Carly Simon Still Kinda Has A Thing For Me, I Guess.

toddler

I knew it. Turns out Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” is about me after all. There it is, clear as day, recorded backwards at the end of the new version of the song included on her album Never Been Gone that comes out next week, a not very subtle answer to one of the oldest, most-gossiped-about mysteries in the history of rock: “David.”

I was not yet two years old when the original came out in 1972. But I was pretty fly back then, with the brim of my “Little Big Leaguer” cap dipped down below one eye, and my apricot Osh-kosh-b’gosh scarf. And Carly was so naive.

That night my parents took me to that party on Martha’s Vinyard, we were visiting our friends the Newmans, who rented a place in Menemsha. I was lying on my back in a playpen, looking at this mirror mobile someone had hung above me, when she walked in. I cooed at her. It was easy. She got over-attached. What can I say?

Oh, jealous people who were not the object of a desperate rock-star’s obsession when they were rakishly handsome toddlers apparently think the song is about a different “David,” David Geffen, who was running Simon’s label, Elektra Records, at the time, and supposedly angered her by putting a lot of attention into promoting her rival Joni Mitchell. Which reminds me, Mitchell’s “Little David” is about me, too.