Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  Paul Samwell-Smith was my producer that summer of 1971. He had come to see the show at Carnegie Hall because he was Cat Stevens’s producer. Jac Holzman had wanted me to work with Paul and asked him to come and pay some special attention to the opening act. When I performed onstage, he liked me right away. He was determined to woo me. I couldn’t have been more wooed. I wanted to be Cat Stevens if it was at all possible. We talked after the show, and it was right there with Jac and my new manager, Arlyne Rothberg, in the dressing room, that we made plans to start one month from then. Arlyne would come along, and I would take my band to England! My first recording experience in London. There would be a lot of Willie memories.

  I began writing in earnest in preparation for recording in England. One day, standing in line to get my passport, I saw a headline in the newspaper a man was holding in front of me. It was about Hank Williams Jr.; the headline said: LEGEND IN HIS OWN TIME. I cast James Taylor for some reason as that particular “legend” and started a song about him, imagining that I knew him, and I indeed was advancing him into a “lonely boy when he goes home alone.” I was going to rescue him.

  I wrote another song called “Three Days,” about Kris Kristofferson, whom I felt in goofy, fruitless awe of. I was playing as his opening act sometime that May at the Bitter End in New York, and then again at the Troubadour in L.A. We had a strong physical connection, but I couldn’t be myself when I was with him. He made witty, flattering comments when he introduced me onstage: “Following Carly is like going from the sublime to the ridiculous.” Mostly I was speechless. I looked and I watched and I tried to please him. I felt a little interchangeable with the many other girls he could have so easily charmed.

  Those were the days when he was drinking so much that he was falling asleep onstage. Kris and I were not to be a couple, but it certainly fit the bill for a slam-dunk deranged month or so. Arlyne thought we made a great couple (we looked good together), and those were days, just as now, when those things were actually manufactured, or spurred on, by managers, agents, and press agents. There were no setup photographs or falsified dates, just an air of two pretty electric personalities who both found music quite close to laughter and sex, and our audience could be gripped in a possible plot—hot information worthy of passing on.

  Mercifully, I found him fascinating, even though I didn’t know how to find out who he really was. I did love singing “Help Me Make It Through the Night” with Kris, and I loved sitting on the bed in one of the many poorly lit hotel rooms he stayed in, learning and playing “I’ve Got to Have You” and helping to breathe new chords into the bridge, as if he could actually use them: “Wakin’ in the morning to the tenderness of holding you asleep in my arms, dreamin’ while your hair was blowin’ softer than a whisper on my cheek…” How did he think of that utterly fragile combination of words? Kris, the man of soft lips and marble eyes sunken in snow? The simplest textures, the songs of a night bird? Every time I sing it, I think of him and what a wonder he is. I think he is magic, the bad boy who only shaves when he doesn’t have to go to church.

  I was already in London, living in a rented house across the street from Primrose Hill, that “soft summer garden,” and recording with Paul, when I had to come back to do one concert in D.C. with Kris. It was one of the ones that acted as a deterrent to my doing other concerts. We were co-billed, and during “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” I had palpitations that launched me into one of the worst onstage experiences I’d had. Thank God it was the last song in my set. After Kris’s last song, we had to grab our suitcases and guitars and get to the airport for the last shuttle to New York. We ran down the ramp inside the airport and managed to get in just before the door closed. We sat down (Kris in the window seat, I on the aisle), and my pulse rate was about a hundred and wouldn’t come down. The plane took off and I bent down and put my head in my lap. I was shaking as Kris read The New York Times and wrapped it around his head, like a tent. He didn’t want anything to do with the possibly sick or frightened woman he had on his hands. He told me to call the stewardess. I spent the rest of our flight breathing into a brown paper bag. But both of us knew other things were coming. He was going in another direction where paper bags wouldn’t be needed. And I was headed to where I didn’t know, but I knew it wasn’t with Kris. I didn’t need someone who made me feel the onslaught of the Beast. I returned to London after that night. Funny how you remember things pared down to a single image: Kris with the newspaper wrapped around his head.

