Carly Simon interview

By Nigel Farndale Published: 12:17PM GMT 03 Mar 2010

Previous of Images Next Carly Simon at home on Martha"s Vineyard, Massachusetts, 2010 Photo: Dana Lixenberg Carly Simon with her second husband, James Hart, and her children, Ben and Sally, at her 1994 initiation in to the Songwriters Hall of Fame Photo: Rex Features "A racer racehorse": Carly Simon in 1976 Photo: Alamy

As Carly Simon is display me around her residence on Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts, she mentions, matter-of-factly, that it is haunted. Guests in the gangling room regularly listen to the same conversation, apparently, about a jot down deal.

At 64 she seems small altered from her Seventies heyday, a skinny blonde in a rah-rah dress and knee-length snakeskin boots. And those teeth still have you helmet your eyes.

"You"re So Vain", David?

Indeed, such is the regard of her far-reaching and white smile, I conflict the urge to point out that ghosts do not exist. Besides, even a apostate identical to me cannot repudiate that there is a metaphorical participation in this house, the spook of a man not nonetheless dead.

I impute to James Taylor, her ex-husband and associate singer-songwriter and guitarist. Fellow legend, too, for the integrate were stone nobleness who used to cling to out with movie stars and presidents, who surfaced the charts, who appeared together on the cover of Rolling Stone.

James built this residence in 1969, she says, display me old photographs of the construction site. It was usually a cabin in the timber and we would nap on a pull-out cot over there.

The residence has stretched a good understanding given then. It right afar has a recording studio, library, tennis justice and a 45ft-tall watchtower that you reach by a nautical-style spin staircase.

Today, with a powdering of sleet on the surrounding fields, it feels cosy. There are candles everywhere, a log glow crackling in the abrade and lentil soup in progress on the stove.

The room we are sitting in is dominated by a baby grand piano. There is a chessboard set up and an acoustic guitar propped conflicting a rocking chair.

Her friends on the island have enclosed Jackie Onassis and Bill Clinton. There are photographs of them but nothing of James Taylor that I can see.

James who? she says with a laugh.

Their matrimony was one of the majority glamorous, high-profile pairings of the Seventies, but it was pushed to the boundary by his heroin obsession and infidelities.

When he picked up a venereal disease whilst on debate a highway accident, as the substitution had it he told her in this room.

Understandably, she didnt take it well and swung at him with the nearest thing to hand, a guitar. When she calmed down she told him she had a small news, too. She was pregnant.

They divorced in 1983 after 10 years and dual children. He remarried, twice. She once, to a poet.

When I encounter Ben, their 33-year-old son, I see James Taylor haunts his features, too. The similarity is uncanny, even with his Mormon brave and beanie hat.

Ben Taylor lives in a lodge in the drift here, but still sees a lot of his father. He is even closer to his mother, but he doesnt usually action as a go-between, given the dual do not talk.

I get the clarity Ben cannot even discuss his mothers name in his fathers company.

It is so critical that Ben has a good attribute with his father, Simon says. Given my druthers I would have a good attribute with him, too. But I dont appear to have any druthers about me!

Druthers?

Oh, is that an Americanism? It equates to given what I would rather have, I would rather have any attribute with James be it frustrating, mediocre, whatever than no attribute at all, than what we have now, that is a prolonged dull alleyway of memories heading up to a big wall of silence.

Blimey. You can discuss it she wrote her own lyrics, cant you? Ben is a musician who has the same outspoken character as his father.

Actually, I think the some-more Ben sings, the less identical to James he sounds, Simon says. He is an engaging multiple of the dual of us. His voice box is some-more identical to cave but the approach his tongue sits in his mouth, and the approach he pronounces words, is usually identical to James.

Ben has achieved on and co-produced his mothers new album. It facilities a integrate of new songs but is mostly new acoustic versions of her old songs, reinterpreted for a voice that is about half an octave reduce than it used to be.

It includes Anticipation, Coming Around Again and how could it not? Youre So Vain, the strange of that had Mick Jagger on subsidy vocals and was one of the biggest-selling singles of the Seventies.

If her ex-husband haunts this house, that strain contingency show up her. But she doesnt appear to mind articulate about it. Indeed, it was so cold when I arrived she poured shots of apricot cognac and sang, Her cognac was apricot! that is a decent joke, if you stop the lyrics to Youre So Vain.

There is a website dedicated to that strain that lists the dozens of times she has been asked by reporters over the years who, in between her most former lovers, the strain was created about. Cat Stevens? Kris Kristofferson? Mick Jagger?

The common arrogance is that it is Warren Beatty. The singer did, after all, ring her to conclude her for the song, given he was so vain he thought it was about him.

At the time they had their affair, she has said, Beatty was still comparatively undiscovered as a Don Juan. She felt she was one in between thousands It hadnt reached, you know, the populations of small countries.

She has regularly refused to contend who Youre So Vain is about, utterly righteously arguing that people dont unequivocally wish the truth, they cite the riddle. I discuss it her I am going to be the initial publisher in roughly 40 years not to ask her, given Ive already worked out the answer. Its about Willie Donaldson, isnt it?

She laughs. Yeah, thats it. Youve got it! Actually, I suspect it could have been about him, in that the time duration would have been accurate, and a lot of the specifics in the story competence have been embellished. I mean, the Leer jet could have been a Falcon. I dont think Willie flew by Leer jet.

Willie Donaldson was her least-likely conquest, or rather she was his. He was may be most appropriate well known as the humorous writer of The Henry Root Letters and the man who initial staged Beyond the Fringe, but he was additionally a sequence bankrupt, crack drug dependant and pimp, one who finished up failing in a decrepit London bedsit, his computer still logged onto a lesbian porn site.

But when they met he was a glamorous, Cambridge-educated seducer and impresario who had hereditary a happening and was going out with the singer Sarah Miles.

It was 1966. London was swinging. Carly Simon was 20. Donaldson described her as the answer to any lucid mans prayers; funny, quick, erotic, generously talented.

Sadly for both of them, he wasnt usually a lucid man. Eccentric would be a improved word. They got engaged, afterwards he dumped her.

I was madly in love with him, she says now. And after he pennyless my heart I couldnt recover my seductiveness in men for 4 years. I kept perplexing to assimilate given I found him so exotic. It wasnt usually given he had an English accent.

"We met on Jul 8 and by Jul twenty he had changed out of his place with Sarah Miles and had changed in with me at Wilton Place. We went up to the Portobello Road to buy tea sets. It was gangbusters. Then the Dear John minute came on Oct 24.

"We proposed to promulgate again once I was tied together to James and he wrote at the back of saying: "There hasnt been a day when I havent thought of you." All this love poured out of him, when I was at a protected distance!

Is it probable that he was being kind when he left, given he knew how self-destructive he was?

I dont think so. I think in review it was a good thing that I didnt wed Willie but it wasnt that he was being kind. I think he knew his ways were as well impolite for me, that I was as well most of a prude.

"There was a story he told of my receiving a bath afterwards lying exposed on the bed and saying: "What do you think?" That never happened. I have no thought given he felt the need to plan that. He didnt even have a bath tub!

He used to call her Little Frog Footman. I think it was from Cinderella. He did conclude me. I dont think I could have desired him as most as I did if he hadnt brought out something that I unequivocally desired about myself. My beloved Richard, who you met earlier, hes identical to that. He creates me feel so good about myself.

Richard is a surgeon, a maestro of the initial Gulf War, and a divorcee 10 years her junior.

He is large in an all-American, flinty-jawed way, and when we met he told me that, given his operations mostly take multiform hours, he likes to have song personification in the handling entertainment and yes, there is a small Carly Simon on the playlist. And no, hes not that kind of surgeon and that wasnt how they met.

He is a heading dilettante in laparoscopic surgery. Simon has had breast surgery, but it was reconstructive, following a mastectomy in the late Nineties. That contingency have clever her mind, I say, given her a sheer sign of her own mortality.

It certain did, she says. One of the things about creativity is you can be in rejection about these things. When I found out I had cancer, there were 4 hours in that I was pulsation my head on the marble kitchen tip saying, "I cant hold it, I cant hold it." But afterwards I felt as if this small armed forces in unvaried was flooding me. They had come to assistance me quarrel it. I felt unequivocally clever about it after that. It was one of the strongest durations of my life.

There is a new journal of Warren Beatty, by Peter Biskind, that suggests that when he met Carly Simon in a club and she told him about her breast cancer he looked worried and ran off. She has a duplicate of it on her bookshelf.

Oh God! she says, rocking at the back of on her sofa. I meant to censor that prior to you got here!

The book quotes Beatty as observant he has slept with some-more than 12,000 women. That contingency have his ex-lovers feel flattering special!

You think? You know what? Ive been flirting with the thought of essay an journal given I was articulate to Mike Nichols about all these biographies entrance out and he pronounced I should never co-operate with them given see what theyve finished to Warren.

"That book is full of inaccuracies. I havent review it myself but Richard review out a small passages, one of them observant I cut a tie by the important and scandalous men of my generation. A swathe? I know usually what I did each singular day given I kept a each day diary from the age of 7 until 1983 when I pennyless up with James.

Was it therapeutic?

I indispensable most some-more care than that!

Simon had a shaken relapse in the early Sixties, one brought on by a drink allergy. She has been saying therapists ever given and, to this day, suffers from a debilitating theatre fright, that equates to she frequency ever performs in public.

When Im feeling concerned or depressed, I do find it helps to reach for a coop and paper. There is something about essay things down, that hand-eye combination, that creates me feel calmer.

"Seeing things that are bothering you created down takes afar their power. It gives you a perspective. Helps you enclose them. The alternative day I was feeling so repelled and unhappy I had to lift the sheets over my head. I think Richard was a small repelled by my behaviour.

Her relatives appear to have been piece of the problem. Her father, additionally called Richard, was a abounding publisher, the Simon of Simon and Schuster. The immature Carly grew up in between the abounding and important of Manhattan. Not usually Rodgers and Hammerstein but additionally George Gershwin were unchanging guest at the family home.

