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“More
Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly
Simon” by Stephen Davis; Gotham ($27.50)
———
Carly
Simon has made some mistakes over the years. But the one
blunder she might come to regret the most is a quote she
gave to a Boston Globe reporter in August when she was
asked about Stephen Davis’ then forthcoming biography:
“I know the author, so there’s some integrity.
He’s interviewed me over the years; he knows my
family. He’s a good guy.”
At least
Davis, who has also written rock bios on Led Zeppelin,
Aerosmith and Mick Fleetwood, attributes that quote on
the book jacket. Otherwise, he has written a lengthy
book about the Oscar and Grammy winner without
attributing most of his material. The poorly edited
“More Room in a Broken Heart” lacks source notes, a
bibliography and sails dangerously close to plagiarism.
Several
authors, such as Sheila Weller and Roger Friedman, have
publicly criticized Davis for borrowing from their work
without permission or citation. Simon, who says she gave
the author some pieces she wrote but not for
publication, calls the book “onerous.”
Take the
author’s discussion of the commercial failure of
Simon’s 1979 album, “Spy.” Davis writes:
“‘Spy’ promised to be the biggest album of
Carly’s career. The timing was perfect. She had a
solid body of music behind her. She had worked hard and
made a good record. She had starred in a sexy video to
promote ‘Vengeance,’ the blatantly commercial first
single. But then nothing happened.”
Rolling
Stone’s late writer Timothy White, in a Dec. 1981
cover story on Simon, wrote: “It promised to be the
biggest album of her career: the timing seemed right;
she had a nice body of work behind her; she had worked
hard and created a well-crafted product; she had even
made a racy videotape to tout ‘Vengeance,’ the
blatantly commercial single from the record. But nothing
happened.”
The
uncredited lifts — yes, there are others — give
Davis’ book the stench of a clip job, a shockingly
slipshod one at that. “More Room” is rife with
errors. Davis alludes to an affair between Simon and
actor John Travolta in the spring of 1979, suggesting
they had just met when Travolta knocked on her New York
apartment door in hopes of meeting her husband James
Taylor, who was not home.
“Carly
entertained Travolta instead, and the two became good
friends,” he writes. “When his longtime girlfriend,
Diana Hyland, died a few weeks later, Travolta
practically moved in with Carly and the children.”
Hyland, however, died in March 1977.
Elsewhere,
Davis notes that Simon’s 1983 effort, “Hello Big
Man,” was to be her final album under the terms of her
Warner Bros. contract but in discussing its musical
content on the same page, he writes that “Epic wanted
a ‘contemporary’ sound from Simon.”
When
“More Room” isn’t merely an editor’s nightmare,
it rehashes familiar bits of Simon lore — her stage
fright, painful stammer, privileged childhood as the
daughter of Simon and Schuster’s co-founder, Richard
Simon. Davis spends too much time on superficial,
occasionally ludicrous descriptions of her songs. Of
“Jesse,” her 1980 hit single, he draws the bizarre
conclusion that it’s “about a woman’s ambivalent
feelings for an incontinent lover who wets the bed and
needs fresh sheets.”
The
careless writing leads the reader to question the
veracity of the author’s few new revelations. Davis
asserts that Simon became pregnant by actor Jeremy Irons
and had an abortion after he directed one of her music
videos in 1985. “Irons broke up with his wife, and
everyone moved on in their brilliant careers,” Davis
writes. However, Irons, now 63, is still married to the
same woman he wed in 1978, actress Sinead Cusack.
“More
Room’s” early chapters are more intriguing as they
trace Simon’s family heritage. Family lore says her
mother Andrea was allegedly born to a Moroccan girl who
had been shipped off to Cuba as an infant after she was
illegitimately conceived by a member of the Spanish
royal family. The story, though, is unsubstantiated.
Once the
chronological tale stumbles its way into the
singer-songwriter’s adulthood, the book devolves into
something akin to a Facebook timeline — in 2009 Simon
did this, in 2010 Simon did that. And though Davis
boasts in his introduction that he heard an early mix of
“You’re So Vain” (“in Carly’s bathroom”) we
never do learn who the iconic song is about, although he
dangles the implication it’s about Mick Jagger because
he sang on the track. Davis writes that Jagger’s
then-wife Bianca phoned Taylor to rat Simon out on the
eve of their marriage in 1972.
“Mick
Jagger had left his scent on Carly’s record like a dog
on a hydrant. … Bianca told James that they must have
had an affair because Mick sang on her song and he never
did this for anyone.”
Davis
leaves the mystery’s summation as innuendo. We still
are no closer to learning the true identity of the man
with the apricot scarf. Similarly, Simon reveals far
more about herself in her confessional lyrics in one of
her four-minute pop songs than Davis manages in more
than 400 pages of dodgy reporting.
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