Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  “Jamie.” That’s what everybody called him. His whole name was James Taylor. On the Vineyard the next summer, Daddy and I went to a “sing” at the Chilmark Community Center. Davy was going to be singing with Jessie Benton (Thomas Hart Benton’s brilliant daughter). I sang along with them on “Dr. Freud, how I wish that you were differently employed.” The whole audience was sitting on the floor, and almost everyone sang with them on the chorus. Jamie Taylor was there, sitting not too far away. His brother was with him, whose name I learned was Alex. Alex was very blond and a little chubby, in contrast to Jamie’s dark lankiness. Daddy was just staring at Jessie Benton. “She’s a knockout,” he said. He was right.

  I was feeling sick about Billy. These gods of music, these gorgeous tan boys who were singing and smiling, were my age. As I thought about Billy, I almost had to leave the community center. It was such a terrible feeling. But I forgot about it soon, and I learned to think of it as something completely “other.” Maybe it had never happened. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I kept thinking I saw Jamie on his bike everywhere. I found out the Taylors lived on South Road right near Stonewall Pond, where the ocean almost connects to Menemsha Pond. Up-island.

  Before that summer was over, my diary revealed that I wanted nothing more than for Davy Gude to fall in love with me, but that wasn’t going to happen. The real, live, beautiful couple that summer was Davy and Jessie. But Davy did lots of good things for me. At his house one afternoon, he brought out his second guitar. He taught Lucy and me a new strumming technique for “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” Lucy’s song that she had written based on a Eugene Field poem, but which Davy was going to record for a record label!!! Lucy and I began to sing that wonderful song at my parents’ parties, and eventually we recorded it. It was our “starting point,” our “break.”

  In addition to learning a lot of music, listening to it, and listening to other people play and sing, I came across a book at the house we had rented that summer about the Greek gods. I spent an hour reading about Orpheus and Eurydice. I savored every tragic detail: how Orpheus, the magical musician and poet, falls deeply in love with Eurydice. As he strums his lyre and sings to her, they fall more and more in love, and eventually they marry. Bitten by a snake, Eurydice dies in Orpheus’s arms and descends to the Underworld. Desperate to bring her back, Orpheus follows her, begging the Lord of the Underworld for his assistance. Overwhelmed, as everyone is, by the beauty and the magic of Orpheus’s singing and playing, Pluto agrees to allow Eurydice to return to the surface of the earth, but with one condition: during their ascent, Orpheus is forbidden even to glance at her. Not once, not even for a second. If he does look, Eurydice will disappear forever.

  Orpheus agrees, but as the two of them are making their way out of the Underworld and Orpheus catches a glimpse of the first welcoming light, he loses his faith. Unsure that Eurydice is really still there, he looks behind him, and the moment he does, she, the woman he loves more than anything in the world and knows he will love forever, vanishes slowly backward into the hazy, twilit nothingness of the Underworld. “The story isn’t real, it’s a myth,” I remember Daddy trying to reassure me. Was it? I thought. Is it? Why did I feel so connected to its power at such an early age?

  For me, the wind-and-water-swept romantic, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was all about everlasting love, about a beautiful musical god so in love with a woman that he couldn’t stand not to look back at her. It was about the cool, cleansing air of music, whether it was exhalations of relief and anger I heard coming from my father at the piano while I was in my bed at night, or the sounds of Davy Gude’s guitar as I gazed at the lost, mystical, beautiful expression on his face. Music brought me closer to the idea of God. Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief. I have always known it would rescue me, as it had bandaged Daddy, bypassed my stammer, brought my families together. Both of them: my family of origin, and the children I would eventually give birth to. There was always an Orpheus in my orbit.

