in ten?” and in the image of two shining stars crisscrossing the heavens on their way to opposite bookings—one to L.A., the other to London.

Meanwhile, Carly was off to London to record her second album,
Anticipation.
Jac Holzman chose Cat's own producer, Paul Samwell-Smith, to produce it with a “softer but solid” sound. “Carly is one of those artists whose incandescence burns brightest with a new producer for each album,” Holzman has said. “After they have squeezed the juice out of each other, it's on to the next, rather like a holiday romance, which in some cases I'm sure it was.” It was, with Samwell-Smith; he and Carly became lovers.

Along with her songs to Cat and Kris, Carly interpreted Kris's song to her, “I've Got to Have You,” to end the album;
Rolling Stone
's Stephen Davis opined, “When Carly moans, ‘I can't help it…I've got to have you,' we're being shown something so primal and so private that it takes your breath away.” The album, which Carly dedicated to Steve Harris, was spare—just Carly and her band: Glanz, Newmark, and Ryan, with Cat helping out on some vocals. Today Carly says she loved recording it, though, during the course of recording, Steve remembers that there was angst between Carly and her lover-producer. Still,
Anticipation
was a more confident effort than
Carly Simon.
In it are the beginnings of what would be trademark Carly touches—her lusty belting on “Anticipation” (its reviewer-dubbed “dazzling, can't-put-down refrain” has an all-out, drum-heavy rock arrangement, with suspended time between drumbeats that perfectly mirror the suspended time she was singing about); her sarcastic takedown of an arrogant man in the bongo-syncopated “Legend in Your Own Time”; her tremulous vulnerability in “Our First Day Together,” which featured what
The New York Times
's Don Heckman would call “a remarkably sophisticated melodic structure”; and the operatic emotion in “Share the End,” with a moving, anthemlike quality that would be most fully realized, years later, in her Academy Award–winning “Let the River Run.” “Summer's Coming Around Again” paid homage to Antonio Carlos Jobim's “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The blue-tinted cover of
Anticipation
shows Carly in a sheer, butterfly-winged top over a shimmery skirt, holding open both sides of a formal, wrought-iron gate. Her long legs are wide apart, and, all the way from hips to boots, they're visible beneath the fabric.

Anticipation
was released in November 1971. The title song remained in the Top 40 three months; the album sold 400,000 copies in the first four months, stayed in
Billboard
's Hot 100 for thirty-one weeks, eventually selling over half a million copies. Carly headlined at the Bitter End on December 18. Don Heckman had, three months earlier, written an impressed review of Carly's originality: “In Carly Simon's music one hears…the folk experience…synthesized through the consciousness of an enormously eclectic musical point of view, and shaped and molded by an esthetic that recognizes none of the traditional boundaries between pop styles.” Now he raved about the “explosive” new singer-songwriter's performance: