Homeward Bound (40 page)

Scheduled to open in the early fall,
One-Trick Pony
premiered on October 3, 1980, with a murky image. The advertisements and movie posters, like the album cover, featured a big photo of Paul on a city sidewalk at night looking pretty much exactly as you'd expect Paul Simon to look on a winter's night: a guitar case in one hand, a baseball cap on his head, a zipped leather jacket, his lips drawn tight, a hurt/aggravated cast to his eyes. The tagline at the bottom of the movie ads, “Rock & Roll Will Give You Some Laughs But It Won't Do You Any Favors,” was both clumsy and confusing. Were they promoting a Paul Simon concert film or an upmarket kind of Elvis movie? Was it a
cinéma
à
clef
about the music industry or a modern domestic drama about careers, love, marriage, and family? Not many moviegoers came to find out.

The film begins with an abstract shot of lights moving across the screen to the hopeful bop of “Late in the Evening.” As the song continues, the verses describing the singer's lifelong fixation on music are animated with flashbacks. All restage moments in Paul's life, first as a small boy singing and plunking at a toy piano in his room,
*
then as a teenage greaser singing doo-wop with his friends in a tiled subway station, then as a long-haired protest singer playing at a 1968 rally for presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The lights on the screen are revealed as an airplane descends into the Cleveland airport, and the central action in the film picks up as Paul's character, Jonah Levin, and the four other musicians in his group move from the terminal gate to the city's famous Agora Ballroom nightclub, where they are booked to open for the rising (and real-life) new wave band the B-52s. The band goes over well, but the applause they get is no match for the shrill ovation the B-52s earn just by stepping onstage.

The band members drive from city to city to fulfill their gigs, but it's clear that the group, like the live music industry, is faltering. When a handful of shows get canceled, Jonah returns to New York to see his son, Matty, while also reconnecting with his not-quite-ex-wife Marion. She loves him but can no longer abide his life as a musician. They clearly love each other, and Jonah is just as clearly a warm and loving father to their five-year-old son, but his fixation on his career overwhelms everything else. When he learns that Walter Fox, the president of a large record label, is interested in signing him to make a new album, he makes tracks for Fox's office suite, where he finds the clearly Yetnikovian executive (“Fox” is the English translation of Yetnikoff's Yiddish nickname, Velvel) consulting with the unsubtly named Cal Van Damp, a dim but enormously successful commercial radio consultant.
†
Fox tells the musician that he'd be willing to pay for him to make a comeback album, but only if it's filled with songs slick and danceable enough to become hits. Given no alternatives, Jonah agrees, though the rest of the scene exists entirely to reveal how craven Fox, Van Damp, and the commercial music industry they represent have become.

Fox sets Jonah up with a hot young pop music producer named Steve Kunelian (played by Lou Reed at his aggro-iciest), who wants Jonah to work with studio musicians rather than his own band; Jonah insists on using his guys. His manager calls to tell him that he's been invited to a high-paying industry showcase meant to create a touring market for oldies acts from the 1960s.
*
Jonah is wary of pandering to nostalgia, but he's in good company at the show—Sam and Dave rip the stuffing out of “Soul Man,” the Lovin' Spoonful perform a perfect “Do You Believe in Magic?”—and the audience is transfixed as Jonah plays his “Soft Parachutes,” the acoustic antiwar ballad that, like Paul's “The Sound of Silence,” became a definitive document of the 1960s. His appearance is a smash, and the music industry seems to be turning his way again.

Yet the tragedy of Jonah, the part of him that has no connection to Paul, is his contempt for the industry and, even more, for the part of himself that yearns for success. From there, it's all downhill. He gets drunk at Fox's after-show party and insults everyone in sight. He falls into bed with Walter Fox's wife, then after hearing the producer Kunelian's slickened production of his songs, he steals and destroys the master tapes. The opening notes of “Late in the Evening” play, the credits roll, and the screen goes dark.

