Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  * * *

  By that November, James and I had moved out of the Murray Hill apartment into a larger place, a four-story brownstone on East Sixty-second Street, between Second and Third Avenues, where we would “live” for the next three years, even though we were spending most of our time in L.A. or the Vineyard. We had the first three stories to ourselves, and we rented out the top floor. New homes mean new faces, new carpenters, but James, I remember, was especially husbandly and sympathetic to me, his newly pregnant wife.

  If ever a girl baby didn’t want to leave the womb, it was our daughter, Sarah Maria. She was three weeks late, and James and I spent practically all that time with Dustin and Anne Hoffman. Dustin, I remember, had a plan: he would make me laugh so hard it would induce labor. While we waited for that to happen, the four of us whiled away the time by playing cards, eating hot Indian food in our brownstone, going to restaurants and shows—including a Peter Cook–Dudley Moore night on Broadway—and listening to Dustin read aloud from Lenny, which he was just starting to shoot. Dustin was determined to induce my labor, but as it turned out, the one time I wasn’t trying—for Dustin’s sake—was one night I went to bed on the early side. That night, I recall, the moon was closer to the earth than it had been in twenty-three years. The night was brisk and clear, and I had a sudden thought from out of nowhere: I should clean all the copper in the house. The next morning, at around 6:30 a.m., my water broke. In a panic, James called for Lydia, our housekeeper and cook, telling her there was water everywhere.

  Lydia wrapped a couple of towels around my waist as James hightailed it onto Sixty-second Street to hail a cab. I’d had a bag packed all month, and as Lydia placed my winter coat around my shoulders, all I had to do was pick it up and delicately pile inside the cab next to James. It was January 7, 1974, and as we sped to the hospital, it felt to me as though we were driving right into the moon, which was still full, still bright. Beside me, James was doing his best to maintain calm, though he made it a point to keep the towels around me at just the right level to keep in check the possibility of a backseat flood.

  But this baby, Sarah, was going to take her sweet time. She had other plans. She would wrap her umbilical cord around her darling little neck, and once we got to the hospital, with the help of Demerol, I would end up pushing for seven hours. James and I had attended a few childbearing classes in tandem, where he learned a few techniques about what would be most helpful during the contraction stage, but they fell away once my contractions started, since no one—no one—had instructed James to sit by my bedside, pretending to be a seagull flying high above the beach in Menemsha. Every time a contraction came through, James, in full seagull form, murmured, “Carly, Carly … the wave is coming in gently … Carly, go with it now … relax…” By now it was harder and harder to relax and I’d start shrieking, but James’s seagull-voice rose up to meet my volume. “Carly, relax … the wave is coming in, it’s breaking gently at the shore…”

  “NO IT AIN’T, BASTARD! IT’S NOT STOPPING!” That was the best response I could come up with.

  But my seagull-husband was a champion improviser. “Okay, we’ll go to the South Shore, then. Now we’re on Lucy Vincent Beach in Chilmark, and there’s a pretty big wave coming on. Oh my, I should have brought my seagull hat with me, the waves are strong, the wind’s picking up…”

  The pain was unbearable, though that’s hardly an uncommon reaction. James called for the doctor to do something, and the doctor did, ordering me into surgery for a C-section. There followed a cluster of sounds from muffled to metallic and clattering—probes, scissors, shots, towels—as the nurses tried to stay in control. As if from another zone, I heard James’s voice, growing more and more faint and birdlike: “Carly, see the seagull? I’m flying over the falls of Niagara … it’s beautiful … you’re gonna be fine … that’s my girl…”

  Inside the small surgery room, the doctor requested scissors; a mask was placed over my face; nitrous oxide. As I went down for the count, I heard James, singing softly, “Bad, bad Leroy Brown … baddest man in the whole damn town…” Was he trying to make me laugh? “Badder than old King Kong … meaner than a junkyard dog…”

  And then there was my beautiful, golden, magical daughter in my arms. While waiting for Sally to be born, James had written the entire song “Sarah Maria.” Sally’s birth meant so much to him, and he was such a wonderful father to her when she was a baby. That night, as I dozed with my beautiful new baby in my arms, James took a taxi over to Trax, the New York nightclub, and sang the song to the audience:

  Well, the moon is in the ocean

  And the stars are in the sky

  And all I can see is my sweet Maria’s eyes, oh

  Sarah, Sarah Maria.

  Sarah Maria and the world at its best.

  “I’ve come home to stop yearning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  heat’s up, tea’s brewed

  There’s always that peculiar thing that rescues you, the thing that’s so hard to name. If I were to locate and then identify all the hellish things we all have to go through in life in order to uncover one minute of happiness, it would take up a lot of space.

  With James, that “thing”—that diversion from the pain of life—lay strongly and squarely in the music that surrounded us, and that he and I sang and played. James’s music gave me grace. It gave me inspiration. Witnessing his creativity—his writing, his singing, his playing guitar—was something I never took for granted. Those times we could sing together and make harmony, or join in a melody in a different octave, were like a gift from some other dimension. We watched the Watergate hearings while James wrote “Let It All Fall Down” and the essence of the time, the denouement of a hellhole in history, was pinpointed and clarified and rounded out. Ford installed, song over.

  From the moment we met, James and I gave each other tacit permission to write about our own fantasy loves, or even real loves, with no questions asked. Monogamy was our physical ideal, but as far as our work was concerned, it would only take us so far in our imaginations. We both needed muses, fantasies, private realities we wouldn’t necessarily share with each other. Even “You’re So Vain,” one of the most intellectual songs I’ve ever written, pulses with sexual energy, not that the two are mutually exclusive. Making a cameo in James’s song “Mexico” was a sleepy señorita “with the eyes on fire,” just as one of the lyrics of my song “Waterfall” is “I saw you and it made no sense at all … Now I feel like there’s too much caffeine in my blood.” As for James’s song “Slow Burning Love,” who was that about? Not me. Much later, I found out it was about some girl he met in the South, who was that song’s spark, its spirit, its engine, its reason for being. In fact, she had to be there, to inspire and help James write words, and who was I, who needed the same ignition humming and simmering beneath my own lyrics and melodies, to engage in the hazy jasmine scent of someone else’s intrigue? For James, that fantasy part of his brain, centered on women with fresher sexual identities, was partitioned off by mutual agreement, just as he allowed me to write songs in which, if he’d listened to them closely, there appeared lines that could have only been about another old love. We both went so far as to sing backup on each other’s songs about each other’s intrigues.

  When Bianca Jagger called up the night before our wedding and James defended me, telling her he knew all about Mick and me, and that he trusted what I’d told him, we were establishing an unspoken barometer, one that permitted both of us to have enough of a private life, or even a secret life, that could serve as food for our music. Without the “gleam in the eye,” you simply lack the juice to write lyrics, or a melody, to woo what you’re feeling into verses, a bridge, a chorus—in short, a song.

  When James wrote “Believe It or Not,” did I believe for one moment it was about me? Did I corner him, shine a flashlight into his eyes, interrogate him? No. I learned not to ask. I didn’t want to smother him. I didn’t want to choke off that thing that made James as gr
eat as he was, patting myself on the back, am I not? Some bits of courage were just “smart.” From my perspective, fantasy is healthy and necessary, though at the same time, I set guidelines for myself that were inviolable. Cheating, for one. If I had acted on an attraction to a man who wasn’t James, I would have risked making my marriage unsafe, and my relationship with my husband was far more important than anyone the Beast might be temporarily eyeing.

