VANITY AFFAIR

I HAD THAT melody for a long time. I had been asked to write the theme song for a [1969] television special called Who Killed Lake Erie? for NBC. They wanted to write about the devastation through pollution of Lake Erie and how it happened. So I wrote that melody and they did use it for the film but I got a very disenchanting TV review saying my Weltschmerzy music didn't exactly lend itself to what it was trying to say. But I kept the melody around and then about a year into my songwriting period, I was just starting to play the piano and my sister and I had a party in our apartment. The doorbell rang and my sister let this guy in. A friend of mine was standing next to me and said, “Look at him, he's walking into the party like he's walking onto a yacht.” I thought, I'm going to write that down, it could come in handy. Maybe a month later I started singing a song that I thought of as a nursery rhyme: (sings to the opening melody of You’re So Vain) “Bless you Ben, you came in when nobody else left off.” And that was the beginning of You're So Vain.

I had all of these different concepts in mind. I had the melody for Who Killed Lake Erie?, I had a melody for the nursery rhyme and the line from the party, so three different things in my notebook under the same heading. But before it was called You're So Vain it was called The Ballad Of The Vain Man. It started out in maybe 1968 and was finished in 1972. It took many little turns and pirouettes.

As for who I think it's about, I think I've told too many people already

(laughs). How many men have claimed it was about them or denied it? I don't think anybody that's ever been asked, at least asked by me, has answered the question with a straight answer. There's always a joke to be made about it.