Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  “CARLY, I LOVE YOU!”

  When he returned to the house, he laid a few pieces of newly split wood inside the Franklin stove and lit it on up (James always “lit it on up,” striking a match on the underside of the kitchen counter or against the sole of his shoe). Once he got the fire going, he closed the stove’s glass doors and turned out all but one small lamp near our pullout bed. Before retiring, he went back upstairs to check how Kate was faring. The way I saw it, that night James had seized the moment, protected his sister, had a catharsis, and in a fit of love-crazed wood chopping, sung my name up to the moon. And I was letting that love shine in, shining it back at him in return. To me, being with James wasn’t so much a decision as a kind of magical predestination.

  Reappearing downstairs, James vanished into the doorless bathroom, where he washed the soot and ash off his hands. Still dressed and wearing his boots, he approached our bed in no hurry at all. His boots (I remember they were made by a company called White’s) made him a good two inches taller than his already tall, toned, six-foot, two-and-a-half-inch frame. He wore a light-brown-and-blue-plaid workman’s shirt. His turquoise belt buckle was loosened, and his jeans, baggy in the knees and unbuttoned at the waist, hung down unevenly over his boots. In the lamplight, I could see his eyes: blazing blue. Even though the room wasn’t entirely dark, I’d never seen that color blue light up the dark in such a way, those two eyes gazing at me wide open, a breathing, cursing, loving, yearning blueness that touched me beyond all words.

  As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.

  * * *

  From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal. The lengths both of us had to go to act as though we felt at ease in the world was a strain. It was a comfort to have in each other a relief from our private, individual craziness. James, of course, had been famously written about before we met. As a student at Milton Academy, the prep school outside Boston, he’d left school his junior year and gone into McLean Hospital, which also provided schooling. Many of his songs from his first album, including “Night Owl” and “Knocking ’Round the Zoo,” were written either about the people or the situations he had encountered there. Whatever his diagnosis was, it was likely complex, part of that marvelous, difficult brain that led him to depression and drug addiction. Both were, and are, so much a part of each other.

  As for me, if I was in trouble, James always rescued me, though I knew he felt he didn’t belong on this earth as much as I did. I don’t know if he really understood my own alienation and feelings of being on the outside almost all the time. Except when I was with him. I preferred focusing on James, no matter the situation, and if I could be helpful I would always try. (Of course, this occasionally led to me trying too hard, and being a nudge, or annoying, or cloying, or in general overdoing it.) If James was suffering, his pain diverted my attention away from myself, the result being that I agonized about myself less. It’s like being a parent: you may be suffering from the worst migraine on earth, but if your child is sick, your self-centered immersion fades into irrelevance and gives itself over instead to the purity and relief of selfless caretaking. In her novel The Shadow Knows, the writer Diane Johnson describes a character holding her children’s hands as they cross the street. The woman wonders how her children can possibly trust her since her capacity to trust herself is so fragile. The same was true for James and me. For the next decade, he and I would grip each other’s hands against the ever-onrushing traffic of the curious, the jealous, the smilers with knives.

  For the first few months, James and I traveled back and forth from New York to the Vineyard, where we splashed on some new paint, pounded a few nails, and cleared some fields, while planting some new, real trees (anything but the prodigious oak or pine). On Lambert’s Cove, there was always the beauty of the outdoors, wood to chop, sassafras to be plumbed for tea, a basement to clean. Owning a place, I was finding out, was a lot different from renting. For example, I never even knew if there was a basement in our Thirty-fifth Street apartment building.

  In New York, we felt as though we didn’t want to socialize other than coparenting James’s giant puppy, David. We cooked, got stoned, and ate. James had a few dishes he would eventually become well known for: beans, for one, an altogether remarkable Jamesian recipe, containing lots of garlic and onions, steeping for days. James slept late most days, and at night, he and I went out with Arlyne or socialized with Jake, Carinthia, Ellen, David, and Mary Ellen. Neither of us was really comfortable with friends or idle time. Accustomed to being “on” when we were out in public, being alone in our apartment felt like an almost foreign notion—and almost always: a huge relief. We got antsy, restless, eternally juggling ideas about what to do and when to do it, quickly becoming irked with ourselves if we stayed home when so many people expected us to attend their shindigs, shows, or get-togethers.

  Our relationship was only three months old when I went out to L.A. to record a demo, while James stayed behind in New York to help record a few cuts for Abigale Haness, the girl backstage at the Carnegie Hall concert who would later marry Danny Kortchmar. Early one morning, my phone rang. It was 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, 6 a.m. East Coast time. It was James, and the story he told me had nothing to do with Abigale’s recording session but, instead, with the eccentric plumbing in our Stanford White apartment building. James had been taking a shower that morning when the hot water quit. Finding himself suddenly under a deluge of icy water, he shut off the cold faucet, forgetting to turn off the hot. He went about his business, spending the rest of the day recording Abigale up in Nyack, an hour north of New York. Sometime during the day, our building’s hot water came back on—including, of course, the water in the shower stall. When he returned to our apartment, it looked like a Ukrainian steam room, minus the old naked men. The living room wallpaper was curling off in strips. The photos and posters had begun a slow curtsying peel inward, and my record collection was warping. All our photos were ruined, though some I eventually straightened out between the pages of heavy books. We ultimately had to move out for three months while the entire place got re-wallpapered.

