Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  I couldn’t tell the story of my family, at least not yet. It was too sensitive, and too soon, and my mother was still very much in the land of the living. I came back with another idea, a story about a bear whose daughter wants to be a dancer. A children’s book with, I hoped, an irresistible appeal. A book about how a daughter turns unwittingly into her own mother would be both universal and (I thought) sweet at the same time. You can’t go wrong with bears! Bears almost never lose! The story had more detail than that—though honestly, not a whole lot—and soon enough my talented illustrator and artist friend, Margot Datz, and I met up in New York at Jackie’s office at Doubleday.

  As other people have noted through the years, Jackie’s office was extremely modest and filled with nothing but her charm and her books. A few months later, we met there again to go over the formal agreement for our book, which now had the title Amy the Dancing Bear. In an effort to be businesslike, Jackie said, “Do you have a lawyer you’d like to talk to about a contract?”

  I’d considered this dreary possibility, but finally I said, when we were alone, “Why don’t we do it ourselves? We could draw up something simple—just us—and not terrify ourselves with the amounts of paper we would have to stay up nights worrying about.” By that point, I was already willing to give her everything. I was at some place of consciousness where it mattered only what she thought of me, rather than the other way around.

  “Yes, I like that approach, and that means we could get to work on it right away.”

  I said, “What about twenty-five thousand dollars up front, which I can share with Margot?”

  “That sounds very reasonable.” Jackie showed not an ounce of anything but innocence as she went on: “I don’t know any more than you do about the business part, so good, let’s wing it together!”

  “That sounds terrific.” I was nervously pleasing her, though the money we’d just agreed on did seem fair to me. More to the point, I didn’t know what the hell “fair” was, and just wanted to be in the right ballpark. Jackie would know if an amount was reasonable or not.

  Amy the Dancing Bear was a success, which is why it felt quite natural for me to write a second children’s book. After all, over the years I had told enough bedtime stories to my children, Sally and Ben, and they were all stored in my head, awaiting further embellishment: an aunt here, a brother parrot, a snowman from Brazil.

  A year or so later—shortly before our lunch date at Café des Artistes—Jackie and I were on the phone, talking about my follow-up book, The Boy of the Bells, a Christmas story scheduled to be published the following year. The question came up again.

  “What do you think would be a reasonable advance?” Jackie asked me on the phone. “Have you thought about it at all?”

  I, the perennial people pleaser, proposed the same amount I’d come up with the first time.

  “What was that deal?” Jackie asked. She said she couldn’t remember.

  “I got twenty-five thousand dollars up front, and I split it with Margot.”

  An audible breath came through the receiver. After a thoughtful pause, Jackie said, “Oh, Carly…” Another pause. “You got screwed.”

  All of a sudden, I was given a glimpse of another Jackie. I was the one who had made the offer—or had she? When we had agreed on that figure, the two of us weren’t really friends yet. If anything, in that moment I realized how cheaply I had sold myself. In retrospect, Jackie had done the normal thing, protecting the interests of her company. After all, she was also a businesswoman, someone who I later found out traded in her own clothes at Michael’s consignment shop on the Upper East Side and walked away with cash for new ones, and who in exchange for getting the best price on whatever seized her fancy at Tiffany promised to give the salespeople’s business cards to her more international friends. No, unlike her new friend Carly, Jackie was familiar with the concept of worth.

  “Screwed?” Really?

  The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout

  Down came the rain and washed the spider out

  Out came the sun and dried up all the rain

  And the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again

  —“ITSY BITSY SPIDER”

  3

  Mike

  WHY DID JACKIE AND I connect as deeply as we did? I’ve thought about it a lot over the years and tried to analyze it, but I’m left only with theories. We began as acquaintances, fellow islanders with people in common. We then developed a professional relationship that quickly evolved into something more casual. I came to believe that, to Jackie, I represented normalcy, relief, a kind of freedom. Most people, even some of Jackie’s good friends, saw and treated her as separate and impossibly lofty, a person who couldn’t be teased apart from history. Around me, Jackie may have felt more like she could be herself. Just possibly, she found in our friendship the comfort and solace a hostess feels when a high-stakes dinner party is over and she can change back into her unironed housecoat or sloppy jeans. From almost the very beginning, Jackie and I were fortunate to inhabit a bubble of ease, that thing that pulls you in for the long ride. The sense, even, that you and the other person have “been there before.” Where the comfort is automatic.

