Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  I had no idea where I was coming from. I had tried to be seductive with Sean Connery, but this was different. When I was with Mick, I became a woman who was attractive to me. He made me feel fantastic. On a good night, James didn’t give me one-half of the energy Mick was giving to me. I always had to meet James halfway, or more. Mick was all there, and present, while James was suffering from that thing that I, in my life, have come to know all too well as my own curse, not knowing how to show up for the day.

  I loved James more and more. What was I doing with Mick?

  Just then the ground under Benedict Canyon shook. Keith’s opening guitar lick of “Brown Sugar” made an operatic entrance on the outdoor speakers.

  * * *

  Later, there was a gorgeous black girl whom Mick was paying attention to. I had to remind myself that it wasn’t a competition. Once I’d made that smart observation, I had to keep reminding myself, because I did feel that I was competing with all the girls buzzing and flitting around him like intoxicated Tinkerbells. In return, he was quite a hummingbird himself, wings beating so fast, he seemed to be lifted up and down by them invisibly.

  Looking at him across the room, I saw the definite physical similarities between us. Specifically: the long face, small jungle eyes, and full lips. Up close, our lips unfurled as certain flowers do on nature shows, filmed in time-lapse. Also, I saw that his were naturally wine colored, emphasizing them. His face was full of color that seemed to move with pixelation. It was kinetic, always moving. And each move was so interesting. There were similarities in our skinny, doelike, floppy limbs. We stood exactly the same height, and since he wore Anita Pallenberg’s and Marianne Faithfull’s clothes, I imagined he might later don mine. That night, before I left the party, he put on my wide-brimmed burgundy hat and gave me an enticing nod.

  I wrote in my diary: “I look at Mick and see a beautiful baby creature of another species born with human instincts.” Then I thought: I wonder what Willie would think if he could see me tonight?

  * * *

  I had wanted to work with Paul Buckmaster because I loved his work with the Stones on Sticky Fingers. “Moonlight Mile” was as perfect an arrangement as I’d ever heard. Jac, being open-minded and generous, had funded a demo so Paul and I could work together and try things out. We had gone to the studio the day after the Hollywood Hills party to record two songs: one of them “Angel from Montgomery,” a song by John Prine that Bonnie Raitt later did a top-notch cover of. I was giving it a rock ’n’ roll edge, starting in a low octave and switching halfway to an octave above. I was excited by the newness of the whole mad approach to the song, although I knew it could be too out-there for Jac and Elektra. But I was so pleased with it myself, I couldn’t wait to play it for James.

  We were sitting on the brown hotel carpet in our room at the Chateau Marmont, with the Sony tape player on the floor in front of us. James was behind me, with his arms around me, and as soon as “Angel from Montgomery” was over, he lowered his head to my shoulder. He had been down for a few days. I wasn’t sure why. Did he hate the song? Why was he shaking?

  I had had some telephone calls from Mick, which likely had made him upset, though he would have been too proud to say so. Mick was calling about the interview I was supposed to do with him for The New York Times, and had also invited me to the Stones concert in San Francisco on that very night. Mick said the plane would wait for me. And I was going—for the article that I needed to write. That’s how I presented it. But something else was brewing, wasn’t it? Was I even honest with myself? James was picking up a scent, though one that I was trying awfully hard not to emit.

  I followed James into the bedroom of our suite and watched as he took a suitcase from the top of the closet. He opened it and reached into a side pocket, bringing out a piece of rubber a few feet in length and the width of a piece of rope. OH SHIT, what was he doing?

  “This is what I do,” he said. “Watch. I can’t have you and the habit at the same time. I just can’t. I’ve got to get rid of this. Maybe if you see me do it, it will take away the cat-and-mouse game. You have to watch me. I have to let it all go.”

