AT HOME WITH …

Carly Simon and Her Family, on Martha’s Vineyard

Just another night eating vegan shepherd’s pie in musical Camelot.

June 30, 2018

Harmonizing with Mom: Sally Taylor and Carly Simon.CreditElizabeth Cecil for The New York Times

LAMBERT’S COVE, Mass. — James Taylor was 22 when he bought 175 acres of woods here with the proceeds from his first record deal. On a stormy June afternoon nearly half a century later, Carly Simon, his ex-wife; their children, Sally Taylor and Ben Taylor; Ben’s partner, Sophie Hiller, and their friends, the musicians John Forté and David Saw, were gathered in the rambling house that has grown up like a wagon wheel around the original structure, with hallways that hopscotch over rooms and staircases in odd places.

Ms. Simon, or Mama C., as this group calls her, lives in the place, as do Ben and Ms. Hiller, in a house next door. They were strewn over a pair of plump green velvet sofas in front of a crackling fire — it was that cold — to practice for a performance they would give in the Berkshires earlier this month, though the men kept wandering outside, despite the pouring rain, for recreational breaks.

“How nice not to be the focus for a change,” Ms. Simon said.

Their show, a medley of songs that includes some of her old hits, would open a yearlong multimedia installation at Mass MoCA’s Kidspace by Consenses, the arts organization that Ms. Taylor founded half a dozen years ago. Paintings by fifth-grade students have been reinterpreted by artists from around the world in different forms from music to perfume to poetry.

This artistic game of telephone, as Ms. Taylor puts it, is also the basis of an educational program she has developed that focuses on empathy and perception. It has been a career shift for someone who, like nearly every person in her very large extended family, has mostly worked as a musician — though she resisted what she refers to as “the Gig” until she was in her 20s.

Now 44, Ms. Taylor was dressed on this day in a taut beige halter top, a Sri Lankan skirt, strings of beads and dangling bell earrings borrowed from her mother. She wore her abundant curly blond hair tied in a knot. At Brown University, Ms. Taylor studied medical anthropology, a major she created after taking time off to research the health benefits of coca leaves with Andrew Weil, the alternative medicine guru, in Peru. “No, that’s not a joke,” she said cheerfully.

It was a typical day in musical Camelot, a shabby-chic Bohemia bedazzled with rock star mementos. In a downstairs bathroom, at about knee level, there’s a photograph of Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger backstage at Madison Square Garden taken by Eddie Kramer, who produced Ms. Simon’s first album; they look like teenagers. If you’re sitting down in there, one of Ms. Simon’s many gold records, the single of “Nobody Does It Better,” has been strategically placed.

From left, David Saw, John Forte, Ben Taylor, Sophie Hiller, Ms. Taylor and Ms. Simon, practicing as a group.CreditElizabeth Cecil for The New York Times

Trees as Earrings

Divorced from Mr. Taylor in 1983, Ms. Simon, now 73, named what became her compound Hidden Star Hill. There is a gazebo, two barns, a horse shed and many outbuildings. Also five goats, four dogs, two miniature horses and two donkeys.

“It’s become mom, like an outfit,” Ms. Taylor said of the place, adding lyrically: “Her spirit is way, way bigger than her body, and so it needs a bigger outfit. She has bushes and trees as earrings and lakes as gowns. Her body almost can’t leave the property, because her spirit is wearing it.”

Ms. Simon said, “She’s telling a pathetic story and making it nice.”

Ms. Simon shares the house with her boyfriend of 12 years, Richard Koehler, a surgeon who took this reporter’s coat, offered her tea and then repaired to a barn to work on a sailboat he is restoring. “He reminds me of Myles Standish,” Ms. Simon said.

Mr. Saw, a 43-year-old Englishman, has been playing music with Mr. Taylor for over a decade. Ms. Hiller, 30 and also British, met Mr. Taylor backstage after one of his shows in London when she was 14; they fell in love a decade later, after she’d been touring as a backup singer for Tom Jones, the Welsh crooner, among others

Mr. Forté, 43, and Mr. Taylor, 41, have been friends since high school. Soft-spoken but with a rock star’s sheen, Mr. Forté, a producer of the Fugees, the 1990s-era band, grew up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and went to Phillips Exeter Academy on a scholarship.

In 2000, he was arrested on charges of drug possession with the intent to distribute, and spent seven years in prison before his sentence was commuted by George W. Bush, largely through the efforts of Ms. Simon and an unlikely ally — Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah.

“Do you know how incredibly lucky I am to have them as close as I do?” Ms. Simon said scooping up the group with a wave. “Is everyone O.K.? I’m sorry there’s no background music but it’s a Sonos system and no one knows how to work it. I’m going upstairs to put some CBD oil on my knee.”

