Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (71 page)

During these same years that Jim toiled and stalled on his novel, Carly was very productive. Jake had once seen her as having two roads to choose from: either being an arts-and-cause maven like Andrea or being an artist and presence in her own right. Now, moored in a marriage to a man who tended to her emotionally, and at the same time anxiously mindful that the career revived late in the game through
Coming Around Again
and “Let the River Run” wouldn't stay afloat forever, Carly became both the social maven
and
the workhorse. She began writing the first of what would be four children's books,
Midnight Farm,
and working with Jake on an opera,
Romulus Hunt,
as part of a collaboration between the Metropolitan Opera and Washington's Kennedy Center; she opened a small Manhattan art gallery named (after her Academy Award–winning song) Riverrun; and she would eventually open, with her friend Tamara Weiss, a boutique, Midnight Farm, that is still thriving on Martha's Vineyard.

Most important, she released two albums by the end of 1990 and one in 1992. One of the 1990 offerings was
My Romance,
in which she wisely renewed the standards franchise that would serve her well in years to come, this time interpreting a group of wistful torchers—“My Funny Valentine,” “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” “Bewitched,” and “Time After Time,” among them—like the kind that she and Tim Ratner had fallen in love to when Jonathan Schwartz played them on his all-night radio station. She also included the Irish ballad “Danny Boy”: the first song she had ever learned to sing, courtesy of her “good” nanny, Allie Brennan (as opposed to her mean nanny, Nancy Anderson), to whom she dedicated the album. The other album,
Have You Seen Me Lately?
featured her new original compositions. It was a pressing midlife quest; as she frankly described it to
The New York Times
's Stephen Holden, she was “middle-aged and feeling a decaying process starting.” Having been “brought up nonreligious” (yet now married to a former seminarian), Carly was finding that “I have more questions and am trying to find answers more concentratedly than I've ever had to in my life.” But the album, in which (as Holden restated the now-tedious trope) her “white, upper-middle-class adult sensibility” was trained on “the longings and insecurities of people who have it all, with wrenching honesty”—and which was delivered in Carly's typical “at once open-hearted and high-strung” voice—didn't catch on like its predecessor,
Coming Around Again,
had. But the 1990s would produce so many life-and-death challenges that Carly's palette of concerns—expressed in her songs of (as Holden put it) “anxious desire and erotic competitiveness”—would give way to more primal issues.

• • •

Carly's next album, the soundtrack for her friend Nora Ephron's 1992 directorial debut,
This Is My Life
(about a single mother raising two daughters), gave her a minor hit (#16 on the adult contemporary chart). “Love of My Life” came to her one night when Sally and Ben were going to bed. Sally, eighteen, would soon be off to Brown University, but Ben, fifteen, had had a bumpy boyhood. Between his dyslexia, his bouncing around to various schools, and a character much like his father's (but warmer), Carly had always been anxiously enmeshed with him. As the youngsters strode to their bedrooms that night, Carly impulsively called out: “You are the love of my life!” The angst of motherhood—both prosaic
and
operatic (“My heart is riding on a runaway train!”)—illuminated the song.

Since 1981, Carly had avoided playing large venues. Her fear of flying and her anxiety disorder hadn't receded. Now she had Jim drive her and her backup band to local concerts in a Winnebago. Carly used her affliction to bond with and help others. The singer-songwriter Marc Cohn (who'd just had the hit “Walking in Memphis”) became one of the young male friends to whom she would also become a big sister. “We had soulful conversations” during the early 1990s, Marc recalls. They shared “extremely debilitating disorders where you have to function despite being in a very anxious place.” Carly took matters in hand. “She wrote me a contract for getting over my writer's block: I would sit down at the piano for an hour a day. She gave me a long list of things I couldn't use to keep from writing—I couldn't use my divorce; I couldn't use my anxiety. Then she made me sign it. It was incredibly Carly-esque: generous, understanding, and funny.” Marc did such a good job of overcoming his anxieties “that when things got easier, I almost didn't want to tell her; there's a part of that symbiotic friendship when it's easier to be equal.” But he did tell her—“and she was thrilled for me.”

