Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  You are the quiet soldier, trained that way, or cold. No dancing tonight. Only coolness of fakery. Forty-nine degrees. Your passion is for something else. How could you anyway have passion for something so barely at a simmer, already cooked and waiting on the stove for hours?

  “Jim is not for you, Carly. He’s got to get a life,” Jackie told me. “He’s handsome and charming and yes, he can talk to Mike and he can be a comfortable best friend in your circle, but if he doesn’t get a job, you’ll end up despising him!”

  Meanwhile, my mother complained about his grammar. “He speaks like a gangster.” I corrected her: “No, Mother, that’s the way they talk in the seminary.”

  Jim believed he didn’t have to exist in the material world, that love could be completely spiritual. I let him believe I agreed with him, when the truth was that I secretly also craved cars and emeralds! For his fortieth birthday, I surprised Jim with a Mazda RX7 convertible. Was I showing him by example what I wanted him to do for me? Whenever Jim brought home a trinket for me—a little thrift-shop cross, for instance—I gave him the most gripping, exhaustive hug possible. Jim, how could you have brought me such a beautiful piece of jewelry? I would say, aware of how over-the-top I sounded. No doubt I would have praised to high heaven a shredded triangle of napkin from the roadside restaurant where Jim had eaten lunch that day.

  “Of course you wanted a car,” Jackie said when I told her how I felt. “A gold thing or two. And you say the poems and the songs were substitutes? No. It doesn’t feel like that to me, Carly. It feels like they are the currency. They are your birthright,” Jackie went on. “Every woman wants to be serenaded, the way James serenaded you once. Jim writes poems for you. It fills that same need.”

  I can’t remember Jackie’s exact words to me over the years about men and women—but I do remember their heart, their meaning, their message. This was the general gist:

  Women are passively persuasive because for centuries we had to depend on men. And of course they have to be men. Especially the short ones! (I can hear her laugh.) The short ones stand up straighter, which only ends up showing you how short they really are! And we—women, that is—think we want to get into a romance with them. We cast them, or they cast themselves, as the great ones, the ones who can rescue women. Rescuing women until they’re blue in the face. Women, in turn, are forced to be the ones who get rescued—that is, if they agree to play that part. And women want to give men what they want—to help them feel like they’re playing their part even more. So you do that—and then you become more like a garden. If you’re strong—and you are strong, Carly—you will want them to be strong. And you will want them to show that strength in different ways.

  Men need to conquer. They’re bred to. Unless you let men be the ones who bring home the food, they will resent you for not letting them play their part. And they will step on you.

  Jackie could hold her face as still as a marble statue for minutes on end. The only break in focus was a very slight movement in one eyebrow. It was always a giveaway of an emotion that practice and technique kept in line. When I didn’t respond to the last part, at least as it related to Jim, the flinch in her brow put an end to the conversation and the subject. Did Jackie feel like she was barking up the wrong tree? At a loss for how to respond, I simply acknowledged her words with a big, ambiguous, up-and-down motion of my head. At the same time, I thought, She’s right. She’s spot-on, even. If I insisted on having illusions about love, illusions that would inevitably end up getting doused by the cold waters of real life, I might as well be married to a pretty funny gardener who tended me, nourished me, and wrote poetry to me—the satisfied, constantly laughing garden.

  No doubt sensing I was vulnerable to getting taken advantage of, Jackie was also very protective of me around my other friends—or rather, the people I liked to think of as my friends. In the early nineties, during the preproduction of Romulus Hunt—a family opera Jake and I wrote together—we hosted a combination reading-and-singing that was not open to the public. It was an intimate event, with the audience gathered in a half circle around the stage. Jackie was there, sitting very close to the stage next to the Irish writer Edna O’Brien. Edna was my favorite writer. I worshipped her talent.

