Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  Our argument was maybe less about Mick than what Mick symbolized. My romantic and musical history, for one thing. But also cars that dropped you off at VIP entrances, and backstage passes, and the unnatural closeness to all the illusory goodies and lures that that sort of life holds out, of which not a lot of people get to partake. I was one of those fortunate people, and I regularly reminded myself of just that, especially during some paroxysm of shame or arpeggio of self-hatred or period when my records weren’t selling and I felt like a complete failure. No, compared to most people, I had it awfully good.

  It was two years into my marriage that “Let the River Run,” which I’d written for Mike’s film Working Girl, won a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture. Since I had already won the Golden Globe, I knew that I stood a fighting chance for the Oscar. But instead of excitement or glee, I fell into a very familiar abyss.

  In an effort to deal with my nervous system, my mood swings and depression, for years I’d been taking one tablet after another, one promise after the next of potential relief, escapism, deliverance. These pellets almost never gave me what I wanted: a meaningful, momentary “out,” a lowering or even hushing of all the clatter and volume filling my brain. Nonetheless, for years I’d excused myself and slipped away to the nearest bathroom, as I’d done a few years earlier at Café des Artistes while waiting for Jackie to arrive. I’d unbutton my medicine bag and choose.

  Which one would it be? Did I want a Sinutab sleepiness, a Benadryl spin? Did the answer lie in what a friend had brought me from overseas—Veganin—or did it require a big, stomping intruder like Xanax? Then Prozac came along, a breakthrough to the mainstream. A “cure for depression and anxiety”!

  The first time I took Prozac—a mere chip of a single pill—was in 1989, a week or two before Jim and I embarked on a trip to Florida, a pre-Hollywood vacation, in a rock ’n’ roll bus outfitted with six bunk beds and a reckless, terrifying driver named Boots. I had just spent that wonderful evening sharing Uncle Peter’s music with Jackie. Sally, Ben, their friend Jed, Jake, and Jake’s girlfriend, Lila, came with us, too, through Charleston, South Carolina, where we ate a crab dinner, then on to Savannah, Georgia, where I’d booked us all hotel rooms.

  The answer is that they have yet to invent a pill strong or dexterous enough to offer me a sufficient safety net during the two weeks of torture I experience before boarding an airplane. Once I board a plane, sit, click myself in, and very publicly ingest a Xanax or a Klonopin or a Valium, along with a swig of gin, I’m silly and relaxed (because who wouldn’t be)—but that’s all aboveboard and, as a result, much less interesting to me. For various reasons, my preference was to sneak pills—a sliver of this, a crumble of that—and to be alone with that delicious, underhanded knowing, as if I alone was the keeper of a colossally interesting secret that I wasn’t about to tell anybody.

  The doctor who put me on Prozac advised me to increase the dose slowly. But the more I took, the worse I felt. Much of the time during that trip, in fact, I was wishing life would go away for a bit. By the time we got to Palm Beach, the last stop before we headed back north, my depression was so extreme that I began (doctor’s orders) increasing the Prozac, and a day or two later I was taking a whole pill. In Palm Beach, I remember sitting by myself most of the time drinking piña coladas and reading the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book.” I found it incredibly helpful, as nothing else I’d ever read zeroed in so well on the merciless fixation human beings have on finding something, anything, “outside the self.” Some thing that satisfies the craving for God, for relief, and mercy, and centeredness, and Mother, and Father, and infinity, and safety, and peace—peace that also lasts.

  Jim and I got back to New York with only one day to pack before we had to leave again for L.A. and the Oscars. But what I would have to do to get to the West Coast stood in my path like a rushing river stocked with snapping crocodiles. I thought about doing what I so often do—disappoint. The fear of flying, the fear of such a public event, it just seemed like too much. As long as I was reading the Big Book, I felt sane, but whenever someone tried to talk to me, I tensed up and turned into an actor playing myself. I spent the next twenty-four hours listening to “affirmation” tapes I’d made, including ones I’d even asked Sally and Ben to record. “Mommy, you are big and strong and beautiful, and you deserve this honor of being nominated for such an incredible award. Winning is not necessary. You are great anyway. You are safe.” Imagine being so frightened that you are compelled to ask your barely adolescent children to mother you. I was that desperate. Despite taking a whole Prozac every morning, it felt hard enough just to exist. All I wanted was to sequester myself—to eat nothing, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

  To my surprise and relief, the flight aboard the Fox corporate jet—a Citation, or a Gulfstream—was uneventful, assisted considerably by my travel mates, Mike and Diane, my managers, John and Brian, and, of course, Jim. Diane was especially fun and helpful, and she and I chatted the entire flight.