  It took about three or four minutes to get it all assembled. But then he tied off above his elbow and, while his blood was collecting in his veins below, reached in his suitcase with the other hand and brought out a syringe and some powdery substance in a plastic bag. There was another bag that had something else in it. Whatever it was, he poured it into a spoon, went into the kitchen in our suite, and melted it on the burner. I couldn’t watch well enough to describe it even a day later. My mouth began to dry up and my heart went into panicked rhythms. Chemistry was in the making, and somehow all the components made their way into the syringe, and as he pulled the rubber tight on his arm the veins became purple and frightening. He walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed. He took the syringe and injected himself. It took five seconds and then he fell back on the bed. When he pulled the needle out of his arm, he exhaled and made some sounds like those of an animal being freed. A few minutes later, during which time I was as still as a corpse—in shock and trying not to show it, just sitting there leaning on one elbow—James got up from the bed and flushed everything down the toilet. All the medicine was gone. He threw the rubber arm strangler into the hallway chute to the incinerator, right outside our door. After the full dismantling, we clung to each other like apes, and closeness got hold of us in a painful but towering way. We stayed that way until the downstairs bell rang to tell me that my limo was there to take me to the airport. I pleaded with James that I would cancel my plans and stay with him, but he assured me that the crisis was over and that he was all right. He was beyond it. Everything was so much better. “It’s over,” he said. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  From my diary:

  James, James, James … His showing me was the big thing, the coveted madness he didn’t want to relinquish. I was angry and terribly depressed. Was he shattering an illusion of what I wanted him to be? Dr. L says an addict will always lie to protect his disease. Life is barren without the drug. Was I asking for too much? There were many elements. Mainly I didn’t want him to die. I was so scared that he would, just like my father. I was even getting to that familiar habit of knocking on wood.

  * * *

  Jac didn’t like my demo with Paul Buckmaster and vetoed it, though he loved Paul’s arrangements. He had chosen Richard Perry to produce my next album and sent him to meet me in New York. He had wanted Richard on the record all along. Richard and I sat across the dining room table from each other, his Brooklyn self facing my Bronx self. He told me that Anticipation would have been “a great album” if the drums had been stronger. The drums kept going off beat. That really put me off. My immediate reaction to him did not hint at the forty years of how close we’ve been since.

  It wasn’t long before I put myself in Richard’s hands, with the necessary stormy conflicts that would make for a stimulating and sexy relationship. Richard had produced or would soon produce Barbra Streisand’s Stoney End, the Pointer Sisters, Ringo Starr, Fats Domino, Leo Sayer, and Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson, which included the number 1 singles “Without You” and “Coconut,” orchestral arrangement by Paul Buckmaster!

  Arlyne and I took the nighttime sleeper flight to London, arriving in the early hours of the foggy dawn. We stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel until my apartment was ready in the Portobello Hotel. It was decided that we would record in London, at Trident Studios in Soho, where Richard was crazy about the clothes. He made friends with shopkeepers and store managers and had them roll in racks of clothes to the studio for him to try on. He would always ask, “What do you think, Carly?” Then he would get out his checkbook, pay for what he wanted, and off the chaps would go with the racks.

  Richard Perry and I worked on my new song, “Ballad of a Vain Man,” about a man who owned a yacht, a private jet, a hat that comes over one eye, and an expensive horse that ran at Saratoga, who had the ability to do French parlor dan
ces, had some friends in the underworld, and who’d obviously had some extramarital dalliances.

  Whereas “Anticipation” was written in fifteen minutes, the song originally called “Bless You, Ben” took many trips down many roads before it came fully into view. I’d started it as a song on piano—I owned my aunt’s old Tonk upright when I was living in my apartment on Thirty-fifth Street—and I played an Am7, got a tempo going, and vamped between Am7 and F with a riff that followed the melody. The words fell into the grooves, though not necessarily the same words I would finish it with.

  Bless you, Ben

  You came in where nobody else left off

  There I was, all by myself, hiding up in my loft

  Talk and trouble took my time

  And singing some sad songs

  I had some dreams there were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee

  There were a number of throwaway lines, as we call them in the business. The only phrase that remains from that first effort came when I was flying to Palm Springs with Billy Mernit, my piano player and great friend since my summer camp job when I met Jake in ’68. Sitting next to me on the airplane, Billy pointed out the reflection in my cup—something he’d noticed with his keen photographer-lyricist’s eyes: “Check it out, you’ve got clouds in your coffee.”