  I first met Edna at a Christmas party Jackie threw in the late 1980s, and we became fast friends. Later, Edna stayed with Jim and me for almost a month in our New York apartment, and I even turned my office into her bedroom. Edna also stayed with us on the Vineyard. Edna especially adored Jim, relating strongly to his childhood (it was one of those Irish-Catholic connection things), and in turn, around Edna, Jim became more confident, and more confidently Irish.

  He was particularly funny around her because Edna was so particularly great an audience for him. Having an ear and a wit, hers is a writerly mind. She listens extremely well and asks a lot of questions, and her writing has always been a Japanese garden of strange, bucolic, wondrous turns. You can tell she is tucking everyone’s words away somewhere, answers that will come out of the mouths of half-real, half-dreamed Irish men and women in novels she will someday write. On the Vineyard, I always remember Edna hard at work, writing things out on a yellow pad, occasionally peering out of another room to ask, “Do you think this word is right?” She could also be extremely seductive. She would sit very close, and place one of her hands on you like a cat paw, while occasionally perhaps unconsciously purring aloud.

  Once Edna threw a party for me in London, and the following night I met her and Sasha, one of her two sons, for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I think Edna was hoping to fix me up with him. When I was married to Jim, it’s funny how many people made a point of trying to fix me up with other men, as if they intuited things about Jim I couldn’t see or understand. Just maybe they spied an opening!

  It seemed as if Edna and I had had a long, intimate familial history, which is why I was so surprised when I got home after the reading of Romulus Hunt and Jackie called. After dispensing with some very flattering oohs and aahs on Jackie’s part, I made the obvious comment that she’d been sitting with Edna. “Yes.” Jackie stopped. In her soft voice, she said, “Carly, Edna is not your friend.” I asked her what she meant, and Jackie told me Edna had made some not-very-nice remarks about the music and libretto.

  What did I do after I spoke to Jackie? I called Edna up the next day. I wasn’t concerned I might get Jackie into trouble; Jackie was untouchable, and Edna would never have dared challenge her. Edna denied everything. She told me she’d loved the show, that it was charming. She assured me she lacked the vocabulary even to describe an opera—that was the issue here, she said, nothing else—and she had no idea how Jackie had even gotten the idea she disliked it.

  It didn’t feel divisive, Jackie telling me this, or competitive. No, it felt specific to Jackie. She was the only person in my life who could ever have said that. I was typically apprehensive about the opera, and no one else who knew me would have wanted to put even a single negative thought in my mind. Jackie had no idea I would turn right around and call Edna, and I never told Jackie I did, either.

  I recollected and then checked on some gorgeous, memorable descriptions Edna had written. Just one of thousands of them, referring to Joyce in her biography of him: “He entered the social order of Ireland as a deliberate vagabond.” Now, that’s my cup of tea. It didn’t occur to me that when Jackie warned me about Edna’s friendship, there might be jealousy around. Maybe Edna thought I had lots of money and wondered, bewildered, how her considerable artistry could be less lucrative than mine had been?

  Of course, I have had many friends with whom I’ve had all-too-human misunderstandings. There have even been periods of time when there’s been a chilling chasm filled with silence and resentment. But the great majority have passed into the good feelings out of which they were born.

  During that same phone conversation, Jackie said, “Do you know who your friends are?”

  We went through the list, person by person. There was her, J
ackie, of course. And Mike. The list went on. At one point, Jackie brought up Jann Wenner’s name. Jackie and Jann had come to know each other when Jackie’s son, John, was launching his political magazine, George, and looking around for editorial wisdom. “Are you friends with Jann Wenner?” Jackie asked. When I told her that I knew him socially, she said, “Well, watch out for Jann Wenner, too.”

  The only thing at the time I could think of was the 1985 film Perfect, with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. Jann and I had both made cameos. Jann, who plays himself in the film—that is to say, the founder and editor in chief of Rolling Stone magazine—and John, who plays a journalist, are eating lunch in a Manhattan restaurant when I come along, recognize John from something terrible he wrote about me, and toss my Bloody Mary at him. I remember Jann kept screwing up a very simple line of dialogue. He got so flustered, he missed it again and again. This went on and on, for five or six takes. Every time Jann messed up his line, John had to wipe Bloody Mary mix off his face and change into a new outfit so we could reshoot the scene.