The early reviews ranged from positive to very good to outright raves. The critic at the
Los Angeles Times
, the hometown newspaper for the movie industry, celebrated every aspect of the film, citing the “acuteness” in Paul's “ruthlessly honest” portrayal of the music industry, then praising director Robert Young's “graceful precision” and his visual portrayal of the industrial Midwest. “One of our most celebrated singer-composers,” he concluded, “has become an impressive actor and screenwriter.” Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
was less impressed, particularly when it came to the scenes that didn't involve the music industry. Still, she admired Paul's acting (particularly the way he used his “innate air of detachment” to dramatic effect). The
Christian Science Monitor'
s critic called it “a delightful surprise,” while the
Chicago Sun-Times
's Roger Ebert, nationally known as the cohost with his
Chicago Tribune
rival Gene Siskel of what was then called
Sneak Previews
on PBS, called it “a wonderful movie,” one of the best in what struck him as a thin year for American cinema.

But all that was swept aside by a torrent of reviews sour enough to make it seem like the critics were talking about a completely different film.
Newsweek
's David Ansen described Paul's acting as a troika of facial expressions: “Poutiness, archness and arrogance.” That last one seemed to be most on Ansen's mind when he dismissed the entire film as “a vanity production.” There were a lot of takedowns published that fall, but the most hostile came from Carrie Rickey, a movie critic for the
Village Voice.
A writer with a distinctly political perspective, Rickey built her critique of
One-Trick Pony
into a harsh analysis of Paul's role in American culture over the previous fifteen years. The first paragraph focused on his Jewishness, pairing him with Dustin Hoffman, the similarly short, dark-featured actor who had been his cinematic doppelgänger since
The Graduate
. Separately and together, she wrote, the musician and actor had personified “'60s college-kid alienation, counseling a smug passive resistance to authority,” while at the same time creating a vogue on college campuses for “philo-Semitism,” and for “legitimiz[ing] Jewish looks.”

Rickey seems most intent on hurling brickbats—what exactly does she mean by “legitimizing Jewish looks”?—but a few of her punches land. She sees through Paul's habit of shielding himself within other images and identities. She notes the contradiction of the massively successful rock star making a movie that rails against the same commercial system that fueled his many triumphs over a decade and a half. The previous year had been flooded with films written by and/or starring famous artists whose works seemed deliberately to cloud the difference between author/actor and character. The fame-dodging Woody Allen as the fan-beset comedy writer/director/actor Sandy Bates in
Stardust Memories
. The recently divorced Dustin Hoffman as the unfairly spurned husband Ted Kramer in
Kramer vs. Kramer
. And now Paul, Jonah Levin, and
One-Trick Pony
. “Shouldn't the dramatic catharsis be in the work, instead of in that trivial limbo between reel and real life?” Rickey asked.

The imaginary Jonah Levin was doing no favors for Paul Simon. The
One-Trick Pony
soundtrack album stalled at No. 12 on the
Billboard
charts, the first original studio record Paul had made that didn't crack the Top 10 since
Sounds of Silence
in 1966. Even worse,
One-Trick Pony
the movie was a resounding financial flop, grossing less than $850,000 on Warner Bros.' $8 million production budget. His autumn-long world tour with Levin, Gadd, Gale, and Tee offered some distraction, but by the time he played his final three dates in London in early November the strain was showing. Accompanying her mother, Judith Piepe, to visit with Paul backstage before a show at the Hammersmith Apollo theater, Ariel Bruce found Paul looking thin and edgy, not an unfamiliar sight among London's music crowd during the cocaine-dusted early '80s.

Part of the reason for Piepe's visit was to thank Paul for giving her a surprise gift of quite a bit of expensive new furniture, and he was as gracious as ever in receipt of her hug and kisses. Yet Ariel Bruce found the rest of his demeanor unsettling. He asked after Kathy Chitty, the London girlfriend who had so defined his time in the city, and grew particularly exercised as he went along. Where was she now? Did they know how he might reach her? He really wanted to see her again, or at least speak to her. But when Paul left the room for a moment, someone in his management swooped in to ask that Ariel not help Paul in his quest. “It was all a bit unsettling,” she says, adding that what happened next was even stranger. “At a concert a bit later, he said, ‘Does anyone know where Kathy is?' And the papers got ahold of that … I was then telephoned by
Daily Mail
,
Daily Express
for a job: would I find Kathy? And I said no.” No matter, the British papers tracked Kathy down to Wales, camping out on her doorstep until she was close enough to be implored to send a message to Paul in their pages. As independent and willful as ever, Kathy didn't utter a syllable, and Paul went back to New York to face up to what suddenly seemed like a very chilly future.