  We also had a shared ability to let our thoughts dip into the magical. Our imaginations took flight in similar ways. We both loved “The Night Before Christmas” and everything it promised, those nighttime moments when you hold your breath to hear a hoof on the roof, the moment when everything seems possible, and life and its complexities have yet to be revealed. “Wasn’t that what so much of becoming an adult was?” I remember asking Jackie once—the innocence of belief we’re born with slowly getting replaced by the pained recognition that nothing and no one are really as they seem? Was there magic in the world? I believed there was—I knew there was—and Jackie did, too, but to admit that in polite circles put you squarely in the categories of “child” and even “lunatic.” So what?

  Jim, my second husband, had a theory that my being more of a “crazy artist” than any of Jackie’s other friends helped her get closer to her own emotional life. I won’t ever know for sure. I do know that Jackie was, in her own way, very artistic. Her generation was crowded with many women from a certain background who would have no sooner gone into a career in the arts than jumped off a mountain. A life in the arts was too showy, too insecure, too not us, dear, except as it may have played out after a sherry or two in their fantasies at dusk. So, instead, their lives became performance, and they became social performers: fresh flowers on all the tables, paintings hanging on the walls, beautiful wardrobes, a desire for harmony and balance playing out in the day-to-day spectacles of life, at cocktail and dinner parties and after-school events that they—these artists who never called themselves that—orchestrated before dimly appreciative audiences who also never called themselves that. It was only when their children or grandchildren happened on a set of immaculate ink drawings, or a design stenciled on a vest, or closets dark with gypsy dresses and sashes that no one had seen their mother or grandmother wear, that they realized who and what had been pushed aside and kept under wraps.

  If you’re not an artist, at least not in your job title, who or what can help bring out that side of you? I think on some level Jackie savored the incoming and outgoing tides of my life, my nervous system acting out scenarios that became hers, too. But it was always at a remove, like a book borrowed that you never expect to be returned.

  Perhaps Jackie and I were two halves of something similar, mine exaggerated, hers in need of greater encouragement. At the same time, how different she was from me, so refined and horsey and Newport-y. That pillbox hat! Even Chanel went beyond my field of vision. I was droopy earrings and imported Mexican heavy cotton dresses, guitar by my side or piggybacking my shoulders. I could never be as sylphlike and straight-backed, or as cultured, in that European way, as Jackie. My idols in the world of fashion would somehow slyly and slowly converge with Jackie’s until, by the accident of a few movie
s, Audrey Hepburn would bridge the gap.

  Early on, we shared how much we each reminded the other of Audrey Hepburn. For me, Jackie was the Audrey Hepburn of War and Peace and My Fair Lady. For Jackie, I was the Audrey Hepburn of Funny Face. I wore the Funny Face black turtleneck and ballet slippers look, while she was the very incarnation of Audrey’s final persona in My Fair Lady, as perfect as if she were created by Henry Higgins.

  Despite this meeting-up of likenesses and differences, I do know that for the ten years Jackie and I saw each other regularly, in New York and on the Vineyard, if I didn’t call her for a while, I could be sure she would call me. Whether we were at her office at Doubleday, discussing what word should go where, or being in contact during her illness, Jackie was always there for me, just as I was for her. Our conversations were punctuated by her laugh, which would start out high-pitched and light before descending into something full-chested that touched the bottom octaves.

  “You know one of the reasons you’re intriguing?” Jackie said to me early on in our friendship. “It’s because you’re a Thoroughbred.”