  Orpheus was a boy who could quiet the wind, charm the rocks, silence the trees, the stones, the fish, the animals, who could divert the course of rivers and even take up arms against the Underworld, his lyre eventually transported to heaven by the Muses to take its permanent place among the stars. A boy who sang the sun up to red-orange, who played the guitar with such delicacy it made every girl swoon and every boy want to be him, in whatever form it took, Orpheus was a teacher. Whatever he knew the rest of us would borrow, add on to as we would. Eventually I would come up with my own sound, my own voice. I hoped and prayed, and still do, that Orpheus will always find me when I dip into my own private underworlds, and that when my soul loses direction—as it has so many times since my discovery—I will be able to find it again. That I will remember:

  Orpheus, it could have been,

  You could have held me again

  You said your songs had all gone

  That the road back up was too long

  But it was there for us, it was there for us

  I loved you all along, Orpheus

  Out of despair and believing I was gone

  You gave up on my love

  You gave up on us,

  But it was there for us

  It was there for us

  I loved you all along, Orpheus.

  —“Orpheus,” 1983

  The Vineyard beach at a time when you could count the footsteps in the sand.

  Joey: the only person who could get the brush through the knots.

  CHAPTER SIX

  the dinner party

  It was July 28, 1956, and my parents were hosting a dinner party in honor of the esteemed English publisher Victor Gollancz. Peter, too young, always got a pass, but as usual, Joey, Lucy, and I were expected to make a formal appearance—never forgetting Mommy’s whispered instructions: no jeans, no bare feet, no sneakers, no nail polish, no hair in curlers (of course!), no hats, no tight dresses, and if we insisted on wearing makeup, only a little, since Daddy had recently yelled at Joey for overdoing it. In fact, he had called her a trollop. She cried very long and hard, which told me what trollop might mean.

  Joey and I shared a front bedroom. Our second-floor bathroom had a balcony overlooking the front lawn, affording us stealthy glimpses of the guests as they drove in and around the circular driveway, a procession of Cadillacs, woodies, and Bel Airs. Occasionally, one of us would be lucky enough to spy a private moment—a kiss, or a front-seat argument, before the couple in question carefully reattached their dinner-party masks, that sneak spyglass-peek of lust or vitriol all the more thrilling for having been seen from our hidden aerie. A man’s body came into view. It was Dickie Bauerfeld, the boy who trimmed dead branches and picked fruit from the fruit trees. It was late in the day for him to be there. We all had crushes on him. Or at least his shoulders. Sometimes we’d stare at him for five minutes straight, but even so I hardly ever saw his face.

  That night began innocently, with no hint whatsoever of the surprise that would come at its climax, causing my diary to overflow with page upon page of coded entries over the next few months. I took a shower before Joey, having won the coin toss. That year, my hair was shoulder-length, and after removing the knots with a broad-tooth comb, I set about copying Lucy’s and Joey’s method of creating pin curls around the base, plus a few extra in the bangs, my quixotic hope being to create a dip à la Rita Hayworth.

  For twenty minutes, I sat under the hair dryer reading an Archie comic book, the machine so noisy that I couldn’t hear Joey pounding on the door. From experience I knew that my own hair would likely either unravel or frizz up fast, but Seventeen magazine had taught me a few insider’s tricks. I removed the pin curls and let them dance damply and loosely on my head before combing them into what I hoped would resemble Rita’s hairdo. I then found a scarf to keep everything in place while it dried. Hair. Hair was everything. Finally, I heard the pounding and let Joey in. She was all red with anger. I said I
was sorry and we exchanged places.

  Next, I applied makeup before the bedroom mirror. Joey and Lucy had taught me well. First came Persian Melon lipstick, followed by a midcoat of Pink Innocence, and at last, the crucial finale: a lip blender, Nude Spring Dance. My salty, damp, oily skin tended to make the acne I was trying so hard to cover over look like a miniature volcano about to erupt, so I added Clearasil over my breakouts, reapplying it every few minutes, as it had a tendency to melt. Next, remembering a scene from Gone with the Wind, I had the brilliant idea of putting powder over those spots. I called out to Joey, asking her if she had some talcum powder, but she was still peeved at me for taking so long in the bathroom and didn’t answer.

