You Might Think This Song Is About You or: She Looked Like a Rita to Me

It’s one of music’s longest running mysteries. For over 40 years, just whom Carly Simon’s 1972 hit song “You’re So Vain (You Probably Think This Song Is About You)” is about has been an endless matter of speculation. This wasn’t the first time the identity of a songwriter’s or a poet’s inspiration has been the source of curiosity.

Stephen Foster, known as the “Father of American Music,” composed his most beloved parlor song, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” in 1854, possibly as an attempt to win back the affection of his estranged wife, Jane McDowell, the daughter of a Pittsburgh banker. In 1850, Foster married Jane, whose nickname was “Jenny,” but the union was less than harmonious, and the couple separated in 1853. The lyrics resonate with plaintive expressions of separation, while the opening words of each stanza reflect Foster’s melancholy: “I dream of Jeanie” (first verse); “I long for Jeanie” (second verse); “I sigh for Jeanie” (third verse).

 

A forlorn looking Stephen Foster sighs for his "Jeanie."

The title of one of Stephen Foster’s earlier compositions, the popular minstrel song “O! Susanna,” may refer to Foster’s deceased sister, Charlotte, whose middle name was Susannah.

The death of a beautiful woman was a frequent inspiration for the poems and tales of Edgar Allan Poe. His mother died of tuberculosis in her early 20s, and Poe’s wife, his first cousin, Virginia Eliza Clemm, died of tuberculosis in 1847 at age 24. Virginia promised Edgar she would be his guardian angel after death. As early as 1843, Poe’s poem “Lenore” may have expressed his grief over Virginia’s illness. In death, she inspired a number of Poe’s poems, including “Ulalume” and “Annabel Lee.”

 

A portrait of Virginia Poe painted after her untimely death

The daughter of a banker in Florence, Beatrice di Folco Portinari (1266-1290), has been commonly identified as the inspiration for and the embodiment of Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, a prose and verse expression of courtly love. Beatrice herself appears as one of Dante’s guides in his epic poem Divine Comedy, escorting the poet in the last four cantos of “Purgatorio” and in “Paradiso.”

 

"Dante and Beatrice" painted in 1883 by Henry Holiday

Dante claimed to have met Beatrice only twice, nine years apart, and although she was married to a Florentine banker, he was so affected by the occasions that he carried an idealized love for her throughout his life, envisioning her as a personal savior who removed all evil in his soul.

Flashing forward 700 years, before “You’re So Vain” became a chart topper, Carly Simon stated the song was about “men,” not a particular individual. Simon has been milking the song’s mystery for over 40 years. Here’s a brief timeline:

In 1983, Carly Simon told The Washington Post “You’re So Vain” is definitely not about Mick Jagger, who provided backing vocals to the song. In 1993, Angela Bowie, David’s ex-wife, claimed to be the song’s “wife of a close friend” with whom Jagger had been “obsessed.”

 

Carly Simon, Mick Jagger

In a 1998 interview, Simon acknowledged that the song is a little bit about Warren Beatty but insisted the subject is a composite of three men from her so-called L.A. days. In a 2007 interview, Warren Beatty said, “Let’s be honest. That song was about me.” Simon admitted that Beatty called her and thanked her for the song.

 

Carly Simon, Warren Beatty

In 2001, Carly Simon said, “The apricot scarf was worn by Nick (Nolte). Nothing in the words referred to Mick (Jagger).”

In August of 2003 (over 30 years after “You’re So Vain” was released), Carly Simon agreed to reveal the identity of the song’s subject to the highest bidder at a Martha’s Vineyard charity auction. Dick Ebersol, president of NBC Sports, bid $50,000, winning the right to know the name. Simon gave a private performance of the song at her home, where she whispered the name into Ebersol’s ear, on the condition that he would keep the name secret.

In 2004, Carly Simon told Regis Philbin the name had an “A,” an “E,” and an “R” in it.

In June of 2008, Howard Stern claimed Simon had privately revealed the name to him. “There is an odd aspect to it,” Stern related, “he’s not that vain.” On Simon’s website, she has denied the song’s subject is Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, former husband James Taylor, or the openly gay David Geffen.

In her 2008 book Girls Like Us, author Sheila Weller recounted in detail Carly Simon’s love affair with a renowned session guitarist named Dan Armstrong (who died age 69 in 2004).

In February of 2010, Carly Simon told the music magazine Uncut that the identity of the song’s subject was whispered backwards in a re-recording of “You’re So Vain,” which was later confirmed to be “David.” And a nation yawned.

