Later in the day, Bill walked in on me in the guest cottage, catching me naked and dripping from the shower. I gasped and made some nervous, wry remark as I hunted for a towel. “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Bill said, “we’re all used to each other’s bodies around here,” and he slapped my rear end affectionately as he passed by.
The next day, Carly Simon showed up. She was kind to me, and offered generous advice about pursuing a singer-songwriter career. Bill joined us on the porch. He was wearing a bathrobe and undershorts, and sat spread-eagled on the chair, legs wide apart, with his member sticking out the pee flap and one ball sticking out the leg hole. When I told my friend Susanna about her father on the porch, she explained that he sat in that heedless way in front of absolutely everyone. I had to marvel; Bill was as outrageous in his own way as my own father.
No sooner was I back in New York than I was desperate to leave again. I decided to drive cross-country, all by myself, in the little red Fiat. Somehow I had to do this alone; I couldn’t explain why. I just let the wheels pull me west, driving hour after hour, day after day, imagining that the left headlight of my car was snorting up the white-painted lane dividers, a continent’s worth of cocaine.
In southern Utah, I spent a couple of indelible days with Michael Tilson Thomas, a young conducting colleague of my father’s who had become a friend of mine, along with his partner, Joshua Robison. We hiked in Monument Valley, and twirled down the San Juan River on inner tubes. I spent a night in a traditional eight-sided Navajo hogan, got up at six, drove to the Grand Canyon, gawked and gaped, climbed back into my car, drove across the scorching Mojave Desert pouring water over my head from a plastic gallon jug (the Fiat had no air-conditioning)—and at sunset of that same day, my toes were in the Pacific Ocean. I was on the West Coast for the first time in my life.
That night, I unrolled my sleeping bag onto the living room floor of a guy who’d been sitting behind me in the restaurant where I’d pulled in for dinner. I was grateful that he didn’t proposition me. If he had, I would have felt compelled to go through with it. I found it hard to say no in those times, because it was even harder to answer the question “Why not?”
At my next stop, in Berkeley, my shoulder bag was stolen out of the Fiat. I now had no wallet, no driver’s license, no bank card, no address book. I felt erased from the earth. I would now have to drive all the way back to New York without a license or a speck of ID.
On the eastbound leg of my journey, the temperature gauge in the Fiat began meandering. It would hover near the red danger zone, seeming to indicate that the car was overheating—but then it would subside again. Driving across the vast, empty western landscape, I began to lose my sanity as I obsessed over the little dial. I began to imagine that I could move the needle back down with my mind.
Outside of Des Moines, the Fiat’s left rear wheel detached from the axle and rolled across all eight lanes of Interstate 80. My car went scraping horribly into the breakdown lane. Two guys in a camper pulled over to help me. One scurried all the way across the highway and retrieved my wheel in the bushes. The other jacked up the car and pounded out the mangled mudguard while I rooted around in the weeds for the lug nuts. I found three of the four. The guys got my wheel back on, and incredibly, I was back on the road twenty minutes later, shaken to the core but in motion. Even more incredibly, there was a Fiat dealer just ten miles away, where I bought the fourth lug nut for $1.34.
That evening I pulled into Chicago, the Windy City, deranged with relief. A very nice cop took a parking ticket off someone else’s car and put it on mine so I could leave my car in the space for a couple of days. He asked me to back up a little, so I got back in and turned the key in the ignition . . . nothing. My car had simply expired, right there in that parking space. I knew exactly how my car felt.
My Harvard friend David Thomas was a wonderful host. We went to the museum, to the zoo, to good breakfast joints. We took long and, yes, windy walks along the lakefront. He slept in the living room and let me use his bed. That arrangement lasted one night. After that, the romance began.
My car started up just fine when it was time to go. But I was heartsick. Here I was heading back to my real life, to Jet and the loft and—what exactly had happened to me in Chicago?
I mailed David a paperback copy of E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Inside the front cover, I wrote to David: “Still feeling windy.” Or, I thought to myself, still feelin’ slee.
