Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  “When love is required, can there still be lust?”

  “How long can it maintain its name: LOVE?”

  “If you have to think about it and try to give it a name, is it already in a category that is unlikely to be love?”

  We weren’t exactly Thomas Merton or Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine, but we were trying. Trying, as most people do, to pin it down. I remember that day, talking. We were so consumed. So happy to be in each other’s company, trying to figure things out. I thought of the story she had told me once of her father, Black Jack, running around the reservoir in a black rubber wet suit. We laughed. She told me about the scent and softness of the fur coat that Janet, her mother, wore as she leaned over “little Jacqueline’s” bed before going out for a glamorous evening. It was a vivid memory. She told me that JFK’s favorite song was “Greensleeves.” That grandfather Bouvier, a mayor, used to take extremely hot baths followed by freezing ones. That there was tremendous fear of poverty in the family. Jackie was born three months before the 1929 stock market crash.

  We talked about James and the stubborn repetition of his rebuffing me. It was as if once he’d arranged his attitude, he was damned if he wasn’t going to live up to it. Rejecting me. It had to have made Sally and Ben very conflicted about how to feel, not only about their parents but also about themselves.

  “How would I get over this?”

  “Would he be able to soften?”

  “More tea, please!”

  “Yes, a little sweetener.”

  “I mean,” and I kept underlining my point, “how is it that James, who is so brilliant, doesn’t know that the more you push someone away, the more opposing force happens, the more attack and passion it has? The yang makes the yin retreat. However, when the yang makes the yin retreat, if the yang goes too far (ha ha ha), it makes the yin go yang!”

  Jackie took a minute to unravel my Dr. Seuss–like sentence and make a sound that was more giggle than laugh but also more breathy and more trebly than bass-y or guttural.

  “I certainly believe I know what you mean.”

  I continued:

  “I remember the first time I felt as if I was a germ to him. At first he was still uncertain how to respond to me and didn’t quite know how to behave, but then Kathryn [Walker, actress and James’s second wife] showed him the way. Kathryn made him scared. He followed her whims; he was such a good boy. He never wanted to visibly disobey. I’m sure it was the beginning of a buildup of fury that turned into rebellion against her in the end. She was so threatened by his past life that he had to work overtime allaying her fears, principal among which was his relationship to me and Sally and Ben, not to mention his entire life on Martha’s Vineyard. His detachment has been an ongoing misery for all of us.”

  Jackie was appalled, but her reaction was muted. After all, she’d been hit about as hard as one could be and come out alive. And then there was Ari.

  She told me about how Ari made excuses when he began to see Maria Callas in secret. He’d say he had to go to England for a conference of his tanker builders. She smiled broadly, and three syllables of laughter later had conveyed that he wore a lot of cologne when he was leaving to go see Ms. Callas. As if it would last a “stinky ride” on his plane for six hours.

  “If she was going to meet him at the airport, I mean, he could’ve reapplied it. I think he wanted me to know I wasn’t everything to him. He didn’t want to leave me completely—not entirely, in case I turned into the ideal mate he hoped he’d married.”

  Jackie told me then about the period of her life when she was her most vulnerable, when, for the sake of her children, she had decided to take refuge (if only it had turned out to be that!) with Ari, whose power and wealth seemed, at the time, like they might make life bearable. Or at least possible. Everything was for her sweet children, to keep them safe.

  That evening was a turning point, a new room in the house of our friendship revealed to me, one in which we could roll up the rug and dance, even amid the wreckage of the past.

  I’m the most dangerous person in this room

  The way you look

  I could do some damage to myself

  —“EASY ON THE EYES”

  5

  The Laughing Garden

  SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS to me on Memorial Day. We all know that Memorial Day is a day to honor those who, as Abraham Lincoln said, “gave their lives that the nation might live.” I realize, respect, and am grateful for that, of course. But for me, Memorial Day is also and always a day on which something goes wildly awry. One Memorial Day weekend, a violent and jealous woman threw a bottle of brandy at me, grazing my forehead through the back window of a limousine, when I was making a gun-moll getaway with her husband. Another year, I was visiting my best friend and lyricist, Jake Brackman, standing a foot away from his kitchen stove, when a bolt of lightning came in through the window and burnt a perfectly round hole in Jake’s copper teakettle. Dramas like these never occurred on Abe Lincoln’s birthday or on Arbor Day.