Ben Taylor, who wore a chest-length beard and enormous laced boots, asked if he could go join Mr. Saw and Mr. Forté, who were out on the porch and seemed to be generating their own version of a cannabis product, judging from the faint tang that had begun to mingle with the perfume of the peonies that crowded the room.

“This time of year, my mom’s whole life is about peonies,” Mr. Taylor said. “You can’t miss it, man. Her appreciation for them is contagious. I came up here to steal coffee this morning and found a note in the kitchen that read, ‘Fernanda: Please pick 20 peonies. I will arrange.’”

Credit Elizabeth Cecil for The New York Times

When her daughter arrived, Ms. Simon was taking pictures of the peonies. “She was saying, ‘O.K., now you, now you.’” Ms. Taylor said. (Ms. Simon has turned her peony photographs into wallpaper and flowing silk scarves.)

“This is her time of year,” Mr. Taylor said. “Was it Robert Frost who said, ‘Nature’s first green is gold’?”

It was.

‘Let’s Get Axes and Mama’

Then it was time to rehearse. “Let’s get axes and Mama,” Ms. Taylor said.

“Do you have sheet music?” Mr. Taylor said. “Just kidding, I don’t know how to read sheet music.”

“Please don’t be afraid to say you hate it,” Ms. Simon said of her singing.

Strumming our soul with his fingers: the young Mr. Taylor. CreditElizabeth Cecil for The New York Times

When Ms. Taylor was 20 and on her Peruvian walkabout, she toured the Nasca lines, ancient geoglyphs that you can see best from the air, and the small plane she was in crashed on the Pan-American Highway. As it was going down, Ms. Taylor had two thoughts, she said: “If I survive, I want to make music, and I want to have kids.”

Mindful of the shadow cast by her famous parents, she had resisted entering their field, unlike her brother, who hasn’t been as bedeviled by the challenges of the family business, and long ago made his peace with its hardships.

“I went to a therapist and said, ‘This is crazy, right?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, it’s crazy,’” Ms. Taylor recalled. “‘But if I need to do this, what steps could I take to not get hammered?’ We came up with this plan to not wake up the ego. One of them is never read an article about yourself. Another is don’t believe the applause.”

Ms. Taylor formed a band, bought a van and christened it “Moby” (for the whale, not the musician), and toured for five years. She organized every aspect of the band’s work: the performances, the press and the distribution of the music, packing up each CD with a thank-you note.

All went swimmingly until she had a fight with her boyfriend on the telephone. “I hung up and felt so awful about myself,” Ms. Taylor said, “I got onstage and used that audience like a drug. Once you do that, you are powerless against it. Having watched my parents go through the emotional roller coaster of a career in music, from an early age I saw it as a substance that was abusable and could take you down. I saw both of them struggle with it successfully and not so successfully. “

Mr. Taylor also famously struggled with addiction to heroin. It was he who taught his daughter not to read her press. “The complete opposite was my mom’s way: ‘I have no secrets and I have no armor so there is nothing to hide.’” Ms. Taylor said. “I feel like I have used both of those strategies.”

‘Those Cheeks!’

Ms. Taylor knew the toll touring takes on a young family. When she married Dean Bragonier, a former restaurateur who now runs a nonprofit that promotes dyslexia curriculums in middle school — Ms. Taylor, Mr. Bragonier and Ms. Simon are all dyslexic — she gave it up for good.

Their son, Bodhi, is now 10. Mr. Bragonier is from Martha’s Vineyard too, though the couple lives in Cambridge, Mass. They met when they were teenagers, as Ms. Taylor’s parents did. Mr. Bragonier was the (clothed) lifeguard at the nude beach Ms. Taylor used to frequent.

Ms. Taylor Credit Elizabeth Cecil for The New York Times

“Lightning doesn’t always strike twice in one family,” said Alexandra Styron, a novelist and a daughter of William Styron, who knows a thing or two about the obstacles facing the children of famous parents. “Growing up as we did gives you a very skewed take on what it means to be successful. It can feel like anything less than superstardom will be failure. Sometimes it can take a while to find your particular niche. It’s really cool that Sally has found her own corner where she can celebrate art and be in control of it.”

Running Consenses is indeed a much happier career for her, Ms. Taylor said, though it has its own challenges. With some 150 contributors, each installation takes about two years to put together. But once the work begins to come in, Ms. Taylor said, “It’s like Christmas. It’s so different, so full of light and laughter.”

How would Ms. Simon describe her daughter? “How about if she were a fruit?” Ms. Simon said. “That’s a very Consenses question. If she were a fruit, she would be a ripe apricot. Because of her coloring, her smile, her ebullience.”

“Those cheeks,” she added, patting them.

(As it happened, Ms. Simon would not make it to her daughter’s opening. A few days before the show, she was on the phone and dipping a toe into the pool when she tripped and fell in, breaking her leg.)

It was time for dinner…

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