  I took out my little black book and wrote it down. You never know. The talent is in catching the right casual quip.

  A year or so before, at a party in New York, my friend Kim Rosen and I had watched how everyone caught sight of themselves in the front hall mirror when they first arrived and held on to their reflection an extra private second longer. One guy who was staring at himself even twirled his scarf around his neck as he was removing it. Kim observed, “Doesn’t he look as though he’s walking onto a yacht?” That line went into my little black book right away. It was a good line. I didn’t know what for, though. And a year before that, I had entered another line into my book: You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you. Not an overheard quip, but a genuinely daft piece of original cleverness. But I had promptly forgotten about it. It wasn’t until a trip to L.A. when I gave the song a new title, “Ballad of a Vain Man,” that it clicked. The word vain did it. Suddenly I had a protagonist! A guy! He would think the song was about him. Flipping through my black book for ideas, I found my beginning, courtesy of Kim: You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht. I gave him a strategically placed hat and some other things that I’m not sure he would have owned (such as a horse and a private jet), but the story was finally there, even though he decidedly did not dance the gavotte. And no, the song is not just about one person. Let’s just say Warren Beatty played second base in this particular infield, which he knows so well, but as for who manned first and third—ask the shortstop. In all seriousness, the subjects of the first and third verses don’t know that this song is also about them, so it would be inappropriate and a rude awakening to disclose their identities until they, them (vain) selves, were notified.

  And here’s a verse that never made it into the final recording:

  A friend of yours revealed to me

  That you’d love me all the time

  You kept it secret from your wives

  You believed that was no crime

  You called me once to ask me things

  I couldn’t quite divine

  Maybe that’s why I have tried to dismiss you, tried to dismiss you.

  * * *

  When James came to London he could only stay for a long weekend because he was needed back in L.A. He slept a lot during his visit. I know he was depressed and now, looking back, it may have had to do with some guilt he was holding on to. Some crumbling of a promise to himself—about a drink, a snort, a girl, something. I didn’t ask him if or what he was doing while I wasn’t around. I could only guess. He was free of demons only for an interrupted and too infrequent period of time. Heaven was when we both hit a glide simultaneously: lovely moments when our love came and rescued everything on the outside. We were enough with ourselves and our enormous little lives. Heaven was when it was happening like that, and I wasn’t taking its temperature and watching like a fearful warden.

  After he left, I was missing him a lot, and thinking about him. About a week after, I got a letter from Lucy, saying “the most adorable thing happened.” James had gone up to Riverdale to ask Mommy for my hand in marriage. I was so overwhelmed that something of such magnitude could happen and I didn’t hear about it until a week later. But I was swept away with joy, calling James immediately. “Yes. Please. Always. Now…”

  Album-wise, Richard and I were coming down the stretch, almost done recording. We decided to make use of our time at AIR Studios, which had become available thanks to its owner, George Martin. We needed to replace some parts, especially background vocals, and a guitar solo on “You’re So Vain.” Right down the hall, Paul and Linda McCartney were cutting tracks and George Martin himself was sitting at an acoustic piano. Richard and I took the chance and just charged into the studio. Richard could get away with it. He knew everybody. Both Paul and Linda were dressed as if they’d come from the country, Linda in clunky boots with wool socks, an oversized sweater, and an unfashionable midlength skirt. She looked so funky and beautiful she stopped my breath. Paul was so himself, I never knew if he was ever any other way. Bonnie Bramlett and Harry Nilsson were there visiting their friends.