  She explained that I was refined, highly tuned, though sometimes a little too edgy for my own good. Of course I was afraid of performing in public, Jackie said; in fact, I shouldn’t perform live, ever! “I’m a workhorse,” Jackie continued. “Big feet. Flat feet. And part Belgian. A cousin of mine used to call me ‘Suffolk.’ I think it was a brand of draft horse he was familiar with.”

  Being someone who was and still is tortured by my own getaway energy, I decided to believe her. At least the edgy part, the wearing of my anxiety like an escutcheon, though very obviously she was exaggerating her role as the foil, the clopping, intrepid horse that could power through any storm with its gaze fixed and its mane lowered.

  “Don’t you wish sometimes you had a little bit more of one thing, and a little bit less of another?” I asked, shifting the stream of the conversation. If a seismologist ever took the time to measure my own emotional graph, I told Jackie, he would see lines and squiggles going up and down at levels so fast and precipitous he couldn’t possibly capture them.

  “Oh, Carly, you have the temperament of an artist. It’s why Mike loves you as much as he does. Because we all know you’re on the edge of falling off the stage, of losing control…”

  From the beginning, Jackie’s and my discussions about working together on a book were peppered with high-school-type gossip about the people we knew. In that category, the most brilliant person in the room—the subject worthiest of interesting, eternal conversation—was Mike Nichols, the actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. Mike, who began his career as one half of Nichols and May, who went on to direct Broadway shows and movies such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, Heartburn, Biloxi Blues, and Working Girl. Mike, who’d won more Emmys, Tonys, and BAFTAs than anyone, not to mention an Academy Award and a National Medal of Arts. Mike was our smartest, wittiest, most brilliant link, the man whose attention and approval we both craved. He was a magician in the way he could arouse and prohibit desire simultaneously. Every time Jackie and I met for lunch, or for tea, or for an ostensible “business meeting,” the subject always turned back to Mike, his dazzlingly present absence connecting the two of us in the same way Mike and I would so often circle back to Jackie.

  We weren’t alone. Almost every woman I met during the 1980s who knew Mike was besotted with him. He was Tiki Zeus—the nickname his wife Diane Sawyer suggested for him during a game a group of us—me, my husband Jim, Diane, Mike, and our kids—played one Thanksgiving at an inn in Vermont. We went around the table trying to answer together the question for each of us, “If our parents hadn’t given us the names they did, what would our ‘real’ names be?” Mine, voted on by the group, was Theodora Dance.

  I’m not exaggerating when I say that Mike was the preliminary conduit to Jackie’s and my friendship. At the time, Jackie had a vision of me as someone “Mike” knew, and who, therefore, was acceptable. What’s more, whenever I talked to either Mike or Jackie, I knew that each of them would milk me for details about the other. If it seemed sometimes that the conversation Jackie and I were having was about to end or stall, our breathing would naturally bend the air half an octave, our conversation jogging ever so slightly before it picked up on its high-octane topic: the mutual fascination that Jackie and Mike had for each other.

  Looking back, I have to believe Jackie was just as uncertain about herself when it came to Mike as I was. Why else would we both keep casting our eyes to him for his approval? It might have been less confusing and more straightforward for Jackie to allow that, yes, Mike loved both of us, so we must both be worthwhile, no? I know this is an oversimplified explanation, but the attention that Jackie bestowed upon me was often hard to separate from the specter of our mutual friend, who compelled and perplexed us in almost equal measure.

  Did we think Mike was afraid of his own artistic soul? Why did he fall in love with the women that he did—his first two wives; Gloria Steinem; his third wife, Annabel Davis-Goff; then Diane Sawyer? Diane was a breathtaking presence and one whose intimacy I sought. She was brilliant and dazzling. Still, I never felt as close to her as I wanted to, and could never bring her and Jackie together. What abiding effect did Mike’s alopecia since age four, resulting in baldness, have on his need to succeed in high society and the worlds of celebrities with houses on warmer islands, the colorful places that build the nightlife pages of Vogue and Town & Country? Did it have something to do with Diane? (Jackie thought maybe it did, though Mike explained away Jackie’s bristling tension around Diane as “a younger woman thing.” After all, at the time Mike and Diane were married, Jackie was close to sixty, and Diane wasn’t yet forty-five.)

