Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (65 page)

Thanks to Russ, Carly jettisoned the disco touches and some of the new wave sound that had colored her last two albums. She went back to what she knew best: a ballad with romance and worldliness. “Coming Around Again” was an announcement of both the phenomenon (unimaginatively named serial monogamy) launched by this cohort of women and the fluctuation of feelings within a marriage that might or might not be worth saving. The lyrics of the song niche it as by and for a woman of a certain age and set, with no apologies. The nicely ironic hook—“So don't mind if I fall apart / There's more room in a broken heart”—is a thumbnail autobiographical sketch, as is the lingering plaint—“I believe in love…It's comin' around again.” Carly popped the children's song “Itsy Bitsy Spider” (with Ben and Sally singing on it) onto the end of the song. Ephron and Streep cried when they heard it. Released as a single along with the movie, it hit the #18 spot and was Carly's biggest hit in six years.

Another song, the fetchingly arranged “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”—in which a restless wife envies her friend who's “moving out to Malibu” with her “bright new shiny boy”—goes at the album's title theme from the opposite direction. In the song, Carly takes the role of long-married Lucy or long-married Jessica (“How have you been able to stay faithful to
one
man for so long?” Carly once marveled admiringly to Jessica; “Who says I
have
?” Jessica shot back, implying that her college-beau-husband had evolved into different “men” throughout their long marriage), giving women like herself advice to make a familiar man sexy and new. Now that it was
always
possible to break up with your mate and look around again, you had to talk yourself into the
artificial
conservatism and placidity that earlier generations of women never had the luxury of rejecting. Two classic Carly lust songs, “Give Me All Night” and “All I Want Is You,” became minor hits, and the album went platinum.
Coming Around Again
was Carly's comeback. Stephen Holden said it was “the pop-music equivalent of the diaries of Anaïs Nin or Erica Jong's autobiographical novels.”

Just about the time, May 1987, that the album was released, Carly's relationship with Russ had run its course. He says, “The relationship was like a cruise. It had a point of demarcation and it just ended.” Russ's ex-wife, Leah, is more cynical. “When Carly decided they were breaking up, boxes of Russ's clothes arrived at his house,” she says. Carly calls Russ “absolutely precious—a pure and incandescent generous soul. He's like the most innocent Thoroughbred who doesn't want to win the race because he doesn't want to make the other horses lose. He was caught up in the bigger dramas. He's been hurt by both me and James. If he had been smart, he'd have put up a Do Not Enter sign.”

But Russ insists, “I have no regrets. I'd do it all over again. Carly and I had some wonderful times; she's a very loving, generous, incredibly kind woman—and she's as funny as a loon.” As for James, “he and I have been through really high times and low times, but it doesn't matter; we're all still here; it's great. And I feel the same way about Carly.” (Russ would eventually marry singer Nicolette Larson and they'd have a daughter, Elsie. Nicolette would die in 1997 from a sudden brain disorder. Russ remarried in 2004.)

Shortly after the breakup from Russ, Carly's face was featured all over Manhattan on bus shelter ads for
Redbook
magazine, announcing her as “Another
Redbook
Juggler.” (Women “juggling” work and family was the late-1980s media version of self-congratulatory mainstream feminism). During this moment of peak visibility, Carly took a trip to visit Jake at his new house in Hudson, New York. Earlier that same day, a thirty-seven-year-old Mutual of New York insurance salesman and amateur poet (in the John Ashbery/Frank O'Hara mode) named Jim Hart had impulsively decided
not
to drive to his usual Sunday custody visit to his ten-year-old son, Eamon, but to take the Metro North Hudson Valley train. Jim Hart isn't sure why he made that decision. Maybe it was the gods.

Hart was a very tall and nicely built man with a broad, genially handsome face framed by a gently receding hairline. He emanated self-confidence and empathy; and this was odd because, on paper, the mediocre-to-grim details of his life would promise neither charisma nor magnanimity. First, there were his present circumstances: Hart lived in a modest apartment in Manhattan's drab middle-class housing project, Stuyvesant Town. He worked out of MONY's New Jersey office. He had only $50,000 in the bank. He was the divorced father of a severely disabled child (Eamon was born with infantile myoclonic seizure disorder, leaving him seriously mentally retarded and very physically challenged), and he and his ex-wife, Alannah Fitzgerald, had declined to have Eamon institutionalized. They cared for him themselves.

Jim was in “the program,” AA. Before getting sober, he'd been, as Jake (who knew him from his own time in the program) puts it, “a bad drunk.” Then there was his background: unprepossessing, from a Manhattan-eye-view. He had spent most of his life in the pine-paneled provinces, growing up in Queens, attending nondescript Siena College, doing his first AA time in Rochester, living during his marriage near Albany (his wife was the daughter of the mayor of Troy, New York). Yet Jim Hart was a
naturally
urbane man. He exuded the literateness found at the tables of Elaine's. (One of his good friends was Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Bill Kennedy, the author of
Ironweed
and
The Cotton Club.
) Better yet, he was a rapt, soothing listener.

There was a hidden wellspring for Hart's unplaceable air of casual gravitas and self-confidence. He had studied for the priesthood for six years. From the age of fourteen to twenty, he'd been a “fervently religious” black-cassock-wearing novitiate of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, known as the Graymoor Friars. He had lived in their seminary in Garrison, New York. “If you meet people in religious orders—people who have spent their time in contemplation of what life is all about—they are not impressed with anybody
ever,
” Jim explains. “We”—he's including himself in this group—“know that you're a sinner and we're going to give you all salvation. And we know that we're all equal and that everything else is bullshit. And that is deeply,
deeply
in me. And if you think some other way—that a new hairdo, or a new car, or a new house on Martha's Vineyard is going to change your world—then you've wasted your life.”

