Carly Simon: Fathers and Lovers

I get along without you very well
Of course I do
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms
Of course I do
But I get along without you very well…. –
— “I Get Along without You Very Well,” Hoagy Carmichael, 1938*

AUTUMN HAS COME TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD. A STIFF WIND cuts through the dense, copper-colored stands of trees that shelter the clearing where James Taylor built a home in the early Seventies for his wife, Carly Simon, and their children. A maze of porches, quasi turrets and windows with frames painted in luminous pinks and yellows, the large, shingled retreat is a cross between some cockeyed farm boy’s idea of the perfect honeymoon cottage and a rustic castle worthy of a C.S. Lewis children’s fantasy. Even on the bleakest day, to approach it from the winding gravel road below would surely make anyone smile.

Well, almost anyone. According to Carly– — sitting outside the house, heavily sweatered against the chill– — these are not the happiest of times in the Taylor-Simon household. She is now facing a formal separation and likely divorce from her husband of almost ten years.

The breakup had been imminent for nearly two years. Both Carly and James were seen in the company of other escorts. And the couple often lived apart. Recently, James set up his own residences close to the house on the Vineyard and their apartment in Manhattan so that he could be near their two children: Sarah, 7, and Ben, 4. The basic bone of contention: Was James ever going to stay home and be a full-time husband and father?

“There are good reasons for the decision,” says a tanned Carly with a pensive nod. “Our needs are different; it seemed impossible to stay together. James needs a lot more space around him — aloneness, remoteness, more privacy. I need more closeness, more communication. He’s more abstract in our relationship. I’m more concrete. He’s more of a…. poet, and I’m more of a…. reporter.”

She smiles weakly, her full lips somehow appearing thin. “Basically, he just wasn’t willing to dress up like Louis XIV before we went to bed every night. I really demand that of a partner.” She bursts into what is apparently much-needed laughter and then grows serious again, smoothing out her corduroy jeans and pulling her long legs up under her.

“I feel as though I have to get on with the rest of my life and that if I start thinking, ‘Well, I’ll wait for James to get it together and wait for us to get back together again,’ then I’m not going to approach my life the same way as I would if I were thinking, ‘Well, that phase of my life is over and now I’m entering a new phase.’

“Sometimes we get along very well and sometimes we don’t get along at all. What you have here are two people who have made up their minds that they can’t stay together, but who are dedicated to raising their children together. Underneath it all there’s a tremendous feeling of….” She searches for the right word. “I would call it love.”

When they first met, it hurt Carly to learn that James was unfamiliar with her music. Almost ten years later, after all her albums (with their notoriously erotic covers) and all her hits (some of which James sang on), she still seems doubtful that she was successful in getting his attention. He was already living with her when he first saw the cover of her inaugural Carly Simon album (Elektra, 1971).

“Hey, that’s a fine-looking woman,” he said to a friend.

“That’s your girl,” said the friend.

“What?”

“That’s Carly.”

“Oh,” said James, looking closer. “So it is.”

Taylor first glimpsed his future wife on the Vineyard in the mid-Sixties, as she and her sister, Lucy, performed at the legendary Mooncusser folk club. But it was not until some six years later that they had so much as a casual conversation. Carly remembers the exact date that she first spoke to her future husband: April 6th, 1971. She was performing at the Troubadour in Los Angeles when “Jamie” Taylor came backstage to say hello. She was attracted to Taylor and let him know it.

“If you ever want a home-cooked meal….” she said.

“Tonight,” he answered.

When they married, in 1972, he was twenty-four and riding high with the commercial and critical triumph of the album Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon and its single, “You’ve Got a Friend.” Carly, then twenty-seven, was soon to rival her spouse’s successes with “You’re So Vain,” the monumental hit off her third album, No Secrets.

Considering her flirtatious ways and his roustabout inclinations, they seemed a plausible showbiz pairing. Stepping out of limos, locking arms in nightclubs, they were two lanky aristocrats– — he from the South, she from the East– — embodying the talent, intelligence, self-conscious style and sex appeal that characterized soft-rock stardom in the Seventies. James was the slyly reluctant ladies’ man, sauntering around in the spotlight with an “Aw, shucks” self-deprecation that amplified his magnetism. And Carly was the brainy siren, the ultimate catch. But while everyone was chasing Carly, she was running after the one guy who just kept on walking.