  Once in L.A., at the Hotel Bel-Air, we were given the most sumptuous suites imaginable. Jim slept in a separate room. He and I decided that for that night sharing the same bed wasn’t necessarily an asset, as I would likely be tossing and turning and trying on different shades of eye shadow. The day before the night of the Oscars was Beauty Day. Harry Winston minions appeared, bearing assorted diamonds for me to choose from. I took a long Hollywood bath, and then had a massage. Along with the Prozac, I swallowed three Percocets (yes, a major drug reserved for the Oscars) and half a Valium, my plan being to delay taking the other half until thirty minutes before the program got under way. I dressed in the pantsuit that my friend Marsia Trinder (who made clothes for Mick and other rock stars) had made especially for me, and spent the next hour applying my own makeup. When anyone else does my makeup, hothouse flower that I am, my face gets bloated and red and feels like swarms of red ants are crawling over and under it.

  The stretch showed up promptly at 4 p.m., and Jim and I, Mike, Diane, Melanie Griffith, and Don Johnson piled in so tightly that our knees collided. When we reached the Shrine Auditorium and the red carpet, I was functioning very much like a robot in the company of other well-programmed robots, funneled into lines in front of microphones. I tried to answer questions like “How do you feel about tonight?” while the crowd screamed out the names of stars as they entered. It was dizzying, but the most interesting thing that took place during one of my answers—“It’s just so unexpected … but of course I’m extremely honored”—was my sneaking the remaining Valium half from my pantsuit pocket and into my mouth while simulating the removal of a stray hair from between my lips, somewhere in between the words “unexpected” and “but of…”

  As we entered the auditorium, I felt both manic and extremely afraid. Shaking, and walking closely behind Jim and John Sykes, my manager, I spotted Max von Sydow in the aisle. Although I had never met him, for sheer diversion’s sake I tapped him on the shoulder. “Max, Max, it’s me, Carly. I just wanted to remind you that in that movie you did with Liv Ullmann, I played the tree.” It killed a couple of minutes, and Max von Sydow was a gentleman who never let on that he thought I might be in my cups, or the pharmacological equivalent. Or maybe he thought, Which tree?

  The award for Best Song was the evening’s first award, and Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines presented it to … me. Of course, it came upon me as a “complete surprise.” I stood up there and gave the credit to others, and was somehow focused and quietly effusive. Especially toward Mike. My God, so many of us owed such a huge debt to Mike for whatever success and glory was handed us—and he, in turn, was so incredibly proud of all of us. I thanked Jim for the contribution he had made to the writing of the song, which was sometimes literal but also spiritual.

  I felt so “out of this world,” I told Jackie afterward, and she went on about how wonderful it was and how proud I must have made Mike. She quipped, “You poor thing.
You must have had to carry that statue around all night, from party to party, wanting to show it off, but instead (knowing you) contorting your whole body to keep it out of sight.”

  After that night, my depression didn’t return for a long time. It may sound unreasonable, transiently hopeful, and fairy-tale-like, but for the first time in a long time I felt no depression whatsoever. Was this testimony to my core hollowness? Was it refutation of the widely agreed-upon belief that happiness is supposed to come from the inside, not the outside? Even when my mother called the Hotel Bel-Air later that night and said, “I’m so proud of you! Look at all those people who deserved it more, but you got it!” her words didn’t knock me off my pedestal or cause me to slump back in the south-facing direction of old agonies. I passed the comment off as her obvious envy, and loved her for it, and wanted to comfort her. And … she was right. I knew that, too. It was a shame I returned more and more to my mother’s way of thinking once that ebullient trophy moment passed into history.

