by Carly Simon
Facing the audience, I blurted out, “I’m having an anxiety attack, I guess. What’s happening is what I’m always afraid might happen.” I told the audience that it would help me immeasurably if they would be willing to come onstage with me. “If you want to sing, please do, but just … I don’t want there to be any separation between me and you.”
At least a hundred audience members took my words seriously, clustering up front, with the guards standing sentry ultimately allowing about fifty people to join a stage already populated by musicians, amps, wires, and scrims. It felt almost as though having invited my neighbors over for a spontaneous glass of holiday eggnog, the entire block had shown up, and now had little to do other than circle a shaking, frozen singer whom some liked, others possibly revered. Most took seats on the edge of the stage, as though I were a living, barely breathing funeral pyre, a woman in flames flailing, disintegrating, atomizing.
Somewhere inside me, a small voice ordered me to sing “De Bat,” one of the songs off Boys in the Trees, which was about bringing Sally home in my arms one night. That will make you lose yourself, I told myself.
Good idea, wrong night. Still, I began singing and was able to animate the images, impersonating, or trying to, the bodies of the bat and the cat.
As I waited for my heart to resume its normal beat, I could only hope that “De Bat” was just what the doctor ordered and could get me back on track. Oh, how different it would have all been if I could have had the dispassion to survey the scene onstage from a great height, or even as a member of the audience. My brain began the following argument with itself, a sequence of unrhyming lyrics:
“Hey, I’m doing okay. I’m getting through this.”
“No, you’re not, did you just feel that? That was a palpitation. You’re not going to live much longer.”
“No—you can control it.”
“No, Carly, this is hardwired. The phobic process is a loop that feeds on itself. You’re doomed. You always have been. You always will be.”
The back-and-forth monologue alerted my adrenal glands. With my adrenaline in free-flow release, my heart palpitations now went into overdrive. Then there was this: I was also hemorrhaging from between my legs. What began as a near-imperceptible slow drip turned gradually into a single hot stream. My bed was burning, the sheets on fire.
What was happening to me? By now my sister Lucy had made her way onstage and was sitting beside me, along with a dozen or so audience members. They sat there, rubbing my feet and ankles. “Carl, you’re doing great,” I remember Lucy saying, and I couldn’t help wishing that she would grab the mic and finish the rest of the show for me.
One fan said, “I love that song,” and sang “De Bat” along with me.
A second one said, “I get anxiety attacks too.”
A third one said, “Can we stay up on the stage with you, even if you don’t get better?”
The fourth one had this to say: “You have blood on your pants.”
I began to address the audience in their seats—“I’m just going to run into the bathroom for a second, and I’ll be right back”—but excited to be part of a “happening,” most were yelling so loudly they could hardly hear me when I said it. Handing my guitar to Lucy, I started exiting the stage, whereupon the audience began to boo.
After such an extraordinary show of support, why would they boo me?
I was mistaken. What resembled booing was instead Don’t go! Don’t go! After a moment’s hesitation, I reversed course and Lucy gazed back at me strangely. “It’s okay, I have to stay,” I told her.
“Are you all right?” Lucy said, though I sensed she was concealing deeper concerns. “It sounds great.” I ran to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and was back on stage in a flash. The audience was thrilled and glad that they’d helped.
I started to sing something, anything, followed by “You’re So Vain” and “Anticipation.” I was holding my legs tightly together. I still had little idea what was happening, but my chest palpitations were easing up, which in turn allowed me to focus on a Kegel exercise, squeezing tightly to keep the blood flow to a minimum. By now, I’d reached a point of complete indifference as to whether I lived or died. I kept looking over at Mike, who was nodding up and down in an exaggerated way as if conveying to the audience—and me—that everything was going to be all right.
Once I’d finished singing “Anticipation,” the audience gave me a standing ovation. Some fans were even standing in their seats, or flocking the aisles, hoping to trade places with the fifty or so fans onstage. By necessity, the guards seemed less vigilant than usual in keeping the peace, but as it turned out, they were at precisely the right height and distance to see where the blood had soaked into my pants.