* * *
After my mother died, the fun had gone out of the Dakota for Mendy. He wound up selling his apartment—to Gilda Radner, as it happened—and got himself an enormous loft on what was then a rather neglected corner: 18th Street and Fifth Avenue. Instead of carving up the open space into extra rooms for his visiting grown children, the ever-inventive Mendy created two cubes on wheels that contained perfect little guest bedrooms; they could be pushed around in any configuration he wished. When Mendy had a party, he pushed the two cubes to the side, thereby making room for his guests—and for dancing!
Mendy liked putting on Strauss waltzes. At one party, the “Blue Danube” came on, and my father grabbed me by the hand and dragged me out onto the floor. I knew the piece by heart from having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey so many times—and Daddy simply knew everything by heart. For once, we were perfectly in sync: anticipating every phrase in Strauss’s music the same way, dancing like a single, sentient organism.
But the rest of the time, we were hopelessly prickly with each other. I had developed a bad habit of not letting my father finish his sentences; I knew I did it out of pure annoyance, but I couldn’t stop myself. For Christmas, Alexander gave Daddy and me each a pair of bright red Everlast boxing gloves.
Despite the frictions, the Dakota had a centripetal force that was irresistible. The building itself was mesmerizing, with its brass fixtures and carved wooden mantels, the echoing marble stairwells and creepily ill-lit corridors, and the inner courtyard with its fountain of spouting art nouveau metal lilies. It was in that courtyard that the residents held an annual potluck party. And one of those Dakota residents was, incredibly enough, the heartthrob of my girlhood, John Lennon—who now lived there with his wife, Yoko Ono. I invited my school pal Ann to join me for the courtyard party, just in case John showed up. We were breathless with delight to see him arrive with Yoko, plus their baby son, Sean, nestled in a pouch against John’s chest. We found ourselves standing next to John in front of the array of desserts. Ann and I felt we could retire from life itself after John mused, in perfect Liverpudlian: “Mmm, I want soomthing mooshy and disgoosting.”
It was hard to resist any invitation to join my father and his guests for dinner at the Dakota—and besides, I tried to spend as much time with Nina as I could. But every visit was something of a crapshoot. In the absence of Mummy, Daddy was as untamed as a sail flapping in a squall. The family’s preexisting behavioral boundaries were gone; now anything could happen. Three examples:
1. The dinner with Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola had an idea for a film musical that he wanted to run by Leonard Bernstein. There were few works of art in those days more beloved than the Godfather films, so Alexander, Nina, and I were beyond excited at the prospect of this collaboration. Our guest arrived with an entire case of wine from his Napa Valley vineyard, and proceeded to drink most of it himself. At the dinner table, LB talked obsessively about LB, repeatedly interrupting Francis and reducing us siblings to three microscopic dots of desperation.
After dinner, Francis unrolled a quantity of white butcher’s paper and began to draw feverishly on it, all the while explaining his concept for the film with a nearly deranged intensity. Maybe we couldn’t blame our father for backing off; we had to acknowledge that there probably wasn’t enough oxygen in the universe for those two guys to occupy the same space together.
The one good thing Daddy did that evening was to come up with a grand nickname for Francis: Fortissimo, derived from the starting letters of his first and middle names (ff). And Fortis
simo did eventually make his movie musical: Tucker—a film about a car, with a score by, of all the non-LBs, rocker Joe Jackson.
2. The dinner with Woody Allen. LB had been contemplating writing an opera about the Holocaust, and Shirley had arranged the dinner with Woody because she thought, a little oddly, that Woody would be an ideal collaborator for the project. As often happened, Daddy was not ready at the appointed hour. He was getting a haircut in his bathroom and taking his sweet time—maybe on purpose. It fell to the rest of us to make chitchat with Woody and his new girlfriend, Mia Farrow. We knew for a certainty that they had no interest in talking to us; it was a miserable penance to be LB’s social placeholder.
