Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (61 page)

The album's controversial centerpiece—Arlyne was nervous about Carly's insistence that it be released as its first single—was “Slave.” The song was Carly's way of lamenting that, despite the rhetoric of feminism, acculturation and psychology were hard to change: “I'm just another woman, raised to be a slave.” James's withholding nature, his lack of enthusiasm for her music, and her need to minimize her success around him: all of this kept feeding her desire to win him, a prize as elusive as her father had been. The song's candor is devastating.

The unsettling, politically incorrect song caused Arlyne to publicly break ranks with her client. “I don't like ‘Slave,'” she told Fong-Torres, “not because of its music but because of its point of view.” Arlyne, a rare female manager in rock music, had bristled when, during an early Central Park concert, the male stars had a trailer to dress and relax in, while Carly was made to change in the public ladies' room. But Carly held firm. Yes, she said, she expected the song to elicit a “little scurry of female hair on the back on first hearing, probably because [women will] take the song at face value,” but she said that it was
actually
a “pro-high-consciousness” song because it identified a stubborn relic of female behavior that she was “angry about—goddamnit, sometimes I actually
still
feel like a slave!'”—enough to want to alter. In retrospect “Slave” is apocryphal. Even decades after she and James divorced and remarried (and divorced those second mates), Carly Simon's inability to stop loving James—her involuntary fixation on their time together—is right up there with her great generosity, her sophisticated wit, her almost dangerous candor, and her joie de vivre as one of the most noticeable things about her. “James!” she exclaims in an e-mail. “What a clenched fist of hard love!” For years, with few exceptions, he has declined contact with her (“He's not going there—guys don't,” one male friend says)—and about this willed avoidance she muses, with the pain that one hears in her songs: “There is no exit from that silence.”

• • •

During the headily feminist/Me Decade years—when
New York
magazine's cover featured a picture of a smiling mother of three who “ran away” from her family and when Avery Corman was writing his soon-to-be-best-selling novel,
Kramer vs. Kramer,
about a custody fight between an oppressed wife turned self-actualizer and a sexist husband turned full-time father—the female partner of (as
Rolling Stone
had called them) the Simon-Taylors was dealing with the reality beneath the new fairy tale.

First, there was her commitment to being a mother. She was so wrapped up in Sally, for a while she thought she'd never record again. Second, there was her terror of performing. Fame—“that's been my viper, my devil, my iguana,” she says—had exacerbated her stage fright; her “panic attacks” (which biofeedback, est, and Transcendental Meditation couldn't quell) were manifestations of her guilt at being the one Simon sister who
wasn't supposed
to be a star but became one. “Every minute of her career was drama,” Arlyne recalls. For years to come, whole days before her performances would be devoted to her trying to calm herself, sometimes with the full-time help of loved ones.
*
Carly was literally hypersensitive. The lights, crowds, and loud noises of a large venue led to a condition called “flooding”; she would experience palpitations, feel as if she were going to have a heart attack. She stopped touring. Third, there was deference to James. This time around, his
Gorilla
and her
Playing Possum
were more evenly matched in sales, and James's hit from that album—the delicious “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You),” which was a remake of Holland-Dozier-Holland's Motown hit for Marvin Gaye—shot to #5. “There have been moments of terrible friction based on who is higher on the charts,” Carly admitted a few years later, “and it's more comfortable if James is more successful than I am.” At the same time, Carly controlled most of their day-to-day life. “He completely went along with her life,” says Jake. “That's the thing with a junkie: They've got a secret;
*
they've got a little other life—
that's
what
they
control. But their outward life, they give
you
to control.” The men around Carly saw her changing. “She went into this myth of being a wife and mother so strongly, even when James was on the nod,” says Jake. On James's tour of Japan, Russ Kunkel recalls, “Carly came along and she was like anybody's wife.” Russ adds, “They seemed, as a couple, very much in love.”