 

CHAPTER 18

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

When the new year began, Paul gave a hard look at the raw numbers of his ten-million-dollar-plus
One-Trick Pony
project (production budgets, promotional expenditures, chart positions, units shifted, and tickets purchased) and went to Warner Bros. Records president Mo Ostin to apologize. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, he said. He'd find a way to make it up to them. Ostin smiled and waved his hands; he wasn't worried at all. Every artist has his ups and downs; he had no doubt that the deal would pay off handsomely in the end. Just let this one go, turn the page, and look to the future.

Part of the process had started a year or two earlier when Mike Tannen, Paul's lawyer, friend, and business partner since the mid-1960s, left Paul's offices for the last time. They'd had a disagreement about Tannen's role in Paul's career, and Tannen withdrew from his job soon after. Paul had turned to Tannen to coproduce the
One-Trick Pony
movie, but with that project finished their day-to-day association ended. In his absence, Paul grew closer to Ian Hoblyn, whose responsibilities in Paul's publishing company had grown throughout his decade-long tenure. Born and raised in England, Hoblyn spoke with the clipped voice of British authority, an affectation (he was not to the manor born) he made real with his intelligence and exceptional skills as a manager, organizer, and problem solver. Intellectually sophisticated, warmhearted, and outgoing, Hoblyn slipped easily into the roles of Paul's chief assistant and daily companion. He accompanied Paul through much of his day and was on call twenty-four hours a day.

Something great was coming next, Mo Ostin had told Paul, but in the late weeks of 1980 and the start of 1981 he found it difficult to believe. If only because he knew that nothing was coming next. He'd been through it before: the weeks and months of silence; the long, frigid winter of the muse. But it had never lasted as long as this, nor been so obliterating. As if he were being punished for his failures by losing his power to make up for them.

It continued through the fall of 1980 and into the winter and spring of 1981. Desperate for relief, Paul called Dr. Roderic Gorney, a psychiatrist on the faculty of UCLA whose influential 1979 book
The Human Agenda
drew on his unique combination of Freudian practice and humanitarian philosophy. That Gorney was the son of songwriter Jay Gorney, who had cowritten the Depression-era classic “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” among many other Broadway and pop hits, as well as discovering the talents of Shirley Temple, was an interesting aside. Paul scheduled an appointment and got on the next flight to Los Angeles. Once he cleared LAX, he jumped into his rental car and drove to the doctor's home office in Brentwood. There he met Gorney, a lanky, gentle-natured man in his midfifties, and considered the doctor's first question: why had he come to see him? It didn't take Paul long to answer: it was all he'd been able to think about for weeks. His problem was that his spirit was so very detached from his circumstances. He was young, healthy, talented, rich, and famous. He was free to do whatever he wanted, nearly all the time. So why was he still so very unhappy? And why couldn't he do the one thing that gave him the most pleasure?

After decades of study and practice, Gorney knew all about the labyrinth of anxiety, pride, and shame that fed the creative drive. The shadowlands of impulse, primal experience, and unconscious association; the symbolic bonds between what must be done and what must never be acknowledged. Gorney's signal case had come in the early 1960s, when he was consulting with practitioners in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was known in the Soviet era). He was presented with a widely renowned concert pianist who, at sixty-two years old, had grown so terrified of performing that she could no longer lay her hands on the keys of a piano, not even the one in her private studio. Just the thought of it made her dizzy. When she sat at the keyboard, her heart raced; if she raised her hands, her lungs constricted. Disaster felt imminent, escape a necessity. Gorney had seen the same thing happen to Vladimir Horowitz one night at the Hollywood Bowl—the maestro taking the stage, sitting at the piano, and then, after a torturous few moments, bolting offstage. Horowitz fought his demons with varying degrees of success for decades, but the female pianist had been rendered mute, and her Soviet doctors were unable to help her.