  Since then I’d run into Jann once on the Vineyard and again at the wedding of mutual friends. Until Jackie said, “Watch out for Jann Wenner,” I had no idea there was any bad—or embarrassed—blood between us. Then again, year after year, I have been overlooked for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Now, I know Jann is not in complete control of who gets inducted, but rumor has it he can be vehement about keeping certain people out. Almost everyone else in my “peer group” is a member. Of course, there may be other obvious omissions, but none, I have to guess, where a Bloody Mary may have been involved!

  Nostalgia you fake, you bitter sweet ache

  The time that you take could make another heart whole

  Could the truth be I won’t really see

  How much I love you

  ’Til it’s over

  —“WE JUST GOT HERE”

  6

  Bring It Back to the Center

  THERE WE WERE THE FOUR OF US (Jim and me and Mike and Diane) having dinner at Mike’s apartment at the Westbury Hotel. Two couples. Carefully prepared food, rich conversation, wit and ease. Mike always making the others at the table feel they can’t go wrong, whether they’re at their cleverest or stumbling worst. The two women at the table—Diane and me—in love with their men, and vice versa. And by “in love” I mean the dynamic, visceral, passionate love that newness enhances and exaggerates. The kind where you can’t believe it, you still can’t believe it. How you ever attracted someone with such immense qualities!

  What’s more, Mike and I were ecstatic with each other’s good fortune in finding such perfect mates. About Jim, Mike said to me, “How can someone look so good and have all those smart things coming out of his mouth the way he does?” In response, I said in my genuinely pleased-beyond-reckoning voice, encouraging immense happiness, “Well, how could anyone have the poise and glamour of Diane, and she’s not missing anything that I can see.”

  Superficially, as I said, it was flawless. It’s astonishing how in polite society, even the kind that pretends complete naturalness and the most casual jousting, people can mask their sexual jealousy. The women (Diane and I) were giving each other so many loving looks and nods, warm glances—the paraphernalia that makes up “the big front.” Neither of us was being insincere. It was just that whatever it was that gave rise to the positive smile, or the appreciative laugh, held also a modicum of pain.

  A woman in that particular phase of her love doesn’t want another woman to be wonderful. I couldn’t help but imagine Jim at some point gazing at Diane, delighting in her beauty, originality, and overall loveliness. Just knowing the threat exists tends to dethrone another woman. At least it does me, I admit it. And those feelings are extremely unacceptable. When another person loudly appreciates a member of the same sex, it’s almost always underscored by a desire to find the flaw, commit it to memory, then clothe this deviant and pathetic envy in praise of sculpted cattiness: She is so beautiful and talented—I just wish I could manage to be so detached!

  In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy touches on the relationship between Ivan Ilyich—“an intelligent, polished, lively, and agreeable man”—and his servant, a peasant boy named Gerasim. Gerasim is the only person in Ilyich’s sphere who shows compassion, authenticity, and no apparent fear of death. Mike and I had both read and dissected the story, but at the time I never anticipated that at some point Mike would begin to project a similar dynamic onto Jim.

  Their friendship was about true, genuine love between a younger man (Jim) who had no material or professional expectations and an older man (Mike) who was surrounded by and weary of people who did. Once Mike and I were talking on the phone and his other phone rang and he said, “Oh, god, I hope it’s going to be a we and not a them.” I hoped that I was in the first category—that I belonged to “we.” Maybe what was gently growing between Jim and Mike, that I believe never blossomed, was their mutual attraction. I was so damn innocent about men, particularly the ones I’d already agreed in my small head were heterosexual. Having complex sexual feelings was within the limits, but my formative (and, it turned out, very narrow) idea about love was from an image in the Golden Book The Happy Family: the pie on the stove, the dog barking, Mommy and Daddy holding hands, the screen door slamming.