When our well-coiffed father finally sauntered into the library a full excruciating hour later, it became instantly apparent that here was a colossal mismatching of personalities. As with Fortissimo, Daddy did way too much talking, and didn’t seem particularly interested in what Woody had to say, and anyway, Woody was pretty quiet. At dinner, Woody served himself a single potato. As Aida the maid withdrew the serving tray, she stepped backward directly onto the paw of Julia’s little white fluff-dog, Tookie, who let out a bloodcurdling squeal. After dinner, we all filed out of the dining room to have coffee in the library. On the way, I overheard Woody say quietly to Mia, “Well, I liked it when she stepped on the dog . . .”
3. The dinner with the Russian guy. Daddy had invited a Russian actor who’d been a generous host to him and Mummy in the Soviet Union many years back. Daddy’s toast to his dinner guest that night was “May you fuck as well today as you did twenty years ago!” Nina and I looked at each other with the age-old tierra, trágame despair. Later, as I left for the evening, Daddy pulled his old trick: kissing me fully on the lips, then pushing his tongue into my mouth.
Daddy tried this tongue-kissing stunt on almost everyone, usually late at night, after much drinking (and possibly also an orange pill). It was a kind of litmus test he liked to spring on people, to find out a few things at once: how accommodating they were, how sexy they were, how much impact he was making. Probably the only ones who were spared Daddy’s tongue were his mother and Julia. (But who knows?) It was a disagreeable experience for sure—even more than the mushy, ardent kisses he so often planted on my lips—but my dismay was tempered by knowing he did it to so many others. The intrusion of Daddy’s tongue was an occasion less for revulsion and more for weary eye-rolling.
My father’s intense physicality and flamboyance had always been there, but now, in the absence of Felicia’s calming influence, it became a beast unleashed. It was around this time that Betty Comden’s husband, Steve Kyle, died—a shock to everyone, and a terrible loss for Betty, who adored him. She invited her lifelong pal Lenny to be one of the speakers at Steve’s funeral.
My father began by describing Betty and Steve in the 1940s, when he’d first met them. “They were both so beautiful,” he said, “I couldn’t decide which one I desired more.” At that instant Betty Bacall, who had been holding my hand, abruptly withdrew her own, muttering, “Son of a bitch.”
As people filed out of the funeral home, there was much sotto voce buzzing about Lenny’s questionable eulogy. Adolph Green’s wife, Phyllis Newman, and her pal Cynthia O’Neal were talking about it as they headed out to Madison Avenue. Suddenly Cynthia felt a blinding pain on her side. She whirled around: a maestro had just bitten her! “Lenny, what are you doing?!” she cried. “Gee, I can’t seem to do anything right today,” he said.
But on the podium, LB was doing very right. He conducted electrifying concert performances of Fidelio in Washington, DC, with the soprano Gwyneth Jones and the Vienna Philharmonic. Then they came to New York for a couple of concerts at Carnegie Hall; the audiences went crazy. Best of all was their performance of the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde; I had never heard that ravishing music before.
There was, however, a subliminal discomfort in being perpetually brought to a state of ecstasy by one’s own father. His musicianship was on such an exalted level; it transported his audiences, and yes, it was erotic. Certainly for him, music-making was a form of lovemaking. For Alexander, Nina, and me, it was a lifelong challenge to figure out how to open ourselves to these immense musical experiences while maintaining some kind of inner equanimity—even chastity.
The Tristan that night was to be my father’s last engagement for a year; he’d cleared his schedule to be a full-time composer.
What he really wanted to do was undertake a new theatrical work, the first one since the debacle of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But he still hadn’t decided what his subject was going to be—the Holocaust opera was but one of several notions—nor had he settled on a collaborator. He even asked me to collaborate with him, as he was in the habit of doing from time to time. His latest proposal was easier than most to turn down. The plot revolved around an aging rock star who finally admits that of all the groupies and women in his fabled life, the one person he loves is his (male) manager, and as he performs the love song he has written about his manager, his teenage fans storm the stage in fury—and eat him.
* * *
Down in SoHo, the age of cheap lofts for artists was over. Our building’s landlord, Gabe, announced he was tripling the rent—and suddenly life downtown was about rent strike, escrow account, lawyers, court hearings. But did I even want to stay in that loft—or, for that matter, with Jet?