The early to late-middle 1970s was one of the worst times to be married to someone with an addictive personality. Hard drugs, especially cocaine, were now considered “recreational,” and celebrities were always plied with them. “James would get a lot of free dope because people wanted to spend a little time with him and that was their ticket to an hour or two,” Jake says. “They'd say, ‘I just got a little China white' or ‘I just got a little Mexican brown.'” “I'm ashamed to say that I was really in cahoots with James,” Betsy Asher says. “I was in trouble myself—doing coke, way too much.” “It wasn't a strange time for [addiction] to be happening in the music business—it was almost unheard of for it
not
to be happening,” Carly says. At the same time, much less was known about spouses' roles in addiction than is known today, and the addict's desperate-to-help partner had to make do with guidance that had barely moved beyond the pot-and-psychedelics days. “Colleagues of mine who were practicing in the 1960s and 1970s tell me that the concept of ‘codependency' didn't come in until the
end
of the 1970s,” says Dr. Terry Horton, medical director of Phoenix House, the largest and one of the oldest nonprofit substance abuse services organizations in the country. Al-Anon, Alcoholics Anonymous's spouses' group, was known only to people in “the program”; this did not include James, who utilized private treatment (at a facility on York Avenue, and through talks with Dr. Andrew Weil, and others) but was not in AA.

Thus, in a hedonistic, drug-friendly time, couples outside of the small addict-and-partner help community were left to their own naïve devices. James was a young, lifelong-privileged man, able to feel he could beat the odds. During his marriage to Carly, he did
not
reach the point “where you say,” as Peter Asher puts it, “‘either I quit or I die.'”

Carly was at a loss for how to help James. “She'd get hysterical at his disappearance,” says Jake. “She'd find the dope and flush it down the toilet.” Carly says, “I lived in a state of fear for years. Addiction really takes over everything, and we were in its power. When James walked in the door, I was overly sensitive in examining his expression, examining the size of his pupils, looking for evidence—
always
looking for evidence. I was so nervous every time he went in a bathroom. I was incredibly naïve. I thought I could actually stop his addiction. Who was I kidding?” Still, she says, “like all difficult situations,” James's addiction was “something we got used to. Generally there were not emergency situations”; rather, there were “ones where he had to sleep something off or the regular methadone delivery [was late].”

Yet there
were
other times. “James was a very active addict in those years,” says one who worked with him. Peter Asher says, “You rapidly learn, about druggies: they will lie; they will cheat; they will do all kinds of despicable things. Carly and James would have rows quite often. They were two talented, neurotic, very interesting people, which made their relationships difficult,” even apart from James's addiction. (“I got him with all his baggage, and he got me with all of mine” is how Carly puts it.) Asher continues, “She was justified in ordering him out of the house a couple of times. During one of those archetypal moments I got a call from the Westbury Hotel, where we had an account. The desk clerk said, ‘There's a man here—he's shown up, he's kind of disheveled, he's got no shoes on and no identification, and he claims to be James Taylor.' My assistant, Gloria, said, ‘That's him!' She didn't need to talk to him.” It turned out that “Carly and James had had a huge row, and he left the house and made his way to the Westbury, shoeless. Obviously, it had been an altercation of some vehemence.”

On the other hand, James's effort to quit drugs made him tremendously poignant to Carly. “James was very, very rigorous at fighting his addiction, and it was very moving to see his fight,” she says. Jake, who is seasoned in AA talk, says, using a term that wasn't known back then, “Carly was an enabler.” As Carly explains, “A lot of James's relationships, including with me, fed into his addiction. When you're an addict, if you decide you're seeing, say, maple trees, then seeing one leaf fall from the tree is going to get you to need the drug. A lot of what I became to him became what he had to go get the drug to avoid.