  The rest of the recording went well, and the result is one of the more memorable records I have ever made: Anticipation. Paul was the ultimate producer for me in so many ways I needed. He was patient, and heard what he wanted and described it in ways that were just poetic enough but not overly flowery. He knew how to get a performance out of me, and was funny in a new way. I loved that way. I played on every track except “Summer’s Coming Around Again.” Oddly, the song that was hardest to cut was the title track (“Anticipation”). You’d have thought because I had sung it live so many times before going into the studio that it would have just rolled off the reel. Not to be. We were starstruck by the song already. Intimidated. We didn’t know if we could make it as good a record as it already was a song. We could push it too far or leave crucial things out. Overproduction is a common enough worry. Paul would see how little production we could get away with. “Less is more” was his slogan. Andy Newmark, our drummer, was lying under the piano or beneath his drum kit for most of the day, and then was asked to play to my already clumsy (time-wise) guitar part, which is how the recording of most of the songs went. I almost always put down a guitar and vocal or piano and vocal first, and every other instrument was overdubbed by Paul and Jimmy and Andy, sometimes all together, sometimes one at a time. It made for an attractively empty, choppy, emotional album. My time was free flowing, erratic. I would linger long and not pick the time back up. One measure dipped or drooped into the next, hardly ever the same length as the next one or the one before. My band could only guess where the next downbeat might land. It wasn’t going to be a dance record, but that was just fine with me. It is unlike anything I’ve recorded before or since.

  Paul is an original, the likes of whom I have never known. I got to know him very well during the summer of ’71, and we talked deeply, revealing our true selves. We talked about sadness, and I got furious in front of him and at him, and I walked out of the studio; we fought silently, viciously, then he very politely brought me back and fed me sausage sandwiches and very sweet tea. He was such a lovely, odd bird in the yard. He was elegant and had a marvelous vocabulary for subjects that were really quite obscene. He had worked with the Yardbirds as bass player for so many years and had plenty of experience with prima donnas. I was not a prima donna. Anyway, I sincerely didn’t think so. I know that my demands can be ridiculous at times. They rarely come out of anything but fear. I can trace all my cancellations, all my refusals to perform, to when there is a plane trip involved. Of course it’s all about being afraid. Paul spent lots of time patting me. He made me think it wasn’t mad to feel the ceiling might fall in during the next take of “I’ve Got to Have You.” He also gave every musician space and love. He appreciated every note and hesitation before a note.

  Paul and I spent lots of time taking a day off here and there, driving all over the southern part of England in his Mini Cooper. There was a feast of delightful-enough B and Bs where we discussed the album, listening to it as we drove. We drank champagne, ate squab, made love in miniature bathtubs, and discussed matters that should have been private but weren’t, because we’d had the champagne first. Then we’d drive back to London and its summer gardens, Primrose Hill and Morgan Studios. We conversationally assembled the new ideas conceived during our voyage into the hinterlands about backup vocals, string arrangements, and mixes. I didn’t have any clear sense of having a singular emotional attachment; though I felt closest to Paul (Samwell-Smith), I have never been so influenced by any g
roup of musicians as I was with Jimmy, Andy, and Paul Glanz, and people hanging out in the studio such as drummer Rick Marotta and Cat Stevens, who sang along with the rest of his band members on “Julie Through the Glass” and “Share the End.” I was more Paul’s girl than anyone else’s, but the fluidity of relationships (at least mine) was such that you only changed a coat’s lining, not the wool, cotton, or fur that made up the outer layer and thus the appearance. I was the girl of the band, and there weren’t many in the mix who I didn’t feel drawn to. I could see it all happening in the pages of rock ’n’ roll literature and magazines. The seventies were dazzling and uninhibited, but in my dreams was that Golden Books image I would chase forever—the apple-pie-cooling-on-the-windowsill, married little wife with her devoted husband and perfect children swinging from the swing that was tied to the old oak in the backyard. Or was it a fruit tree? That tree would nourish love, keeping it safe from harm. It might be able to undo the haunting images of my parents’ so-called marriage. I was counting on it.