  Less important than the wallpaper was the moment I learned what had happened. “Is this Carly?” said the familiar gentle voice on the other end. “This is James Taylor.” Not James, but James Taylor. As if, after four months of propinquity at its finest, he feared I might possibly confuse him with another James. In tension, James’s good manners came out, his civility, his old-fashioned North Carolina gentlemanliness. I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the hot water or the wallpaper or the condition of our record albums, all of which seemed absurd and could be replaced: the only thing I cared about was that the sweetest, kindest, least replaceable man on earth was on the other end of the phone.

  “My Darling James,” I wrote in my diary around that time, “you are so rare in my life. Such a special thing. I pray nothing will ever make you less so. I’ve never felt so close to anyone in so many ways. That’s the thing—the combination of closeness. I’ve had sisters and friends I could share intimate thoughts with, and men I could love but not talk to—uncles and aunts I could easily live with, and men I could talk to, but not love—I’ve had a dog I could snuggle up to and bathtubs that could surround me with warmth, and a grandmother who impressed eccentricity in its dearest forms upon me—but you, my Darling, leave me in a new space. You’re all in one and then some more.”

  It was true. From the first time I saw a picture of him, James was it—the ultimate Orpheus of all my fantasies. He was smart. He was funny. He was beautiful to look at, a long, lean, poetical stalk of a man. He was anyone’s romantic ideal of a poet and musician, and listening to him, I felt sometimes as if no one had ever had to teach him
anything, that he’d been born simply knowing things. There’s little doubt that the amount of attention James was getting at the time also intimidated me. In the early seventies, James Taylor was the most talked-about singer and composer in music, and everyone wanted him, though I never would have believed that kind of thing would have impressed me. I felt another thing, too: if James fell in love with me, then I could never doubt myself, or my own attractiveness, ever again. (Yeah, sure. And no. But I’ll get to that.) Then, too, James also reminded me of my own father—that combination of musicianship, worldliness, and dryness, as well as the physical height, mixed with an obscure darkness and sadness, qualities hinting at something beyond what was visible. My father had been present but absent, and James had something of this same characteristic: I’m just visiting—this apartment, this city, this earth. Daddy had almost never looked me in the eye for more than a moment, and James, too, had a habit of breaking his gaze, mostly to glance downward at his own feet.

  Several years later, when Jake became a devotee and student of Sufism, I found out about an extremely intimate practice called trespasso that I persuaded James to do with me. Sitting across from each other, I gazed into one of James’s eyes for ten minutes, after which we were supposed to reverse roles, with James’s two eyes gazing intently into one of mine. After ten minutes, we were supposed to do the same with the other eye. James, I remember, hated this. He could only look at me with anger, as if I were violating his very mind and soul, possibly because I’d pressured him into doing this strange thing with me in the first place. I wasn’t altogether comfortable with trespasso myself—it made me self-conscious, and I was acutely aware of James’s own discomfort. I remember being taken aback by how furious James became during even the first two or three minutes our eyes came together. His expression was closed, but I could feel the waves of aggression coming off him, too.

  When James and I became a couple, a famous couple—more in print and in the imagination of our fans, maybe, than in our bedroom and living room—I found out that the same fire that ignited our relationship could turn to icy silence, to “no-ness,” to “can’t-go-there-ness,” to “we don’t talk about that-ness.” I accepted this duality along with the rest of the package that was James Taylor, probably because I was accustomed to the same quality in my own father. Besides, as Mark Twain once said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” “Angry dawns” once again! James, then, may have been my charmed Orpheus, but he was also Heathcliff, flirting with shadows and demons both hot and cold.

  There was also the matter that we were both performers, and both very much in the news. It—my career, and the attention I was getting—had happened fast. First came the shows with Cat Stevens, followed by shows with Kris Kristofferson, Don McLean, and Harry Chapin. After James and I got together, I’d joined him on a multicity tour, performing around ten shows in all. A few months into our relationship, in March of 1972, James and I went to Hawaii, and on the way back, we stopped in San Francisco to pick up a rental car so we could drive down the California coast to L.A. The Grammy Awards were taking place that night in New York, and both of us were nominated, me for Best New Artist of the Year and James for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male. The two of us weren’t planning on attending in person. I can’t vouch for how James felt about the prospect of getting, or not getting, a Grammy—he was mum about the subject—but I was quietly focused on it, though I made it a point not to say anything to him.

  By two in the morning, the fog was sweeping in from the Pacific and that, combined with our jet lag and restlessness, lay behind our decision to stop along the way and take a nap, though we didn’t have reservations anywhere. Barely able to make out the highway before us, we somehow ended up at the Big Sur Lodge. Luckily, management had room, and the two of us made our way through the mist with our bags to a small cabin amid the redwoods. We found a telegram pinned to the door addressed to James Taylor and Carly Simon. One of us opened it. It was from Jac Holzman at Elektra, and it read: “Congratulations! Both of you won Grammies! Love, Jac.” The most amazing part was that dear Jac knew only that James and I were driving down the coast from San Francisco to L.A., and had sent a telegram to every single inn and hotel along the route.

