Guess She Actually Had Lots Of Time For The Pain
Carly Simon says her musical success is the direct result of a luridly dysfunctional family when she was growing up.
Her mother was openly sleeping with a college boy 24 years younger who had been hired to teach her brother tennis and baseball. Her ailing father, book publisher Richard Simon, had his own affair with a friend of his wife’s who was 18 years older.
“There was no truth, because we were living this Tennessee Williams play,” Simon told Vanity Fair magazine. “It was so convoluted it was unreal.”
She started stuttering after her brother’s instructor moved in. Explains Simon: “Everything was sublimated into music. I felt so strangulated talking that I did the natural thing, which is to write songs, because I could sing without stammering.”
Loose talk
Isaac Hayes, on his return to recording (in Spin magazine): “Folks are getting back to the real r&b sound. All those ‘lick me all over’ ballads are turning off some people because there’s no real seduction there. Whatever happened to foreplay?”
He’s been reduced to doing cheesy commercials
Ringo Starr turns 55 today.
Bet Mickey and Mallory would’ve made it
Speaking of screwed-up families, a guard on Tuesday foiled an attempt by Woody Harrelson’s father to escape from the Atlanta prison where he’s serving life for assassinating a federal judge. Charles Harrelson and two companions tried to scale a wall with a ladder fashioned out of pool cues and art easels.
And that’s the end of it - knock on wood
New York’s highest court has rejected Woody Allen’s appeal of a ruling awarding custody of Moses, Dylan and Satchel to mother Mia Farrow. Farrow accused Allen of abusing Dylan after she discovered he was having an affair with an older adopted daughter, Soon-Yi.
She’s not about to try crossing that bridge
Naomi Judd’s ex-husband says he realized daughter Wynonna was fathered by another man by the time she was 3. “I just looked at her real carefully and I knew,” Michael Ciminella told a Kentucky newspaper. Judd calls the claim “unnecessary, inappropriate and inaccurate.”
So is he a newt, or more of a chameleon?
Newt Gingrich’s lesbian half-sister, Candace, defended the House speaker at a gay pride celebration in Santa Fe, explaining: “Newt my brother is a different guy from Newt the politician.”
But in the end, there aren’t any winners
Roseanne’s estranged sister, Geraldine Barr, on how the family copes with her allegations of abuse: “I like to tell my parents they’re VIPs Very Important Pedophiles - and we act out this board game I invented called Dysfunction Junction. We take all of the charges Rosey made in People magazine and re-enact them as panelists. We decide if it’s incest, merely inappropriate behavior or boundary crossing.”
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino