Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  Still, the shaking wouldn’t stop. Nick and I went to the Picasso Museum in the little town of Vence. I bought a piece of pottery for my mother. That night, I awoke shaking and depressed.

  We went to Eze-sur-Haute, and then Eze-sur-Mer. A brilliant walk on the beach. Drove back to Châteauneuf de Grasse. Night came around; I fell asleep and awoke, shaking.

  At one point, six weeks into our stay, Nick and I drove to Spain, pausing along the way in ancient French towns that reminded me of the canvases of Cézanne and Van Gogh. We puttered past and through Aix, Les Baux, Arles, Montpellier, Cap d’Agde, Perpignan, and just over the Spanish border, Cadaqués, the town that Salvador Dalí painted, as well as a resting spot for Picasso, Miró, and Duchamp. Nick and I shared a sunny room in Cadaqués. It was the first night of hot running water in weeks, which we took full advantage of by filling the tub almost to overflowing. Our stay was enchanted, and I attributed the relaxation I felt to one thing: I didn’t tremble. After a long hiatus, Nick and I made love, which also helped alleviate any symptoms of “the vibrations.” The next day, we headed for Barcelona. When I first glimpsed what I thought was the city, brash and ugly and charmless, with factories and pollution filling the air, I felt my spirit break in half, and was relieved to discover that the city I beheld was Badalona, on the seacoast forty-five minutes to the northeast of Barcelona. What a difference a d makes. Nick drove at top speed to Barcelona, where a reservation awaited us at the Avenida Palace. A total relief, a magnificent city.

  At dinner that night, I glimpsed a woman at another table who looked so much like Chibie I dissolved into tears. My grandmother had died of a heart attack the previous summer, a week after I fainted in front of Odetta. Since then I’d been having quiet anxiety attacks where I feared losing control the same way I’d lost control onstage in front of Odetta. That night at dinner the dam finally broke. I cried so long and so uncontrollably that the waiters and the formally attired diners surrounding us noticed, and the maître d’ became so concerned that he arrived at our table bearing cold towels. Nick was worried, and prepared to call an ambulance. Instead, somehow we escaped from the dining room, me with my torso bent over, collapsed into Nick’s shoulder. Both of us were bewildered. What exactly was going on? That night I stayed awake, shaking, sleep coming only after I took a hot bath and a phenobarbital.

  Early the next morning, still in Barcelona, I called my mother from the hotel room and described my symptoms. Mommy had recently become intrigued by psychoanalysis, and from time to time saw a famous practitioner in New York, a disciple of Freud named Dr. Albert Lowenstein. Later that same morning, after consulting with him, Mommy called me back. Based on my symptoms, she and Dr. Lowenstein thought I might be suffering from a “nervous breakdown,” the same thing Daddy had been hospitalized for twice. We made a plan: I would leave, go home, and get help.

  A week before I left, I lay out by the twig-strewn pool on one side of our little house, reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Blowing in off the ocean up the foothills of the Alps were tiny water drops, reflecting the shimmering hues of the mountain flowers. It was, I found out, the local phenomenon known as the mistral—a strong, cold, ill wind, similar to the sirocco that bulldozes across Africa or the mystical Santa Ana winds in Southern California. Leaves piled up thickly on the bottom of the muddy pool as I read my book, riveted by its melodrama, longing, and romance.

  Nick would remain in Châteauneuf de Grasse, writing his novel, as well as letters to me about the hillside and his excursions. I hadn’t even left yet, but already I missed him terribly, missed our small house, missed our tiny, cold-water bathtub, missed the flowers and the cooking, missed our expatriate life together. I also regretted that our love wasn’t more physical, or urgent. I didn’t feel that my body was something he would want to spend time with. When he touched me, I felt his hand more than my body.

  As I lay there reading, Nick joined me, and we had a depressing but honest conversation about the state of affairs between us. We both agreed that our relationship had grown middle-aged (ha!) and uneventful (how amusing to feel this way before you’re even twenty-one!). We were both bored, and if another romantic opportunity arose, we agreed we would urge the other person to take it. Nick was as aware as I was of what was wrong with our relationship. I knew it and so did he, but I think he was surprised I felt the same way. My youthful conclusion was this: I should never have stopped looking things up in the encyclopedia, never stopped trying to keep Nick interested. Why hadn’t I asked him about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Why wasn’t I better read, more casually literate? Why hadn’t I insisted upon reading the book he was writing? If only I had devoted more time to keeping Nick intellectually stimulated, I might have kept myself stimulated, too.

  Has anyone ever properly explained love’s weather patterns, low-pressure systems, cold fronts, storms? Surviving its tides and seasons, I’ve found out, is a feat exclusively for the strong of heart. With the agitation that had been building up all spring drained off, Nick and I were left to bask in the love we still had for each other. My last night in Châteauneuf de Grasse with Nick still lives vividly in my memory: The stove in our little kitchen. The woodpile just outside the front door. The mimosas beginning to sharpen their yellow tones. The sweet early green of the olive trees, the verbena, and the climbing roses subtly changing the complexion and color of our caretaker’s cottage as the season began its softly spiraling turn. That night, I cooked our favorite recipe: Swedish meatballs with a lot of heavy cream, brandy, and noodles. We made love, and I packed, and there was more unspoken than spoken.

  The next morning, Nick drove me to Nice. On the boat to Europe and throughout my stay, I’d fantasized about meeting French musicians who would show up at our house carrying guitars, lutes, flutes, and hand drums, all of us jamming late into the night, the entire scene ending up, inexplicably, with Lady Brett Ashley from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in the stands of a Spanish bullfight. Naturally, none of that had happened—not even close. But along with the homecoming presents I’d tucked inside my suitcase for my family, I would be returning to the States with my Phillips tape recorder and at least three songs I’d written, two with Nick as lyricist. While not as much or as many as I’d hoped, those three melodies represented some sort of beginning.

  * * *

  I began therapy immediately with an old-school Freudian analyst whom Dr. Lowenstein had recommended. Five days a week, I lay down on Dr. F’s couch, never once looking at him, Dr. F unremittingly silent in return, which gave me ample time to dwell on the Rorschach-like paintings of trees and cucumbers covering the walls. Sometimes during my sessions, I suffered quasi–anxiety attacks. I’d sit up on the couch, hide my head between my knees, breathe hard, and try to find answers that could shed some light on the puzzle of what ailed me. I had countless dreams about both Billy and Ronny, but Dr. F and I never got to the bottom of their significance—or I just didn’t believe his interpretations. Occasionally I could hear the sound of his pen scribbling, and entering and leaving his office I occasionally caught fast glimpses of a nice-looking man whose unfocused right eye lent him a slightly comical—or maybe it was magical—expression.

  The most significant result of my sessions with Dr. F? I no longer had the shakes, not even once since returning to New York. I had come to believe that my trembling was the direct result of my relationship with Nick. Dr. F also spent a lot of time asking me about Ronny, though I remember being extremely embarrassed to talk about anything important, or intimate. In some essential core of myself, I’d always known about Mommy and Ronny, and their involvement was now out in the open. Four years after Daddy’s death, Mommy and Ronny could be found everywhere: on the library couch in Riverdale, in the garden planting bulbs, kissing in the kitchen, walking my mother’s Dalmatians, Mandy and Pandy. Everyone in my mother’s social circle must have known. What did they think? I wondered. Did they gossip? Did they care?

  I was never able to understand the unself-co
nscious ease Mommy obviously felt over her affair with Ronny, never able to accept that whatever guilt she might have felt ended the moment Daddy died. I still wasn’t cutting Ronny any slack. I loathed him. His speaking voice always had a phony note to it, one that always made me imagine he was hearing his voice on a tape recorder and wondering how it stacked up against Ezio Pinza’s.

  At the conclusion of my analysis—coincidentally, at the same time the small inheritance my father left me had run out—Dr. F told me gently that it was time to graduate, that together, we had gotten to the root core of my psychological problems. From this point on, he said, I would be far more capable of handling any situation that came my way. Looking back, I assume he must have caught a whiff of that pungent, sour aroma of future bounced checks, the scent of a patient on the cusp of exhausting her funds.

  * * *

  By now, Nick, too, had returned to New York, and we went out to dinner at Chez Napoleon, on West Fiftieth Street, to celebrate my psychoanalytic “graduation.” Among the offerings on the wine list that night was Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the same wine we had drunk every night in France. Over a shared bottle, Nick and I ate flounder, oysters, and onions in cream sauce as we reminisced about our days and nights in the Alpes-Maritimes, both of us aware we had been in that stage of our relationship where couples who love each other say good-bye, in very slow motion, before moving on to others.

  After dinner, we walked all the way over to the East Side, where I was living with my sister Joey at Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue. Nick left me there, as there was no longer a reliable question of his spending the night. I fell asleep watching a movie, and a few hours later was awakened by a rumbling throughout my body—the same shakes I’d had in France, the ones that had driven me into psychoanalysis. Here they were again. Why? Had I had a bad day? Did seeing Nick unearth some ancient memory of our relationship in France that had resurfaced at the restaurant? Then it finally hit me: it was the red wine, the Châteauneuf-du-Pape! The same wine Nick and I drank almost every night when we were in Europe. Like the final twist in an O. Henry story, it wasn’t a nervous breakdown at all, but instead: allergies. If only I’d gone to an allergist instead of spending all that time, not to mention my inheritance, on Dr. F’s couch, I might still be in France with Nick, buying little Mattisses and Picassos in seaport towns.

  Allergies aside, I still had to decide whether or not to go back to college. My mother, Joey, and Lucy all saw me on a stage. Nick was alone in pressuring me to resume my education, and I loved him all the more for ultimately being on the losing side of this debate, and not least for accompanying me, hand in hand, through the hardships of the mistral. I honestly had no idea what I wanted. I would have gone in any direction anyone else seemed sure of. I could see nothing really positive about returning to Sarah Lawrence and was happy, and even relieved, to put my formal education on permanent hold. Lucy and I had hastily released a second album by then, and we were singing all over the country, but the problem was I didn’t really want to continue doing that, either. If the truth be known, I didn’t really develop any major new musical ambitions until I fell in love with Willie Donaldson.

  “It Happens Everyday.”

  Lucy and me in London, 1965.

  CHAPTER TEN

  frog footman

  In the mid-1960s, London was where everything interesting and offbeat was happening. It was the world of Henry Orient and What’s New Pussycat?, of “Help!,” “Ticket to Ride,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and “Downtown.” Herman’s Hermits, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, the Hollies, the Animals, and the Beatles—so much music to imitate, to interpret. Songs I could stand up and sing into the mirror, while dancing at the same time, or by singing harmony/descant or an improvised horn part at the top of my lungs. Alone in my room, I regularly sang along with the Everly Brothers, the Weavers, and other folksingers, but I was taken—captivated, enthralled, seduced—by the rhythms of rock ’n’ roll. Clearly I needed a bigger mirror, a new one that could accommodate my entire body, and maybe London would be that place.

  In 1965, with college on eternal hold, Mommy, Lucy, and I were supposed to take the Queen Mary to Europe and stay for a month, but at the last minute, Mommy elected to stay home—she blamed Pandy, the dog, I think. Lucy, who’d come down with a bad flu, followed suit, though my sister promised to come over to England later if I managed to arrange the Simon Sisters a gig or two. So it would be just me, sailing alone to England.

  A week after the Queen Mary left New York, the boat docked in Southampton, and I took the train by myself to London. My first few days there, I stayed with a friend on Harley Street, eventually finding a room at the Russell Square Hotel. I felt extremely homesick, and a day later was relieved to find a phone number that had been given to me by a family friend who knew any number of London-based entertainment agents and performers. The name and number scrawled on the slip of paper, which would prove crucial to the rest of my stay, not to mention life, read only: WILLIAM DONALDSON, 18 HASKER STREET, followed by a phone number. The name meant nothing to me. The family friend told me that if I ever found myself in any trouble, to “just call Willie. He will take care of homesickness.”

  It seemed an overstatement, but when Willie answered the phone, the rapport and even attraction between us was instantaneous. What exactly was it that was so irresistible about even the sound of Willie Donaldson’s voice? There are some people who just do it to you, and you get them, and they get you: Willie had a magic that seduced me from the start. Before I knew it, I’d accepted his invitation for breakfast at his Chelsea town house, and when the door opened, Willie handed me a glass of orange juice.

  He was attired in a loose-fitting pair of cuffed pants and a charcoal-gray V-neck sweater over a classic white button-down shirt. The town house was elegant but also funky and dressed down, four floors of raffish English charm. Willie was easily six foot two, and as he walked ahead of me up the stairs from the vestibule, it struck me that even though he was barely thirty years old, his stride reminded me of my father’s—long, unathletic, patrician, and vaguely effeminate. His accent was just as unusual. It seemed to take a particular route around his uvula, revolving up around the roof of his mouth and echoing back to his tonsils, this particular sound all driven from the sound box of his long head bones. His lips alone could have given more definition to his words, but I certainly wasn’t the one who was going to make such a suggestion.

  Willie was the president of a company called Players and Writers, and had produced the traveling English comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. Beyond the Fringe was the precursor to the Rutles, Monty Python, and Saturday Night Live. I had seen it five times in New York with my friend Jennie Lou, and we’d both gotten to know one of the four cast members, Dudley Moore, on whom Jennie had a crush. I fell for Jonathan Miller. When I learned he was a stutterer, I knew someday we’d meet. We haven’t.

  But on that July morning in Hasker Street, I had no idea who Willie Donaldson was, and knew even less what, if anything, he expected of me in return. Did he assume I’d called him in hopes of landing a secretarial position, or a part in a play, or a job as his cat walker? What had our mutual family friend told him about me? Had Willie ever heard of the Simon Sisters? I doubted it. I could still be a call girl. It could be a naughty nun reference. There was no gag on our imaginations.

  The town house in which we were sitting, it turned out, belonged to Willie’s girlfriend, the actress Sarah Miles, whom I had just seen in the film The Servant. To my mind, Sarah was the ultimate new-age English movie actress, on par with Julie Christie and Susannah York. Willie and I sat on a threadbare, dark brown Edwardian couch in their second-floor living room (the higher the social class, the more missing threads, is a pretty dependable rule of thumb), my back facing floor-to-ceiling French windows opening out onto Hasker Street below, Willie’s face and foxy hazel eyes illuminated by the morning sun.

  I already felt at ease, placed perfectly in the
moment, lulled by Willie’s fast, sharp British wit. Willie was the first man I’d met in my life who reminded me of my grandmother, Chibie. He had her mixture of the straight-faced and the absurd. Already Willie seemed a compatriot in my favorite kind of fun—the kind based on irony and mock formality, the sort where carefully choreographed pauses and inflections play a starring role, a humor that says Life is a game to be played, so must we really insist on taking ourselves so damn seriously?

  For the next three hours, Willie and I sat there on the couch, pressed up against a row of needlepointed pillows covered with hair from two Abyssinian cats prowling underfoot. The cats manipulated their long gray hairs into the sofa like artisans. Willie noticed this and reprimanded them with class: “Hey, knock it off please, will you?” All the room’s upholstery looked like intricately woven pieces, fashion, faux, fabulous! He reminded me of nothing so much as a formal little boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. We talked about everything, including how my crush on Dr. Miller would culminate. The subject then turned to Lucy, and the Simon Sisters, and whether Lucy and I might be performing in England later that summer.

  “What a good idea.” Eyebrows raised, and not even bothering to ask me if I minded, Willie spontaneously requested Lucy’s number and reached for the phone. He was putting on a show for me, as I would find out he did for so many people. “Good morning,” he said, practically singing his greeting and yodeling the syllables from high to low. When my older sister picked up, “Is this Simon Sister?” Then, “Have you had your orange juice yet?” Clearly the answer was no, because Willie suggested she fetch a glass, “and then we can talk about your hasty getaway from New York and get you over here at once, so you and the other Simon Sister can perform at the Palladium, and a week or two later, at the Albert Hall, and we can all make a great deal of money, not to mention in cash, too.”