  I put on “Moonglow,” my favorite song that year, the beguiling string parts humming and crackling through the speakers of my portable record player, turning up the volume as loud as it would go and dancing as Joey continued to ignore my pleas for talc. I moved my hips and watched myself in the mirror thinking that this is what Davy and Jamie might have seen if they’d followed me with their gaze.

  Earlier that day, I’d decided to wear the blue sleeveless dress that Lucy had passed down to me. Not wanting to disturb the turban holding in the pin curls, I put it on feet first, pulling it up carefully, negotiating the arm holes, angling it onto my body, coercing it into a strange, unfamiliar shape. After two summers clinging to Lucy’s body, it would forever hold her particular camber. I was hoping that my bust would be almost as curvy, sexy, and grown-up as Lucy’s, but when I stood up straight, instead of a bust there were two puckers that looked as if I’d been punched twice from the inside, by a baby’s fists.

  When Joey finally opened the bathroom door, holding the talc, she found me with my back to her, stiff-shouldered, still trying to maneuver Lucy’s dress around my gangling, resistant shape. I couldn’t help but gaze at Joey’s chest, from which protruded an infuriatingly grown-up pair of what were then politely called “bosoms,” or more alluringly, “breasts.” Looming from inside Joey’s white slip, floating just above the waterline, they were Hallelujah breasts, breasts that belonged to the climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and I couldn’t have been more fascinated, nor hated her more.

  From behind the bedroom door, we both heard my mother’s voice rushing us, calling from the bottom of the stairs. The two of us exchanged a fast, nervous glance. “I know a trick,” Joey said suddenly, and in her voice was now a distinct tone of compassion. Opening up her sock drawer, she took out a pair of white cotton tennis socks, balling them up in her hand and rolling them out as flat as she could. Once they were in position on my chest, Joey rezipped my dress and we both surveyed the results: two points of uneven, lumpy, linen shapes, jutting out into the room, again like babies’ fists punching from within.

  Joey tried hard not to laugh, even though by now I was crying, convinced nothing in my life would ever work again. But Joey knew another ruse. Tearing off a piece of tissue, she spread it so it leveled the lumps in the socks, pushing and mashing the sock-tissue mix more deeply against my chest. Still, a dead giveaway. We heard Mommy’s voice again, this time warning and insistent. Defeated, I removed the two sad little white socks. Joey draped a scarf around my shoulders, which I’d have to keep close. Then the two of us walked like ladies downstairs.

  Among the crew of regulars that evening were Don and Deirdre Budge, Benny and Alice Goodman, Jackie and Rachel Robinson, Bennett and Phyllis Cerf, and Daddy’s new author Sloan Wilson. I was relieved to see Uncle Peter there, too, and silently prayed I could sit beside him. As usual, Joey was the first to enter the living room, absorbing a royal cascade of ooohs and ahhhs as her natural birthright. All the men except for Daddy rose to their feet, while the women at the table hesitated, stealing glances at the other females for clues on how to react. On how to respond when a much younger woman takes all the attention in the room. As dinner music, Daddy had put a record on the turntable. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” If heaven was preparing a dramatic dénouement, it landed on its mark perfectly. The horns seductively swelled and reached their peak, just as Lucy took everyone’s breath away, simply by entering the room.

  She appeared in the hall doorway inside a golden hazy ray of the dying afternoon sun and took a lone step forward, shy, sweet, nervous, corruptible. She wore a sleeveless rose-brown dress that buttoned all the way up from the shapely middle of her legs to where her waist pulled in tight. In her hair was a dusting of polyanthus, and in possible defiance of Mommy, her feet were bare. In all our days together, Lucy was never as beautiful as she looked that night and, for the first time, I saw her through the guests’ eyes—the eyes of a larger audience—and, not least, in questioning contrast to myself.

