SWEET DREAMS and FLYING MACHINES by MARK RIBOWSKY ; MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

I read the entire book though there are only two references to our Mistress of the Month, Evey, who is called Evelyne in Mark Ribowsky's book.  She's identified as a Japanese dancer here, and just has to be the same woman.  The book mostly dwells on Taylor's music career, long time drug addiction, and psychology. 

 
I found what the author had to say about Evelyne as well as Taylor's being "highly skilled at the art of deception," as he managed his public personae and reputation, and hid his long history of using drugs and alcohol from the public, though it was only too well known to his friends, family, and the mother of his children, Carly Simon.  It's always quite interesting to me how many co-dependents such a person has, but it sounds like Carly had gone to many psychiatrists seeking help for him and them.  You can say that she has been a devout mother and did for a long time attempt to stay married.
Chapter 19, called Never Mind Feeling Sorry For Yourself, is where we find mention of Evelyne.  The scene;Taylor and Simon have a baby son who is sickly and has to have "delicate and risky" surgery. "During the unbearably tense and frightening hours he was in surgery his father (JT) wasn't there because he was driving his latest plaything, a Japanese dancer named EVELYNE to the airport." (Carly was furious and when he did show up at the hospital. Her manager Arlyne Rothberg saw him and started to scream at him to get upstairs at the hospital.  He did eventually arrive and was bedside as the child awoke from surgery.  Prior to this he sat alone outside the hospital alone and "zoning out."

..."Before going back on the road," JT "thought nothing of trading in the dancer for an actress, Kathryn Walker, with whom he now began spending most of his time." (He would marry Walker.)* 

She, Carly, and his first serious girlfriend of note, called Maggie, were all slightly older women and you could say sophisticated and accomplished women.

The author, though he has spent many chapters explaining that Carly Simon was being driven crazy by her husband, seems not to favor her in the end because he doesn't see her as forgiving enough. Would I?  No way. I think this author gave us plenty of reason why Taylor was so difficult. I know from other reading that he and Walker did divorce, he met and remarried and had twin sons with another woman, his third wife, and now in his senior years seems to have learned to live authentically and soberly, and may have come to terms with his past.  However, in my experience and opinion, some people do leave others with lasting, life-altering pain, even when they themselves reach the point of being sorry they lived that way.  Maybe forgiveness is then over-rated!  Missy


*I read this one on e-book, and on Overdrive.  I found these passages on Evey at approx. pages 1681-1686

"EVEY" - JAMES TAYLOR'S JAPANESE NEW YORK MISTRESS and HIS WIFE CARLY SIMON

EVEY, a Mistress of one of America's best known and loved singer-songwriter's
 JAMES TAYLOR, 

remains a mystery to us, though Carly Simon, Taylor's wife at the time, has called her out.
She's called EVELYNE in "Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines," a biography
of James Taylor by Mark Ribowsky.

*********************************************************

*******************************************

BOYS IN THE TREES - A MEMOIR by singer-songwriter CARLY SIMON.

 

CARLY SIMON is famous for her glorious almost-opera alto voice, for her wonderfully autobiographical song writing, especially hits like, "You're So Vain," and now long over marriage to singer-songwriter JAMES TAYLOR, with whom she had a son and daughter, who are not surprisingly also musical. 

Apparently though singer-songwriter fans loved that Carly and James were married rock stars, whose voices complimented each other when they made appearances on each other's albums and in concerts, their marriage wasn't what most of the couple's fans imagined. Carly Simon says, though she loved James - and I think this woman's love for her husband and the father of her children was outstanding - they were not the perfect couple that they had been promoted as.  Not at all. She acted as though she had found her soul mate and forgot her view of her parents marriage that she wrote about in her song, "The Way I Always Heard It Should Be."  During her youth her father had Kept his own Nanny as a Mistress and her mother had installed a Boy Toy under their roof and right under her ailing husband's nose.  Had Carly learned to tolerate cheating? She did hold to the belief that no musicians were faithful and she did tolerate her husband's groupies, an affair with a back-up singer, and his confession to her of having gotten gonorrhea.  What made Evey different was that she was a real challenge to her marriage.

Taylor was absent, not only because he continued to tour while she more or less stayed home to raise their two children as if she were a single mother, but because he was a drug addict - pot - coke - whiskey - heroin - and not really there even when he was in the room. You could say he was married to his addictions.

But then Carly discovered that he was also not at home because he had a Mistress stored away in his apartment there in New York City, an apartment she had never seen that he used for rehearsing. Called "Evey" by Carly in her memoir, "Boys In The Trees," Simon had a duplicate key made, and went over there in the middle of the night, a valium and Sangria to help her courage, and faced Evey.  She wanted this other woman to know she was "not a monster."