Toward the end of 1992, Jim's inability to complete his novel after four years of effort—and four years of Carly supporting him, emotionally and financially—was eating away at their marriage. He gave up on the novel entirely. Despite being “madly in love” with each other, as he puts it; despite a personal intimacy that seemed to have nothing to do with money and résumé, sadly, “the world couldn't go away in our heads,” he says. “When you marry a famous, relatively wealthy woman and you don't have money of your own, you're a bounder. With any relationship that's this unbalanced, you both withstand a psychological barrage.” Jim moved into a small apartment in a tenement building on the Upper West Side—“the move showed I was a man of integrity”—and went back to selling insurance.

Carly deeply missed the man who soothed her through her anxieties, and Jim wrote of now being “a spoon without a mate,” aching “for your melody and musk…a tad of linen next to your skin…the timbre of your voice close to my breath.”

The separation only lasted a few months. Emergency intervened: Andrea Simon was diagnosed with lung cancer. Jim returned to Carly, while Carly cared for her mother on the Vineyard. He secured a position teaching poetry at Harvard with Robert Coles, the noted child psychologist. Eventually, when Coles started a quarterly magazine on the arts and humanities called
Double Take,
Jim was made editor.

Carly's relationship with her larger-than-life mother had always been complicated. She had both rebelled against Andrea (becoming a hands-on, breast-feeding mother rather than relying on nannies, for one thing)
and
become
like
Andrea: the witty seductress, the stylish life organizer. As with many psychoanalyzed, feminist women, she had come to view her mother both sympathetically—as a victim of an earlier, sexist age, doing what she
had
to do to escape husband-borne indignities—and also critically, angrily. One day (before Andrea's cancer had been diagnosed) Carly dashed off a lyric-metered letter to Andrea about the unresolved issue of Ronnie Klinzing. “Why can't you apologize / You say it was all Daddy's fault / He loved Auntie Jo and treated you like a scullery maid…” Still, Carly contended, the victims were her and her sisters. She considered mailing the letter—getting one's true feelings out was the orthodoxy of the day—but was stopped by a remembered bit of Andrea's advice: never mail a letter composed in strong emotion. The wise demurral would inspire an album (and title song),
Letters Never Sent.

Even as Andrea's cancer advanced, “she was still indomitable,” Jim says. “She said, ‘You've gotta do this! You've gotta do that!'” Carly cared for her frail mother—“carrying Andrea to the ferry,” Jim says, “taking her to the bathroom—this woman who had been such a giant and such a tremendous influence on her daughters.” When Andrea resisted radiation treatment, Carly hired two handsome young actors to escort her mother to the hospital; Andrea rose to the occasion. As 1993 turned to 1994, Andrea's prognosis dimmed. Carly, Joey, Lucy, and Peter decided not to tell their mother that she was dying. “We knew it was a truth that she did not want to know,” Lucy has said. Instead, they gathered around her bed in the Grosvenor Avenue house and sang to her. In February, she succumbed; Carly was at her bedside, and “I wanted to crawl under the covers with her and go back to the womb,” she told a confidante.

Instead, she wrote:

Those three lines are resonant for any adult sisters for whom arguments about material things are merciful proxies for the hurts, hierarchies, and guilts of childhood, which indelibly animate their sisterhood. In the alternately solemn and buoyant “Like a River,” in which she invokes the grand nurturance of the mother she cannot believe is dead, Carly returns to the simile (female = river) she'd coined twenty-two years earlier in “Think I'm Gonna Have a Baby,” but now she shears it of its breeziness. “I'll wait no more for you as a daughter,” she sings, then turns around and vows, “but I will wait for you for-
e
-ver, like a river.”