  In my living room today, beside the fireplace, is the same chair where James used to sit with his guitar, with our black, heavy, oversized Sony cassette tape recorder tracking the sounds of the household and our family. In that chair James composed what would soon become “Secret o’ Life,” as baby Sally goo-goo-ed and ga-ga-ed in the background. “That is July 5, 1974, Tisbury,” James says on one tape, before his voice shifts over to fatherly teasing. “And this is Sarah’s tape. Sarah’s getting fed right now. That scraping sound you hear is the sound of the spoon in her bowl. Sarah’s a very hungry, very greedy little girl…”

  James was very fluid and unself-conscious about composing, or trying out new lyrics or melodies in front of me. He would always be playing the guitar, whereas when I wasn’t working on my own music, I was cooking, or giving the kids their baths, or picking up their toys. Another example of “Great Mom.” In general, though, we would trade back and forth, now and again doing informal joint recording sessions together at home. It took me a year or two into our marriage before I could make any musical commentary on what James was composing, but from that point on, I was always pretty open about giving him ideas or comments without feeling annoying about it (I knew from experience that the more brilliant a person is, the touchier he can be, too). In “Secret o’ Life,” I can take some small credit for the mention of “Einstein” in the lyric “Einstein said he could never understand it all,” since James had no specific line in mind at the time. “You use that chord too often,” I remember telling James. “Can you maybe play something I’ll be surprised by?” I suggested he pin the lyric on either the name of a city or a star or a person, and in the end he came up with Einstein.

  In return, James was always generous with giving advice. Sometimes I’d ask him for help, and he would always give me pearls, perfect lines. In my song “Boys in the Trees,” it was James who gave me either the lyric “Sheets the color of fire” or “Curse my own desire”—I can’t remember which. We traded back and forth, James and I, and he never hesitated to help me in the studio. I never played guitar or piano on any of his records, but I did sing backup on “One Man Parade,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Is Music Now,” “Let It All Fall Down,” “How Sweet It Is,” “A Junkie’s Lament,” “Shower the People,” “B.S.U.R.,” and many others, too. James, of course, more than returned the favor with “Mockingbird,” “Devoted to You,” “Waterfall,” “You Belong to Me,” and at least twenty other songs.

  Then there was the duet we did on James’s song “Terra Nova,” from his JT album. One day, James, no doubt after an afternoon spent browsing in Manny’s Music Store on West Forty-eighth Street or the drum store across the street, brought home an accordion-like Indian instrument known as a shruti box. With its charming, dronelike, bovine sound, the instrument is based on a system of bellows, which players can tune as they wish by adjusting various buttons, dials, and slabs of wood.

  When the shruti box showed up in our house, I used it just as an accompaniment for my simpler tunes, including a simple melody I played whenever I put Sally to sleep in her automatic swing. One day, as Sally was suspended in her swing, I sang an ahhh vowel sound, shading it with a melody simple enough not to stir a dozing child. Five minutes later, I started singing some lyrics: “Out to the west of Lambert’s Cove … there is a sail out in the sun … and I’m on board though very small … I’ve come home to stop yearning…” followed by a second verse: “Burn off the haze around the shore … Turn off the crazy way I feel … I’ll stay away from you no more … I’ve come home to stop yearning…”

  Over the course of that summer and the following one, I kept my eye on Vineyard Sound, off the west of Lambert’s Cove, from the top of our house’s hexagonal tower—watching the sky and the trees breathing their top branches into its changing colors; glimpsing, just past the trees, the sailboats out in the sun; gazing at the sun as it rose and set. Some nights James and I climbed up to the tower together to look up at the shooting stars. We’d find a perfect night to savor, climb the narrow winding stairs that still lead to the tower, and make love high up in the sky, while Sally slept the night away in her crib two floors below. I liked to imagine myself aboard one of those boats, and in that dream I found a few more words to add to what had begun, simply, as Sally’s shruti box chant.

  When James and I were in L.A. in 1976, he had finished writing, and was starting to record, the album later known as JT. He was singing “Terra Nova”—a song about his father’s sailboat—in our bedroom, putting the finishing touches on the lyrics, as I put on my makeup in the nearby bathroom. Five minutes later we were in the car. Sally was whiny, and in an effort to calm her down, I started singing my shruti box song, “Out to the west of Lambert’s Cove.” At which point James said, “You know, I think that goes naturally into ‘Terra Nova.’”