  At Richard’s invitation, all of them came down the hall to celebrate the finishing of our album. This made me quite angry, as I knew I wouldn’t be myself with all that company, I wasn’t really sure how things would sound, and we still had overdubs to do. But they crowded into Studio B, where Richard played a few cuts that he was especially proud of. There were sincere compliments sprinkled with questionable ones, with a few obviously fake ones stuck in between sips of vodka. I was almost silent, I was so tense. George Martin was an elegant sod (I’ve never known what that word means exactly), but he was brilliantly handsome and tall and renowned. How could Richard be such a relaxed host? He was and is a comfortable man. He became the life of the party. There was a lot of laughter and wine and vodka. It had the feeling of a very large celebration in a very small place. Toasts were made to all the future albums that were being mixed into shape at this renowned studio.

  We had done a hundred takes of the basic track and at least thirty lead vocals for what we called “Ballad of a Vain Man.” I told Richard we had to stop at a hundred, that I refused to be part of a record that went beyond a hundred takes. It was too expensively embarrassing for anyone but Liberace. Drummers had been flown halfway round the world, more than once, to play on this song that Richard had believed in right from the start. He had asked me to do the harmony parts while a “circle of friends,” as he called them (I called them highly intimidating musicians), listened. I begged Harry Nilsson to sing with me, and he didn’t hesitate to accept. Harry was a close friend of John Lennon’s and was one of the terrific artists who didn’t promote his work by stage performance. He was handsome and tall, wearing sunglasses, and had tawny hair curling around his unmistakable face. We were comfortable enough with each other, and got in a few takes (which means fewer than twenty-five with Richard at the helm) before I got a call on the studio phone and stepped out to take it in the lounge.

  “Hallow, is this Caughly?” I didn’t have to ask who it was.

  “How did you know I was here?” Had Mick ever not been able to find anybody?

  “What aw you doin’?”

  I told him I was putting some vocals on a track with Harry and invited him to come. “You know where AIR Studios are, yes? No?”

  Mick was there almost instantly, having probably been in a car right downstairs, sussing out his possibilities for the night. Timing is everything. After some hugs and kisses that looked mimed, Richard invited Mick into the recording studio to join Harry and me on the vocals. Harry was already ensconced. Paul and Linda had disappeared momentarily with the elegant George Mart
in.

  Mick and I said hello in front of Harry in the control booth. We kissed each other on the cheek (one cheek, and then the other). Again, it was a little formal.

  “Right to it, man,” Harry said, as he shook Mick’s hand and bear-hugged him.

  “It’s pretty easy, Mick,” I said, feeling jittery and trying to be calm. “Just sing the melody if you feel like it, or improvise and do any harmony you think of.”

  I remember only that after four or five perfectly acceptable go-rounds, Harry said: “You two do not need me, you sound as though you’re joined at the hip.” He left for the control booth to find his future in a drink.

  Mick and I were alone for the first time since the party in Hollywood, just a few months before. Proust says somewhere that “happiness is the absence of fever.” If true, those forty-five minutes in the glass vocal booth with Mick Jagger were an extreme example of unhappiness. As we sang together—Mick was a natural at singing backup—the energy was choreographed by the heavens, an unexpected fever that was certainly heightened by the music. The song that had been waiting to come to life for so long finally exploded. From the first lines in my notebook, the flight to Palm Springs, the party in New York, and now with Mick’s just happening to drop by at the studio at the very moment I was recording “Ballad of a Vain Man,” it was all, as if by wizardry, coming together.

  It felt like everything in my life had led me to this moment. My earliest musical influences—Odetta, the Southern blues singers, the Delta blues of Mississippi, John Hurt and Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and especially Uncle Peter—fused with my jazz and folk roots. I had it all in those loops in my brain and in the twists and turns of my crooked musical ear, and it ran alongside the nearly impossible blending of Lucy and me and our guitars, Joey and Puccini, the Great American Songbook, and all the musicals of the forties and fifties that I studied and sang. Lordy, my parents were part of my performance in the glass booth—Mommy singing “Summertime,” when George and Ira suggested she give it a go, and Daddy’s dedicated long fingers on the keys, his head bent over his Steinway hour after hour.