‍Carly remembers her past lovers

‍ONE OF the greatest albums of the Seventies was Carly Simon’s No Secrets on which she sings You’re So Vain, the haunting song she wrote about three of her narcissistic lovers, but who were they? That was the question even to this day. She kept two of  them a secret.

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‍She admitted to the Press that one was Warren Beatty, he apparently was the second verse but she has never publicly disclosed who the other two were, although we guessed one of them was Mick Jagger. Was the other one Robert Redford?

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‍Just the other day I was rummaging through the historical archives of the New York Post for something entirely different, when I came across her talking about the song and revealing all about her love life during those heady years.

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‍What a good read it was, if only we had got stuff like it at the Express, which in the main, in my view, too often ‘buttered up’ the stars to get the chat.

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‍Apparently about a month into her romance with Warren Beatty, Carly got a call from him saying he was flying to New York from LA and desperately had to see her. He’d be getting in at around 12:30 a.m. and would have to be gone by 5:30am for an early-morning shoot. He arrived, and the couple “made love like it was a movie scene.”

‍Carly’s hit album

‍“Warren was such a professional and the sexual pressure points he knew about stirred a tremor in me,” Carly said in the feature that followed up on her book.

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‍After he left, Carly slept, then went for an appointment with her long-time therapist, whom she called “Dr. L.”

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‍She was ‘telling all’ about her steamy night with Beatty and what a “superman he was in the sack”, when Dr. L looked puzzled. It was 11am that morning and Carly asked what was wrong.

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‍“Under the circumstances, I can’t withhold this,” he said “It’s too much to believe. You are not the first patient today who spent last night with this man!”

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‍Then there was the time Jack Nicholson asked her at a party if they could go to her apartment. Once there, they sat on the couch and drank coffee and chatted for a few minutes before he asked: “Do you ever drink coffee in your bedroom?” The romance lasted just a few nights.

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‍The Post feature went into lots of other anecdotes from Carly’s book about her life getting bonked by the stars. But when she was making the album No Secrets and recording the track You’re So Vain, her producer invited a few guests to the studio.

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‍As she stressfully tried to finish her songs, she found herself surrounded by Paul and Linda McCartney, George Martin, Harry Nilsson and Jagger. Nilsson joined her on background vocals, followed by Jagger and her 45-minute collaboration with him was ‘feverish.’

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‍“Mick is that genius of an artist who thrives on the dark and the daring and you could say that the love affair between us that was brewing, contained both of those things,” she said.

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‍She and Jagger “spent some evenings together at the studio where he was recording, and some other times in rooms at a well-known hotel, which was dangerous and conspicuous.”

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‍Not once in the feature did Carly reveal the names of the other two men, apart from Beatty, she was writing about in the song You’re So Vain. But the lyrics are now part of pop history:

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‍You walked into the party like you were walking on to a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner
They'd be your partner and …

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‍And in the end, it was James Taylor, of course, who stole her heart. And the third man she sang about in You’re So Vain? Perhaps we’ll ever know.

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‍GARROTTING TOPS THE CRIME LIST BY

‍A NECK AS PARLIAMENT LASHES OUT

‍THE PRESS coverage of garrotting exploded in 1862 when an MP was strangled and robbed of his watch on his way home from the House of Commons. The attack on Hugh Pilkington shocked the nation.

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‍The story ran for weeks and led to Parliament pushing through the Security from Violence Act in 1863 which created a punishment of 50 lashes and a hefty prison sentence.

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‍After the attack on the MP for Blackburn, garrotting cases from all over the country were appearing in the London papers, police became more heavy-handed and the City and Westminster were flooded with plain clothes officers.

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‍But garrotting proved good for business. Companies started to develop anti-garrotting equipment and clothes. Various devices were invented to dissuade potential garroters. Various designs of hulking neck-collars with large spikes were patented. Most popular was a cravat with a blade sewn into the hem … to cut the attacker’s arm.

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‍The extreme lengths people went to protect themselves from garrotting was highlighted by gun maker Henry Ball and patented in 1858 —The Anti-Garrotter Belt Pistol. This belt-gun was designed to be worn on the bottom. If someone was trying to strangle you from behind, you could discharge the weapon into his balls.

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‍The whole affair led to cartoons in the Press; increased arrests and even adverts for bodyguards in newspapers.

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‍One said: “The Bayswater Brothers (whose height is respectively 6ft 4in and 6ft 11in and the united breadth of whose shoulders extends to as much as 3yds 1ft 5in, respectfully give this notice to the Gentry and Public of Paddington, Kensington, Stoke Newington, Chelsea, Eaton Square, and Shepherd’s Bush:

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‍“They will be most happy, upon all social and jovial expeditions, such as dinner and evening parties, as well as tee-total meetings, to escort elderly or nervous persons in the streets after dark, and to wait for them during their pleasure, to escort them home again in safety.

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‍“No suburb, however dangerous, objected to and the worst garrotting districts well known, as the brothers, BILL and JIM, were for several months in the Police Force.

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‍“Terms, so much a head per hour, according to the person’s walk of life. A considerable reduction on taking a party of 12 or more. Distance no object. Testimonials, and ample security given.”

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‍Purrfect for the garden

‍‘A Liverpool firm has just received a consignment of nineteen tons of embalmed cats, from Egypt, which are to be used as garden manure...they were bought for 78s 9d per ton.’

‍The Dundee Courier and Argus 1890

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‍GENTEEL LADIES’ MAGAZINE FELL

‍INTO ARCHIVES OF PORN HISTORY

‍I CAME across the most extraordinary story while surfing the pages of the successful Victorian Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine, a genteel, monthly periodical for middle-class women, published from 1852 to 1879 by Samuel Beeton, with his wife, Isabella Beeton.

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‍The magazine provided practical advice on domestic management, cookery, and dressmaking, along with fashion plates, serial fiction, poetry, and even translations of French novels.

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‍It became a template for today’s women’s magazines. But when the letters page took up the subject of corporal punishment for disciplining children in 1868 a whole new readership came on board — men who enjoyed the erotic world of flagellation — beating themselves or others with whips for sexual gratification.

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‍Editor and owner Beeton was shocked to find his post box overflowing with letters from women, many who were obviously men, enjoying going through the details of stripping youngsters and beating them. They got more graphic as time went on. So bad, that today some of the worst are locked away in the library of Cambridge University, I later discovered.

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‍It all started when a correspondent called Pro-Rod wrote in the letters page: ‘I believe a good sound whipping from the child’s mother’s hands will generally have a wonderfully good effect’.

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‍From this time on, a huge number of letters on the subject flooded in, both for and against corporal punishment. This is from an early letter before they got worse.

‍Beeton came under enormous pressure over the letters, with readers torn between those who wrote in to say the whole thing was disgusting and a huge flood of mail continuing the argument, and sexual stories of bare bottoms. Circulation rocketed.

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‍Apparently, Beeton realised that there was a way of pleasing everyone and making money in the process. From April 1870 onwards, the letters were published in a special supplement in the magazine, which could be purchased every month for twopence (the normal magazine sold for a shilling an issue).

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‍The supplement became a sort of late-nineteenth century Fifty Shades of Grey it seems, and were probably not the normal middle class female readership of the magazine.

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‍On further investigation I discovered that the British Library has now acquired a bound copy of all the supplements from a major collection of erotica, which had been part of a Victorian gentleman’s private library.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍29 September 2025