Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  Sarah Lawrence was a three-and-a-half-hour drive away from Harvard, but nonetheless I was spending as much time as possible in Cambridge with Nick, taking the train or getting a lift with a friend on Thursday afternoon and returning Sunday night. During my visits, Nick was eager to show off his “lady’s” new singer persona and voice, along with my meager guitar playing, which he’d always said he loved. Gradually I was finding my voice through imitation, by hearing my own pipes overlaid on the voices of other women, not just Odetta, but also Peggy Lee, Judy Collins, Annie Ross, Mary Travers, Billie Holiday, and even Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte. My Odetta imitations included “Bald Headed Woman,” “All the Pretty Little Horses,” “John Henry,” “Circle Round the Sun,” and a few more songs that I belted out in the rooms of Harvard’s Kirkland House and Claverly Hall. But one day I sang “Bald Headed Woman” and my voice no longer sounded like Odetta’s, it sounded like mine. Not on purpose. It just happened.

  Another benefit of spending more time with Nick was that I could avoid school and therefore any additional classroom embarrassments. Nevertheless, my time at Sarah Lawrence, and especially my visits to Cambridge, amounted to a series of unofficial out-of-town auditions. I continued to feel the release and freedom that singing gave me, and the relief of not having to talk (I hadn’t yet made the transfer from “talking is scary” to “singing is scary,” which I would later). Many elements of my singing would need to be corrected or even erased before I was ready to sing for “real” people, but those months were an unofficial dress rehearsal for the rest of my life.

  At the same time, Nick provided camouflage. I slid and hid beneath his eloquence, his charisma, his good looks, his generosity, and the jealousy I felt from senior Sarah Lawrence girls that I, and not one of them, was hanging off his arm. I was obviously, precociously, in love. Nick and I broke all the rules by making love in his Harvard dorm room. I was under the spell of the romantic poets back then, and Nick was always quoting some poetry to me, elevating romance and sex into something unworldly.

  Outside the bedroom, Nick was just as compelling in his wide-legged, slouchy corduroys and handmade shoes, his long black hair falling in a shiny blade over one eye. As a director at the Loeb Drama Center on Brattle Street—how Nick had learned to direct plays like Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Sartre’s The Flies was a mystery to me—he dressed the part in his long scarves and berets, his soft, measured voice, and his seductive, almond-shaped, dark brown eyes. I wondered sometimes if Nick was aware of the impression he made on other people. My guess is that he counted on it.

  Lacking any deep knowledge of what the words actually meant, I knew enough to reject the “bourgeoisie” by looking and acting “bohemian,” a distinction Nick made it his responsibility to teach me about, considering that I was obviously wrestling with being a bourgeois girl living through bohemian times, and trying my best to look and act the part. Following Lucy’s lead, I got my own ears pierced, and wore my by-now extremely long hair in a light brown, lightweight mane down my back, even though it was always so thin and wispy it escaped any attempted braid. At home and at school, every young woman of my acquaintance was swapping clothes, songs, and jewelry. With Brigitte Bardot as our style icon, at least as far as heels were concerned, we spent our free time hunting down the lowest-cut shoes possible, imports from France and Italy, which we found on Lexington and Third Avenues, near Bloomingdale’s. When my classmates and I weren’t working the bohemian style, we switched over to the Audrey Hepburn look: black tights or extremely white sheer stockings with Capezios.

  With my long earrings and pale pink lipstick, I was starting to become known around Sarah Lawrence not just as a singer but, for the first time ever, as a “hip” girl, an “in” girl—“cool,” at least by the standards of the mid-1960s. Nicky’s father sent him an article about the French singer Françoise Hardy, believing the two of us looked alike, and at one point my friend Lani informed me solemnly that she and I were the only two people on campus who had “shvank.” It was a close cousin of twirl, the word people had once used to describe my father’s style.

  * * *

  When I wasn’t hanging out on campus or visiting Nick in Cambridge, I’d begun spending time below Eighth Street, taking the train from Bronxville and switching to the Fifth Avenue bus down to Greenwich Village. The Village in those days was a kaleidoscopic blur of sandal sellers, guitar makers, Indian drum stores, Spanish restaurants on Charles Street, and outdoor markets on MacDougal and Bleecker that sold tie-dye T-shirts, flared skirts, and cheap jewelry. My friends and I would return to campus wearing long, dangling Thai earrings, headbands, and pocketbooks with fringe around the borders. Music stores sold classical and folk albums stuffed in crates, all mixed and merged and spilling onto the sidewalks. Bookstores overflowing with photography books, sheaves of imported paper, books for class, books to impress, books that had called out to me for soulful reasons, like Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, a book my father published in America by an author Daddy had visited in Vienna, whose descriptions of sex and fantasy I found titillating, yeah, soulful! (The book was later adapted into the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut.) Not to mention books by D. H. Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and assorted volumes of secondhand poetry and plays, everything from Rupert Brooke to Shakespeare, with pen-drawn illustrations of Ophelia floating lifeless in the water with a garland balanced between her breasts. The older, rattier, and more deliciously fragrant the book, the more in demand it seemed to be. Crowded around the book and music stores were even more storefronts selling beads, bell-bottoms, patchouli oil, hand-woven baskets, gongs, old postcards from Prague street fairs, baskets overflowing with astrological cards, and Nehru shirts whose vivid, blaring colors shone through the gunning exhaust and fading light of the city day.