But wait – there’s more! In 2013, Taylor Swift said Carly Simon had told her the name in confidence.

And that brings us to T-Swizzle herself, Taylor Swift, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter - with over 26 million albums and 75 million digital single downloads to her credit – who has been often criticized for turning soured romances into chart-topping ditties dissing the poor sap who broke up with her. At least a dozen of her hits were breakup songs that slam such former celebrity squeezes as singers John Mayer and Joe Jonas, actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Lautner, not to mention a series of nameless ex-boyfriends, even a 16-year-old classroom crush.

John Mayer, who had earlier recorded a duet with Smith and performed in concert with her, said Smith’s 2010 song “Dear John” “humiliated” him. “I think its kind of cheap songwriting,” he said. “I know she’s the biggest thing in the world, and I’m not trying to sink anybody’s ship, but I think it’s abusing your talent to rub your hands together and go, ‘Wait till he gets a load of this!’” Interestingly, both John Mayer and Joe Jonas wrote and recorded their own songs about Taylor Swift.

For her part, Taylor Swift has vainly insisted she tries not to talk specifically about her song subjects “because these are real people,” in her words. “You try to give insight as to where you were coming from as a writer without completely throwing somebody under the bus.” According to a recent online post titled “Nobody Wants to Date Taylor Swift,” entertainment writer Price Peterson noted, “America’s favorite twenty-something teenager…built a career on taking an electron microscope to her every failed romance, but…that may be the very behavior that’s preventing her from finding a new boyfriend.”

The gossip website Radar declared, “Taylor is almost impossible to find dates for because of the nature of her music, which focuses heavily on heartbreak…None of the guys she shows interest in want to be the subject of a mean song six months down the road or be painted the bad guy.”

Not all “You’re So Vain” tunes slam their inspirations, and on the Moviehouse jukebox, we’ve punched in a historical playlist for your listening pleasure.

Released as a single in 1957, Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “Peggy Sue” was originally written as “Cindy Lou,” after Buddy’s niece. The title was changed to “Peggy Sue” for Crickets drummer Jerry Allison’s former girlfriend, Peggy Sue Gerron, as a way of asking her to take him back. Jerry and Peggy Sue subsequently married but were later divorced. In a 2009 interview, 68-year-old Peggy Sue remembered, “I was just delighted…It’s really hard to stand still when you’re listening to ‘Peggy Sue.’” When asked if being the inspiration for one of the most influential songs of the 20^th century was a burden, she replied, “A privilege, always. I never get tired of it.”

 

The wedding of Jerry Allison and Peggy Sue Gerron

In 1967, when a Westminster female traffic warden (meter maid to the colonials) named Meta Davies issued a parking ticket to Paul McCartney, he accepted the citation gracefully, then co-wrote the song “Lovely Rita” with John Lennon for The Beatles watershed album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club.” In the 1994 book A Hard Day’s Write: The Story Behind Every Beatles Song, Davies recounted, “As he was walking away he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, is your name really Meta?’…We chatted for a few minutes and he said, ‘That would be a good name for a song. Would you mind if I used it?’ And that was that.” Asked why he titled the tune “Lovely Rita,” Paul replied, “Well, she looked like a Rita to me.”

 

Prudence Farrow (left), Ringo Starr, Ringo's wife, Maureen Starkey

The Lennon-McCartney song “Dear Prudence” from 1968’s double-LP “The Beatles” (popularly known as “The White Album”) was inspired by Prudence Farrow, who was present, along with her older sister, actress Mia Farrow, when The Beatles went to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Prudence, who earned bachelor, master, and PhD degrees in Asian studies, taught Transcendental Meditation, and among those she mentored was the late Andy Kaufman.

Stephen Stills and Judy Collins met in 1967 and dated for two years. Collins later fell in love with actor Stacy Keach, and the heartbroken Stills wrote the song “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” for Crosby, Stills & Nash– a composition in the classical sense with four distinct sections - in anticipation of the imminent breakup. “We were both too large for one house,” Stills said.

 

Stephen Stills, Judy Collins

In a 2000 interview, Judy Collins remembered when Stephen Stills first sang her the entire song solo in a West Coast hotel room, calling it a “magnificent creation. So the legacy of our relationship is certainly in that song.”