Soon enough, it became clear where everybody should focus his or her gaze. Things were made official when one college-age boy, who’d been patting my leg as if consoling an injured, scared child, or animal, took away his hand. All at once, everyone in the band and the audience could see that his hand and my two pant legs were saturated with blood. I won’t go into any more detail. I will say, though, that if you can recall a night as strange as that, it serves as an excellent gauge by which to compare the other highs and lows of your life.
I could make out Lucy’s voice faintly: “We have to get you backstage.”
“She’s bleeding!!!” someone called out, sounding alarmed. By now I was beyond shock, as Lucy, always and forever the boss, engineered a pathway and led me offstage behind the curtain, followed by Mike.
I took a Valium. I took a shower. I took my pulse. I put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and within five minutes I was back onstage, moving like a hero in a sports movie, resuming my concert. The audience rose to its feet as my arms found my guitar. When I sang “Legend in Your Own Time,” ten thousand people stood and remained standing for the next twenty minutes I remained onstage.
As I said good night, the ovations were long and numbing. I really wanted to believe and take in the cheers and applause, but instead I was overcome by annihilating shame. As I was leaving the stage, I thought about the Beast and gave it a silent nod. I knew it was up to something but didn’t know what it was yet. I fell onto the couch in my dressing room and blacked out.
For obvious reasons, the night’s second show was canceled. Lucy insisted on it. I was just too weak to perform. We canceled the six or seven remaining tour dates. Unfortunately, the insurance companies didn’t pony up the full amount to refund the losses, which infuriated the promoters, and even though I had a hit song, “Jesse,” at the time, the album, Come Upstairs, didn’t sell very well.
* * *
As ever, music was the only thing that could bring me back to life. But before returning to the studio, at my family’s insistence, I checked into a general hospital. I now weighed even less than I did before the Pittsburgh concert. Doctors assessed my blood, glands, heart, and brain, advising me to remain under professional care until I was eating regularly again. The awful pressure of Ben’s sickness and operation, and of James’s and my splintering marriage, followed by the calamity that was Pittsburgh, was more than I could take. So I stayed on in the hospital for another month, and by the time I was released, James was already in another relationship, this time with Kathryn Walker, an actress who would later become his second wife. Scott visited me often, and James came too, once bearing a very large bouquet of blue irises. I placed myself into the mental frame of mind that I wanted James to be with Kathryn, that he’d be better off with her than with me, and that I also wanted our relationship to be put out of its misery—though that feeling lasted for only a day or so. Still, I continued to see Scott; and the next few weeks were a blur of me gaining weight while fighting off various lawsuits from promoters who had never heard of the contractual phrase act of God, or if they had, were doing their best to declare themselves atheists.
Pittsburgh was just the most recent, horrific example of the condition I’ve suffered from for as long as I ca
n remember: depression and the other side of its tricky coin, anxiety. It began with my childhood “worry lump,” the term my mother gave it, her hope being that my lump could somehow become a lifelong trusted pal and companion. In the 1950s and ’60s, no one ever spoke of “depression.” When I was young, I didn’t know that my father had his own version of that same lump—depression and anxiety—though I must have intuited it when I hoped that my incessant, superstitious, compulsive knocking would keep him alive. When my anxiety attacks looped around each other to the point where I couldn’t tell what was nerves, what was my fear of stuttering, what was shyness, what was not wanting to sleep at anyone’s house, what was anything, I began convincing myself I was becoming just like Daddy. My Dear Daddy, who lived in a time when it was much too soon to speak easily about “depression.”
