Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (51 page)

Carly came to see Richard at his Laurel Canyon house in May 1972, bearing a song she had just written, the gentle, somewhat folkie “Ballad of a Vain Man” (she'd loved Dylan's “Ballad of a Thin Man”). The song had come together in four separate parts. First, about a year earlier, she'd sketched out in her journal the beginning of a song called “Bless You, Ben.” Then, on a flight from L.A. to Palm Springs for the Elektra Records convention, she'd added another, totally unrelated line to her journal when her seat mate, musician Billy Mernit, looked into the cup on his tray and said, “Doesn't that shape look like clouds in my coffee?” Thirdly, at one point when she was feeling vengeful about the men who'd emotionally laid her low, she'd scribbled another, tauntlike, line into her journal. The line was waiting for context and meaning, but she knew it was good: “You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.” Finally, everything came together at a party in L.A. A man she knew walked in, with a certain attitude, “and I said to myself, This is
exactly
the person that ‘You're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you' is about!” Carly says today. “I envisioned him looking in the mirror and the scarf twirling, and the imaginary gavotte, and all the women wanting to be his partner.” After the party Carly realized that drippy “Bless You, Ben” was going nowhere, so, elongating its melody by three beats, and syncopating it, she substituted: “You
walked into
the party / Like you were
walk
ing onto a yacht”—she thought “walked into” had a “nice flicker” to it—and kept going.

The song reflected her belle-of-the-ball year and a half, which had negatively affected her self-esteem more than it seemed on the surface. Carly had belt-notched all those coveted hotties—Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, not to mention the unfamous ones (and her truly loved James)—and with her “extreme intelligence and worldly wit,” Ellen observed, she had enjoyed the party. Yet, Ellen adds, “I don't think she knew how to do it in her heart.” Jake agrees. “Those were all wrenching emotional affairs for her.” Sexual revolution or not, she'd felt used. “And this thing that Nicholson and Beatty
*
had, where they find a new girl and then they want to share her as a male bonding thing, that passed-on feeling [translated to]: ‘You gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me…'”

As Carly sat down at the piano and started playing “Ballad of a Vain Man,” Richard Perry grabbed his bongos and started “banging them up to a thunderous crescendo,” he recalls. Sure enough, inside the gentle folk song was a full-blast rocker. “Just listening to that song for the first time, I thought, Oh, my God—
what a hit this is!
” he says.

Carly flew to London in the middle of the summer to record
No Secrets.
James joined her when he finished a lengthy round of political fund-raisers with Carole for George McGovern's presidential bid. James and Carole were the first rock stars ever to stump for a presidential candidate; Warren Beatty organized the concerts and James's participation came as a favor from Carly to Warren. By now, “Ballad of a Vain Man” had turned into “You're So Vain”—the anthem of a woman exerting power over the boyfriend who did her wrong. The narrator's bitchy playfulness lights up the song. (“I bet you think this song is about you, don't you?” is Carly's adult version of her waving Ronnie Klinzing's jockstrap aloft.) The clunky-as-a-yearbook-autograph rhyme—“yacht,” “apricot,” “gavotte”—signals that this rock song is boldly uncool. It's a chick song. Happily using these ill-fitting words, the narrator is observing the employment of clothes, status symbols, and gestures of narcissism and insecurity in the war for self-esteem. But rather than using these things to shore herself up (or to put another woman down), she's using them to mock a powerful man. This is what makes people view the song as feminist—real-life feminist, not academic feminist. “Carly understands middle-class women,” Arlyne Rothberg says.

Over the course of their week working on the track, Richard Perry says, “anyone who heard that record would giggle, because you knew it would be a massive hit, and it kind of tickled you to have that feeling. Normally, no matter what something sounds like, you still hold a little quotient [of hope] in reserve. But with this record,
everyone
knew.” “Take it to the bank!” Steve Harris laughed, when he heard it. “Bet the house on it!”