Hart's spiritualism outlasted his traditional religiosity. Just before he was twenty-one, he told his superior, Father Juniper, “I have to leave because I don't believe in God anymore.” Father Juniper mused, “You know, some of our most important saints—Augustine, Francis, et cetera—had that problem.
I
don't think you have a faith problem; you have a
celibacy
problem.” This proved true by default. Thrust into the noncloistered world, Jim Hart developed a happy attribute that would have been lost had he continued in the priesthood. “I'm incredible in bed,” he says, without modesty or irony. “This is true. I have a long list of references.” He came to think of himself as a “stallion.”

And so, on that spring day in 1987, Jim Hart was standing at the Hudson, New York, station with his ex-wife, Alannah (a beautiful blond singer of Celtic music), and Eamon, waiting for the train back to the city. Walking to the same station eaves were Jake and Carly. The two old AA buddies, who'd kept in touch over the years, met up and Jake made introductions all around. Even though Jake assumed that Carly's first name alone was sufficient, “I introduced her as ‘Carly Simon.'” But, amazingly (or, perhaps, strategically), Jim didn't know that Jake's friend was a famous singer.
*

Jim kissed his child and bid his ex-wife good-bye when the train arrived, electronic horn sounding. Carly got in one car; Jim got in another, distant one. Then Jim (mentally erasing the fact that he had a girlfriend) raced through the clattering cars to find—and flirt with—Jake Brackman's sexy friend.

From Carly's point of view, Jim's not knowing who she was was more intriguing than insulting; he was so handsome and charming. Jim figured he had a shot with her when (he sensed) she
said
she was seeing someone but he could tell that she wasn't. He had the two-hour ride to woo her, and he shrewdly used his chits: his utter exoticism to this city girl's experience and what Jake had always admired as his conversational “silver tongue, his gift of gab.”

Jim told Carly about his years studying for the priesthood in the Franciscan order, in which priests worked with AIDS patients and addicts. He zeroed in on her romantic streak by unfolding the two-hankie turn-of-the-century origins of the Graymoor Friars: an Episcopalian nun and a Catholic priest fell in love and vowed, as a sign of that love, to never so much as touch each other—and then they founded the first ecumenical order of the Catholic church. As the train rumbled its way to Penn Station, Jim also told Carly how he had come to be divorced. His wife had left him for a fellow Celtic musician, a man who was one of the rare practitioners of strictly classical bagpiping, the plaintive-sounding
plebra.
And he told her how his father had been, in his youth, a virtual member of the notorious Irish gang the Westies of Hell's Kitchen (according to legend, the Westies, among other things, left decapitated human heads in kitchen freezers) and had been criminally or psychiatrically institutionalized “fifty-five times before he was thirty-five years old” but was
also
one of the wisest men he knew.

As he was proffering this unique biography, Carly was enraptured by Jim's milieu and experiences. She had spent every one of her over-forty years of life in the worldliest of circumstances, yet “there were worlds that are
not
about Carly Simon. I understood that,” Jim says. He could give this to her. And he wanted to. “Within twenty minutes of talking to her, I knew this was going to be a very significant relationship.”

Carly felt the same way. “I met a handsome man on a train,” Carly enthused to Jessica after she got home. “He was a priest and he's a writer.” “What has he written?” Jessica asked. Carly indicated that he hadn't exactly published yet, “but he's writing a book,” she said brightly. True, Jim had a novel about himself and his father mapped out in his head. It was just a matter of putting it down on paper. He even had a title for it,
Spike and Dive.
(The title referred to the measures of a rock face, and it was also slang for the angle of entrance into a woman's vagina.)

A romance quickly developed. As Jessica viewed it, “Carly found in Jim a great intellectual partner. She loved talking to him. She thought of him as a philosopher, and she valued his opinion on things. They could speak for
hours.
It was an immeasurably close relationship, very different from what she had with James.”

Jim held his own in Carly's high-powered social world. Jackie Onassis found him absolutely fascinating. Andrea flirted with him. Mike Nichols became his chum. (“Fake it 'til you make it,” Jim says, of his ability to mix with this crowd.) And he possessed two qualities that made him a perfect match for Carly: a grandly romantic perspective and high sexuality, a combination of qualities he would later express in his dedication to her of his 2004 self-published volume of poems,
Milding
: “If a stallion had a goddess…”

One day in fall of 1987 Jim called Jake, saying, “I need to talk to you—you're the only one who knows both of us. I want to ask Carly to marry me. What do you think?” First, Jake told Jim that he would have to consider it during lunch and for Jim to call him later. When Jim did so, Jake hesitated; then he said, in his slow, low voice: “She's the most neurotic woman in the world.” He paused, then added, “But she's the only one who's worth it.”

Jim proposed and Carly accepted. Jim quit his job at MONY; he would write
Spike and Dive
full-time now. They estimated it would take a year, maybe two, for him to complete the novel. She had faith in him.

They had one “huge” fight, Jim says, just before the wedding. Carly wanted Jim to sign a prenuptial agreement. Such documents were now being recommended when, among other things, people of different economic levels were marrying. “I was furious,” Jim says, “because the prenup elevated one aspect of the relationship—and
not
the most important one—over all others.” Jim asked his father's advice. “Do you love her?” Hart the elder asked. His son replied, “I
adore
her!” “Well, she's dead wrong,” the wise crook said. “But apologize to her for fighting with her—and sign it. Because if you love someone, apologizing when you're
wrong
doesn't count. Only apologizing even though you're
right
counts.” Jim signed the prenup.

Two days before Christmas 1987, as a light snow drizzled the Vineyard, Carly's and Jim's families gathered in an Edgartown church for their wedding. “Carly looked like a Russian heroine” in her fur-cowlnecked, tight-bodiced white dress, Jim says.