Did I want to be a responsible person with a stable relationship, or did I want to be, you know, a rock star? The latter would require that ever-troubling intensity of self-involvement: it would mean choosing to be more like Daddy. What if I became less kind? “Kindness, kindness, kindness,” my mother had said to me on her deathbed. Which parent was the better role model? Neither option seemed entirely compelling.
And every now and then, a sense memory of David Thomas in Chicago would leave me rooted to the spot, gazing into space.
I launched into a flurry of meetings with prospective managers, promoters, and record company executives. To send my song demos around, I had to get duplicate tape reels made—a tedious, inefficient process in those days, as was the designing, printing, addressing, and mailing of invitations each time I performed anywhere. (Today, of course, all of these tasks could be accomplished with the stroke of a laptop key.)
Every person I spoke to had his or her foolproof theory for making it in the music business. A manager named Ken said my songs weren’t commercial enough. One record company executive said, “That’s not a song; that’s material.” A friend suggested, “Write something that makes you sick, and it’ll be a hit.” That was probably the best piece of advice I got, but I didn’t follow it.
I hired an energetic young press agent named Tony who set me up with all sorts of interviews. They all asked the same questions: Does your father give you any advice on your career/songs? Are you going to collaborate with your father? Did your father teach you to play the piano when you were young?
Tony the press agent arranged for an interview with veteran radio personality Joey Adams. Every five minutes Joey said: “I’m talking with a lovely young lady whose father . . .” Joey Adams even coerced me, despite my desperate protests, to sing a Leonard Bernstein song, on the air. Grudgingly, I sang one verse of “New York, New York” from On the Town. Tierra, trágame.
I hired three musicians, at considerable expense, to be my backup band at a club called SNAFU. The bass player was fifty minutes late for the sound check. I was furious, and I didn’t want to feel that way. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I should “use” it.
Well, I definitely did use it, judging from the reactions I got afterward. Jet told me there was only one expression on my face: a snarl. My father’s main comment was how angry I was up there. (And Ken the manager was conclusively discouraged by the red Mylar hot pants.)
The rent strike at the loft was devolving into chaos. Gabe the landlord turned off the water, then the electricity. One day, Jet and I walked into our loft to discover our music studio reduc
ed to rubble. Gabe had gone in with a power saw and destroyed it. Nothing remained but shards of wood, crumbled Sheetrock, severed wires. It was a deep violation; we had worked so long and hard to build that room. Our home, our music-making, our relationship—all reduced to dust. Literally.
As summer reached its zenith, I was down to nothing: I had no loft; I had broken up with Jet; I had no band and no manager; Nina was going off to college (Harvard, of course). Nothing was pinning me down anymore. I began to feel a certain tickling lightness—whereupon I got a call from David Pack, front man for the rock band Ambrosia. Some years back, Pack had played electric guitar in a production of Mass in LA, and Daddy had befriended him. Pack had shown up at the awful sixtieth birthday party at Wolf Trap, but beyond that I didn’t know him. Still, I’d sent Pack a tape of my songs, just for the hell of it—and now here he was on the phone.
He said he really liked my music, and that maybe we could record some of my songs in his manager’s twenty-four-track studio in LA. I said I was sort of thinking of going out to LA soon, and he said he did happen to have some free weeks in September, and . . .
I was leaping around the room. I called my father to tell him: I could hardly talk for crowing.
I was going to LA! This had to be my big break!
Daddy wrote me a little birthday song, using the best tune from his new piece commissioned by the Boston Symphony, a potpourri of material called Divertimento. The song was a quirky seven-legged waltz. His lyrics made fun of the terrible profanities with which Alexander, Nina, and I casually peppered our conversation. He was also making gentle fun of my efforts to make it as a rock musician. And maybe it was a little autobiographical, too:
Shit-a-brick, time is running out on me;
I must get moving fast undoubtedly.
Suck-a-dick, I am sick in heart and soul,
Got to get moving fast to reach my goal:
Famous Father Girl Page 19