Of the several providential touches that made people feel that way, the first was Jagger's walking into the studio one day, at Carly's behest, to sing vocals on the chorus. Perry was delighted and stunned. “It was the peak of the Rolling Stones' success and Jagger
never
did anything like that”—but there he was, adding his unmistakable cracking voice to Carly's sarcastic “
Don't
you,
don't
you,
don't
you?”s. “I honestly credit Mick with making my entire career,” Carly says, “because his voice was so important on ‘You're So Vain'—the sound, the mystery of who the song was about: it had a lot to do with Mick.” James, however, may have felt more unbalanced about Mick's participation—and about other men in Carly's past and present in general, at least according to one observer: Danny Armstrong. Danny happened to be in London, so Carly invited him to a session. “James was standing in the control room—I saw him as a very nervous, upset-but-keep-it-cool-on-the-outside person,” Danny said, when interviewed for this book. “He kept looking at me—he was interested in what the heck I was about, and it went both ways.”

The next key moment in the making of the record was Perry's happening upon bassist Klaus Voormann, warming up his fingers by doing a fast brush of the strings—Perry seized on that ominous-sounding, minor-mode accidental lick and had Voormann repeat it for the song's introduction, over which Carly whispers, “Son of a gun.” Finally, when everyone thought they had the track nailed, Perry still felt “it wasn't 100 percent”; the drumming was good, but not good enough. Jim Gordon (who'd played on Carole's album with The City,
Now That Everything's Been Said
) came in at the last minute and did a run-through—and Perry knew:
this
was the drummer.
*
When Carly arrived at the studio the next day and Perry asked her to do the track yet again, she was beside herself. “I thought we
had
it!” she said, and burst into tears. “Look, you gotta trust me,” Perry pleaded. “
This
is the
one.
This is the record we've been
dreaming
about.”

The cover of
No Secrets
shows Carly, as Arlyne puts it, as “the epitome of the 1970s educated woman.” Long, layered hair streaming out of the bottom of her wide-brimmed, high-topped hat, she is in errand-doing, lunch-date-going motion in velour jeans, tote bag swinging. Under her long-sleeved tight jersey, her nipples are discreetly visible.

After recording
No Secrets,
Carly returned to New York with James. “Mick and I had spent time together” in London, she says (while denying there was an affair between them), “but I really didn't want to be with anybody but James.” Steve Harris could tell “it had become more serious—there was a we're-going-to-get-married kind of feeling. Carly wanted it to be permanent.”

On November 1, the phone rang in Carly's apartment. It was Bianca Jagger “and she said to James, ‘You know my husband and your fiancée are having an affair,'” Carly recalls, “and James said, ‘That's not true'; he defended my integrity so beautifully.
**
(Confirming that she made that call, Bianca Jagger says that she suspected an affair because her husband sang chorus on Carly's song, and she says she found “a letter from Carly to Mick and a letter for Mick to send to Carly.”)

Carly says that she and James had, some days before the phone call, planned to marry quickly, but she also says, “There's nothing that gets men so crazy as other men pursuing their women. Boy, did we decide fast!”

Two days after Bianca Jagger's phone call—on November 3, hours before James was to appear at Radio City Music Hall
*
—an extremely minimalist wedding ceremony was held in Carly's apartment. Arrangements were so rushed that “certain tests were waived,” Carly says. The only guests were Andrea Simon and Trudy Taylor—the two opinionated matriarchs eyeing each other warily—and Jake Brackman, who served as best man to bride
and
groom. Just before the judge arrived, Carly called Jessica and Ellen with the happy news so they wouldn't have to learn it from the media. While Peter Asher was denying to reporters the rumors that a marriage was taking place—because he didn't know it was happening—James and Carly became man and wife. (However, the Ashers certainly knew the seriousness of the relationship and that a marriage was pending. Betsy—whom Joni had been calling during her months in Canada, playing her her new James-based songs for
For the Roses
—“was,” she says, “designated to tell Joni that James and Carly were going to get married.” Joni's reaction, Betsy says, was “‘Oh, okay.'” She concentrated on what she hadn't liked about James. “James's Martha's Vineyard scene was not for her. James had employed the whole island and all his brothers to build his little cottage. They were smoking dope on the roof. She'd passed on that.” Another friend of Joni's says that by that time it was definitively over with James. “She was ready to let him go.”)