  * * *

  The Simon Sisters. Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled—or dismissed—as just another novelty sister act. But in the summer of 1963, armed with only our guitars, we hatched a plan to hitchhike up to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, and score a singing job. We had a fantasy of being little-girl Woody Guthries as we went from car to truck to car up and down the Cape, landing singing gigs left and right. In this fantasy we were brave and slightly decadent. Nothing more complicated than that—and we had no illusions about being “discovered.” It was more of a lark than anything else, just one step more serious than singing at our mother’s cocktail parties.

  Mommy nixed our plan. We could either take the bus, she told us calmly, or not go at all. In the end, Lucy and I took a Trailways bus from Thirty-fourth Street in New York to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where we got a lift from a friend the last fifteen miles to Provincetown.

  Our first day in Provincetown, Lucy and I proceeded to stroll the entire length of Commercial Street, the town’s main drag. Lugging our guitars in cheap cases as lightweight as papier-mâché, we stopped at each and every boardinghouse and small motel, looking for a room to rent, not wanting to call Mommy and say “Help!” By the time we found a single, inexpensive “bug crawl” room (an expression for lodgings with a spider here, an ant there) above a noisy restaurant, we had been traveling all day and were both exhausted. Our room was tiny and cramped, with a sink in the bedroom and a communal bathroom down the hall.

  The joys of being young and on the musical prowl were hardly lost on either of us.

  It happened last night we were feeling adventurous

  We put on our heels and went out for a walk

  More for a drink than to have a few eyes on us

  Jenny and I slipped to town for some talk

  Me and Jenny, twinklin’ like crystal and pennies

  Two hot girls on a hot summer night

  Looking for love

  —“Two Hot Girls (On a Summer Night),” 1987

  Almost immediately, we heard that a local Provincetown venue, the
Moors, needed a musical act, as the singer scheduled to perform had just been drafted to go to Vietnam and was leaving the next day. Without even bothering to audition us, the club owner said, “We’ll try it out—just get here at nine tonight.”

  It was a good time for Lucy and me to get serious and ask ourselves: How many duets did we really know? How many chords? How many songs?

  But instead of practicing, we headed for the beach, where we decided to go for a swim. There, on the cold sand, something happened that—while unimportant in the overall scheme of things—I remember as a landmark moment. Wanting to impress Lucy as much as test myself, I conjured up the mental image of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. I was going in all the way, I told Lucy, shaking my fists as I cried out, “Courage!” with Bert Lahr’s exaggerated, burring “C-C-COURAGE!” With half-girl, half-lioness bravado, I tromped ahead of Lucy into the freezing water. Lucy’s applause and laughter greeted me when I turned around and dashed back, shivering, to my towel on the sand. Even if I was only in the water for a millisecond, I realized: you can always mime yourself into something better. You can become someone “other,” taking a crucial step away from yourself, just as I’d done by singing over my stammer, or using an accent to answer the phone. Costumes, headphones, earphones, blindfolds—these were all steps away from the scary, pained, naked self.

  Refreshed and exhilarated by being on the beach, my sister and I quickly adjusted to our new B and B, divvied up sides of the bed (one, two, three: shoot), and took turns in the shower. Afterward, we unpacked, hung up our clothes, and picked the least wrinkled ones to wear. We put on matching white, full-sleeved Mexican blouses fetchingly pleated and cinched in at the waist by colorful woven belts; our full, generous, knee-length linen skirts were supposed to be wrinkled anyway. Our slave sandals tied up around our tan ankles came all the way up to our calves. That night at least, we were all about our tans and youthful, head-turning bodies. Our hair was long and undone, natural, wavy, and slightly damp. Instead of focusing on the way we looked, Lucy and I should probably have concentrated on learning a few new songs to add to our repertoire, but for some reason, neither of us was terribly worried.

  Dressed and coiffed to be adored, we hitched up to the Moors, guitar cases in hand, giving the finger to any and all cars that didn’t pick us up, shouting after them, “See you at the Moors!” This became an expression Lucy and I still use, indicating “A pox on you who dare to pass us by!” Tonight would be the first time Lucy and I had sung together in front of a real audience. I had sung many times at Sarah Lawrence and in various rooms at Harvard, but this was professional. We were getting paid, or at least that’s what they promised.

  The stage of the Moors was an eight-foot-wide makeshift slab of plywood two feet higher than the rest of the floor. The audience clustered around tables that came so close to the stage they nearly grazed the plywood, both sexes sporting a sea of tattoos and denim—not exactly the same kinds of people who strolled along the paths and lawns of Bronxville and Cambridge. There was no backstage. Lucy and I used the tiny, funky restroom off the greasy, french-fry-smelling kitchen to apply our final coat of lipstick. From head to toe, the Moors had the distinct feeling of being smudged, and by the end of the week, despite appearing in our clean white blouses, my sister and I most certainly felt smudged ourselves.