  I could relate to all this intrigue, and still feel out of danger. I was just a foil, a minor player, there to move the plot along, though whenever I told Mike bits and pieces of the conversations I’d had with Jackie, he ate them up like a rich dessert. This reflects badly on me, I wrote in my diary, having to tell [Mike] but mostly not keeping the confidence of one of the most impressive women in history. It was an ongoing problem for me where Mike was concerned: seducing him with information, always fearing he’d see me as dumb or confused, then berating and hating myself for engaging in such a low form of entertainment. Mike had a taste and an eye for the amusing out-of-character things our friends did and once pointed out that he’d bumped into Jackie on the street and she was chewing gum. As the two of them chatted, Jackie didn’t stop the motion of her jaw, or bother to tuck her gum behind her teeth. She kept chewing. I wondered: Was gum-chewing a kind of épée-thrust on Jackie’s part, a reminder that somewhere in her heart there lurked a tough and fearless street kid?

  The president of my record company said to me once: “I wish you wouldn’t hang out with Mike and Jackie and Diane so much. You need to hang out with musicians and lose the image of being so exclusive.” I suppose he was jealous, too. Who would imagine, if they were thinking clearly, that Jackie Kennedy Onassis lacked soul? That Mike Nichols or Diane Sawyer or Jim Hart or Mike’s collaborator Elaine May or others I hung with lacked soul? Please. Was he suggesting that his new collection of hit makers were the only ones with “soul”? And how did he know who I was hanging out with, anyway?

  * * *

  MIKE AND I HAD MET for the first time on Main Street in Vineyard Haven, in front of Leslie’s Pharmacy. He was visiting Lillian Hellman for the weekend. Lillian introduced the two of us, and in the same breath told us that Mike’s and my children were going to marry one another someday. At the time, Mike was married to the Irish writer Annabel Davis-Goff, and had two beguiling, out-of-the-ordinary children, Max and Jenny, who were exactly—almost to the day—the same ages as my children, Sally and Ben. A few months later, I would sit next to Mike at Susanna Styron’s wedding, and we would stand together the next summer at Lillian’s funeral.

  For the next ten years, as our partners came and went, the Nicho
lses and I were an extended family, spending all our holidays together. Before they married, Mike and Diane stayed in my guest cottage when their house just down the road was being renovated into a showplace even more spectacular than it was when the actress Katharine Cornell had lived there in the 1940s and ’50s. In my own Forrest Gump–like life, my parents had taken me to visit that very same house in 1952, when I was a child, to pay a visit to Ms. Cornell.

  Mike’s and my friendship grew, becoming creative in 1985 when he asked me to work on the film version of Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Working on that film was a labor of immense love and appreciation—it was difficult to imagine anything better—even though the movie was based on Nora’s book, a pretty liberal depiction of the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, whom I also knew quite well. Told from Nora’s point of view, the book and film are both somewhat unsparing of Carl, other than Jack Nicholson being a great choice to convey Carl’s charm and intellect.

  Once, during lunch at the now-defunct Mortimer’s on the Upper East Side, I filled Jackie in on the backstory. “Mike and Carl met for lunch at the Russian Tea Room, and Mike told Carl he was planning on directing the movie version. Carl felt terribly betrayed, but I guess Mike told him that ‘art was art’—only a lot more cleverly and eloquently than that, I’ll bet. Anyhow, on the way out to the street, the two of them had a physical altercation of some kind in the revolving doors. I always pictured them getting caught in the same position, face-to-face, unable to move. Air running out. No running water!”