Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  As the band laid down its track, I ventured into the control room, standing beside Albert Grossman, who asked me to sing along with the track, even though the melody was pitched too low for my voice. That could be a breaker. It was the difference between a surround that caught the song, and my voice, in its very best light, and a surround that would make me clumsily try to fit into an unloving slot. Caught up in his own grandeur, Albert turned full on me and asked, “Carly—when is it going to be our time? When are you and I going to get it on?”

  Albert’s long gray hair was damp and sweaty, bound by a rubber band or dirty piece of twine. I forgot for a moment who I was. What is all this? Who am I? Why are they playing this in the wrong key? What was I doing here? My God, instead of trying to come on to me, why wasn’t Albert checking to see how Bob Dylan was doing in the hospital following his motorcycle wreck? “You know, you’re a nine out of a perfect ten,” Albert added. “You miss the mark because you have too much money.” I was confused; I had no idea what he meant. He must have assumed I was rich, which I wasn’t, though I wasn’t altogether sure, either. I’d grown up in a household where it was considered gauche to talk about money, where I never learned the difference between a hundred dollars and a thousand. My mother never gave me any money, and I was living perfectly well on fifty dollars cash a week. Even if there was more money squirreled away somewhere, did it matter, and who was he to say? It was obvious that Albert equated a bank account with a lack of soul and feeling.

  Regardless, my sole mission was to make a great recording of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” the song Bob Dylan had rewritten for me. When I went inside the booth once the track was cut, and attempted my first vocal, I knew it was two keys too low for me. I tried to change the melody enough to get closer to my key, but the Producer and Albert kept steering me back to the melody. To this day I can’t prove it, but it seemed that one or both of them had deliberately sabotaged the track, cutting it in the wrong key, as payback for me not responding to their sexual advances. The key they kept insisting I follow might have been Levon Helm’s, or Robbie’s, or Richie Havens’s, but the Producer had set the melody two keys too low for me, which meant I couldn’t belt it out with the pushy, sexy, rock ’n’ roll punch I and they wanted. Over the next couple of months, I called Albert, and John, and even Robbie about twenty times in all, but it soon became clear it was all over before it had even started. The track was shelved. None of them ever called me again. Had what just happened even happened? Desolation followed. The track does exist now in my very own hands—a duet between me and Richie Havens, who had apparently come in separately to record his part. It certainly had the flavor of anticipation, but with no point of arrival that was satisfying.

  * * *

  Depressed, I started gaining weight, quickly getting up to 150 pounds, and then 158, which was heavy for me, as I was typically a size six, or eight. It didn’t help that Joey and I had both become addicted to a frozen drink sold at a small Forty-fifth Street deli and advertised as having no more than 145 calories, a claim that was later proven to be completely untrue. I don’t know how many times Joey and I stood in the long lines on West Forty-fifth Street, but I do know we drank three or four of those concoctions daily, each one a frothy quart of self-destructive comfort in exchange for the devastation I felt over my first big failure in the music business. The fall from feeling like a bit of a star in London to waiting in line with masses of tubby girls like me for another chance to gain a few more pounds was another Beast cue, and I was now on the alert for new, ignominious ways in which it could operate.

  The men in my orbit didn’t seem to notice how miserable and heavy I was getting. At the time, Joey was dating Henry Morgan, the well-known radio personality, and one night Henry brought his fancy friend, a famous writer, to our apartment. As if I were a calf at auction, Henry asked me to stand in profile. That night I was wearing knit pants, and my swelling outline must have been dramatic, but unable to see myself as others did, and curious but not offended by Henry’s request, I turned forty-five degrees to the left. Across the room, the writer made an alarmed-sounding noise. Henry announced, to no one in particular, “You see?”

  The truth was this: Willie was gone, my solo music debut was a failure, and I was fat. One night, I reached into my pocket and my fingers closed around what Willie had slipped into my coat pocket in the train station. It was a tiny jade frog. I kept that frog with me at all times, and every time my fingers found it, I couldn’t help but think how Willie had rechristened me Frog Footman and that maybe we would get back together.