  What a perfect time to meet Warren Beatty.

  Soft summer gardens.

  Me hailing a cab in New York City to get home and cook crème brûlée for a big date.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  the potemkin hotel

  When my charisma was at an all-time high, I had a visitor backstage at the Troubadour. In between shows during my first week opening for Cat Stevens, Warren came into my dressing room and feigned shyness. He was affecting a touch of the old “aw shucks” attitude. As he saw there was no one else around, he closed the door. He got very close to me, looked into my face, and looked down at my breasts, braless and curved bravely in an insinuating shape under my chamois shirt. He said: “Can I see you?”

  I knew who he was, of course, before he introduced himself. In actual fact, there was no one who could match him. What a glorious specimen of man. He put them all to shame, if looks and charm were what you were after. He homed in like a tracking dog. It was mysterious because it worked and it shouldn’t have. Now, when I say it worked, I mean it was irresistible. He had to have me as a notch in his belt, a belt where the greats could mix warmly with the rich, the famous, and the fair.

  Warren was naturally skilled at keeping several women on the hook at the same time, but there was always one at the top. He had a list that he referred to as “the main loves of his life.” We all likely have had lists like that. Warren’s list was there on a piece of white paper in his pocket so he could take it out and show you. When he showed me, he added my name, to make me current (the main one at the top) so I could see that I was right up there above women like Catherine the Great, Marie Curie, Maria Tallchief, and Lillian Hellman. As I said, this shouldn’t have worked, but this is a man who imitated nothing. He was completely himself, and though it is unlikely that he had had his heart too terribly broken, he could manifest both that sheepish look and the “bird with the broken wing” thing. He was such an actor that he could convince himself that he was vulnerable. Therefore by the time he communicated it to you, it wasn’t false at all. The three or four women he held at any given time in his upper tier actually made his infidelity less onerous per capita than if there had been only one other.

  Warren always phoned the next day. Sex was followed by a call. He referenced things only the two of you could ever know; the two of you together would be the only two in history to ever remember at exactly what time on the morning of June 17 the radio had come on with the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood” playing. He remembered the names of my mother, sisters, brother, grandmother, old boyfriends, streets where I lived five years ago. With this groundbreaking memory, he seldom if ever got confused.

  I thought: What have I done to merit all this attention? Never have I had such a rush before. Not that I haven’t been aware of my appeal to some men, but this was over the top. The only thing it could mean was that he was one of those men who believed that my interest in them would make them more attractive to other women. What did Warren want from the next woman before whom I was being dangled as a lure? Who could satisfy the craving enough to make him settle down? He was like Frank Sinatra in The Tender Trap.

  But you must give Warren credit for loving women. He did and does love them. He’s not alone, but he is privileged by being universally attractive. He became compulsive because he could. But in love he believed that you use everything you possess to make her play like a Stradivarius. You use your hands—every inch, pad, and tip—and your voice must be seductive and trained to envelop the object of your affection in the finest Indian silk. He was just poetic enough, just passionate enough. How he was sincere is hard to understand, but he was sincere. I knew I could never have Warren even if I wanted him, so I didn’t ever think to take him seriously. I was playing the game he was setting out.

  Maybe Warren had questions about his lack of ability to maintain a relationship. If he questioned his ability to love, I can understand why he might, but I for one believe he can and does really love, and like the best of his kind, he can also “simulate” love. Maybe it was pure need, disguised as love, and likely he made sure he moved on before what was disguised as love would ever come to that.