What Evey had to say to Carly, what James had told his mistress about his wife, was shocking and exaggerated. A sensitive artist, deeply emotional, and profoundly hurt, trying to keep her family together, one child sickly, Carly was perhaps facing reality too. Evey told Carly in so many words that she was considered to be a privileged, materialistic, selfish, and demanding woman. Maybe Evey was just flouting her ability to live in a small, barely furnished pad awaiting her man,"Jamie." A  tiny Japanese (or Japanese-American) woman who spoke English with an accent, she was a dancer with a good body, physically unlike Carly.  Evey was proud of her man and unexpectedly competitive.  Perhaps Jamie really was the biggest deal in her life. She amused herself when he wasn't there playing some of his favorite music. He certainly wasn't Keeping her in luxury.

It's ironic really. Usually when a wife calls out a Mistress, it's her belief that her husband is being too generous (any amount of money can be "too" generous when a wife believes that half of that money should be hers) with the Other Woman.  It's almost as if Evey is proud of her lack of demands and needs, but when I excerpt the showdown between these two later this month, I think you'll gasp like I did at the things Evey had to say to Carly, a woman who had inherited much less than imagined, used most of her inheritance early to pay for therapy, and who had success in her own right. Evey even said James Taylor told her Carly Simon was a "JAP" (Jewish American Princess)! Carly's father was Jewish and a well to do publisher (Simon and Schuster), her mom wasn't, and the family was fairly non religious.

*****Beyond this acknowledgement, later in her life, of her husband's Mistress by Carly, little else is publically known about Evey.  She may have been a musical muse, kind of like Ruth Tryangiel, the Mistress of Bob Dylan. Though in 1980, about a year after the showdown with Evey, their marriage was still intact, Taylor would soon divorce and remarry but not to Evey.  We don't know how she and Tayor met, how long they were together, if she earned enough money to support herself besides the probably free living in the apartment, or if he continued to Keep her when he remarried. After Carly, James went on to marry two more times and seems settled into and happy in his current marriage.  Carly also remarried four years after their divorce from him and is currently divorced from James Hart after almost 20 years of marriage. Evey wasn't why the Simon-Taylor marriage didn't last. 

I usually read books, but I've also started listening to some audio books, and I'm especially interested in doing so if the author is reading their own words to us.  I want to hear their voice and emotional expressions as they read their work. I heard that Carly Simon's memoir about growing up in a well-to-do publishing-related family also contained snippets of her music. What a great idea!  And so I got BOYS IN THE TREES on audio. I must say I loved it and was even brought to tears at times. (I've posted a couple Carly Simon YouTube videos in the past so you know I'm a fan.)

Carly was frank about her early sexual experiences and growing up in a household with a secret which involved her parent's infidelities.  Her mother, still married to an ailing retired husband, with their youngest child a boy, hired a college student to sort of care-give this son, while having an ongoing affair with him. The affair required a secret passageway in their house which one of her sisters figured out first. You could say Andrea Simon, Carly's mom, had herself a Boy Toy for a while. Carly's father, Richard Simon Kept his own nanny, who helped raise him as a child, as his Mistress for years, including after his marriage to Andrea. All this had a profoundly upsetting effect on Carly who may have started stuttering  as a result.

Online you can possibly link to an old article I cut out of Vanity Fair Magazine, titled "I Never Sang For My Mother," by Marie Brenner from August of 1995. At the time it was published it was quite shocking in the revelations about Carly's parents and their extramarital set ups but also that her mother could diminish her daughter so in a moment of her success.

Carly Simon, back in the day when she was a singer-songwriter (a little like the Taylor Swift of her generation) was promoted as a sexy young woman singer-songwriter - and she posed for photos that were considered daring at the time, though a typical selfie by a Kardashian sister is usually showing more nipple or rear end.)  In her memoir she admits to a whirl of affairs with musical men, prior to her marriage, as well as not being the first such woman to be passed around among them.  It was the 1970's, a wave of feminism had hit the shore, and a lot of women had decided they were not going to wait until married to have some adventures with men, but as she was talent and among peers, she was not a groupie.

VANITY FAIR 2016 - CARLY SIMON THE PHOTO THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

 A secondary reference for this month's subject, I'll excerpt from this bio by Mark Ribowsky later in the month.  In this book "Evey" is called EVELYNE

Evey gives us a moment to pause.  She, sadly, falls into the category of Mistresses who are with men who lie terrifically to them about their wives, who have their Mistresses on their side against their wife, and who are in place quite deluded. Having known women and men who've had affairs and behaved in ways in which you can't help but think they are acting out for attention and want to get caught, I can't help but think about James Taylor at this point in his marriage with Carly Simon.

If interested in the Mistresses of musical men, their Mistresses, or their groupies, read archived posts about Bob Dylan, Pamela Des Barres, or Jim Morrison (although that one has an outstanding number of hits and I'm about to take that whole month down!)

 

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