  * * *

  Still in the dumps, and unable to pay the rent, I needed to find a day job. Jennie Lou, my old classmate from Riverdale and Sarah Lawrence, told me I should consider working as the secretary to her husband, a producer on a television show called From the Bitter End. It was a studio-produced variety show intended to duplicate the look and feel of the actual nightclub, the Bitter End. The idea absolutely horrified me, but I took the job. I had evolved, it seemed, from being a singer at the Bitter End, the club where Lucy and I had performed just four years earlier, to taking shorthand for the producer of the television show based on the same club. It was a real comedown. That ladder was active up and down. It was good practice, as I would go in both directions many times. The producers couldn’t have been nicer, but my shorthand was nonexistent. I lasted there a month, though not before spending a few weeks serving as an on-set gofer. My first task: go to Marvin Gaye’s dressing room and see what he needs. When I arrived, Marvin was bare-chested, and when I asked him what I could do for him, he replied that he wanted to see something, and would I mind sticking out my tongue? When I obliged, with the same innocence I’d shown when modeling in silhouette for Henry Morgan and his friend, Marvin lunged at my face, swept my tongue into his mouth, and began sucking on it. I extracted it without inflicting damage.

  From there, I went into the dressing room of the comedian Redd Foxx. As I knocked and entered, Redd let his famous red fox fur coat fall to the floor, revealing his naked body underneath. Laughing at my startled expression, he gestured me over, but I’d already turned on my heels. Still, there was a problem. What am I supposed to feel? I asked myself once I was back in the hallway. Was what I had just seen attractive? Was it not attractive? Why was I always so split off? I gave Marvin Gaye a pass only after hearing him sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” onstage. That was my weak spot: Orpheus. Men blessed with immense musical talent. Those guys always got a pass.

  Where was my compass? Why wasn’t I more upset, more shocked? What was real, what was underhanded, what was aboveboard, what was underground, and what was the difference? What was my problem and what was someone else’s?

  * * *

  Getting a job as a counselor at a summer camp in western Massachusetts may have sounded like a big step backward, but to me it represented a whole new group of people and a whole new environment. I would be teaching guitar to high school girls, making sure they were tucked in bed every night, though mostly it was a symbolic escape from New York.

  The camp, Indian Hill, was located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. At twenty-two years old, I wasn’t all that much older than the girls I was charged to oversee, and looking back, it felt as though time was out of order. Wasn’t a counselor the sort of gig you were supposed to have as a teenager?

  Indian Hill was perfectly and eternally green, with huge elms, beechnuts, maple trees, beautifully maintained lawns, and a swimming pool. It was an easy walk into Stockbridge, too, where there was a row of little shops where you could buy fudge and feel the freedom of being off-campus. The day I arrived at Indian Hill happened to be my birthday, and pouring rain, too, and as that summer would turn out to be remarkable—not least because the camp was where I met Jake Brackman, lifelong friend and partner in many ways—I developed the unprovable theory that the best things in life begin in the rain.

  All of the campers at Indian Hill were engaged in at le
ast one of the arts: drama, music, dance, or the visual arts. Music flowed out of every building, tent, and dorm, or from a nearby amphitheater, with rehearsals usually taking place on the huge lawn. As a counselor, I shared a room with two other girls in the main house and had a small corner bed, my stuff packed in a three-hook closet a foot away, as it had been on the ship coming back from England. There was no mirror, no privacy. If I’d felt on top of the world in England, working as a summer camp counselor in western Massachusetts, and pretending to be officious and angry if the female campers were ten minutes late to bed, felt like an enormous humpty-dumpty fall. By the time I got there, my weight had fallen to 148 pounds, though food was almost always on my mind. I occasionally found the willpower to skip a meal, but eating and not eating had become an ongoing struggle.

