CARLY SIMON
The pop-rock secretkeeper talks memoirs, You’re So Vain and pain.
“You have to tell me exactly where you are,” says Carly Simon down the line from New York. “I just love London. How far are you from Wilton Place? ” Once MOJO has divulged its south London home office, noticeably less ritzy than Wilton Place’s Belgravia locale where Simon spent six weeks in 1965, we establish that she’s lying on her bed in the same Martha’s Vineyard house where she and James Taylor lived. Her ex-husband is one of the Boys Of The Trees, the title of Simon’s new memoir that confesses with nerveless candour the spells cast by the ‘Orpheus’ archetype, those divinely gifted male musicians that crossed her path – Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Mick Jagger and Taylor included. Though it all starts with dad, the Simon of US publishing giant Simon & Schuster, a gifted pianist according to Carly, but who favoured her two older sisters, which psychologists might say drove her into the arms of all those Orpheuses – though Wilton Place was home to her aristocratic English lover Willie Donaldson.
Who was Willie Donaldson?
He was our manager when the Simon Sisters [folksinging duo Carly and sister Lucy] did shows in London. He was the producer of Beyond The Fringe, and he wrote The Henry Root Letters. He was hilariously funny… he was friends with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers. I just adored Willie. It was as if I had found the greatest story of my life, and he became a story because it lasted such a short time between us.
Why a memoir, and why now?
I started one in 1987, I had a call from [close friend] Jackie Onassis, who asked me to write an autobiography on behalf of a publisher, so I wrote 80 pages, but I realised it was too raw. Any book I’d want to write had to tell the truth, and that was too uncomfortable, because my mother was still alive, and I didn’t want to write about the nucleus of what my book became, about my parents’ relationship and those spawned from that, and mine with various men.
In large swathes, it’s a very revealing read, and painfully so.
The most painful part was reliving the rejection I felt from my father. And then when he got sick, I just wanted to save him [he died of a heart attack when Carly was 16]. Embrace Me, You Child [from Simon’s 1972 album No
The golden-hued contralto on heartbreak, candid memoirs and Henry Root.
Secrets] is about my father and God, and how there was nothing those two couldn’t do.
After your London sojourn, you went solo – what kind of singer did you want to be?
That was my problem, I didn’t know who I was. I once sent a demo to Jerry Ragovoy, who [co-]wrote Piece Of My Heart, he said, “You have a great voice but I don’t know what your personality is, are you a jazz or a folk singer, a rock singer or a club singer? ” I loved Annie Ross, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Odetta, and then I discovered male singers, Harry Belafonte and Cat Stevens, Neil Young and Mick Jagger. You try to imitate them, and then one day you wake up and it’s you. But what I do know is that I was always expansive in my attitude to melody and chord changes, like on Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds.
People still talk about You’re So Vain, which you’ve aided and abetted – you’ve admitted the second verse addresses former lover Warren Beatty, while one version has the guy’s name whispered on it.
That’s from [2009’s] Never Been Gone, which was a home recording of old songs, but the name’s played backward! The thing is, the other two [subjects] don’t know it’s about them, so it’s not fair to say. But people like to have a puzzle. Sometimes it’s fun to talk about.
In the book, you say how you and James Taylor were, “the perfect fourth”: that you were F sharp and he was C sharp.
Those were our best notes, everyone has one. Mine’s probably gone down to an F now. When we sang together, it seemed to be all right in the world.
And now you haven’t talked in over 25 years.
As long as we’re both on this Earth, I don’t think that I won’t want to have a communication with James. The more I desire it, the sadder I feel that our children have felt pretty awful about it most of their lives, that he put down a real iron curtain. Maybe he’s built up so much energy around it that he can’t break it himself. It’s got to be his second wife who’s putting on the pressure. In some ways, we repeat what’s happened with our parents – I found another man to pretend I’m not there. But my second husband does see me, and loves me.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before. I pray at night, a little confessional of my own, which I’ve done since forever. I’m pretty comfortable with secrets of the past, because by the end of the day, there will be a pile more.