  The Saturday before this particular Memorial Day weekend, in 1986, once again I was visiting Jake, who lives about an hour and a half outside Manhattan, in Hudson. I took the train from Grand Central Terminal, on the Hudson River line. The route is spectacularly well conceived, winding its way northward with almost continuous views of the Hudson River Valley and the river itself, through Ossining, Peekskill, Garrison, Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, Rhinebeck, Claremont State Park, and finally arriving in Hudson.

  After spending two wonderful days at Jake’s house—a huge, magnificent, fallen-apart mansion with deep, dark wood staircases molded by Calvert Vaux and a kitchen that was in the middle of being noisily renovated—I decided to return early to New York on the Sunday morning train. Jake and I pulled up at the Amtrak station with only a few minutes to spare, and I stood in line behind a very tall man waiting his turn, as I was, to buy a ticket. “Jim!” Jake called out suddenly, in his commanding voice, which in this moment had a slightly ironic, maybe gangster-like tone. And the tall man turned. It was as though they were co-conspirators in a bank robbery, though I later found out they had met only a few times before. Even though it was Memorial Day, there was no blip or click in my brain, no instantaneous recognition or prescience to alert me that I was standing across from the man I would marry.

  “Jim, this is Carly. Carly, this is Jim.”

  Somehow, despite Jake’s unmistakable vowels, and Jim clearly hearing my name, I would find out later that Jim thought I was Linda Ronstadt. I turned toward the ticket counter while the two men caught up, but just then the train arrived. Jake picked up my bag while Jim said his good-byes to the family members who had dropped him off—people whom I would get to know later as his ex-wife, Alannah, and young son, Eamon.

  I boarded, and made my way to the last car, which was empty. Before the train left Hudson, I opened my book and began reading. A moment later, the pneumatic door slid open, and the tall man whom I had just met (was his name Jim?) looked down at me. Had Jim maybe said anything to Jake about me, similar to the “He’s major, major!” that Jake hissed into my ear as he and I said our good-byes?

  “Would you like to sit here?” I said, not entirely sure how hospitable I genuinely felt.

  He would if I didn’t mind. “Train’s a little crowded.” Good, he had a sense of humor. I liked that.

  He positioned his overnight duffel bag on the overhead rack, hoisting my tiny doll’s luggage beside it to make room for his rangy and expansive self. The high reaching of an arm, the slant of a hip, the split seconds of eye contact, Jim’s body settling unselfconsciously into the seat across from mine, my own legs and arms crossing and folding—the exciting awkwardness of two bodies sizing each other up, as if responding to some unseen wind. Then … nothing.

  I didn’t start a conversation. He inspired silence in me. Not the silence I fall into when I’m tired or bored or awed. A new kind. At one point, I looked down at his shoes. They were leather, a relic
from the 1970s, the kind of shoes for sale in arty stores in Cambridge, San Francisco, Boulder. His feet made a pleasing swelling shape against the soft leather edges. I next snuck a peek at his knees. They were elegant and roundly pointed and seemed longer than most, as though the tendons, ligaments, and bones had conspired in unison to prepare their owner for a life of aristocracy. If these knees were to show themselves to full effect to various chirping country maidens, they would require a full schedule and season of polo, kilts, high socks, and Howd’youdooo’s!

  Jim was also extremely well-spoken. Some people have great presentation, others great content. Few mix and match the two as he did.

  I would write in my diary:

  Jim Hart, who I met on the train, told me tough stories, and I revealed some of mine (fewer). I told him as we pulled into Grand Central that he could ask me some questions. We had a little laugh about that.

  A few months later:

  Somewhere during this week, I began falling in love with Jim.