  “Skylight, James?”

  “Sure, I’ll have one!”

  Adding a wing to the shack.

  “Everywhere I look I see your eyes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  moonlight mile

  June 1972. James and I were in L.A. to do some recording, staying at the Chateau Marmont. I was going into the studio the next day to make a demo of some songs. One night, when James was working, we had been invited to a party given by Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, who had proudly signed the Stones and had delivered “Brown Sugar” to the world. I went to the party alone, driving myself into the hills of Hollywood, and found the Erteguns’ mansion, where butlers opened car doors and front doors, handed out flutes of champagne, remembered everybody’s names, and then closed the doors behind them.

  Mick was front and center. I saw him, registered it, looked around the room, put my pocketbook down, and went to say hello to Ahmet and his wife, Mica, whom I knew by then. I was a couple with James. We’d been living together for more than half a year. We were sought out by the Ahmets of the world, and they acted as though they’d known us all our lives.

  Naturally I flirted with Mick. I mean, who wouldn’t? If a woman didn’t flirt with Mick, it could only mean she had a cold sore or she’d been brushed off by him already. Every time Mick passed me while I was talking to someone, he looked at me with the same expression: You and I know the same thing. I, personally, have no idea what it is, and neither do you, but it is the same thing. He kept looking at me, even if I was dancing with someone else (as dancing had started up and couldn’t be stopped, what with the combination of the volume, the booze, the time, the city, the personalities). We found ourselves together at the doors leading to the pool area. We left naturally, as if we had a purpose out there.

  In the garden, we finally entered solidly into each other’s orbit. We walked together just out of sight of the crowd at the manse and discussed the interview that The New York Times had suggested I do with him. Sy Hersh, who assigned the piece, imagined that I would be able to get a story out of Mick, for reasons hinted at but not fully established. I wondered what I’d ask him. “What size shoe do you wear? Do you ever write songs in the bathtub?”

  During our walk around the pool, Mick mentioned Cocteau and Genet. I talked meaninglessly about neoclassicism, and then he dropped Rimbaud’s name. Nothing made sense in our conversation, just nervous emanations: sexy disruptions of the air around us.

  “Slavery is such an underdiscussed subject—how it’s affected the South.”

  “Violence is a calm that disturbs you,” Mick said, as though it was supposed to have relevance. There was a stiff potted tree in front of us. How different than the moves of Mick Jagger. I thought of him and Keith onstage like palm trees raging in the Caribbean wind.

  “Violence is not in that potted plant.” I didn’t know what I was saying. I guess I might have been afraid of what I wanted. I knew I shouldn’t be flirting with this kind of danger.

  “Do you speak French?” I asked Mick, closer now to poolside, noticing a few inglorious cigarette butts lying at the bottom.

  “Just a bit, enough to say adieu. In fact, I got married in Saint-Tropez.”

  “How nice,” I said, lowering my voice and reciting a bit of poetry. “Quand j’étais petite, je n’étais pas grande, je montais sur un banc, pour embrasser maman.” I felt I had to compete with him, for absolutely no reason. No, I guess honestly it was to impress him. Those phrases were some of the first things I had learned in French class, and they apparently parked themselves in my memory bank of useless, very short French poems. I didn’t stutter. I don’t know why. In fact, I didn’t even fear that I would, or that my face would contort over a wo
rd. I knew if I had trouble, I could stop short. Even if I left out a word, it wouldn’t be that awful. And, I could let my words come out real slow.

  “Where is the bride?”

  “Bianca’s home buying some hats.”

  “Did you pick out what she was going to wear on your wedding day? Oh no, that’s right, you’re not supposed to see…”

  “Really, Carly, aren’t you going to do a real interview?”

  We were checking each other out in the circle of seduction. I didn’t think it was unusual for him, but for me … well, I could easily get lost and not know what to fall back on. No more French poems, no more questions about Bianca or clothes. That “Little Red Rooster” glint shone in his eyes as he looked at me sideways.

  “Do you want to know what my favorite Stones song is?” I asked. It was innocent enough, but he stared at me as though I had become a young fan who was going to bore him.

  “Be serious,” he said.

  I looked directly into his eyes and held the gaze. “I am deeply, deeply serious.” Suddenly I was as sexy as I’d ever been. It came from him. I was reacting, more than initiating. But then I realized I no longer had to talk. I could just be quiet and look at him. Let him be uncomfortable for a minute. But he wasn’t. “Mick,” I asked after a moment, “you really don’t like to show your soft side, do you?”

  “You think I have a soft side? What’s that? Like a pudding?”

  I had no idea where I was coming from. I had tried to be seductive with Sean Connery, but this was different. When I was with Mick, I became a woman who was attractive to me. He made me feel fantastic. On a good night, James didn’t give me one-half of the energy Mick was giving to me. I always had to meet James halfway, or more. Mick was all there, and present, while James was suffering from that thing that I, in my life, have come to know all too well as my own curse, not knowing how to show up for the day.