  From the moment I arrived at Indian Hill, I kept hearing the name “Jake.” Jake, it seemed, was a Harvard student and a counselor who would be arriving at camp two weeks late, as he was recovering from a bout of hepatitis. People kept telling me how much I would like Jake, and they would say this even in front of Faye Levine, my roommate and Jake’s girlfriend. Faye herself told me how similar Jake and I were, how the two of us shared a physical resemblance, and she couldn’t wait until the day we met. Was she setting up a rivalry, or possibly deflecting a future one?

  Jake, Jake, Jake.

  When Jake finally showed up, I didn’t meet him right away. He and Faye spent the whole day moving their various belongings into the camp’s “couples” housing. That whole day Indian Hill, for whatever reason, felt strangely tense. No one seemed terribly interested in their Bach cantatas, their oil paintings, their pas de deux. That night, there was a big cookout on the lawn, with around a hundred kids and counselors in attendance. I arrived dressed in a polka-dotted peasant blouse, tucked tightly into a pair of cutoff jeans. Bare legs and bare feet. Bangles on my wrist, hair flying long and sassy.

  Several of the counselors had plans to dance around the fire that night, and the mood on the lawn was faintly orgiastic. The first person summoned to the fire was, of all people, Jake. The second person was me, and the campers led me to a spot on the other side of the fire, directly across from Jake, but with our backs to each other, so we were ten feet or so apart with flames and sparks a barrier between us. At the count of three, Jake and I were to turn, face each other, and smile as broadly as possible. In their little brilliant minds, convinced that Jake and I looked alike, and that even our toothy grins shared the same teeth, the campers must have known, somehow, that the two of us would become friends. How?

  To this day I’ve never been able to fully explain the elaborate, premeditated choreography surrounding Jake’s and my first encounter, but in hindsight, it felt to me as though a group of strangers was arranging a cabalistic meeting that they knew would transform our shared destinies: word-man and music-girl … mother and son in a long-ago life … sardonic father and rogue, lanky daughter.

  Three … two … one. Turning around, I stood there demurely, in my Daisy Mae outfit, smiling widely. When I glanced up, there he was—Jake. Our eyes met very briefly before we both glanced immediately downward. Both of us were feeling shy, I’m sure. Perhaps it was some absurd psychology experiment. Perhaps the campers thought, Here is a girl who can stand up to Jake. It didn’t matter. The first gaze Jake and I shared made everyone around quiet enough to hear the crickets sing.

  Jake was tall and lean, with long, thick, dark brown hair. He was handsome; not exactly a male version of me, but there were interesting similarities. Over the next few days and weeks, I would discover how smart Jake was, too, how keen, alive, and ever-moving his intelligence was. He would wait patiently until you had finished talking before delivering a savage insight. Or else he would hesitate for the longest possible time before thrusting a verbal épée into your solar plexus. Jake, it seemed, always had the final word. In a group, all eyes and ears would gravitate to him, awaiting his coda or final summation, his mischief, incipient and outrageous. The only hint of what was to come was a tiny, curling, shuddering muscle in Jake’s lower lip that alerted you that a perfectly aimed bon mot was about to wreak havoc on the room. Later, after we’d known each other for years, I coined a term for this technique: Jaking. A short, simple gerund, loosely defined as someone lightly cutting you in a language too original to ever forget. And sometimes not so lightly.

  Over the course of that summer, Jake and I became as close as everyone had vowed we would, with me laughing longer and harder than anyone else at the things he said. Clearly Faye, his girlfriend, “got” Jake, too, and during their years together at Harvard and Radcliffe, where she and Jake were intertwined as the publisher and editor of the Crimson, Faye was no doubt the target of some of Jake’s fabulous cruelty. Still, over the next few weeks, Jake and I developed shared summer rituals: driving to Friendly’s for ice cream sundaes, getting high (my first time), and getting Jaked.