Immediately after Andrea's death, Carly's friend Jackie Kennedy Onassis took a turn for the worse in her battle against lymphoma. Carly had a lunch for Jackie on April 14, 1994—“the last day that Jackie was leading a normal life,” says Joe Armstrong, who was present. “Jackie was just finishing a round of chemo; she was wearing a wig, which was very upsetting and jarring to Carly and me, because we hadn't seen her in a month or two and she was no longer the strong, vibrant person we knew.” Still, Jackie was upbeat. “She said, ‘Just four more weeks and I get my life back.'” As Carly's two guests were putting on their coats and leaving, Carly said, “I have something for you,” and she put a tape of a song, “Touched by the Sun,” into Jackie's hand, explaining that she had written it for her. The song, delivered with Carly's “You're So Vain” ferocity, was about a woman living in proximity to greatness—as women of Jackie's (and Andrea's) era did—but also living daringly, even foolhardily. (“I
need
to let them say, ‘She must have been
mad.
'”) People had thought Jackie Kennedy “mad” when she married homely, crass, foreign Aristotle Onassis and fell off her young-widow-of-Camelot throne. But her quieter audacity was in being, for twenty years, a regular Manhattan working woman, strolling alone through Central Park; trying, with any editor's limited effectiveness, to get celebrities to pen tell-alls; living happily with a man she wasn't married to; standing in movie lines like any ticket holder.

Jackie, Joe Armstrong says, “was bowled over by Carly's song.”

At the beginning of the third week of May, when the Central Park outside their windows was freshly abloom, Carly and Joe knew that Jackie was dying. They were on their knees, praying, in Joe's Upper West Side living room, when the phone rang. It was Marta, who'd been Caroline and John's nanny, saying, “Come right over.” Jackie wanted to say good-bye. The Fifth Avenue apartment was mobbed with friends, but only women, and few of them, at that, were allowed into the bedroom. “Madam wouldn't want a man to see her like this,” Marta told Carly, so Joe hung back as Carly entered the bedroom of the most queenly woman in America.

A day or so later, Carly and Joe returned to the apartment—for Jackie's wake. “We were just shattered,” Joe recalls. They hadn't expected “a big cocktail party, people with drinks in their hands, all this noise—and there was Jackie, in the corner, in the casket.” At the funeral, Ted Kennedy humorously orated about his brother—“Jack” this and “Jack” that. It seemed odd to many that the woman who had for decades led such a singular, self-powered life was, in death, reduced to that long-ago stage of her life she had surpassed—being the ornamental wife among young lions. The Camelot images that filled the nation's TV screens during the tributes to her seemed as knee-jerk and unrepresentative as Joe and Carly felt the wake had been.

Letters Never Sent
was released in 1995, with Carly's songs to her mother and Jackie on it. But there were no singles, no hits. Carly was now called a “heritage”—read older—artist by Arista. She had passed the fifty-year mark.

Carly loved Jim; her charming poet was the stallion who thought her a goddess. But for all of that romance, issues remained in their marriage, and Carly and Jim did what so many verbal, middle-aged married people now did: threw themselves into couples therapy. “Carly's attitude was: ‘I don't give a shit how much this hurts! We're gonna get an answer!'” he says. But “two or three” therapists later, they felt fatigued and disheartened. “The last counselor—we're both crying, walking down the street…and she says, ‘I'm not doing this anymore.' And I say, ‘I'm not either.'” They made one last—inventive—stab at counseling. Carly had read that in China, when married couples have problems, they enlist another couple to counsel them. They chose Jim's good friend, TV writer David Black, and Black's wife, Debbie, to perform this function. Through their “sessions” with the Blacks—with David heatedly taking Carly's side and Debbie heatedly taking Jim's (“she, like me, was trying to be independent within a marriage”)—they realized one root of their problem: “Carly thinks and feels symbolically, while I think and feel literally.”

Still, that abstract revelation didn't solve things. In 1997 Carly and Jim moved into an arrangement they would occupy for the next eight years: they would stay married, remaining “madly in love,” talking many times a day like best friends, keeping the future of their relationship open—but mostly living separately. Of those “many ways to touch,” they'd found an imperfect version they could live with. Carly recorded another album of classic torch songs (“Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,” “Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye,” and more) with one original composition,
Film Noir.
Steeped in emotion over the limbo state of her marriage, she put her heart into the songs;
Film Noir
is her favorite of her albums. Then again, perhaps all that emotion was her body warning her mind that, after her mother's death and Jackie's death and the separation from Jim, an even bigger blow was coming.