Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (64 page)

According to Carly, her divorce from James, which she did not want, “was totally orchestrated by Kathryn Walker.” Carly remembers their last moment as man and wife: “He was sitting in front of me in the courtroom and I just have a picture of his ankle that will stay with me forever. I remember
every
way his ankle bone turned and where his pant leg stopped, and his sandal—it
stays
with me.” Not with a bang but a whimper.

When Ellen told Carly she was divorcing Vieri, Carly—who'd given Ellen that valuable wake-up call a few years earlier—“just kind of sat back and smiled and said, ‘You don't think that's going to solve anything, do you?'” Enlightened talk among women about what they
deserved
from men made such fair-sounding good sense; to educated, privileged women who'd ridden the wave of liberation with élan—who'd done “work” on themselves, who'd
scienced
love, whether as Jungian Ph.D.s or pop star feminists or anything else—that talk was supposed to be the beginning of self-esteem (a concept that was not yet a cliché). If only that righteous empowerment you were supposed to feel could lead to something other than irony and regret, or could change things. “Years later,” Ellen says, “I told Carly, ‘You were right; that was no easy solution.'”

Carly released her eleventh original album,
Hello Big Man
—its title tune, homaging her parents' romance—the year of her divorce, 1983. She was in the shadows; it was the era of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Carly and Carole and Joni's generation—their bulging emotional dossier, all those lessons learned—was irrelevant. History was CBGB's; history was Sid and Nancy.
Real
history was Stevie Nicks. Unnoticed in
Hello Big Man
was “Orpheus,” one of Carly's favorites of her own songs and a personal signifier in her current life. It's an obvious melodrama, but, to her, a real one. Giving James the name of the ancient Greek poet of the lyre (and, by implication, making herself into his adored wife, Eurydice, whom he lost, tragically, twice), she sings of how James first drove her away, then when she took the bait, closed the door to their relationship and moved on, even though she was more than willing to return. Her pleading refrain—“But it was
there
for us…”—movingly expresses her regret for ending the relationship, a move he had essentially forced upon her by his behavior.

Carly had a new man, Al Corley, a handsome blond actor from the Midwest over a dozen years her junior who'd been the original Steven Carrington on
Dynasty.
Corley (who eventually became a director) would inspire Carly's taunting, defensive “My New Boyfriend,” on her next album, in which a woman declares her rebound romance with a younger man to be not as shallow as it seems. Al was great with Ben and Sally, “teaching them how to dive off a diving board; teaching Ben to play basketball; he was youthful and very active athletically,” Carly says. In the boundaries-demolishing tradition of her family, in the mid-2000s Carly's son, Ben, would be romantically involved with Al's post-Carly girlfriend.

The Peyton Place–like incestuousness of their lives was never more evident than on one night in 1984 at an Upper West Side restaurant. Carly (now broken up with Al Corley) was there with friends while James, Kathryn, and Russ Kunkel were seated at another table. James and Russ had met and bonded fifteen years earlier at that first “Fire and Rain” session. They were virtually best friends, but there was also a power and status difference—James was Russ's “boss” (Russ uses that word, unironically); they were recording star and drummer. Russ was the person who, on April 6, 1971, had come into Carly's Troubadour dressing room and made her even more stage-frightened than she already was by exclaiming (as he recalls his words): “Dig this! James Taylor's coming to see the show!”

“Carly came up to the table,” Russ recalls, of that evening in 1984. “Being around Carly was uncomfortable for James because it was uncomfortable for Kathryn, but Carly said ‘Hi!' And”—in hearing range of James—“she gave me her number and said, ‘Call me if you're going to be in the city for a while.'” Carly remembers the atmosphere being so awkward that the candle on the table fell over, “and”—she exaggerates—“Kathryn's sweater went up in flames.”

Russ continues: “Carly looked great, so, what the heck—I called her. I went to see her, and we had lunch, and there was an attraction there.” In a matter of weeks, Russ leased out his L.A. house, came to New York, and moved in with Carly—he and his boss's ex-wife became a couple. Someone who knew them all at the time says, “James was over Carly; he didn't care that Russ was
with
her, but he didn't want her backstage at the shows.” Carly says, “Russ and I fell in love, and he was trying to work with James, but I wasn't allowed to go to the performances. It was very awkward and devastating.” One night Carly challenged that ban. When a person who worked with James ran into Carly and Russ walking into the backstage area before a concert, “I looked at Peter Asher,” the person says, “and he looked at me and we
ran
to the elevator and pushed the down button to get the hell out of there.” James Taylor got
angry.
“In hindsight,” Russ says today—with a session player's sense of “knowing his place”—“maybe” the romance with Carly “wasn't the best idea because it made my boss feel uncomfortable.”

The relationship with Russ was very good for Carly. While he was indeed a simple man (“There were no conversations with William and Rose Styron about the German philosophers,” Jake would say to Russ's eventual replacement, Jim Hart, who
did
make such repartee), he was “loving, kind, and guiding,” Carly says, “and he was more important than anyone else in my musical education. He taught me to be self-taught. He was the most enthusiastic and knowing audience I ever had and he wasn't competitive with me.”