  I always imagined Warren as a train conductor. Potemkin was Catherine the Great’s lover and the man who basically ran the Russian Empire during her reign. The story goes that Catherine had never seen the Ukraine before and was coming there to see how he had taken over as Governor of these devastated lands. Potemkin ordered his builders to construct miles of houses and splendid villages along the banks of the Dnieper River, so that when Catherine’s barge arrived she and her visitors would see prosperity and order. But Potemkin realized that due to time constraints it would not be completed in time. He wisely instructed his builders to make exotic fronts of the houses and stores that could be seen from the river, much like a Hollywood set. “The New Russia” was a success. What a coup. So, I think of Warren as Potemkin, lining his psyche with such “sets.” I can see him riding, the whistles starting to blow as he rounds the bend on the train. He, the conductor, would have a half smile on his face as he came within a mile of the station. He would get out his small case and polish his shoes. He would get off the train when it huffed to a halt and look up, now with a full smile, at his mark. I was where his gaze rested. I would wait in the second-story window, which of course was a shell, with two gauzy antique lace curtains blowing in the finest wind a stage director could imagine. I was in his hands.

  The great slip-up, and there was one, yes, involved my analyst, Dr. L. The therapist who told me to jump into the deep end of the pool. The same one to whom I would have listened all session long on what he had to say about Utah. Whenever there was a slow moment, he would resort to travel suggestions, usually involving Utah. This is the way it went down:

  Warren called me on a Sunday afternoon to tell me he was at the airport in L.A. and flying to New York. He would be in by twelve thirty or one, and would be over to my apartment as soon as he could get here. One caveat was that he was needed on the set for some early morning shots and would have to leave by 5:30 a.m. But he had to see me. He missed me. He couldn’t wait to see me. I got undressed and put something on the stove, some buttery pudding-like thing with a brûlée crust on top in case he was hungry, but also, to live up to the whole fantasy that this amazing man, the most handsome and charming and sweet and funny and politically correct and extremely talented man, was coming to see me in the middle of the night. I think we had known each other for only about a month at that point, and maybe I had been his partner on the court five or six times. Evidently enough so that he had noticed by then that my thighs were, indeed, “poems.” When he arrived at the apartment, he picked me up at the front door and carried me into bed (on which I had sprayed some very nice eau de cologne, which was supposed to pass as my inner self). We made love like in a movie. However, there were real sensations, for Warren was such a professional, the pressure points he knew about stirred a tremor in me, which meant that I left my he
ad for a while, and all of a sudden we weren’t in the movie anymore. Warren seemed to have just created a brand-new manual on how to make love—not too brazen, not just missionary, but not too many tricks either—and followed it so expertly while being at the same time attuned and sensitive to the response he was getting. He didn’t speak. Didn’t whisper, either. Didn’t call you “darling” or “sweetheart” but used your name. How can one formula work for so many? That was his genius. Maybe I was in love. I certainly was starting to talk myself into it.

  There was no heath or roaring surf, but Warren was a warrior prince and in his mind, there were those things; he conveyed them as he put his hand on the small of my back, balancing me just at the right angle.

  He was up and in the shower by five and out the door with a piece of toast by five twenty. I then got a few hours of sleep and raced to dress and get in a cab and up to Ninety-sixth Street by eleven in time for my appointment with my beloved Dr. L.

  “Whew!! What a night I had. Warren flew in at the last minute and didn’t get to my apartment until one thirty, at which point I was already tired, but he had so much energy and my God, he’s such a superman, I know what I’ve said about him in the past, how I believe he’s better at playing him than anyone could ever be, and how it was even better having two of him: one ‘him’ and one him playing ‘him.’ But last night I felt as if there was only him, you know what I mean…”

  It was then that I noticed Dr. L looked unwell. He had a pallor that scared me, and I thought he was going to be sick or do something violent or that he might die on the spot. I asked what was wrong and sat forward in my chair. He said:

  “Under the circumstances, I can’t withhold this. It’s too much to believe … it’s unbelievable, in fact … I suppose … I suppose I will tell you … that … You are not the first patient of the day who spent the night with Warren Beatty last night.”