A teenaged discovery of pop art demigod Andy Warhol, Patti D’Arbanville was 16 when she was cast in Warhol’s 1968 production “Flesh.” Modeling in London in the late 1960s, she met and fell in love with British singer-songwriter Cat Stevens. She would travel frequently to pursue her modeling career while maintaining a presence in Warhol’s The Factory film studio. Interviewed by Warhol himself, Patti recalled that Stevens – whom she preferred to call by his real name, Steven (Demetre Georogiou) – wrote the song “Lady D’Arbanville” “when I left New York for a month. It wasn’t the end of the world, was it? But he wrote this whole song about ‘Lady D’Arbanville, why do you sleep so still.’ It’s about me dead…for him, it was like I was lying in a coffin…he wrote that because he missed me…It’s a sad song.”

 

Patti D'Arbanville, Cat Stevens

Inspired by the end of their romance, Cat Stevens composed and sang 1970’s “Wild World” as a cautionary tale for his departing lover: “But if you wanna leave, take good care / I hope you meet a lot of nice friends out there / But just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware.”

 

Patti D'Arbanville as photographed by Francesco Scavullo

In mainstream Hollywood films, Patti D’Arbanville appeared opposite Jeff Bridges in “Rancho Deluxe” (1975), William Katt in “Big Wednesday” (1978), and Ryan O’Neal in “The Main Event” (1979). In 1989, she portrayed Cathy Smith, the infamous groupie who injected John Belushi with the fatal speedball, in the box-office bomb “Wired.”

 

Claudia Lennear in "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"

As a soul singer, Claudia Lennear backed up several acts in the 1970s, among them David Bowie, George Harrison, Leon Russell, Ike and Tina Turner, Humble Pie, Joe Cocker, and Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. As an actress, she had a brief but memorable role in “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” (1974) as a secretary who asks Clint Eastwood for his Social Security number. Lennear was the inspiration for the song “Brown Sugar,” the opening track and first single from the 1971 album “Sticky Fingers” by The Rolling Stones. Lennear also inspired David Bowie to write “Lady Grinning Soul,” featured on his 1973 album “Aladdin Sane.” She once said, “Why should I sit around, be obsessed whether they wrote a song about me or not. Why didn’t they write a song for me to sing?”

 

Mick Jagger, Claudia Lennear

In 1973, Claudia Lennear released her solo album, “Phew!”, and appeared in a 1974 Playboy magazine pictorial, appropriately titled “Brown Sugar.” She left music to teach French and Spanish. Lennear was featured in 2013’s “20 Feet from Stardom,” an all-star documentary about backup singers which won the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. In a March 2013 press release, David Bowie offered to write original songs for the 60-something Lennear. She said, “He told me he wanted to write my next project.”

After winning a Golden Globe and earning an Oscar nomination for her performance in 1970’s “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” Carrie Snodgress walked away from a burgeoning career in 1971 to live with her new boyfriend, Neil Young, on his northern California ranch and care for their son, Zeke, who had been born with mild cerebral palsy. “I decided that I was going to be in love. I was going to give it everything I had.”

 

Carrie Snodgress, Neil Young

When Young was bedridden with a back injury, Snodgress became his live-in nurse, inspiring him to write “A Man Needs a Maid,” featured on “Harvest,” which would become the best-selling album of 1972 in the U.S. The song includes the lyrics, “I was watching a movie with a friend / I fell in love with the actress / She was playing a part I could understand.” Although feminists labeled the song sexist, Snodgress said, “I fell in love with Neil’s pain.” She asserted, “We were in this cocoon of intensity.”

Neil Young’s 1974 album “On the Beach” included a song titled “Motion Pictures,” dedicated in the liner notes to Carrie. She was also referred to in Young’s songs “New Mama” and “Tonight’s the Night.” In a 1983 interview, Snodgress looked back wistfully on her life with Young: “It was like heaven on that ranch. I don’t know why we broke up. We never fought.”

After a seven-year absence, Carrie Snodgress returned to acting in 1978’s “The Fury,” starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, and Amy Irving, directed by Brian De Palma. She later costarred with Clint Eastwood in 1985’s “Pale Rider.” In 1986, Carrie Snodgress said she had no regrets about temporarily putting her career on hold. “I was never really a career woman,” she said. “My life always came first…My dream had always been to do my work well, fall in love and build a life for myself.”

Carrie Snodgress appeared on TV in “Judging Amy” (2002) and “The West Wing” (2003). Her last role was in the 2004 HBO film “Iron Jawed Angels,” starring Hilary Swank. Snodgress was hospitalized, awaiting a liver transplant, when she died of heart failure on April 1, 2004, age 57, with son Zeke at her side.

