Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

  Slightly under a cloud, we took a cab to the Pink Beach Club in Tucker’s Town. It was midafternoon. Once we settled into our room, we changed into our tennis clothes (white pants and white shirts—de rigueur for the Cleveland Professional School of Tennis) and headed for the courts. James was being a good sport for my sake, but that night I felt jittery as the two of us ate dinner in our room.

  The phone rang first thing the next morning. James got out of bed and answered it just in time. It was the customs official who’d interviewed James in the airport cubicle. Further studies showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the four pills confiscated from my cosmetics case were … nothing.

  “Nothing?” James repeated.

  No, the pills turned out to be nothing more than “just an ’armless ’erb,” the man said, adding, “Would you like to come down to the police station in Hamilton and pick them up?”

  “That’s all right.” I could hear the relief in James’s voice. “You can just throw them out. Thank you so much. Have a nice day.”

  James laughed his way back to our bedroom and repeated the entire conversation to me, his favorite words being an ’armless ’erb.

  I was still lying in bed. “So what did he do with them?”

  “I told him to throw them away.” A long pause. “Wait a minute—why did I do that? Shit! I have to call him right back!”

  A few moments later, James was on the phone, explaining that he’d made a mistake, and his wife still needed her pills. In response, the officer told him which buzzer to ring at the station, and he would come down and deliver the ’erb in person.

  Like most Bermudan days, it was sunny and in the mid-seventies, and after getting directions to Hamilton, James mounted a bike and an hour later was back at the Pink Beach Club armed with four pills of pure mescalito. He gulped one of them down with his morning orange juice, and though I didn’t take one myself, I was happy to go along for the ride. James and I spent the rest of the day walking along the beach, lying in the sun, and staring intently at individual grains of white sand. I’d very much wanted to take half a pill, but again, with my temperament, I didn’t know if I’d be able to distinguish a good or even a bad trip from genuine, wall-dissolving madness. Regardless, it turned out to be one of the nicest days I can remember. That night, James and I played cards before he tuned up his Whitebook guitar and started a little island music going.

  I was reminded of some of the ukulele rhythms that Uncle Peter played for me when I was very young, which is why I started dancing. “Do you remember the day your uncle taught us his dance?” James asked.

  He goaded me to show him the dance again. “Come on, sweetheart, you can do it.” He amped up the volume on his guitar, his playing getting wilder, which in turn loosened me up. How gorgeous and complete an experience it had been for me to see my uncle Peter simultaneously singing and dancing, moving the lower half of his body like a motor gone crazy, his movements and motions belonging to a dance as yet uninvented, from a country on no world map whatsoever, his hands jabbing at his upper torso and face like some beatifically smiling Indian princess as his legs performed what I can only describe as the Monty Python version of an African boot dance. Just recalling Uncle Peter’s dance, James and I laughed so hard that my face hurt. That night, we skipped dinner, but celebrated James’s birthday in the bathtub, surrounded by candles, toasting Uncle Peter with flutes of champagne.

  Well done, Simon Sister!

  * * *

  At the end of May 1973, upon my return home from the most recent James tour, I found out that I was pregnant. I’d accompanied James, along with his flagship band—Russ Kunkel, Lee Sklar, Danny Kortchmar, and Clarence McDonald—and when we returned to New York, I remember keeping the news to myself until I was positively sure nothing bad would happen. The first few months of my pregnancy, I did the usual sleeping around the clock, and James and I spent those sleepy months on the Vineyard, building the new “wing,” its forty-five-foot-high tower the crown of the neighborhood. The wing had a new living room area, with a real (though very tiny) kitchen, attached to a central room, with a brick fireplace, and a dining room table with extra leaves for when we had people over. And there were never not people over. In the times between sleeping and carpenters sanding the floors, surrounded by dusty people, many holding guitars, most smoking pot, all of them wearing bathing suits, I remember cooking massive amounts of Trudy’s clam chowder for the assembled hordes. My own marijuana days had ended a few months earlier when a hash brownie nearly had its way with me. (In those days, there were no specific warnings about pot smoking while pregnant, though caution, I seem to recall, was the prevailing mood.) The only thing I took occasionally, for sleep, or seasickness, or airsickness, was Dramamine.