  It was an aha moment of sorts. When James and I got to the studio, naturally we had no shruti box, but it was easy enough to imitate the sounds it made on a synthesizer. Clarence McDonald, the pianist, played the right chords in the right key, and a few minutes later Peter Asher said, “Carly—just start singing it during the outro, when James sings, ‘Got to be on my way by now…’” Which I did. I sang my lyrics over the drone of the chord, with James joining me, singing a harmony—“I’ve come home to stop yearning”—on the last line of every verse. We passed through our perfect-fourth harmony, and when we did I literally experienced goose bumps. It was another mystery of the physics of sound, or the ghosts of music, making a natural, or should I say unnatural, reverb—since the lyrics and melody of what James and I were singing overlapped so eerily well. Ultimately, in order to make my part of the song truer to the original source and power of the shruti box, we called my friend Carinthia West, who was staying at our Vineyard house, and asked her to ship the instrument to L.A. She did, and it still had the sound of a musical cow.

  Just being around James, on the Vineyard and in New York, during those years, even when we weren’t playing music, rarely failed to have a magical effect. When James walked into a room—any room—he transformed it, charging it up with his radiance, his message of “I’m just passing through, but while I’m here, it’s the night before Christmas.” Thinking about it now, many years later, I can still feel that Oh-dear-sweet-Jesus, he’s here—James is here! feeling. And that’s all there is to it.

  And you know who I am

  Though I never leave my name or number

  I’m locked inside of you

  So it doesn’t matter

  There’s always someone haunting someone

  Haunting someone.

  —“Haunting,” 1978

  * * *

  James and I spent the winter in L.A. renting a house on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, the very house that O. J. Simpson would buy a year later. Both of us were working on new albums. I must have been on the lookout for omens—Will James and I stay together? Will he be okay? Will we be okay?—but the only omen I was ever aware of was that I awoke one morning at 2:50 a.m., noting the time on my watch—Should I put on the oatmeal yet?—and glanced through the bedroom skylight just in time to see a comet streaking down through the dark blue sky. I fell back asleep, not bothering to wake James, as the comet would be long gone, but not before first touching legs with him, my darling husband, who forever kept me on my toes.

  As much as motherhood was a diversion from worrying about myself, so was my continued sense of falling in love with James—with his mannerisms, his profundity, his wit, his insights. Any worries I had shrunk in the presence of the love I felt for him, one so strong that it
banished any concerns that James, in return, didn’t love me as much as he had when we spent our first night together in another city, another apartment, another time.

  Although James and I were both glued to Sally, we spent our time in L.A. working on new music, thanks to our beloved babysitter, Patty Kelly, whose presence made it possible for us, James and me, to leave Sally each day and drive half an hour to our respective recording cells in Hollywood. On the days we brought Sally with us, she got quickly used to the heavy bass pulsing through the floorboards, making her blue elephant shake and quiver along to the beat.

  Like most new parents, we found it hard to be without her. Still, in the interests of a getaway, one night James and I decided to drive up the coast to Santa Barbara. Sally wasn’t even three years old, but James and I hadn’t tried for a grown-up honeymoon since her birth, and our night away, at least as I foresaw it, would be devoted to lovemaking. But almost as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, we began remembering her, nostalgically, as though she were a beloved song we couldn’t get out of our heads. As we drove north, we suffered together as we discussed her delicious smell, the sound of her giggles, each of us bemused by the other’s imitations of her two-year-old voice, expressions, yawns, twitches, stretches, movements—the entire glorious baby package that was her.

  We arrived at our destination, and once our bags were parked in our sumptuous hotel suite, I went into the bathroom to tidy up. Raising my eyes to a window to the right of the toilet, I let out a sudden scream. The bellhop, who had lugged our bags to our room, and was no doubt accustomed to guests making their way directly to the bathroom after a long car ride, had found himself a perfect perch from which to peek.

  The bellhop was bad enough, but outweighing even a stray peeping employee was … Sally. Our little girl. James agreed with me: Why stay? When we told the concierge what had happened, he didn’t charge us, and having been settled in our lovers’-lane getaway for less than ten minutes, we returned our unopened luggage to the car and hit the highway back to Brentwood. All the way home, relieved and excited, James and I both talked about how much we missed Sally, more than we could have possibly imagined, and how dazzlingly great—what a homecoming—it would be to see her again.