The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman,” released as the second single from their self-titled 1972 album, was inspired by, of all people, Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948), the wife and muse of The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who dubbed her “the first American flapper” of the Jazz Age in the Roaring Twenties.

There was speculation that The Rollling Stones’ 1973 single “Angie” was about Angela Bowie or actress Angie Dickinson or Keith Richards’ newborn daughter, Dandelion Angela. Richards claimed Angie was a pseudonym for heroin, and the lyrics were about his attempt to quit the drug.

 

Bob Dylan, Joan Baez

There’s no secret that the wistful, melancholy 1975 song “Diamonds & Rust” by Joan Baez was inspired by her relationship with Bob Dylan, evidenced in the lyrics, “You burst on the scene / Already a legend / The unwashed phenomenon / The original vagabond.” In the early 1960s, Dylan was initially attracted to Baez’ little sister, Mimi, but under the media scrutiny that Bob and Joan were attracting, their bond grew intimate, and the two became romantically involved, off and on, for two years. The relationship had fizzled by the time Dylan toured Britain in 1965.

 

The real Sharona, Sharona Alperin, posed for the cover of the single.

“My Sharona,” the debut single from The Knack’s 1979 album “Get the Knack,” was the fastest certified gold status debut single since The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” sixteen years earlier. When 25-year-old Doug Fieger, the lead singer of The Knack, met 17-year-old Sharona Alperin, “it was like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat,” he recounted. “I fell in love with her instantly. And when that happened, it sparked something and I started writing a lot of songs feverishly in a short amount of time.” He claimed that he wrote “My Sharona” in 15 minutes. Guitarist Berton Averre was averse to using a real name in the song, but Fieger wanted the song to specifically express his feelings.

 

Doug Fieger, Sharona Alperin

Alperin later recalled that Fieger “told me, ‘I’m in love with you, you’re my soul mate, you’re my other half, we’re going to be together one day.’” She already had a boyfriend, whom she broke up with a year later, and she indeed became Fieger’s girlfriend for the next four years. The two subsequently married other people but remained friends.

Fieger had brain surgery in August of 2006 to have tumors removed. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2007, underwent extensive chemotherapy, and had half of one lung removed. He died, age 57, on Valentine’s Day 2010. Sharona, now a real estate agent in Los Angeles (with a website, mysharona.com, that plays – you guessed it -“ My Sharona” on its homepage), visited Fieger frequently in his final months. She remembered, “A lot of his idols, people that meant so much to him in the music industry, came to pay their respects to him. And it was really beautiful.”

Among the speculation surrounding the inspiration for the 1982 song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash were rumors of the band’s impending dismissal of Mick Jones, who wrote the tune and sang lead and was, in fact, let go in 1983. It was commonly thought that the lyrics were about Jones’ rocky romance with singer-actress Ellen Foley. Best known for singing the duet “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” with Meat Loaf (buxom Karla DeVito appeared in the popular music video, lip-synching Foley’s vocals), Foley played a public defender on the first season of the mid-1980s sitcom “Night Court” before being replaced by Markie Post.

 

Mick Ronson, Ellen Foley, Mick Jones, Ian Hunter

Mick Jones, however, asserted the song “wasn’t about anybody specific and it wasn’t pre-empting my leaving The Clash. It was just a good rockin’ song, our attempt at writing a classic.”

The Record of the Year Grammy Award-winning “Rosanna” was the first track and first single off of Toto’s 1982 album “Toto IV.” Keyboardist David Paich insisted he based the song on several women he had known. Allegedly, band members played along with the public assumption that the song was inspired by actress Rosanna Arquette, whom keyboardist Steve Porcara was dating at the time.

 

Rosanna Arquette

Not so speculative was Rosanna Arquette’s inspiration for Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” a hit single from his 1986 album “So” that became an icon for screen romance when John Cusack raised a boombox overhead to win back Ione Skye in writer-director Cameron Crowe’s “Say Anything…” (1989). Although they never married, Arquette lived with Gabriel from the late 1980s into the early 1990s.

 

Rosanna Arquette, Peter Gabriel

In an interview with Howard Stern, Billy Joel claimed that “Uptown Girl,” his 1983 doo-wop tribute to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, was originally titled in the plural, inspired by his then girlfriend Elle Macpherson, fellow supermodel (and soon-to-be Mrs. Joel) Christie Brinkley, and Whitney Houston. Not at all coincidentally, Christie Brinkley was featured in the popular music video for the song.