For me the connection between depression and anxiety is complicated. Depression is a low-grade energy, sending me into a dark place where only the darkest thoughts are invited to live. Then, seemingly without warning, it flips over into anxiety, at which point I’m likely to take a sedative, retreat into a quiet room, or try out another one of the many strategies I’ve done my best to master over the years. With anxiety you know exactly what’s next: You’re going to feel crazy. You’re going to have to lie down. You’re going to snap your own wrists with the rubber bands you keep handy. Then my anxiety gives way, again, to depression, its funnel of brown, single-minded thoughts telling me I don’t look good, I can’t keep a man, I’m uninteresting, I can’t read or even sit through a movie. I remember two acutely zestless years when I never cried, never sang around the house, didn’t laugh, and had no appetite for food or much of anything. Clearly that was not the answer, either.
Looking back, I realize that during our marriage, James looked as though he was more depressed—though not more anxious—than I was, self-medicating his condition with a wide assortment of specialist-ordered (and newly invented) antidepressants, as well as alcohol and other inebriants. I distracted myself from my own anxiety by diverting him using peppy words my own mother might have used, like “How ’bout a nice brisk walk on the beach?” If we did go, James wouldn’t even bother to glance at the water. Back then, not understanding the disease of depression as well as I do today, I would also ply him with food, music, or lovemaking. Those were the times I was boldest about singing, playing guitar, and even writing music in front of him, in an effort to bring him back into the harmony and blend of life. In an effort to make James laugh, I would talk in various accents, make up poems, and sometimes—when a lucky star shone down from above—James would shoot me a sideways glance of appreciation. He would fake getting unstuck from his depression, and either chase me around the apartment or tickle me. Amazing how very much alike we were. Just exchanging masks.
James told me once I had a very low tolerance for any kind of pain, particularly the psychic variety, and he was right. Antidepressants and other medications have helped me, off and on, over the years. When they’re working, I laugh and sing songs around the house, but when I’m depressed, it’s another thing entirely. Home helps me. Family helps me. My children help me. Which is why the end of James’s and my marriage, when it came, was such a blow to my sense of wholeness. I never imagined that our concepts of the meaning of divorce would be so different, that we would truly stop being a family, and that it would be so devastating to me. When a marriage ends you don’t always get to choose what remains.
James: He walked straight—looking neither right nor left. 1980.
It turned out to be a vase after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
strip, bitch
And yet, things were reluctant to the end.
About a year or so after James and I were officially separated, he came to the apartment we’d once shared on Central Park West, where I continued to live with Ben and Sally.
It was right before dinner. James was dropping off the kids, who had just finished doing their homework at his new apartment on West End Avenue. It was unusual that he came up with them, as he usually left them in the lobby. James entered the kitchen, wearing his heavy, faux-fur-collared coat. He was still the tall apparition of the man I loved. He mentioned in passing that a cab was waiting for him downstairs, and that he was en route to the Village for dinner.
During this period, relations between us were confused, sharp sometimes, heated in hate, our visits and phone calls whirling with eloquent insults, a lion and a lioness in winter. “Angry man, hungry woman,” as James himself once wrote. Other times, we were civil. With a cab waiting downstairs, I assumed he would simply turn around and reboard the elevator. But instead, once the kids were settled in their bedrooms, James took a seat in one of the kitchen chairs, facing me. That night I was wearing a suede, leopard-print wraparound dress as I leaned against the counter. Behind me, the dishwasher was on its dry cycle, the steam emanating from its borders possibly making my own edges blurry and tempting—for a poor old southern baby in his cups (James was either drunk or stoned, or both) I could very well have been a sight for sore eyes. Two feet away from me, tipped over slightly at the waist, his left elbow propped on his left knee, James gazed at kitchen tiles he once knew well, a lit Camel between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. The laces of one of his large boots had come untied. He still had on his coat.
Tension: there was certainly that in that room. Steam was coming through my dress. The angled distance between James and me was jagged, irregular somehow. A scream was going to happen; a song was about to start; something was about to blow. After exhaling smoke, James’s lips remained half-open, as if he’d gotten distracted and forgotten to close them. Any minute, I assumed, he’d stand up, give me a gentlemanly nod, open the kitchen door, and leave, with nary an insult, at least not tonight.
