When Stephen Davis gave Carly Simon a first look at his new book, More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon, he enclosed a note.
“I sent her the galleys, you know, the uncorrected proofs, and I said, ‘Carly, if you like this book, I haven’t done my job,’” Davis reveals.
The veteran music writer was right. “I’ve talked to members of her family and they say that she is upset with the book, and it’s not a good idea to get Carly Simon upset at you,” says Davis. “On the other hand, it would have been an even worse idea to write a boring book about Carly Simon.”
More Room is a far from boring account of the life of the iconic singer and her five-decade career, which is rife with huge hurdles of neuroses, great leaps in songwriting, and it features bizarre cameos by the most important personalities of her time.
A sampling from her youth: Pete Seeger was her kindergarten music teacher; Jackie Robinson played second base in family softball games; George Gershwin came over to hear how Summertime would sound with her mom singing; MLK and Einstein visited for lunch. Later in the book, Marvin Gaye comes onto her, Jeremy Irons has a controversial cameo (see Irons in the fire, right, for more on that) and she gets Mick Jagger to sing on her biggest hit.
A ‘did they?/didn’t they?’ theme recurs throughout the book.
She also enjoys romances with Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, lots of drummers, and most notably, she endures a decade-long marriage to James Taylor that saw fire and rain.
“I think she feels that the book is too revealing,” says Davis, who usually drops at least one big bombshell with every musical biography he writes, including previous subjects Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson and Aerosmith. And Simon has been publicly making her displeasure with the book known through various outlets, but the way Davis sees it, if she’s providing free advertising, nobody does it better.
“If she would just be quiet,” he muses, “you know, you can’t buy the publicity that she’s giving this book.”