  I was, for a time, attracted to opiates, almost as if I’d internalized James and his craving during the 1970s. My favorites for almost a year were Percocets combined with Quaaludes (half of one, half of the other), which seemed to make me happy, or at least not unhappy. After six months, I began to start spinning and rotating, and they made me dull and lugubrious momentarily, and then once again ashamed. I was drawn toward that flash of a light-filled moment that the character Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, refers to as the “click”—those ten seconds when something in your conscious mind and body opens its doors to the slow quixotic flood of the hypnagogic state, shutting down all fears, twitches, paranoias, and shaky needs for control.

  But a critical component and attraction of my love of pills was privacy, secrecy, no one knowing or ever suspecting a thing. Relishing the aloneness of it all, the danger, the adrenaline. That urge to be bad. The urge to seem like I was there, even though I wasn’t. The battle of opposites, self-destruction in a tug-of-war against the life-surge of self-protection. Yes, I was emulating James in some big, perverse way, but maybe I would have done the same thing without James as a model. The most curious question, and one that still remains, is what was it that lightened my heart and my mind, made me positive and gregarious?

  Was it the Prozac or the Oscar?

  * * *

  THAT YEAR, 1989, was a good one for me, though less good, at least in a material way, for my husband. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, I found myself praying for “some kind of success-in-the-world for Jim.” However, while he received a few letters from publishing people that were complimentary, most stopped a few inches short of jubilant acceptance.

  Whether it had to do with the fate of his book, or Jim not working a real job, or the general state of our marriage, our homes in New York and the Vineyard continued to teem with our silent noons and angry dawns. I asked myself, How could anyone hold his own sharing the drenched tutu that was my life?

  He just doesn’t get it, I would think. My love is eroding swiftly, and nothing is changing. Maybe it’s eroding because nothing is changing. Then, the usual hasty reversal of feelings: Jim and I are both too special to be bringing out the worst in each other. At one point, Jim, who had begun leasing a separate writing and living studio on West Ninety-seventh Street, relocated his office to the tower of our Central Park West apartment, which I had rented from the landlords way back when James and I shared the apartment. It was reachable only by a spooky changing of elevators. I couldn’t help but recall James’s self-exile to that exact same tower—wordless and blank, like the third ghost in A Christmas Carol. Did I do something to make them want or need to remove themselves? And what did their private lives really entail?

  Mixed with my exasperation was my paranoia that Jim was cheating on me. That he’d fallen in love with another woman who, in my imagination, was easier to live with and more deserving of all the things he did have to offer. Someone who didn’t put all this ungodly material pressure on him. My suspicions worsened when Jim began attending a writing workshop at the Sixty-third Street YMCA, where I assumed—because my brain worked that way—that all the other students (female) had fallen in love with him.

  * * *

  I’VE ALWAYS HAD a spy living in my own head, which is maybe why, when I decided to hire a real private eye, I was simply rounding things out! Snake—yes, that was really his name—lived in New Jersey, and a trustworthy friend had given me his contact information. First, though, I called Jackie to tell her about my plan. I was initially hesitant. Not wanting to give it all away, asking myself, “Oh, come on, Carly, what exactly is there to give away?”

  Jackie told me to be careful, and even offered her own private detective if I wanted to make his acquaintance.

  “But Snake sounds so—” What were the words I was looking for? “So … impressively unreliable—so unreal, so like a cartoon of whoever he is! Which is what I think I’m going to want, Jackie. I don’t want to believe anything bad or conclusive about Jim, I want to overrule it!”

  I called my detective. Snake had a New York/Bronx/Brooklyn accent with overtones of somewhere in the hinterlands of Hoodlum City. He asked for five thousand up front, gas in the car, good faith, trench coat (I wished). I sent him ten pictures of Jim. Every angle of his face and his statuesque tall strong body. I never laid eyes on Snake, so this is a pretty fair description of one of our exchanges:

  SNAKE: Well, I see him now. He’s on Fifty-seventh, coming out of a store called Bendel? Yeah, Bendel. Like meddle or maybe kettle. He’s got a shopping bag … yeah, I think it’s a book bag. Maybe a brown paper bag or somethin’.