“So I became very much the enemy, and it fit into the way I had been treated by a lot of men in my life, especially my father. It's so hard to break those patterns! I found James incredibly intoxicating and brilliant and funny; what was devastating was how he turned so many of those things against me. And you feel so responsible! ‘What did I do wrong?!'” James's drug addiction, exacerbating his withdrawing nature as it did, stimulated Carly's neediness, just as her father's silences had, years earlier. What the needle-and-guitar was for the one, the infirmity-and-piano had been for the other. In both realms was a girl hungry for love and a mother pained that her husband wasn't more present with their children. “It became a cat-and-mouse game,” says Carly. Tim White expressed it this way: James was “clever, shy, reckless, aloof, gentle and romantic in his own unreliable way; he was as casually self-absorbed as a man hooked on heroin for the better part of nine years could be. Drawing him out of that relationship and into hers, Carly found, was like pulling a grown man through a knothole.” More bluntly, Arlyne says, “It's impossible to have a relationship with a junkie; there's no ‘there' there!”

While trying to rescue her husband and caring for Sally, Carly continued to write and record. She put her complaints about James's absent parenting and their fights over the parental double standard into the sarcastically sweet-sounding “Fairweather Father” (in the liner notes, she denied the song was about James) for her 1976
Another Passenger.
Though the album, produced by Ted Templeman, didn't sell well, it was praised by
Rolling Stone
's Ken Tucker. Still, that review and others reprised some old cliché complaints about her.

By now, the hard-core rock press had gotten over their enthrallment with “You're So Vain” and were back to dismissing Carly as slick and pop. Even some women reviewers disliked Carly for a life that seemed too easy, straight, and connected.
*
Yet the women's movement was encouraging college girls to apply to law and med school; to be a young
woman
was to recast as
correctly
“political” those things (acquiring professional status and one's own money) that had been disdained as bourgeois—and were
still
bourgeois if you were male. Whether they were slightly younger women who were embracing currently-NOW-blessed, once-thought-“straight” ambition, or ex-wild-children Carly's own age made suddenly sensible by having babies, young and youngish women
were
becoming more “middle-class.”

From
Passenger,
Carly had a hit with a Michael McDonald song, “It Keeps You Runnin',” and its “Libby” celebrates her new close friendship with songwriter Libby Titus, “a charming, funny, vivacious hell of a woman,” as Danny Kortchmar describes her, whose lovers or husbands included, in said order, the Band's Levon Helm, Dr. John, and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen.

Another new friend was Mia Farrow, Carly's neighbor in the Central Park West building that she and James moved into as renters after selling their brownstone. “I wanted to
be
Carly,” Mia says. “I would see her walking down Seventy-second Street smiling, with a big bunch of flowers and her coat almost to the ground—the woman can
stride!
—and I knew all was well with the world. Even though she was riddled with phobias and she was always running herself down about her stage fright, she's also fearless with love and life.” The two women created, in their floors-apart twelve-room spreads with Central Park views, a cup-of-sugar-borrowing friendship that spanned the 1970s and 1980s. And Carly visited on Mia the kind of solicitousness she lavished on her other women friends: Carly would make Mia her special red wine pasta; Carly was Mia's son Moses' godmother; when Mia's mother took a fall in the building, Mia came home to find Carly and Jake standing over the older woman with a first-aid manual. Carly fixed Mia up with a male friend of hers, dressing Mia for the date “in an antique lace blouse from out of her closet,” Mia recalls, “and introducing me to the man with lights down and candles burning.” They would spend hours comparing money problems and shortcomings. “Not that we weren't
both
paralyzed with fear, but I'm more repressed, and Carly seemed so strong in my life—like a warrior, and the most loyal person I know. And she has a childlike quality of being unbuffered by her accomplishments. I've spent my whole life around celebrities in one way or another, and I've never known a celebrity
less
likely to get any safety and comfort from her success; it's like she's nine years old sometimes.” And Mia noticed, of course, Carly's trademark quality: “She is the most romantic
and most indiscreet
person I know.”