  I didn’t think for a moment that there might be a spoken or unspoken hint of sex between the two men. Mike and Diane were as apparently “unswinging” a couple as I’d ever known, and I certainly never had any inkling that Jim would come out a quarter century later as gay. Not bisexual, but really, really preferring men. Without any doubt at all. Over the years, these sublimated shadings would only reveal themselves arduously in strange, strangulated ways.

  Unforgettable is that day in 2004, years into our marriage, when I raced in a beating heart of a car over to Mike and Diane’s house, and blurted out like an insensitive Roseanne Barr, “Jim’s gay!” Mike’s Oscar Wilde–ian response: “Oh, not him, too.” Mike gave me hell for that, and for all that followed my revelation. His front was: “How dare I discuss Jim’s sexuality with anyone, or at least with him?” Diane proved more supportive. She turned out to be so much more than I’d ever imagined in a variety of ways. Sometimes she just needed an opening line.

  * * *

  WHETHER OR NOT THE COMPLEXITIES inherent within our relationship were already there, Jim’s and my marriage didn’t get off to an easy start. Two or three years into things, as Jackie had warned, I was becoming more and more resentful about Jim’s bank account, or rather his lack of one, and also about his hesitance to take responsibility around the house.

  To ask him to participate didn’t seem outlandish: I wanted Jim to pitch in, help out, feed the animals, do the dishes, take out the garbage, buy toothpaste, take part. I felt ungracious for even thinking these thoughts. I told myself that if Jim were helping pay our monthly expenses, maybe I wouldn’t have expected as much on the domestic side. One day I wrote a list entitled What I Need and from Whom. Jim, of course, was first. “For him to get a job,” I wrote. “To contribute financially to our marriage. To initiate more. To provide thoughtful romantic gestures: Gifts. Flowers. ‘Let’s go out to lunch.’ ‘Let me take you to the…’ Let’s. I want him to say Let’s. Beyond basic needs, there’s no ‘let’s.’” Then I would remind myself that Jim’s more accessible qualities—his intelligence and talent, and my respect for both those things, not to mention the need to be near him—were more vital to me than whether or not he put his bowl in the dishwasher or hammered a few nails or brought his sneakers upstairs to the closet.

  Against an ongoing backdrop of money squabbles and silent, mopey resentments, our disagreements were simply ways of distracting ourselves from what was really going on. There was a big fight late that summer when the Rolling Stones brought their Steel Wheels Tour to Shea Stadium. Jackie had told me that John and Caroline wanted badly to go, and almost timidly asked if there was any way I could get tickets and maybe even sneak eve
rybody backstage. Well, I was always happy when Jackie asked me for anything, so of course I would do everything I could to oblige her! Jackie said that John played “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” night and day on his “player.”

  The night of the concert, John, Caroline, Ed, Jim, Ben, the great beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and I piled inside a big, white stretch, and an hour or so later, flashing our backstage passes, flew past the guards and roadies and into the general, all-purpose eating-and-socializing room. I was nervous Mick wouldn’t come out before the Stones took the stage, as I knew how much John wanted to meet him, or so Jackie had hinted. I understood. As a mother, I would have done everything I could to make sure Ben wasn’t shunted aside if he was ever in the presence of one of his idols.

  In the end, Mick made a brief, slinking appearance in the room, and proceeded to make an immediate beeline for John. It was like a summit meeting between two of the world’s most instantly recognizable romantic and sexual magnets. It didn’t last all that long, and I don’t know what they talked about, but when the concert was over, and Jim and I were back at home and getting ready for bed, Jim suddenly lashed out at me.

  “You were obviously flirting with Mick. It was embarrassing, and dumb, and you looked like a groupie. And you made me look like some feckless hanger-on.”

  “I was flirting with Mick? Jim, I didn’t say one word to Mick!”

  “Since when do words count? You didn’t need to use words!”

  “Jim, this is insane. Is this some projection on your part?”