  As soon as we were introduced by the geeky, hillbilly, cross-dressing owner, Lucy said something and it got an immediate laugh. In fact, everything we said got a laugh, including “Hi folks, we are the Simon Sisters, Lucy and Carly.” Our first song was “East Virginia,” which we’d learned off Joan Baez’s debut album. When we got to the lyric “There she laid her head upon my breast,” the crowd at the Moors went wild, regaling us with wows and whews and yows and whoops and barking laughs.

  Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay-and-lesbian bar. What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival. But anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister. I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.

  Together, our voices made for an interesting, nearly ideal blend: the exact same pronunciation of words mixed with an entirely different vocal quality. Lucy has a pointed tone and delivery, whereas I have a lower, more smoldering voice. She provided the clear point to my husk, and in the end, we sounded like a single voice. We performed a few more songs: “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” (Lucy’s soon-to-be-famous song), “Delilah’s Dead and Gone,” a Serbian folk song from the Theodore Bikel songbook, which required five chords—Lucy and I knew four and a half apiece—and two or three Harry Belafonte songs, of which “Day-O” was the unquestioned crowd-pleaser.

  * * *

  Charlie Close was a good friend of Lucy’s, and may in fact have been pursuing her romantically at the time. He was business partners with Harold Leventhal, a well-known music manager, and together they managed Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Alan Arkin, Woody Guthrie, Judy Collins, and many other performers. Charlie came to see us at the Moors one night, and over the next few days taught us F# minor and a cool way to play an E major up the frets. In retrospect, he was grooming us for future management, as he was certainly in a position to escalate our careers. That week, Charlie, Lucy, and I went out to restaurants, cafés, and beaches. We talked about concepts, songs, clothes, and harmonies, and by the time Lucy and I took the bus back home to New York in mid-July, an idea had been hatched: the Simon Sisters would try to break into the Village folk scene. First, though, we had to audition for Charlie Close’s business partner, Harold Leventhal.

  Harold was a diminutive man, and when Lucy and I walked into his office and Harold stood up behind his desk, I kept thinking he was going to stand up straighter, but no, he leveled off a few inches over five feet. Alan Arkin, who started his career as a folksinger, was also in the room, playing a song called “Jenny Kissed Me.” I developed an instant crush on him. More to the point, Harold, who’d been impressed by “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” and Lucy’s songwriting skills, wanted to represent us, which was a major jump, though at the same time I felt I was only along for the ride, tagging along behind my older sister. Under her sweet, angelic appearance, Lucy, after all, had much more confidence than I ever did. After signing a contract with Harold’s management company, we auditioned for Freddie Weintraub, the owner of the Bitter End, the nightclub, coffeehouse, and folk music venue that’s still standing on Bleecker Street. Freddie promptly booked us at the Bitter End nightclub for the fall, two three-week stints in all, and we were off and running. This all took place so quickly that I really forgot I was still a college student, still Nick’s girlfriend and plenty in love, and still scared stiff at the notion of performing live on a real stage.

  * * *

  The rest of the summer I spent with Nicky in Cambridge, comforting him about everything he feared would happen to me once I entered the big bad world of show business. Nicky was aghast at the idea, convinced that my new future would consist of late nights and exposure to all kinds of seductions. Nick had brought me into the world of the intellect, and he feared I would ride into a Sunset Boulevard world while sacrificing a deeper, more thoughtful side. He had always insisted that I sing for the Harvard boys, but at the same time, he would probably have preferred to remain my own personal impresario. Why would I crave a bigger audience when, after all, I had him? I promised Nicky that the luster of showbiz wouldn’t change me, or make me love him any less, nor would I attract the attention of all the playboys of the Western world.

  Yet as Nick claimed to worry about my head being spun in all directions, it would be hi
s head that turned first.

  It happened in August of that summer. When Lucy and I got back from Provincetown, Nick and I rented a house in Menemsha, the little fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a one-room house with multipaned windows all around, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower in the back. There was a stream beside the small driveway and a path meandering over a wooden bridge, past flowering bushes, honeysuckle, and columbine. Nick was working for a local fish market, delivering bales of fish to various seafood stores and restaurants on the island, and I was spending a few weeks hanging out and visiting friends. Sometimes I could hear him typing, and other times, he and I played gin rummy on the dock. Nick was also trying to teach me how to play chess. Lucy was in New York starting a semester at Cornell Nursing School.

  One beautiful afternoon, I collected the mail from the post office and drove back to our little house on the pond. I planned to spend an hour or two on the beach while Nick was working, then come home and cook dinner for him and Max and Yvette Eastman, longtime friends of my parents. First, though, I riffled through that day’s mail. There was nothing much: a bank statement, as well as an overstuffed envelope from a mutual friend of Nick’s and mine from his Fieldston School days, now a student at Radcliffe. The envelope was addressed to Nick, but against my better judgment, and since it was from a mutual friend, I opened it anyway. I shouldn’t have. Our friend said she was acting as a go-between. The other, more important letter in the envelope was from a girl named Nini. Among the things Nini wrote: “I can’t bear to go around hiding our love in the shadows.”