  For reasons apparent only to the gods, it seemed that Jake Brackman and I were destined, in some way, to merge. I say “in some way” because only for a single second might there have been a slight hint of romance between us. He and I never acted on it. But it was much more than a celestial field that kept us truly intimate but also apart, knowing that if we’d ever gone the romance route, it would have ruined everything.

  His friends are more than fond of Robin

  He doesn’t need to compliment them

  And always as he leaves them

  Feeling proud just to know him

  But when Robin gives his love to others

  There’s no one living in my heart

  Oh yes, I keep others in my heart

  But they’re not like Robin.

  —“His Friends Are More Than Fond of Robin,” 1971

  * * *

  A year after my recording session, I’d still never heard back from Albert Grossman and his posse. It was an in-between time for me. As the late 1960s rolled toward 1970, my social life was split between East Coast writers and intellectuals who were publishing in Esquire and The New Yorker—Jake’s crowd—and professional musicians who were putting in the time, but had yet to see the glory. One of the places musicians hung out and gathered was at a Greenwich Village guitar store called, simply, Dan Armstrong Guitars. I met countless young, hungry musicians there, including Jimmy Ryan, who ultimately became my guitarist, not to mention cowriter, music director, and very best of friends. And of course I met Danny Armstrong himself, who had just invented a Plexiglas electric guitar that was garnering a lot of publicity. Danny became my boyfriend, and one night he took me backstage at Madison Square Garden where he was meeting Keith Richards to show him—and possibly give him—his hot-off-the-rack Plexiglas guitar.

  I accompanied Danny backstage. Ike and Tina Turner were the opening act, and they were still onstage. I would have loved to have been in the audience, but Keith came first.

  Danny and I were directed into a large locker room, and when Keith finally came out from one of the stalls, the Stones’ road manager, Chip Monck, introduced him to Danny. I was just the female shadow along for the ride, an unnamed girl wearing a hat with fox fur lining and a tattered raccoon coat over a pantsuit. After conferring with Danny, Keith moved on, and Danny began discussing changing the strings on Keith’s guitar with Ian Stewart, the Stones’ pianist, a thick-waisted, sad-eyed, beer-drinking, softhearted Scotsman. Keith returned, now attired in his black satin stage jacket. Thanks to a shot of whiskey and a pair of pliers, Danny finished restringing the guitar while explaining how the pickups worked, and Danny and Keith started jamming.

  Then Mick walked in. One expects superstars to be altogether too large to fit through ordinary doorways, but much to my disappointment, Mick entered the room with utter ease. My first impression was that he was like a diminutive version of Mick Jagger. He was my height, with narrow shoulders and an extremely lean chest, and I found him sexy not just from the get-go, but way before the get-go. He was like a life-sized doll, with a generous bu
t small painted face: neat, correct, at once plush and angular. After greeting his bandmates, Mick ambled through the locker area into one of the stalls, while Keith and Danny continued jamming. Besotted by Danny’s new instrument, the boys were as cool as can be, whereas I was all smiles: Jagger was in the room!

  Charisma is an overused word. It’s different from beauty, and it’s not the same as cuteness. People who have it possess faces that change from moment to moment, from stunning to plain to gaunt to exquisite to ugly to pale to flushed, challenging you to put a name, an adjective, to what you’re seeing, or imagining, but since you can’t, you give up, not realizing you are continuing to gaze helplessly at them, still puzzled, never not puzzled, in fact, unable to take your eyes off a face whose angles and adjectives seem to whirl and spin before you. Right away I could tell that for Mick Jagger, all women, including me, were his, by divine right. Women existed to frame him, impress him, shimmer for him, illuminate him, jog themselves helpfully into his peripheral vision: a fast-click snapshot Mick might take out of the corner of one eye for future purposes and dalliances. By now Mick was huddling with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. I can’t remember if Mick even glanced at me that night, but my memory is he didn’t—that would come later. Nor could I bear to look at him directly. Then it was time for the Stones to do whatever it was real rock ’n’ roll bands did before a show. There were groupies in the room, and Danny and I made our way out.