  Soon after that, as I sat on the porch in Menemsha, the up-island fishing town where I had a little cottage that looked out over the site of a concert I was about to perform for HBO, I wrote:

  Jim and I have been in constant contact talking over our possibilities and carefully becoming more intimate with each other over the phone. Jim had a talk with Jake yesterday, and Jake allowed there were quite a few problems Jim would face in loving me but that I was well worth all of them. Jim is so many surprising things, many things in the right amount.

  As an aspiring theologian, Jim had been expelled from a Franciscan seminary due to that tricky vow of celibacy. Now in his thirties, he had a day job selling insurance, but he really wanted to be a writer, a novelist, a poet. His friend William Kennedy, who wrote Ironweed, which had just won the Pulitzer, was acting as a guide and mentor. Jim was now also a recovering alcoholic, and since getting sober had become something of a star sponsor to many members of the recovering younger set in New York. But nothing that I knew of his background foreshadowed what we would face in our marriage. And in the beginning at least Jake was right that, worth it or not, I would be the bearer of problems. Soon after we were married, I was forced to think that one of my biggest problems would be my own snobbery.

  When did I become such an arbiter of my own taste? I wrote in my diary when, newly married, Jim and I had spent a long weekend at a rural “ye olde” New England inn. How did I decide I was better than other people at knowing what good sheets were? What would Jackie do? Call a maid? A doctor? A friend nearby with a mansion? As compensation for my own psychological unease, my bodily comfort had always been of paramount importance to me. I was a careful, hyper-aware stenographer of my smallest pains, trying to pin down any and all unexpected tremors and twitches, sneaking inside myself less like an interested explorer than like a tiny frightened kitten: Why am I feeling so strangely flushed? Was it the dinner that made my stomach hurt? Was there fish shit in the water? Is the barometric pressure making me so spacey? I wondered if Jackie worried about such minute sensory fluctuations as these.

  When exactly had I turned into Howard Hughes? Jim’s and my long weekend at “ye olde” inn was a challenge: How much external stimuli did the two of us need? Could we be alone together for seventy-two hours, minds and bodies existing side by side, without the usual diversions of phones, TVs, and assorted other electrical devices? Weren’t we supposed to love this back-to-nature, roughing-it, long-weekend vacation that, of course, cost me a small fortune? Darn right we were! So why wasn’t I having more fun? Had I forgotten how? Why did I need at least a week to practice depriving myself before entering an actual sensory-deprivation tank?

  Nothing worked for me. The bedsprings didn’t yield evenly, at least not in any of the right places. The curtains wouldn’t close properly. The pillows were lumpy, like floating pockets of fat, evoking what I imagine is stored in the backroom refrigerators of plastic surgeons. For the first time, I noticed how absurdly paranoid I was about the sexual history of the hotel bedspreads and throw pillows that remain on the bows and sterns of beds, unlaundered, for months on end, a sexual guest book signed by countless Debbies, Pauls, Judys, and Scotts. Jackie would have at least stripped the bed and called someone with a starched white apron.

  When Saturday morning came, a scent crept up through the spaces in the floorboards, one that turned into a smell, then an odor. It was rancid bacon grease. It infused our bedroom, coating the bedspread and the ratty curtains and suffusing me with a melancholy made worse by Jim’s indifference, the faint lift in his eyebrows signaling his dawning awareness that he was married to a princess who had uncovered what was surely only the first of many peas beneath her mattress.

  “I can’t stand this smell,” I told Jim, making a joke about my own hothouse-flower sensibilities. In response, Jim basically told me to get over it, the implication being that he and I were going to be smelling rancid bacon grease for years and years and years, at least until death did us part.

  Jim’s unconcern about the smell, his shrugging acceptance of imperfection—burnt coffee, diners with loud voices, kitchen doors that thumped open and shut—upset me maybe more than it should have. Our olfactory organs are completely different, I thought. That bacon smell was confirmation, maybe, of just how bourgeois and spoiled I was. Was I those things, or simply accustomed to high standards around my own comfort in ways Jim wasn’t?