  ME: Stay with him! (My astute instructions came from my lifetime of experience with TV crime shows.)

  SNAKE: He’s makin’ a turn on Fifty-ninth Street, on Central Park South. Oh, oh, wait! He’s going in a little store with antique kind of like things. Yeah. (Heavy breathing.) Yeah, he’s still in there, looks like he’s making some kind of deal. He’s talkin’ to the proprietor. You know what I mean? Okay. Here he comes. He’s empty-handed.

  I heard an obvious puff on his cigarette, a long inhale and undisguised, equally long exhale.

  ME: You mean he’s left the shopping bag he had coming out of Bendel’s?

  SNAKE: No—he’s got that. He’s walking fast and seems he is getting into a cab. Yup. That’s it—a cab.

  ME: Follow him!

  SNAKE: Okay, they’re headed west across Central Park South, and now he’s just going down Seventh Ave. There they go. Bingo. There’s not too much traffic, they’re speeding. Oh, God. Speeding.

  ME: Speeding? You mean he’s trying to lose you? (I hear strains of a female singer.)

  SNAKE: Well, let’s see … (I start to hear Lena Horne singing over his radio.)

  ME: Snake, could you please turn your radio lower? I can’t hear you.

  SNAKE: Sorry about that. Better? Okay, we are looking at some new decision by the cabdriver and the target. Looks like they are headed uptown. I’ll try and follow. Yup. I still have a yarn on them. A lead. Yup. I got ’em. They’re fighting the Christmas traffic on Amsterdam. Wait, a bus is in the way. Oh, jeez.

  ME: Stay with him. He’s probably going to his apartment on Ninety-seventh Street and Broadway.

  SNAKE: That’s where the two of yez live?

  ME: Complicated. No. Just he lives there. He writes there. Where are they now?

  SNAKE: Wait! They’re going west. Looks like the West Side Highway. Yip. They’re going to the West Side Highway. Bingo!

  ME: The bridge? They’re going to the entrance to the bridge?

  SNAKE: No, but the George Washington Bridge is probably next. Speedin’ up the West. That’s them all right. Bingo!

  ME (thinking): He has an office in New Jersey forty-five minutes up the Palisades, but why is he going there on a Wednesday night with a present from Bendel’s for a woman? My head is swimming with facts, names, times. God damn him. He’s due home in an hour. (Soon there would be cell
phones, but I didn’t have one until 1991.)

  SNAKE: Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I got ’em getting off at the 178th Street entrance to the bridge.

  ME: Good going, Snake! (I can’t believe I’m saying that name.) Keep going. Good going.

  Snake is a little quiet for the next ten seconds.

  SNAKE: Hold on. Jeez, he got on the lower level.

  ME: Yes??

  SNAKE: I think I must be on the upper level. I can’t find him. Oh, I guess I lost ’em.

  ME: You lost him? How? Shit!

  SNAKE: You said it: shit is it! What do you want me to do now?

  I let Snake keep the down payment. For the time being, my angst over Jim and his sly remove went underground. We spent a nice Christmas together, and although there were a few times when I thought I maybe should have taken Jackie up on her security guard, I decided just to allow a lot of hairy nuggets of dust to exist under the rug until I had some definite knowledge.

  Was it the tension and even the bizarreness in Jim’s and my marriage in the early nineties that inspired Jackie to invite me to build a small cabin on her property in Aquinnah? I believed she meant it, too, at least in the moment. Assuming she was just being charming, I let the subject drop, only for Jackie to bring up the idea again a week later, adding that I could stay at Caroline’s and John’s quarters as my prospective cabin was being built. I had never had such a loving invitation. “An artist’s cabin,” she embellished on her fantasy.

  I just adore her so much, I wrote in my diary, and that worship must be gently patted down and kept at bay.

  Fortunately or not, I was distracted from the vicissitudes of my marriage by the social goings-on of the Vineyard in August. I wrote in my diary:

  A party on Saturday at my house with too many heavy-hitters left me prey to my body and head doing loop-de-loops … At the tea party, along with everybody’s children, were Jackie and her dear friend Maurice Tempelsman, Kay Graham, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall; in fact, my mother was there too and most pleased to be so—oh God, it was awful!