  June 18th, 1973:

  We’re off to New York in a couple of minutes. The day is cold and depressing. I’m not lightening it any. Last night James got drunk again. The problem is grave. He doesn’t know why he needs to get drunk, but says that he needs to at least four times a day. I don’t seem to satisfy much in him. I don’t understand him when he says he needs me. He’s so down on himself that he relies not at all on himself but on chemicals for happiness. He only seeks me out for affection when he fears its loss. I’m so sad.

  He is more physical toward me in the presence of other folk than when we are alone. He thinks when I say “I love you,” that I am asking a question, that I need something in return. Patience, I guess.

  * * *

  James was just off a two-week detox when he and I traveled to Europe in July to visit two of our best friends, Ellen and Vieri Salvadori. I’d been friends with Ellen since the seventh grade, and Vieri was my first partner in ballroom dancing class. In Rome, we were met by a record-company executive, who drove us to Siena, where Ellen and Vieri had a madly beautiful house overlooking what looked like a painting: Tuscan olive groves amid a landscape of charming, choppy, impossibly green hills. It was an extremely romantic setting, except for the fact that James was almost untouchable, suffering as he was from skin-hypersensitivity whenever my leg so much as grazed his, and declining all efforts at closeness or intimacy. “James just doesn’t seem to want me,” I wrote in my diary. “Bastard, I hate him. Why do I love him so? Why don’t I love a Giver? I suppose I need enough elusiveness to keep me feeling as unworthy as I believe myself to be. Perhaps James has given his heart away. To opium. No—it’s me being over-needy.”

  A week or so later, the four of us drove north to Switzerland and Austria, where my sister, Joey, was performing at the Spoleto Festival. It was always shocking to see my sister in the environment where she thrived, to hear her sing in that big, trained voice, the mezzo richness of it all making me wish I had studied singing and could do more with my phrasing. Joey was stunning, and I hoped I showed her how proud of her I was. The next day, we took a night train to Paris, stopping at an inn along the way, ultimately deciding to rent a car and drive the last fifty miles to Paris through scenic woodlands.

  James had been fairly cool to me the entire trip, but when we got to the inn, he emerged one night from the bathroom a shaven man. His mustache was gone. It was a complete shock: in the two and a half years we’d known each other, I’d never seen him without one. (James had appeared on an album cover without it, but I’d never seen him clean-shaven in person.) Without his mustache, he looked embarrassed, almost, to show me his face, as if he’d never let me see him naked before. He was instantly transformed into the shyest, most vulnerable southern baby. Removing that rigid Prussian-soldier barrier seemed to affect his personality, too, as all the goodness of his nature came forth, and after my period of feeling unloved and missing being close to him, we made love just like a pregnant wife would with her clean-shaven husband.

  But I’d also come to a realization: James needed his space—physically, emotionally—and was liable to reject anyone who deprived him of that raw square footage. If a close friend like Ellen Salvadori wanted a hug hello, or a kiss good-bye, that was no prob
lem, but a sharp observer could easily intuit that the whole time James was looking for the exit sign. This same hypersensitivity to closeness, mixed with James’s coolness—if not actual revulsion—to anyone who trespassed on his physical space, happened in the wake of every single one of his detoxes. His detoxes were from methadone and opiates, not alcohol. It got complicated, especially when he drank, when liquor made him want me physically. For James, those nights were double-edged.

  By that September, we were both out in Los Angeles, recording. James was working on his new album, Walking Man, and I was working on my new album, Hotcakes. Jake was in L.A., too, living in Malibu, and he and I kept fiddling with songs, some of which we would put aside for future albums. In Jake’s house, he and I worked on a new song, “I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” whose lyrics Jake wrote right in the middle of recording the album. Originally, Jake intended for it to be an I-love-you-and-you-came-along-and-changed-everything kind of song, but when I asked him if it was about Jennifer Salt, the woman in his life, he told me it was in fact a Sufi song about Oscar, his Sufi teacher.

