After 38 long years, Carly Simon has revealed the subject of “You’re So Vain” by creepily whispering the name of the guy that all the girls dreamed would be their partner in a song on her new album, Never Been Gone. The name: “David.” Experts have already dismissed David Cassidy and David Bowie, and consensus seems to be mounting around the fact that it’s David Geffen. And by consensus, we mean Geffen’s Wikipedia profile has already been updated to reflect the the information. David Geffen! It’s unimaginable. Our whole lives — well, from the moment we were cognitive music-listening beings — we assumed the mysterious, sultry, elusive protagonist of “You’re So Vain” was a famous sex symbol, like Performance-era Mick Jagger, or Bonnie and Clyde–era Warren Beatty, or at the very least Sweet Baby James–era James Taylor. But David Geffen?!?! He’s so corporate. So bald! So completely and utterly homosexual!
The worst of it is, by making this callous — nay, vain — decision to reveal this information in order to score some cheap publicity instead of taking it to her grave like we will the name of the fourth person we ever had sex with, Simon has taken away another one of a rapidly dwindling pool of Great American mysteries. We know that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, that the Skull and Bones society is just a bunch of drunk college kids, that Goldman Sachs is powered by a pair of nuclear testicles, and no one even cares anymore about who killed Jimmy Hoffa. And now we know this: One of the world’s greatest love songs of the past century was written about the gay guy who backed Bill Clinton and Cats. Thanks a lot, Carly.
You’re So Vain, David [USAT]
