About a month into a romance with Warren Beatty, Carly Simon got a call from him saying he was flying to New York from LA and absolutely had to see her. He’d be getting in at around 12:30 a.m. and would have to be gone by 5:30 for an early-morning shoot.
He arrived, and the couple “made love like in a movie.”
“Warren was such a professional, the pressure points he knew about stirred a tremor in me,” Simon writes in her revealing new memoir, “Boys in the Trees” (Flatiron Books). “Warren seemed to have created a brand new manual on how to make love.”
After he left, Simon slept, then went for an appointment with her longtime therapist, whom she identifies as “Dr. L.”
She was raving to Dr. L about her night and what a “superman” Beatty was in the sack, when she saw “Dr. L looked unwell.”
She asked what was wrong, and he told her.
“Under the circumstances, I can’t withhold this. It’s too much to believe,” he said.
“You are not the first patient of the day who spent the night with Warren Beatty last night.”
It was 11 in the morning.
Much of the attention surrounding Carly Simon’s memoir involves the identity of the subject of her hit song “You’re So Vain,” which she reveals in a throwaway paragraph to have been about three people, with the second verse about Beatty. She has not revealed the other two.
But this question pales in interest to the realities of Simon’s romantic life.
Simon, who began singing as a child to work through a stammer, writes of growing up on Martha’s Vineyard, including a lanky boy she knew there, with a “stringy, androgynous allure,” named “Jamie” Taylor.
Performing in Greenwich Village with sister Lucy as The Simon Sisters, Simon began meeting, and dating, a slew of creative men, including directors Terrence Malick and Bob Rafelson, author Michael Crichton, producer Eddie Kramer and singer Cat Stevens, who inspired the hit “Anticipation” when he kept Simon waiting for a dinner date.
Then there was the time Jack Nicholson asked her at a party if they could go to her apartment. There, they sat on the couch and drank coffee and chatted for a few minutes before he interjected, “Do you ever drink coffee in your bedroom?” The romance lasted just a few nights.
‘Warren seemed to have created a brand new manual on how to make love.’
- Carly Simon
The first time she met Beatty, she was on tour, opening for Stevens. He visited her backstage.
“As he saw there was no one else around, he closed the door,” she writes. “He got very close to me, looked into my face, and looked down at my breasts, braless and curved bravely in an insinuating shape under my chamois shirt. He said: ‘Can I see you?’ ”
Simon was left speechless.
“What a glorious specimen of man,” she writes. “He put them all to shame, if looks and charm were what you were after. He homed in like a tracking dog.”
Beatty kept a list “he referred to as ‘the main loves of his life.’
“It worked and it shouldn’t have. It was irresistible,” she says of Beatty’s process.
“Warren’s list was there on a piece of white paper in his pocket so he could take it out and show you. When he showed me, he added my name, to make me current (the main one at the top) so I could see that I was right up there above women like Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Maria Tallchief and Lillian Hellman.”
Beatty was a dalliance she knew wouldn’t last. Mick Jagger would be, too. Simon recalls speaking to Jagger in 1972 at a party thrown by Atlantic Records President Ahmet Ertegun. Jagger had a wife, Bianca, and Simon had been living with singer James Taylor — her “Jamie” from the Vineyard — for six months.
Jagger seemed to communicate with her in a language only they understood.
“Every time Mick passed me while I was talking to someone, he looked at me with the same expression: You and I know the same thing. I, personally, have no idea what it is, and neither do you, but it is the same thing.”
Nothing happened that night except for jittery conversation, but sometime after, as she recorded the song “Ballad of a Vain Man” — which would become “You’re So Vain” — her producer invited a few guests to the studio.
As she stressfully tried to finish her album, she found herself surrounded by Paul and Linda McCartney, George Martin, Harry Nilsson and Jagger.
Nilsson joined her on background vocals, followed by Jagger. Her 45-minute collaboration with Jagger was feverish.
“Mick is that genius of an artist who thrives on the dark and the daring. And you could say that the love affair between us that appeared to be brewing contained both of those things,” she says.
She and Jagger “spent some evenings together at the studio where he was recording, and some other times in rooms at the Portobello Hotel, which was dangerous and conspicuous.”
In the end, though, her feelings for Taylor eclipsed all.
“I was holding back with Mick — not giving him exactly what he wanted, but I knew it was still more than James would be all right with.”
The night before she married Taylor, he got a call from Bianca Jagger saying he shouldn’t marry Simon because Simon and Mick were having an affair.
“She muttered some things I couldn’t believe she was saying and James couldn’t quite make out due to the connection and the language barrier,” Simon writes. “Then James said, ‘I’m sure that’s not true. Carly has told me about it, and it’s not what you think. I trust my wife-to-be. I trust Carly.’ ”
Soon, any notion of trust would be moot.