  With me pregnant and working, and James writing and recording, we were in one of the mellowest periods of marriage ever. After a difficult summer, we’d relaxed into a nice year and a half. A good explanation of how I was feeling is expressed in a song I wrote at the time called “I’ve Got My Mind on My Man.”

  He’s a lotus that opens and closes

  I know that he won’t always let me in

  But I’ve got my mind on my man again, my mind is on my man

  Sometimes he’s sleepy, and I don’t think he loves me

  I worry about his lovin’

  Ain’t I crazy?

  He’s a northern baby and a southern child

  He’s a gentleman lost at the fair

  He’s a cowboy getting drunk at the Plaza

  He has a place in my heart anywhere.

  From my diary:

  Dec 1st, 1973:

  I’m generally euphoric and more in love with James, I don’t know how it can keep growing. How much capacity do I have? It’s wonderful. I am a lover.

  * * *

  “Mockingbird” had its origins in a car, in the wake of a toasty little beach party, and maybe a glass of rum. We were in the car on the Vineyard, about to make a left turn onto Lambert’s Cove, when I said to James, “We should think about a duet we could do.”

  “Do you know”—a pause for some Jamesian humming—“how about ‘Mockingbird’?” It wasn’t the better-known version parents sing to their children—the one that begins, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…” a lullaby I would eventually record on my album Into White, but a 1960s novelty song written by Inez and Charlie Foxx. James began singing the song right away, leaving off the introductory “Mock.” Yeah … Bird … Yeah … It was James who arranged the song, decided who would sing what verse, or note, but the topic of “Mockingbird” didn’t come up between us again until I offhandedly mentioned to Richard Perry that James had suggested it would make a good duet. One day, in New York, Richard brought up “Mockingbird”; he thought it was a great idea. As usual, Richard was relentless, whipping James and me into a “Let’s get it done right away, it’s a hit” mode.

  The quality of the musicians living in New York in the late 1970s was so high, it was borderline ridiculous. You could simply call up the choicest musicians in the world, knowing they’d be at any one of a handful of studios, and schedule a time twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. One was Robbie Robertson, another was Mac Rebennack, otherwise known as Dr. John, and the others included drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Klaus Voorman, Jimmy Ryan, Ralph MacDonald, Bobby Keys, and Michael Brecker.

  Richard suggested that Mac make the sound of a bird on the organ, while Jimmy, Robbie, Klaus, and Ralph were busy working on keys and tempo, a gumbo of ideas and inspirations from some of the most creative people in the industry. Michael Brecker and Bobby Keys (whom I’d last seen at Ahmet Ertegun’s Hollywood party) didn’t come in until later in the day, but in the meantime James and I cut the basic track of “Mockingbird” during a single afternoon, and by the time we went home that night, we’d laid down a rough track.

  On the line “Everybody, have you heard…,” James swapped out heard for hoid, showcasing his Muddy Waters genes. He would always sing “Mockingbird” live that way, too, never on the first verse, mind you, where I take the lead, but on his own verse. I took it as James’s way of out-Uncle-Peter-ing me, since Uncle Peter would often incorporate the spirit of New Orleans or Chicago in his delivery by singing notes with a “black” or “jazz” accent. James and I performed “Mockingbird” live a few times, most memorably, maybe, at the No Nukes Concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979, which to me counts as one of James’s most animated performances. When the two of us were onstage together, there was often a healthy, unspoken competition, one that lifted James’s energy level up to mine, which, I should add, was always disastrously high, not on purpose but because of my ever-present anxiety levels.

  When I accompanied James on tour—and I went on at least some part of every one of them until the late seventies, when it didn’t seem fair to drag our small children, Ben and Sally, along with us—“Mockingbird” was always a showstopper. Singing it together, James and I were always flexible, comfortable and sexy in our dancing and patter, eternally loose in our vocal play. James was dry and funny, and whenever I laughed at what he did, and said, it seemed to spur him to even goofier levels of outrageousness. Our two voices would do their call-and-response, dancing, jabbing, flirting, sparring with each other until the moment comes, a minute or so into the song, on the line “I’ll ride with the tide and go with the flow…” when our two voices, hand-holding, land deftly, perfectly on a musical fourth, my grind against his gentle upswing, that note for me, now and forever, James’s and my musical hearth and home.

