Carly’s marriage had no shot – ex-hubby is gay
“LUCKY JIM” is Jim Hart’s astonishingly candid account of his long, sexually fraught marriage to Carly Simon, who ended her notorious run of famous lovers with a gay man.
Not that she knew. Hart, a recovered alcoholic and struggling novelist working as an insurance broker, was in deep denial when he met Simon in 1987.
They were introduced by a friend on the platform at a train station in upstate New York. What had to have struck Simon was Hart’s almost doppelganger resemblance to exhusband, James Taylor. Their rock-star marriage, as much sexual fusion as anything else, had cratered four years earlier.
On their first date, Hart and Simon enjoyed a cozy evening at her sprawling Central Park West apartment, ending the evening chastely with a kiss.
“She had clearly been swept away by me,” he writes.
The door had barely closed on him when Hart started envisioning the golden new life ahead that would allow him to “escape” from “the dreary, unrelenting, middle-class obsession with making a living. I was so tired of everything about my career in insurance.”
At the time, Hart was seeing three other women and had “discovered” gay phone lines. He’d taken to dropping into the gay movie house near his West Village apartment.
An evening out with Simon, though, beat all. Hart escorted her to a birthday party director Mike Nichols threw for himself at his Upper East Side townhouse. The rooms were thick with celebrities.
Harrison Ford, Paul Simon, Sigourney Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Candice Bergen, Steve Martin, Richard Avedon, Rose and William Styron. This was Simon’s crowd — and now his.
Six months after they met, they married. He already fit comfortably into her life both in New York and Martha’s Vineyard, where their magnificent seaside home was the one she famously shared with Taylor.
Hart had grown up hardscrabble in Long Beach, L.I., and spent years in and out of a seminary as a teenager. The trauma of life in those years was something he shared with Jackie Onassis, Carly’s good friend and, soon enough, his as well.
Onassis, Hart writes, was always eager to hear his opinions about the men in her life. But as her 62nd birthday approached, she had a more specific malerelated question to ask.
Hart recalls her asking in her “breathy whisper” whether his friend Alec Baldwin might consider being her date that night for dinner and the theater. Even though Baldwin had just started seeing Kim Basinger, his first words were “I’m there.”
One day Simon came to him stuck for lyrics on a song she was writing for Mike Nichols’ new movie “Working Girl.”
Hart hit the books, specifically James Joyce and Walt Whitman, presenting Simon with a “first draft” that, after she added a few phrases, became “Let the River Run,” the first song ever to win a Grammy, a Golden Globe and an Oscar.
Yet old urges kept intruding on Hart’s idyllic life with Simon. One night she confronted him with phone records. He’d been making calls to an S&M sex line, The Dungeon, to “chat with guys about what they wanted to do with me.”
Hart writes candidly about the sordid and brutal homosexual encounters he had through years of repeated relapses on drugs and then alcohol. Simon stayed in the marriage until filing for divorce in 2006 after 19 years.
On what would have been their 20th anniversary, Hart was truly a changed man. Not only was he sober, he was in the loving arms of a man. So ends the saga of James Hart and Carly Simon.