The first time Simon saw lanky Jamie Taylor outside the Vineyard, it was on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low.” Walking with her sister, Simon said, “I’m going to marry him.”
Months later, Simon and Taylor hooked up after his show at Carnegie Hall. Simon fell hard. That night, as she lay “half on top of him,” she found it “the nicest contact I could ever know, could ever have asked for, or ever remember.”
For Simon, Taylor was “my muse, my Orpheus, my sleeping darling, my ‘good night, sweet prince,’ my something-in-the-way-he-moves.” He moved into her Murray Hill apartment, and they were rarely apart thereafter.
Around the time she first flirted with Jagger, she noticed Taylor was feeling down — partially about that — and one day saw him reach into a suitcase and remove “a piece of rubber a few feet in length and the width of the piece of rope.”
“This is what I do,” Taylor told her. “Watch. I can’t have you and the habit at the same time. Maybe if you see me do it, it will take away the cat-and-mouse game. You have to watch me. I have to let it all go.”
She watched him tie off, cook heroin in a spoon, shoot it in his arm and fall back on the bed. Minutes later, he flushed the drugs down the toilet.
Troubling signs continued to emerge. Taylor would become cold. He’d berate her for not knowing certain words. Simon also found it concerning that he spoke to his ex-girlfriends, including Joni Mitchell, rudely when they called, yelling at them never to call again.
Shortly after their marriage, Simon wrote in her diary that Taylor “says that he needs to [get drunk] at least four times a day. I don’t seem to satisfy much in him.”
The couple had a daughter, Sally, but by mid-decade, just as Simon began to suspect she was pregnant again, their marriage felt the strains of Taylor’s infidelity as, Simon writes, he told her that he “had to get checked out for clap.”
She reacted calmly at first, not snapping until later that night.
As she recalled in her diary, “it was 8:30 p.m., and I was lying in bed. I went downstairs to break the Whitebook guitar on his head. He caught me in time, and I hit him with my fists as hard as I could.” (Simon was right about being pregnant. Their second child was a boy, Ben.)
In 1979, when Simon learned Taylor cheated on her with a backup singer, she began dating her engineer, Scott Litt.
Convinced by a producer that she needed to tell Taylor, she did, only to be confronted by a worse hurt — that Taylor was “ ‘seeing a few other women,’ [including] Evey: an Asian dancer who, he told me, was currently living in the fourth-floor walkup apartment on West 70th Street he used for rehearsals.”
After a night when Taylor didn’t come home until morning, then briefly moved out, Simon announced, “I’m going to your other apartment to meet Evey.” He didn’t respond.
Simon arrived to find a “tiny and muscular” woman with terror in her eyes. What followed was as awkward as one would imagine.
‘How does a person — me, or anyone else? — move ahead, push forward through life?’
- Carly Simon
“I spoke first: ‘I want you to see that I’m not such a monster,’ ” Simon writes.
“ ‘Oh, yes, you are,’ she . . . replied in her broken English. ‘Jamie doesn’t love you. Don’t you know that? He calls you a JAP — and he told me you buy big Mercedes convertible and drive around California trying to be a movie star, but you’re not pretty enough.’ ”
Evey continued her tirade, mixing real aspects of Simon’s life with pure fantasy. Simon went into the bathroom to contemplate her next move, but wound up leaving quietly. She continued on with Litt, and Taylor with Evey.
The last straw came soon after, at a show in Pittsburgh, when, during her first song, her body began gyrating and her heart started palpitating. It was a horrific panic attack.
She stopped singing, frozen, during her next song. She told the crowd she was having an anxiety attack and asked “if they would be willing to come onstage with me.”
About 50 people joined her, sitting around her, holding her hands, trying to give her comfort. But her palpitations increased, and then “I was also hemorrhaging from between my legs. What began as a near-imperceptible slow drip turned gradually into a single hot stream.”
Her pants soaked in blood, she ran backstage, changed, finished the show, then spent the next month in the hospital. While both Litt and Taylor visited her regularly, by the time she was released, Taylor was in a relationship with actress Kathryn Walker, who would become his second wife.
Simon ends the book around this time. Given the intensity of her day-to-day emotions, and her phenomenal recall of details, trying to include her entire life of love might have produced a tome too heavy to carry.
“How does a person — me, or anyone else? — move ahead, push forward through life?” Simon, now 70, asks toward the book’s end.
“The answer is that none of us does, not entirely. I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path. I move forward by incorporating whoever or whatever is missing or vanished into my very being, my body, my breath. The psychologists call this introjection, but I call it surviving.”