  * * *

  By 1974, we had completed a new wing on the Vineyard house, plus a few new sunlit terraces, only to begin imagining other, future wings, carports, gardens, and—because I was left with too much idle, swimming-pool-construction time on my hands while James was on tour—a swimming pool. When James came home, the pool was already filled with water, its borders surrounded by dirt, mud, and sand. It was completely audacious of me, and there was no excuse for me not walking James through it beforehand, though I could have sworn I had. (Judging by his response, I hadn’t told him, but there was no way I would have gone ahead with a decision as monumental as that without clearing it with him first.) That was only one of the liberties I took that made him angry. Another was the circle garden I planted a year later. James was not happy about that, either. Both were bourgeois and selfish gestures on my part, utterly at odds with James’s cabin-in-the-woods, no frills, New England sensibility.

  Mick told me once that whenever he wished to increase his emotional distance from me, he would remember the time I’d told him I had a Swiss bank account. The only problem was it wasn’t true. Back in the early seventies, I wouldn’t even have known what a Swiss bank account meant! That doesn’t matter. The point is, Mick was simply saying that I skirted around being “bourgeois,” and therefore the opposite of what he stood for. Which is another way of saying that at least two important male role models of mine, James and Mick, had “labeled” me. Hadn’t Albert Grossman told me I’d be a perfect ten if only I didn’t have money? But the irony of it was that my father had been robbed, though I didn’t know it at the time, nor did I know that there wasn’t much money left in the Simon family coffers. When would this rich-girl image quit dogging me?

  James and I had other head-buttings, too, including conflicting ideas about the best color for the trim on our now-expanded, increasingly fanciful cedar-shingled house. By the mid-seventies, thanks to the forty-five-foot-high hexagonal tower James designed, which rose up four levels, it was a very visible structure. James voted for yellow trim so it would look sunny all the time through the windows
, whereas I wanted an equally optimistic rosy pink color. We worked out our differences of opinion amicably by counting the trim-worthy surfaces and splitting them in half, with each one of us getting an even amount of paint. In the end, half the trim was yellow, the other half pink.

  Both the press and the people who loved us, I knew, imagined our lives on the Vineyard in a glamorous, seaside mist, as a musical Camelot on the edge of the stormy, crashing sea, but our day-to-day life was a lot more pedestrian than that. People sawing and hammering eternally on a house that, it seemed, would never be done, never cross the line of being able to be “lived in.” I cooked almost constantly. I got to be friends with a lot of Vineyard hippie girls, especially Kate, Jeannie, and Brent Taylor, James’s sister and sisters-in-law, with many of us pregnant at the same time, our aprons billowing white jibs over our swelling stomachs. Kate was having a very successful singing career at the same time.

  Mixed in with home and domestic and pre-childbirth matters were the typical worries of two people in a very tough business. James and I would often swap concerns about the state of our careers. One day he would console me, and the next it would be the other way around. This show business stuff, I once wrote in my diary, is for people narcissistic enough to put themselves through hellish reductions for the occasional ego gratification. What’s more, the appetite for more attention, more hits, more publicity, more triumph, simply increases. I added, “It’s good to have James as a mate—so constantly understanding and comprehending of every career situation. He is so fine. I love every hair on him.”

  * * *

  By that November, James and I had moved out of the Murray Hill apartment into a larger place, a four-story brownstone on East Sixty-second Street, between Second and Third Avenues, where we would “live” for the next three years, even though we were spending most of our time in L.A. or the Vineyard. We had the first three stories to ourselves, and we rented out the top floor. New homes mean new faces, new carpenters, but James, I remember, was especially husbandly and sympathetic to me, his newly pregnant wife.