Photo by Peter Simon.

For just as many years, a question rivaling that of (before Vanity Fair solved it) “Who is Deep Throat?” has been: Who is Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” about? You know, the man who “walked into the party like he was walking onto a yacht”--the song that taught young people in early 1973 that there was the (conveniently “yacht”-rhyming) verb, “gavotte” and, far less elegantly (but far more endearingly and memorably) informed us that a cup of coffee could contain clouds.

Carly herself has enjoyed not answering that question. “It doesn’t really matter who it’s about,” she told me, when I interviewed her for my book, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation, but she did tell me details of the song’s composition, which I’ll get to in a minute, and I formed my own theory about who it was about, on the basis of my talks with her and other research.

During a recent interview, Carly mentioned that the answer to the question lies in a track on her new album, Never Been Gone, which set off a firestorm of rumors yesterday that the subject was definitively record executive David Geffen, and that the reason she'd felt hurt by him was his favoritism of Joni Mitchell. By yesterday afternoon, the speculation had been quelled, but the question was still unanswered, so I set to work...I e-mailed Carly, but she was on her way to London to promote the British debut of her new album, Never Been Gone, whose release created yesterday's fuss in the first place. Her automatic reply informed me: “I will be away from my email until March 12th. I will not receive any messages until then. Thank you. Love, Carly.” I called her friend and webmaster Jodie Wright, who reminded me that Hotcakes (the album released close to the same time as Joni's Court and Spark) came out in 1974 and, of course, "You’re So Vain" was released in 1972. So while Carly was eventually upset about Geffen’s favoritism for Joni, her miffed feelings were too late in time for him to have been the person in the two-years-earlier song… if such was Carly’s motivation. Jodie said something else, which was interesting: “Why does everyone assume it was about a famous man?” Hmm… good point.

I talked to Carly’s ex-husband, Jim Hart (they were married for 20 years), who remains her close friend and confidante. Jim had no idea that the rumor had even started. "Geffen?" he said, puzzled. I left messages with several of Carly’s close friends and associates. Her publicist Alisse Kingsley called me back and said this: “Carly did recite — backward — the name David’ in the new version of You’re So Vain’ on Never Been Gone. (By the way, that’s a gorgeous, counter-intuitive arrangement — the song’s original slow version, “Ballad of a Vain Man.”) “But it was only one name, a first name — David. No last name,” Kingsley adamantly declared. “There is a David who is connected to the song in some way, shape, or form. But he is not David Geffen.”

Jim Hart shot me an e-mail: “I called [Carly, transatlantically] and couldn’t get through — and sent her an e-mail and got an automatic reply. I am 99% positive that the story [about Geffen] is not accurate. I would be 100% sure if it wasn’t for my dementia.”

Okay.

None of Carly’s major pre-fame boyfriends whom I knew of — novelist and professor Nicholas Delbanco; the late British writer and decadent aristocrat Willie Donaldson; the late working-class, Ohio-raised musician and guitar-emporium owner Danny Armstrong — were named David. Just before she hit big, she’d been good friends with comedian David Steinberg, but he’s not at all arrogant and, anyway, he was a couple with photographer Mary Ellen Mark at the time. In my book, I took “You’re So Vain” to be a combination of frontrunner Beatty and three other men in Beatty’s crowd — Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson, and Don Rafelson: all those cocky, girl-sharing, early 1970s hip-Hollywood bachelors — whom she also romanced. (Hey, it was an era when every girl had a lot of romances.) Warren Beatty has always been the frontrunner in most people’s minds, from Warren himself, to allusions Carly has made, to the theories among Carly-ologists. Beatty as the song subject is like the theory of global warming, at this point. (Roger Friedman agrees.)

Before the song came out, when it was an unknown entity, not a number-one hit and feminist anthem that became one of the iconic rock songs of the last half-century, Carly gave an interview in which she referred to the “men,” not a mere “man,” who had inspired it. Also, she had told me, on the phone, in 2006, while I was writing my book, that she got the final zing of the idea for the song at a party “in L.A.” A man she knew walked in, with a certain attitude, “and I said to myself, This is exactly the person that [a line she had already developed] You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you’ is about! I envisioned him looking in the mirror and the scarf twirling, and the imaginary gavotte, and all the women wanting to be his partner.” A man she already “knew” and a party in L.A., she’d said. Here’s the thing: Carly had never been to L.A. in her life until her star-making Troubadour gig, opening for Cat Stevens, in early April 1971. So that rules out anyone she knew well before her sudden burst of fame, unless he’d suddenly morphed from East Coast scenemaker to L.A. partier —in those non-frequent-flyer, quaint days when the two coasts were still The Two Coasts, that was not hugely likely.

An early David? One of Carly’s best school friends called me back. “This is going to sound stupid,” I asked, “but did Carly ever have a teenage or early-20s boyfriend named David?” We both laughed. This is a friend who once watched Carly write a very moving, passionate college-admission essay about a novel that she’d never read, while both of them were cracking up. (On the strength of that essay, Carly got into the college.) “Carly’s always throwing misleading breadcrumbs about who the song was about,” the friend said now, laughing, before her cell phone — truly, by sheer accident — gave out.

Another close friend of hers called me back. This person had a possible idea about the “David.” This person is a very reliable source but did not want to go on the record. This person revealed the following tidbits: There was a famous, secret “club” that a male close to Carly all her life “founded”— a club for men who, like the founder himself, were “exceptionally well-endowed” and who welcomed photographic confirmation of same. One member of this “club” was named David. Common Jewish last name. Was / is in film. Bicoastal. Involved in liberal, trendy political causes in the ’70s — like people in Carly’s early-career and lifelong circle. His career and life intersected with hers in some definite ways. “And,” my source bluntly said, “she knew the size of his organ.” This David currently resides in the very place where Carly grew up, and he has a daughter whose name sounds an awful lot like “Carly.” Leave it to the witty, mischievous, lusty, cultured Simon to choose a David who was anatomically a Goliath — a David who, like the famous statue, was not unproud to be disrobed.

I was Googling this particular prime-suspect David when Arlyne Rothberg called me back. Arlyne was Carly’s manager from a year before Carly’s fame through her glory days. (Arlyne also managed Diane Keaton’s career.) Arlyne is a straight shooter and, like Carly, a soulful survivor. (They’d bonded in part over their mutual fate of having sons who were born with physical defects that had briefly turned dire.) “David? Really, there was no David’!” Arlyne told me. She volunteered, unequivocally: “It is definitely not Geffen or any other David. As far as who it is, we were all sworn to secrecy from the moment the song was recorded, and everybody agreed: We’re not gonna spill the beans!’ And, as far as I know, nobody has revealed who [“You’re So Vain”] was written about. "And," Arlyne added, with brio, “it’s been fun!”

Fun! Of course it’s been fun.

Just before she left for London, Carly, who recently sued Starbucks for failure to properly promote her previous album This Kind of Love, and who has lamented that she can’t afford to retire, e-mailed me: “Going to London tomorrow to be Sisyphus again. Oh, that rock. Jesus Christ, that rock is hard to get up that hill. Same ratio of the spider against the drips of water in the spout.” But her woebegone-ness was misplaced. Now she is in London, that canny city whose reporters minted and mastered Gotcha! tabloid shrewdness. And, because of a London tabloid writer, London is all aflame, naively thinking “You’re So Vain” is about David Geffen, when it is not. Sisyphus… or Mona Lisa? The girl’s got game. Long live song riddles, labyrinthine, dead-end guessing games, secret clubs for well-hung Riverdale regular Joes — and the kick-ass gift-that-keeps-on-giving magic of “You’re So Vain.”