Later that night, James told his Radio City Music Hall audience that he had just married Carly Simon. Cheers went up. A midnight party followed. Radio deejays announced the marriage—the first between two rock stars—as if it were a union of royalty.

Two months after their marriage, Carly and James were the subject of a ten-page
Rolling Stone
interview, in its January 4, 1973, issue. Writer Stu Werbin referred to them in the article as Mr. and Ms. Simon-Taylor. They were posed, honeymoon style, lei-bedecked, by a boat rail—he in a white suit, she in a bikini bottom and a macramé-backed lei. The elusive, head-in-his-sound-hole James Taylor was remarkably open, declaring, “Carly and I are in love with each other.” (Perhaps fearing he'd gotten too earnest, he also played the tough rocker, adding, “She's a piece of ass; it bothers me—if she looks at another man, I'll kill her.”) He revealed that they'd already named what he called their “hypothetical children” Sarah and Ben. (That the naming of his future children had not only been
done
by the inscrutable, hard-drugging James Taylor but volunteered
by
him to
Rolling Stone
was startling. Male rock stars weren't supposed to be romantic and domestic; this was
girl
stuff. This interview would lead to Carly and James being called everything from—in
The Washington Post—
“the Rainier and Grace of Rock” to, negatively, in hard rock circles, “the Ozzie and Harriet of Rock.”) James talked very honestly about his addiction, and, in a remark that would prove more truthful than she imagined, Carly said she was “addicted to James.”

Then Carly turned the conversation to gender politics, using her marriage as a vehicle.

Carly voiced concern at the fact that, until
No Secrets,
James had never listened to her music. He replied that he didn't
ever
listen to records, not even his own, but that answer didn't cut it with her. (She didn't tell
Rolling Stone,
but early on he'd told her he didn't
like
her songs—and this deeply hurt her). She used the interview to ponder aloud a disturbing realization that she and many other women were having, now that they were analyzing their romantic history through this new lens: “Any male that I've been involved with in the past,” she said (silently conjuring Delbanco and Armstrong), “has not liked my success, has not wanted me to be successful, has been threatened by that fact.”

James came through—sort of. “I'm very much interested in not seeing Carly behind the kitchen stove, because I see females live totally vicariously through their husbands and it drives them crazy and it drives the husband crazy, too.” Still, he was speaking to one easy issue (a woman giving up her career), when she was expressing anxiety about a more challenging one: What if she
surpassed
him? The much-buzzed-about
No Secrets
and the meteoric “You're So Vain” were about to be released. So were James's less promising
One Man Dog
and its single “Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”

Carly had made feminist points before, telling the
Chicago Tribune
's music critic Lynn Van Matre that, as Van Matre put it, “she'd never liked the term female singer-songwriter, with its implications that there is something unusual or somehow distinct about a woman who writes her own material as opposed to a man who does.” But in the
Rolling Stone
interview she became most fully what her female fans had approvingly suspected she was: a thoughtful, college-paper-word-using woman, laboring to turn the big ship of man-woman relations right along there with them. She said children should be raised to learn that gender differences don't mean male “dominance” and female “subservience,” and that “men can be emotional and women can be breadwinners,” that gossip columnists' interest in her love life rather than her work was “an extension of male chauvinistic pigism.” And she knew what she had to overcome: “My own conditioning is that one voice says to me, ‘Carly, you mustn't try to dominate the situation…[and] you mustn't expect James to do the dishes.'” But the other,
new
voice was saying, “‘I want my musicians to play in a slower tempo and it's James's turn to do the dishes tonight.'”