Instead he glanced up. He was taking me in. Usually I could decipher James’s legion of expressions. Tonight, though, I couldn’t. He snapped ash onto the floor, then flashed me two or three milliseconds of his faintly bloodshot baby blues. I noticed he was sweating.
“Strip, bitch.”
James hadn’t moved; his posture remained the same as he exhaled perfectly concentric rings of smoke. Waiting to see if I’d take his bait, he didn’t blink; I glanced up, and for a few seconds he just observed me. Looking up at the ceiling to halt our eye contact, I took fast, furious inventory. A few more seconds passed. From the kids’ perspective, it wasn’t out of the question that Mother and Father would vanish behind a closed door, where conceivably they might be having a conversation, maybe even a quarrel. They might be talking about school schedules, pickups and drop-offs. They might be taking out their calendars and coordinating vacation times. It wasn’t so unlikely a scenario. Not all that long ago, after all, the bedroom where I now slept alone used to be “our” bedroom.
Underneath the too-bright overhead kitchen lights, neither of us had the time or the inclination to do anything but erase all judgment and be from a family of earlier hominids. I don’t remember how we got to the bedroom and how I silently locked the door.
Time had gone by, but there was nothing uncoordinated or awkward about what we did. We were hardly new lovers; it had just felt like ages since he or I had inhabited the same nervous system. We were silent but blatant. With the front of his body to my back, he pressed himself into me. I noticed that James’s long, aristocratic fingers were stained with nicotine. Mostly I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. There was a hesitation. But that familiar weight, like that of some sleek animal, grafted onto me. Later I knew he’d say he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant to, that it didn’t mean anything, but in those moments I was in heaven that lust had toppled him. I felt I was Orpheus leading Eurydice out of the underworld, not daring to look back until we had at least reached the upper air.
But unlike the myth, and despite the gender roles being reversed, I never looked back, and James still disappeared.
* * *
Three years later, in 1984, at a dinner pa
rty on the Upper East Side, I was introduced to the then-CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard Snyder, and his wife, Simon & Schuster president and publisher Joni Evans. Dick and Joni were a certified New York power couple who did everything they could to match and even exceed their reputations. When dinner was over, Dick turned to me and announced that I must bring Sally and Ben down to the publisher’s new offices on Forty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. “Have you ever been there?” he asked, and when I told him I hadn’t, he proposed that I stop by the following afternoon. My answer, I think, surprised him:
“If you really mean it, I’ll be there,” I said, adding that Sally and Ben got out of school at three forty-five, and would four fifteen work for him? Dick smiled, did a little shuffle in his pointy shoes, mock bowed, and said, “Okay, yes, Carly Simon, I’d be delighted. Just ask the receptionist to show you to my office.”
The next day, I held the hands of Ben, seven, and Sally, ten, as we piled out of the taxi and made our way into Simon & Schuster’s dark, cavernous lobby. I’d never given my kids all that much background about their grandfather, Dick Simon, how he’d once been the reigning king of publishing, how, with his tremendous talent, innovativeness, and vision, he’d created from nothing a company that has since become part of a giant media conglomerate. Ben and Sally seemed to remember only that Daddy had crossed paths with Albert Einstein—and wasn’t Einstein the same person who discovered America?—being far more interested that Daddy’s hairline had started receding when he was in his mid-twenties, and did that mean that I, their mommy, would go bald someday, too?
The three of us took the elevator up to a high floor. It was hard not to remember another elevator ride I’d taken in another building, in another decade, to meet up with Daddy alone in his exile on the twenty-ninth floor. But that was twenty-five years ago. In contrast to the old Rockefeller Center elevator, this new and improved one was smooth, faceless, frictionless. It made a delicate ping as it came to a stop at Simon & Schuster’s executive floors. When the doors opened, I was momentarily jolted, frozen almost in my tracks. My eyes fixed immediately on the names etched on frosted-glass double doors: SIMON & SCHUSTER. That same moment, as Sally’s gaze met mine, I sensed she’d just come to a new, slow-dawning awareness of who her grandfather had been.
