Blogtrek

The Mystery Man of Carly Simon

I heard in a news story yesterday; for example, in USA Today, that Carly Simon sold at an auction for $50,000 the identity of the mystery man in the song You're So Vain. The winner of the auction had to promise Carly that he would never give away the identity of the vain man. Lots of legends have built over the 30 years since the song came out about just who this vain man with the apricot scarf was. Some say it was Warren Beatty, others Cat Stevens, and Kris Kristofferson and Mick Jagger have been mentioned as well.

The song is interesting in many respects, and it is somewhat vain itself and certainly it contradicts itself, rather like a snake eating its own tail. The picture that it paints is certainly a vain one. This guy saunters out onto a dance floor wearing an apricot scarf, which normally would be found on a woman. He cocks his cap a certain way, strategically. Interesting. He doesn't boogie on the dance floor. He doesn't salsa, waltz, swing, or rock either. He gavottes. He is pretty, prim and proper about it, just like the type of dance the gavotte is. He is looking in the mirror to see how pretty he is. Well hasn't everyone from time to time? And certainly if all the people of the opposite sex wanted to be with you, that would make you feel good, wouldn't it? I certainly would if I had women pursuing me left and right. Sadly, most of my life has not been like that at all, although for a few precious times it has.

So this is a pretty vain cat, whoever he is. Some other aspects of this song interest me as well. For example, She sings "then you flew your Lear jet to Nova Scotia to see a total eclipse of the sun". She means the 1972 July 10 total eclipse of the sun in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Gaspe. I saw that eclipse from Prince Edward Island, but I took the train, not a Lear jet. I wasn't that vain. Besides, a 25-year-old brand new math PhD does not have that kind of money. It got really DARK when I saw that eclipse on Stanhope Beach. I tried to take a picture of it with an Instamatic but it did not come out. I resolved right then and there to see another one with proper equipment.

So I went to Mexico on 1991 July 11 to see it. I had a 4-inch telescope and a camera and took a good photo of that eclipse, the longest in our lives (see My Astronomy Page for my photo of that eclipse). If the Carly Simon song had come out then, it would have said, "took your Lear jet to Cabo San Lucas to see a total eclipse of the sun...".

But talking about my rather huge web site sounds pretty vain in itself, so I will come back to Carly. Some other interesting words in the song are "clouds in my coffee", as though your inner weather is determined by the weather in a cup of holy brown liquid; "some underground spy or the wife of a close friend"; well certainly I would not want to deal with any spy, let alone an underground one; I don't know about the close friend's wife. She said she was quite naïve. Well, everyone is when they are young.

But the thing that really gets me going about this song is that it contradicts itself. She sings, "You're so vain." OK. This guy does sound pretty narcissistic. But then she sings "You think this song is about you, don't you?" She implies by her tone of voice that this song was not written with this vain guy in mind, that it was one of those parts of her life that don't concern him at all. But look again at the lyrics. Just about every word in the song talks about this mystery man. It is about him, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? The song contradicts itself; it is essentially an embellishment of the sentence "This sentence is false."

Besides there is something vain about the idea of writing about a mystery person. It gives you a certain sense of price to know that you sang about a person that nobody knows who it is. I know, for I have written such a song. Go to jimvb.home.mindspring.com/music2002.htm and you will see some of the lyrics of a song I wrote about someone. No, I am not going to tell anyone who this is. In fact, I am displaying only four lines of the lyrics of the song. Perhaps I will tell when Carly Simon tells me who she's singing about.