 

Billy Joel, Christie Brinkley

Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley married in 1985 and divorced nine years later. Their daughter, Alexa Ray Joel (her middle name honors Ray Charles), born in 1985, became a singer-songwriter and keyboardist in her own right. Christie Brinkley painted the artwork for the cover of Billy Joel’s 1993 album “River of Dreams,” but after the divorce, the song “Uptown Girl” was conspicuously dropped from Joel’s playlist on his 1994 “River of Dreams” tour.

Moving from the sublime to the bizarre, in his book The Heroin Diaries, Nikki Sixx, bass player for Motley Crue, claimed that the 1987 Aerosmith hit “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” written by Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and Songwriters Hall of Famer Desmond Child, was directly referring to Motley Crue lead singer Vince Neil. Go figure.

 

Dude, Vince Neil looks like a lady.

In his wildest dreams, Dave Coulier, a journeyman standup comedian best known for his role as a surrogate “uncle” on the long-running sitcom “Full House,” probably never imagined he would be targeted as the bad guy in a vindictive tirade by a jilted Alanis Morissette, who co-wrote the single “You Oughta Know” – from her third album, 1995’s “Jagged Little Pill” - as a venomous indictment of an ex-boyfriend. The recently divorced Coulier, who dated Morissette but broke up with her before she recorded “Jagged Little Pill,” recognized himself in the lyrics “And I’m here to remind you / Of the mess you left when you went away / It’s not fair to deny me / Of the cross I bear that you gave me / You, you, you oughta know.”

Alanis Morissette

In 1997, Coulier admitted “the lines are very close to home.” However, in an October 2008 interview, Morissette reiterated her refusal to identify the song’s subject, saying, “I’ve never talked about who my songs were about and I won’t because when I write them they’re written for the sake of personal expression…I write these songs for myself, not other people.” In July of 2014, Dave Coulier denied that the song had anything to do with him. He told Buzzfeed, “First of all, the guy in that song is a real a-hole…I don’t want to be that guy.”

 

Dave Coulier..."that guy"

Postscript:

Beyond celebrity, we come to one of the most ingenuous yet nonetheless entrancing accounts of a song’s inspiration. In the Montreal of the early 1960s, Suzanne Verdal was a young dancer who became the free-spirited muse of Beat poets. “The Beat scene was beautiful,” Suzanne recalled. “It was live jazz and we were just dancing our hearts out for hours on end, happy on very little.” Months into her relationship with Armand Vaillancourt, a sculptor, performance artist, and political activist, she was introduced to poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Suzanne said, “But we didn’t really strike a note together until maybe three or four years later.”

Suzanne remembered, “He got such a kick out of seeing me emerge as a young schoolgirl…and a young artist, into becoming Armand’s lover…So he was more or less chronicling the times and seemingly got a kick out of it.”

 

Suzanne Verdal

After separating from Armand, Suzanne moved to the waterfront with her daughter. “The St. Lawrence River held a particular poetry and beauty to me,” she said of the harbor apartment. “Leonard heard about this place I was living, with crooked floors and a poetic view of the river, and he came to visit me many times. We had tea together and mandarin oranges.” They would stroll around Old Montreal, past the church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, where sailors were blessed before heading out to sea.

In 1966, Leonard Cohen wrote the poem “Suzanne Takes You Down” as an account of the time he spent with her in the summer of 1965. Judy Collins urged him to write a song based on the poem, and she recorded “Suzanne.” Cohen recorded the song in 1967. When she first heard the song, Suzanne admitted she was flattered. “But I was depicted….in sad terms, too, in a sense…I don’t think I was quite as sad as that…maybe I was and he perceived that and I didn’t.”

 

Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins

Their friendship remained platonic. In a 2006 interview, Suzanne said she and Cohen never had a sexual relationship. In 1994, Cohen said he only imagined having sex with her, but there was neither the opportunity nor the inclination to pursue it.

The two inevitably drifted apart, something Suzanne didn’t “quite understand. I stayed true to art for art’s sake but he moved on and I stayed true to the cause, as it were…I don’t know if that intimidated him or embarrassed him or made him uncomfortable.”

In the late 1990s, Suzanne was living in Los Angeles County with her seven cats, where she worked as a dance instructor and massage therapist. When she hears “Suzanne” these days, she noted, “There’s a little bit of a bittersweet feeling to it that I retain. I guess I miss the simpler times that we lived and shared…I hold dear this time, very much so.” She said, “That is me still.”