More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon by Stephen Davis

Author:Stephen Davis [Davis, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101554258
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2012-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

DON’T LET ME BE LONELY

Carly Simon’s marriage to James Taylor had some of those close to her scratching their heads. The marriage looked great on paper—two of the stars of the American singer-songwriter movement joining creative (and reproductive) forces. But everyone knew also that there were bound to be some serious issues. Carly was older than James, who was openly struggling with the downside of national stardom at the age of twenty-four. Drugs—heroin and cocaine—were part of the burden that Carly took on when she accepted James’s heated proposal after Bianca Jagger’s upsetting phone call.

“I was afraid of drugs,” Carly said of this later, “and extremely naïve about it all. I just didn’t know what people were doing in the bathroom with needles and white powder. And [James] was very clever about hiding it. But once I realized that James was addicted, I became terribly afraid—for his life. I started realizing he was quite different when he was using, and I could tell when he was using this or that. But being so naïve, I thought that the love I felt for him would help him get better, because it had to. That’s how I felt at the time.”

Some people close to Carly reflected that the careers of the two stars might be about to diverge, with Carly’s star ascending while James’s was going down. His (low-key, totally brilliant) album One Man Dog—eighteen short songs in thirty-seven minutes—was released in November 1972, but didn’t sell as well as his previous records, despite a huge budget and an impressive roster of talent. The single “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” would only reach number four in January 1973. Meanwhile, insiders realized that No Secrets and “You’re So Vain” were about to propel Carly to the highest levels of their profession. Some worried the effect this might have on the marriage, since James Taylor was known to be quite competitive in his professional life.

Meanwhile, Joni Mitchell had just released For the Roses, an entire album about her relationship with James. For the Roses was immediately recognized as a pinnacle of the singer-songwriter era, an important and beautiful work of art that would prove to be one of the great albums of the century. The songs dealt frankly with James’s heroin addiction and the difficulties and heartbreak of living with it. Some of the lyrics bitterly described James’s underdeveloped personality, annoying personal habits, and his continual and often desperate search for drugs. Other songs remembered the beautiful and tender side of him—“while the song that he sang to soothe her to sleep / runs all through her circuits like a heartbeat.” If listening to this utterly thrilling new music, explicitly about her troubled young husband, gave Carly Simon any pause, she never mentioned it to anyone.

Andrea Simon, at home in Riverdale, had been expecting the call from Carly saying that there was to be a wedding, but she wasn’t expecting to be told the wedding was the next day. On November 3 she arrived

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