  In the end, maybe, it was all about nature, and how humbly you carried your human self in its presence. New Yorkers regularly sought to domesticate nature and go for glamour. Unspoiled men like Jim found this idea impertinent. Of course, this war was not just between city and country, but female and male, clothed and naked, wood and stone, showy and plain, each party saying to the other, “You just don’t get it,” and both being right.

  The bacon smell receded, but how could it ever be forgotten? Over the next few years, Jim would tell me what a perfectionist I was, what a burden it must be, how it must spill over into all aspects of my life—my surroundings, my looks, my work, my friends (they had to be the smartest, the funniest, the profoundest friends in the world), and, of course, Sally and Ben, who were growing up in their very own category of perfect. I would try to justify my existence by telling him it went hand in hand with being an artist, despite the fact that most of the world’s great artists weren’t what you’d call neat freaks.

  But the differences between Jim and me seemed more minor than all the things I loved about him. He had proposed to me in the fall of 1987, and I said yes. A few days before Christmas we were married on the Vineyard in a small ceremony, our very short honeymoon spent across the sound on Nantucket during a Doctor Zhivago–ish blizzard. By then Jim had already met most of my friends, and he and I became an established couple at New York and Vineyard lunches, dinner parties, and birthday celebrations.

  I could tell that Jim’s presence in my life fascinated Jackie, inspiring both her genuine curiosity and her fierce and growing protectiveness. Once I remember telling Jackie that my mother had instilled in me the belief that it was more thrilling for a woman to save and set free some poor, starving artist than it was to do the conventional thing of marrying a man for security, or status. My mother also, perhaps contradictorily, told me that men preferred “little women,” i.e., women who were physically on the small side, as it brought out their protective instincts. (Unfortunately, I got tall—too tall—very early on in my life.) I think most of the men I got involved with saw me as a mother, someone who wasted no time in giving too much right away, with my wide smile and my body saying, Come in and I will protect you and never let anyone hurt you, don’t mind me if I lose myself along the way.

  Was I at risk of making the same mistake with Jim? We had already come to an unofficial agreement: Jim would quit his job selling insurance and devote himself to writing his novel and being a good stepfather to Sally and Ben, and I would happily support both of us because at the time I could. Naturally, Jackie, and no doubt everybody el
se around me, took eagle-eyed note of this. Jackie in particular worried that maybe I was being taken for a ride. Based on conversations she and I had had, I knew she had an old-fashioned philosophy of love: the man takes care of and supports the woman. Jackie and I also had different ways of thinking about money or, rather, joint marital resources. I was more share-and-share-alike (or maybe, deep down, I felt that a man’s love had to be bought). My feelings on the subject weren’t exactly uncomplicated, but Jackie was adamant: Carly, you will never respect a man who doesn’t take care of you.

  She put it even more bluntly. “You will come to find lots of faults with Jim if he doesn’t get a job pretty soon,” she said at one point, sounding a lot like a mother, though not mine. “How long must you do this to yourself?” My mother was enchanted with the idea of the poor, starving artist, while Jackie preferred them after their commission to paint the official portrait of Charles de Gaulle.

  Here is a diary entry from not long after we got married. Jim and I had had a fight. I was willing to apologize, but here is what I wrote:

  I’m unable to stay still. Making beds, lighting candles, worrying, imagining things, soaking up every last ounce of pain. Checking myself to see if I’m looking all right, attractive enough for your re-entrance. Am I too unhappy? Will I look too anxious? You can only notice or see real knowledge of other people by the little expressions that cross their face when they can’t control them. When they don’t know they’re being noticed. Not the ones they bring to a party. He’ll notice mine. My grimace of disapproval, my mistrust, but more than that, my basic lack of the spine that would hold my back straight and sure if I could control all of these little postures of self-worth. And then … yes. My empathy. I always see your side too. What’s with that?

  You stay away. Maybe on the street, maybe a pizza with the “crowd,” maybe a dark corner with a cigarette and one friend. I need you bouncing fierce, courageous rabid, making my need whole. Pinning me with kissing and losing it like a first date. Like you don’t know the outcome. You can’t wait. Urgent like a tribal ritual, on the front of the beat revealing impatience. Maybe someone in a tent is on their deathbed.