You're So Vain producer Richard Perry dies at 82

Richard Perry, a hitmaking record producer whose many successes included Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, has died at 82.

Perry, a recipient of a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.

The one-time drummer, oboist and doo-wop singer proved at home with a wide variety of musical styles, achieving No. 1 hits on the pop, R&B, dance and country charts.

He was on hand for Harry Nilsson’s Without You and The Pointer Sisters’ I’m So Excited, Tiny Tim’s novelty smash Tiptoe Through the Tulips and the Willie Nelson-Julio Iglesias lounge standard To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before. Singers turned to him whether trying to update their sound (Barbra Streisand), set back the clock (Stewart), revive their career (Fats Domino) or fulfill early promise (Leo Sayer).

In Stewart’s autobiography, “Rod,” he would remember Perry’s home in West Hollywood as “the scene of much late-night skulduggery through the 1970s and beyond, a place you knew you could always fall into at the end of an evening for a full-blown knees-up with drink and music and dancing.”

He dated Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda among others and was briefly married to the actor Rebecca Broussard.

Perry helped make pop history as producer of “You’re So Vain,” which he would call the nearest he came to a perfect record. Simon’s scathing ballad about an unnamed lover hit No. 1 in 1972 and began a long-term debate over Simon’s intended target. Perry’s answer would echo Simon’s own belated response.

“I’ll take this opportunity to give my insider’s scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The person that the song is based on is really a composite of several men that Carly dated in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, but primarily, it’s about my good friend, Warren Beatty.”

In the ‘70s, Perry helped facilitate a near-Beatles reunion.

He had produced a track on Ringo Starr’s first solo album, “Sentimental Journey,” and grown closer to him through Nilsson and other mutual friends. “Ringo,” released in 1973, would prove the drummer was a commercial force in his own right, reaching No. 2 on Billboard and selling more than 1 million copies.

But for Perry, the most memorable track was John Lennon’s I’m the Greatest - a mock-anthem for the self-effacing drummer that brought three Beatles - Starr, Lennon and George Harrison into the studio just three years after the band’s breakup.

Perry’s post-1970s work included albums by Simon, Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel. He had his greatest success with Stewart’s million-selling “The Great American Songbook” albums, a project made possible by the rock star’s writer’s block and troubled private life. With Stewart struggling to come up with original songs, he and Perry agreed that an album of standards might work, including “The Very Thought of You,” “Angel Eyes” and “Where or When.”

Perry was a New York City native born into a musical family; his parents, Mark and Sylvia Perry, co-founded Peripole Music, a pioneering manufacturer of instruments for young people. With his family’s help and encouragement, he learned to play drums and oboe and helped form a doo-wop group, the Escorts, that released a handful of singles. A music and theatre major at the University of Michigan, he initially dreamed of acting on Broadway. Instead, he made the “life-changing” decision in the mid-1960s to form a production company.