That influence had to wait for an album to manifest itself. Carly had her twelfth album,
Spoiled Girl,
pretty much mapped out when she started living with Russ. Stephen Holden generously called the August 1985 release a “spicy, lighthearted romp,” but Carly admits she lost her judgment when making it. Indeed, she used nine different producers, it hewed to the trendy dance music sound that was not her natural métier, and though the album may have
sounded
“lighthearted,” she'd approached it with desperation. She unloaded her worries on Don Was (the producer for the B-52's, who later produced Bonnie Raitt's Grammys-dominating
Nick of Time:
its wonderful title song, a woman's contemplation of aging) right after they met. “She said very candidly that she was afraid of not having a place in music anymore,” Was says. Joni and Carole were in similar situations: Joni had made, with husband Larry Klein, a synthesizer-driven album,
Dog Eat Dog,
which the radio stations were ignoring; Carole made the synthesizer-driven
Speeding Time
(her husband, Rick Sorensen—still known as Teepee Rick in the hills of Idaho—cowrote one of its songs, “Chalice Borealis”), which also fared poorly. All three were women past age forty. Joni and Carole were married; Carly was regretfully divorced and involved with her ex-husband's drummer, and both she and Russ had been put in their “place” by James. Hardly an ego-enhancing situation.

The only song, aside from “My New Boyfriend,” that Carly solely wrote on
Spoiled Girl
was “The Wives Are in Connecticut,” about an executive whose own cheating on his wife first fills him with macho pride and then makes him wonder if his cuckolded wife's amorousness is
really
directed at him or has been inspired by a secret affair with any number of local young studs. Listeners didn't know it, of course, but that witty song had Richard Simon and Auntie Jo and Andrea Simon and Ronnie Klinzing written all over it. Still, the album, for the most part, tanked.

By the time
Spoiled Girl
was released, Carly and Russ were officially engaged. Carly contends that her engagement to her ex-husband's friend and drummer is what made James ask Kathryn to marry him. Others might disagree, but most agree that the Carly-and-James story didn't end when their marriage did. For James, his almost exaggerated avoidance of Carly was in keeping with his confrontation-ducking personality, and almost surely influenced by his strong new wife and even stronger mother.
*
(Says one who knew all parties well during that time: “It was very difficult for James to have Carly in his life—to communicate with her at
all
—when he was taking on new relationships. It just didn't work for him. He had to cut himself off.”) For Carly—Leah Kunkel recalls James's brother Livingston first expressing this widely shared feeling—“her divorce from James was just another chapter of their relationship.” In any case, says the close friend, “the children were wounded by that divorce. They deeply and passionately love their mother and father.”

James and Kathryn were married in December at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Carly moved Russ into the romantic Vineyard home—with its beautiful fields, woods, and ocean views—that she'd lived in with James and which became hers in the divorce (she lives there, to this day). She told reporters who inquired that, though they had postponed it because of scheduling conflicts, “at some point there will be a wedding…I'm in love with someone I want to marry. He has children
**
and I have children and we want to combine them and make a family.” (Not everybody believed a wedding would take place. “Russ was in over his head with Carly” is how Leah puts it.) Free from James's aversion to the soirees that Carly favored (even though, as Jake notes, every woman James married “was an ‘uptown girl' who dragged him into a life of cultured cocktail parties—he seemed to want or expect that”), she cultivated friendships templated on her parents'—with the Styrons, with Art Buchwald, and directors Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron, whose turning of contemporary urbane love stories into movies would give Carly a second musical life.

But the ultimate of these new friends was Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who, as an editor at Doubleday, had approached Carly to write a memoir. Carly hesitated (and eventually turned the offer down), but a connection flourished. In Carly, Jackie saw someone “who was uninhibited and free-spirited, like
she
had been when she was running around Washington as a single girl with a camera and taking all those exotic trips and writing those diaries,” says their mutual friend Joe Armstrong. “Because of the life she had, Jackie had to be so controlled; she was only
thirty-four
when her husband's brains were blown out while she sat next to him. But Carly got to
stay
that way. She was the most open, honest, colorful whirlwind of energy.” In Carly, the former First Lady glimpsed the person she “couldn't be anymore.”

Carly sang at Caroline Kennedy's July 1986 marriage to Edwin Schlossberg, doing a rendition of the Dixie Cups' “Chapel of Love” and her own first song for James, “The Right Thing to Do.” At the wedding party, the mother of the bride—usually perceived as one of the most untouchable women in America—cheerfully used the same Portosan as the band members. Jackie gossiped like a schoolgirl with Carly about men and love and conquests. (And politics: John Kerry would probably be thrilled to know that, Carly says, during his years as Massachusetts senator, “Jackie loved him and always remarked on the fact that he had the same initials as JFK.”) And the elegant Jackie was no slouch in the practical jokes department. One time Carly and Jackie went backstage after a Placido Domingo concert, and Domingo flirted profligately with Carly, as was his wont. The next day a messenger arrived at Carly's door with a gift-wrapped framed photo of Domingo, autographed, “My darling Carly, I will adore you forever.” Beside herself with surprise and glee, Carly called Mike Nichols, and Lucy and Joey, and gloated about the memento. Then she called Jackie and said, “Can you imagine? He sent this to me! I think he's in love with me.” Jackie roared with laughter, and confessed, “
I
signed and sent that picture to you.”

• • •

“You do the bass part—you
can
do it,” Russ told Carly, when she started writing her thirteenth album,
Coming Around Again.
He was her coach and support system (as well as, on one track, her producer). She credits Russ with returning her to her true musical self after a few years in the trying-to-be-trendy wilderness. The title song originated as an assignment: Carly would write the music for the Mike Nichols–directed film version of Nora Ephron's novel
Heartburn.
Meryl Streep was playing a fictionalized Ephron, dealing with being dumped, mid-pregnancy, by a fictionalized Carl Bernstein (played by Carly's long-ago one night stand Jack Nicholson). Character, writer, actress, and singer-songwriter formed a perfect storm in proffering the cynical but hopeful postforty female: a slightly more bedraggled, domesticated (and tarter) eight-years-later version of Jill Clayburgh's plucky self-sufficiency seeker in
An Unmarried Woman
and Diane Keaton's cerebral
and
bubbly heroines in
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan.