Carly Simon: Boys in the Trees & No Secrets

While prepping my notes for the debut of our “Songs of the 1980s” program, I checked out Carly Simon’s memoir to discover what, if anything, she had to say about “Let the River Run,” the first-ever simultaneous Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe winning song (written, composed, and performed). A quick flip to the back pages of Boys in the Trees led to the disappointing discovery that the memoir ended well before Simon’s big 1989 win. But as this memoir chronicled one of the more influential voices in the musical backdrop of my adolescence--via radio and my personal copy of No Secrets.--I was curious to discover what made this particular voice tick.

She was the daughter of Richard Simon, founder of the famed Simon & Shuster book publishers. Luminaries, including the likes of Benny Goodman, Richard Rodgers, James Thurber, Oscar Hammerstein, were regular visitors to a household filled to the brim with music: her talented father endlessly performed classics on the piano, and the entire family entertained each other acapella with the latest from Broadway. 

But beneath this stunning façade was a depressive father who paid his third daughter little personal attention; a mother who carried on an affair in the family home with her son’s live-in tutor; a boy who sexually molested Carly, beginning when she was only seven; a painful and lifelong stutter she developed at eight. Simon might have been a daughter of privilege, but she was also a child of suffering.

However, the money came in handy when she and her sister, Lucy, began their singing career, traveling back and forth to London. Known as “The Simon Sisters,” the two put out three albums before Lucy got married and Carly was left on her own. At this point, her childhood repeated itself in a way; just as her parents surrounded themselves with the superstars of their day, so did Carly, making friends with half the music and film industry and sleeping with the other half: Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, to name a few of her more famous, albeit brief, partners.

Her relationship with James Taylor was love at first sight. Or second--they knew of each from their Martha’s Vineyard childhood summers. Or wait, third sight: When Simon saw his face on the cover of Time Magazine in March 1971, she declared to her sister Lucy, “I’m going to marry that man.” A month later, they met as adults, and married the following year. The two had much in common: both grew up wealthy. Both were singer/songwriters. And both were pained souls searching for peace, as Simon describes in the memoir:

From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.

Yet, for all their issues, the initial union of these two creative forces seems to have been quite lovely:

As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.

The songs Simon wrote chronicling their early years were included in the No Secrets album, which I owned as a 12 y/o. While in the midst of the memoir, I suddenly regretted the LP having slipped from my keeping during my high school years. Reading the stories behind the songs produced a craving for another encounter with the record. Before its replacement came in the mail, I began comparing it to Carole King’s Tapestry in my mind. King was the other powerful musical backdrop in my young life, and her Tapestry songs, playing in my memory, seemed far more cerebral and cleverly put together than Simon’s.

But when No Secrets arrived, when I placed it on the turntable and was again in the presence of that lovely, husky voice, everything that compelled me to inhale it while it was in my possession came rushing back. The lyrics and tunes are simple, yes, and one sometimes feels that they don’t perfectly rhyme, but they are unarguably beautiful. And with half of the memoir under my belt, some of the songs now struck me as the creation of a sensitive soul, perhaps—no, definitely—someone who has transformed deep suffering into poetry. “Embrace Me You Child” is beyond touching, written by a late 20-ish woman who admired her musical father from the distance to which he always held her.

If Simon suffered from her short-term adult relationships (which, from the memoir, it’s clear she did), she had the last word with at least one of them in “Your So Vain,” a #1 song that kept the world guessing for decades. Beatty, it seems, was at least the subject of verse two, but verses one and three are amalgams of clever phrases Simon jotted down as well as (possibly) two additional men whose identities she has never revealed. Simon was tortured with lifelong low self-esteem, but perhaps at the moment of this song’s composition, she felt strong enough to call out at least one egotistical miscreant because she was happily in love with Taylor; making her own recording of his song, “Night Owl”; celebrating their new relationship in the joyous “The Right Thing to Do” while angsting over it in the title track, “No Secrets.”

I never got around to performing the inspiring "Let the River Run" at our 1980s library program because we ran out of time, though learning to play and sing it was pure joy. But I'm certainly thankful my research led me to Boys in the Trees. It's a fabulous read, written in loving detail by a life-long diarist and poet of the first order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play my new copy of No Secrets one more time.

"The Way We Were": Memories of a song.

 

I was a high school freshman when I saw “The Way We Were” in the theater with my clique of friends, one of those irritating groups of young people who attend films to socialize and watch the screen only during conversation lulls. So, I retained only two distinct memories of that viewing. Number one: When inebriated Hubble Gardiner momentarily rolls on top of an eagerly waiting Katie Moronsky, my friend Barb turned to me and whispered, “Did they just…?” I had no answer for her since I was just as clueless. You’ll have to cut us some slack; we were both sheltered 13-year-olds, and whatever the characters did during that brief scene remained very much under the covers.

The second memory was the music. Perhaps that’s why my babysitting family gifted me with the soundtrack album for Christmas the following year, which I listened to nonstop, despite my mother’s constant complaint that Streisand was just “yelling.”  

Mom was a choir singer with an excellent musical ear, but she and her contemporaries, who inhabited the tiny close-knit world of first-generation Dutch Americans, had been raised by Old-World parents who forbade their children to watch films or otherwise interact with popular culture. Although Mom snuck out to see The Wizard of Oz (naughty, naughty!), Judy Garland’s vocals apparently didn't ignite a life-long love affair with pop music; I later discovered a scrapbook Mom affectionately put together--programs from church and school choir concerts. While she clearly possessed a devoted affection for vocal performance, it was impossible that Streisand's exquisite sound would find a place in her heart. 

But I was mesmerized by the singer as was the rest of the world: I recently learned that 50 years ago, February 1974, the album's title song, “The Way We Were,” became the number one single on the US Billboard for three weeks, remaining in the top 100 for 24 weeks. It was Streisand’s first single to make it that far, which I found surprising, since she had been a star for more than a decade and The Way We Were was her fourteenth album. Yet the album’s title song was, indeed, her first number one.

Inauspiciously, this Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning song was written on spec; composer Marvin Hamlisch hadn’t yet made a name for himself. But film producer Ray Stark promised him that if director Sydney Pollack liked Hamlisch's attempted title song, he would not only be reimbursed for its composition, but would also be hired to score the entire film. Hamlisch eagerly agreed. He and Streisand had been friends since the Broadway production of “Funny Girl” when she was the young rising star and he the rehearsal pianist.

He went to work, deciding early on that though the film tells the tale of a doomed love affair, the theme song should be in a major key, so as not to give away the ending. Working for three hours a day, composing draft after draft, he finally created something he loved, before nervously auditioning it for the film director. Pollock’s young assistant director, in the room when Hamlisch presented the song, was smitten: “From the moment I heard the first notes…chills ran up and down my spine. It was hauntingly beautiful.” (1)

Apparently, Pollack shared his opinion, because the tune was then turned over to Alan and Marilyn Bergman, a successful wordsmith team, who, together with Hamlisch, presented the finished product to Streisand in May 1972. She loved it, suggested a few brilliant alterations, and it was finished. 

The song was placed throughout the film, first during the opening credits, which portray Katie and Hubble as Cornell students at opposite ends of the 1930s cultural/political spectrum. Hamlisch was so concerned about overusing the song, he initially decided not to include it in the film's final scene, when the two leads have a brief encounter before parting forever. But when he sat through the first screening, he realized the music at the end wasn't working and should be replaced with the main theme.

He paid for some last-minute orchestration and attended the next screening. Tom Santopietro, in his book, The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic, relates what happened next:

“[Hamlisch] braced himself as Katie and Hubbell said goodbye and the orchestra swelled. He waited tensely—until he heard the sound of a single woman crying, and then another, and yet one more, until crying jags broke out throughout the theater. The song worked and the movie worked.” (2)

I hadn’t experienced enough of life in 1973 to join this throng of weeping fans, and I only saw the film once in the theater, so for years, all I had with which to encounter the song was my record album. It was plenty. The title song became a siren call, beckoning me to the beauty that could be discovered in not only listening to a song, but in performing one. Fifty years ago, “The Way We Were” catapulted its way into the consciousness of every musically inclined individual, even a sheltered suburban teenager who couldn’t get enough of its soul-tugging power.

 

(1)   Santopietro, Tom. The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic. Essex, CN: Applause Theater & Cinema Books, p. 108.

(2)   Santopietro, page 136.