Her father died in 1960 when she was 15. It was a formidable age. There was an regretful insensibility surrounding his genocide for me that hasnt been damaged by yet. I had an even bigger greeting when I was 10 and I found out he had had his initial heart attack. That demolished me. So freaked out.

"I would hit on timber 500 times each night meditative that would keep him from dying. Compulsive behaviour. The actuality that he didnt die the initial night I did it meant I had to keep you do it. I was so scared. I in the future began knocking less, removing it down to 300, afterwards 100 in the last year, afterwards he died.

There were unused issues. I longed for him to live longer so that I could see him and my mom unequivocally love each other. I couldn"t bear the thought that they didnt have the undiluted marriage, with the undiluted house, and the undiluted car and the undiluted apple cake cooling on the window ledge.

"My mom fell in love with someone else, you see. And when my sisters told me when I was twelve that my relatives didnt love each other, that was when I proposed carrying critical stress attacks.

Did that mental recall strike on her own marriage?

I think we do recompense by going off in the conflicting direction. You can repeat the mistakes of your relatives matrimony or you can go out of your approach not to repeat them.

"I listened Ben contend the alternative day that he unequivocally doesnt wish to repeat what he saw in the attribute in between myself and James. Yet those small repetitions hide up on you from at the back of and there you are you do the same things your mom did to your father.

She sounds identical to a destroyed romantic.

I am. As a kid I used to review Gone with the Wind over and over again. I longed for to be Scarlett OHara. I never longed for to hold that it was probable that there could be infidelity. I never longed for to be hold that it was even probable for a man to see an additional way, even for a moment. My burble of monogamy was pierced in a oppressive way.

Speaking of biographies, there was an glorious three times one that came out not prolonged ago called Girls Like Us, about Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon. It portrayed them as feminist icons, nonetheless that is not how Simon saw herself at the time.

I longed for to be the small lady at the back of the man heading the educational life, she says. I was as well bashful to be front of stage.

"The alternative day I came opposite a recording I done of a night at my unit when I was vital with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around progressing and we were all flitting around the guitar. Whenever it came to my spin I would run in to the kitchen and contend Id left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

Shyness? Really? Wasnt she bashful and assured at the same time? Driving with her feet on the mangle and the accelerator?

Yes, but with me it goes from one impassioned to the alternative identical to a pendulum, until I turn the hum of the pendulum. I stole that line from Mike Nichols. If I contend anything good, Ive probably ripped it off. Youve got to listen to this recording. Can I fool around it for you?

She goes upstairs, earnings with a MacBook Pro and finds the receptive to advice file. Kris Kristofferson sounds dipsomaniac when he is articulate but when he is personification his guitar and singing he sounds flattering good.

Was it usually the guitar they were flitting around?

As I recall, it was some-more about drink that night. I did used to fume weed though. There was a time for about dual years when I would hurl myself a corner each sunrise when I woke up.

Not good.

Why?

Ending the day with a joint, maybe. But starting it? Surely thats a sleazy slope.

But you get used to it. I theory I was befuddled as most of the waking hour as I wasnt stoned. I stopped it all unequivocally unexpected when I was profound with Sally.

Simon began her career as piece of a stand in action with her sister Lucy. They were called the Simon Sisters and on the musical circuit they non-stop for Woody Allen, in between others.

They separate up when Lucy tied together a psychiatrist and had a child. They still infrequently duet on the phone but it contingency have been tough for Lucy to watch as her sisters piece for one person career took off?

I theory it was but if she felt that, she had the good beauty not to show it. She was never going to contend to me, "Damn you and your series one singles". That said, my family were all flattering irritated around the time I tied together James. That seemed as well most for us to all of a remarkable turn identical to this stately couple. Yet it was never discussed. I still feel a small guilty about it.

Because?

Because I wasnt the one who longed for fame, but got it anyway.

Famous people had regularly surrounded her, though. Is that given the Clintons and Jackie Onassis found it easy to be in her company? Because she wasnt star struck?

Probably. I recollect with Jackie especially… She trails off.

Sorry, but she was Jackie to me. To try and be decorous about it would be even some-more repulsive than sounding as if I was name-dropping. I used to take good wish in being loose in front of her and think she appreciated that given she regularly seemed loose with me.

"I think a lot of the people in her hold up were emotionally concerned and not peaceful to share. We had a identical clarity of humour and were captivated to a lot of the same people. We desired each alternative and I recollect one of the initial times we had lunch together I was unequivocally shaken given she was half an hour late.

"She had been stranded in the conveyor but she incited up as ease as anything and I was the one who was hyperventilating. I had to take a Valium cleared down with gin. She thought this was droll and told me I was identical to a racer racehorse. High strung. Which is true.

It is scarcely eve and Richard comes in from outside. He has been clearing timber and right afar has a bonfire going. Simon suggests we all go out and fry marshmallows on it. She puts on a black velvet frock-coat with a bushy neck cuff and, carrying a parcel of marshmallows in one hand, picks up a guitar in the other.

Well, it is a campfire and she is Carly Simon. Somehow she manages to strum whilst wearing long, white silk dusk gloves. A racer racehorse, indeed.

Carlys Simons new manuscript Never Been Gone is expelled on Mar 1