  Daddy had risen to his feet for Lucy’s entry, too, his eyebrows cocked slightly upward in approval. No one saw it but me. It was as if Daddy had just seen an angel descend to earth, and what’s more, realized that he was that angel’s father, a certified angel-maker. At that moment I knew one thing for sure, one thing that had been true for as long as I could remember: Lucy was Daddy’s Darling, the ingénue to the star, Joey, who was loath to—and never would—relinquish her power. I was long past wishing I were Daddy’s favorite—I didn’t want him, in fact, and was officially out of the running, which was okay with me, as I had Uncle Peter to love. Tonight, as always, Uncle Peter would step in as my parent substitute. My entrance was flawlessly unnoticed. I slipped between the guests, otherwise preoccupied, neither shadow nor star. Uncle Peter saw me and whispered, “Don’t worry, we’ll get through this together.”

  At dinner, I sat between Jackie Robinson and Don Budge, at one point the top-ranked tennis player in the world. As for the Robinsons, our family had a long history with them. Jackie and his wife had lived with us during the construction of their own house a few miles away in Stamford. Daddy, Jackie, and I used to drive to Ebbets Field to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home games. In the dugout I would sit on Pee Wee Reese’s lap, and was once even informally named the Dodgers mascot, with the team stitching together a special jacket for me with DODGERS printed on the back and CARLY on the front. I was very proud of Jackie, and my knowing him was a very big deal. His son Jackie Junior was my brother Peter’s best friend. Jackie even taught me to bat lefty, though it never took. I loved him. He always had the cutest look around the side of his mouth, as if he were thinking about what he was about to say before he said it.

  Across from me at the cramped, cozy table, Mommy looked glamorous and lovely. Her gardenia matched the white stripe in her stiff black-and-white cotton dress, the two colors zigzagging diagonally across her bodice in dramatic contrast to her red lipstick. She could have been a dancer. She danced as she passed the hors d’oeuvres and her eyes danced as she lived most of her divinely choreographed life. Who wouldn’t have envied Andrea Simon and her marriage to one of the reigning kings and innovators of the publishing world? Even though Daddy had suffered his first heart attack a year before, he was still making round trips to Europe, returning to the office with new books and new strategies to publish them. That year alone, he had published books by the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Whyte (who wrote The Organization Man), and our dinner guest Sloan Wilson.

  At age eleven, it was embarrassing to admit I still wasn’t sure what a publisher even did. I imagined paper dipped into vats where colors and dyes ran and swirled together, alongside piles of parchment paper in need of sanding so they could become smooth enough to allow tiny, monklike people wearing hats adorned with pompoms to write on them. Eventually, miles of Scotch tape and string would bind together the finished books. Even though it was absurd to think I ever believed that, it was as comfortable, and comforting, to me as the ridiculous notion that Mommy and Daddy were in love with each other. Notions could be absurd and still stand, after all.

  The conversation at dinner that night was typically wide-ranging, from how the Dodgers were doing to the recent sinking of the Andrea Doria. An ocean liner sinking: I
could now add drowning to my long list of other fears, which included spiders, earthquakes, shark attacks, and getting through sentences. Benny Goodman, who had just finished recording the Mozart Clarinet Quintet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, dominated the conversation. Even if Benny had interested me as a musician—and at the time I was preoccupied with Frank Sinatra and Elvis—he was far better known to Joey, Lucy, and me as a suspected kleptomaniac, a sneak-stealer and pocketer of one of our family’s pens. He was never indicted, mind you, only suspected.

  Today, I can’t help but think back on Jackie Robinson and Benny Goodman at the same table that night: Jackie, the athlete who’d broken the baseball color line in 1947, and Benny, the musician who ten years earlier, during an era of segregation, was the first bandleader to integrate jazz by hiring the pianist Teddy Wilson and the guitarist Charlie Christian to play in his bands. A counterattack in the eternal war in American race relations was brewing, and later on I felt proud to have been part of such an “advanced” era, especially as it was just another Saturday night in my parents’ house.