Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  I told Jackie that night that I hadn’t been able to reach Jim and that I firmly suspected that he was with someone named Joanne (I wasn’t ready to reveal that I really meant “Joe”). I’d read some telephone message from a broken-into trouser pocket. I did that. I’m so bad. I did that. I told the group in the next general meeting. They were ready to bludgeon Jim. They gripped their seats. I didn’t even exaggerate. I was furious. They didn’t have to be persuaded. I had let the idea that Jim might be gay enter my brain quite often—but then would rationalize it away, until it had the importance of a side dish I wasn’t going to eat anyway. Lima beans, maybe.

  This grew, this Seventy-eighth Street singing rehab group, for the next few days, and it was sincerely the most fun and the loosest of singing I had been part of in ages. Before I left, I made lots of promises that I never kept, and I still consider my lack of carrying through as a lost opportunity. I really should have, would have, could have carried through.

  Jackie said:

  “Carly, you have to write it. As a book or a TV show.” And then unexpectedly, reflecting the dark side of her humor that I adored, she quipped: “Perhaps you would play the chain-smoker who killed his mother with a sledgehammer.” I laughed aloud. Jackie’s humor was a joy to me and her enthusiasm buoyed my spirits. But it also filled me with horror that she might expect more from me than I could deliver. The lines between us were not always sharply defined, but one thing she was very clear about was the subject of Jim. She would insist:

  “One thing you have to get clear from your mind is Jim’s mystery life.” I had only just found the “beard” poem. I’d convinced myself that the description was a disguise—meant to throw me off. My interpretation was set in the broader tableau of betrayals. This was after someone on my team robbed me of a large sum of money and my self-esteem had found new depths. How I would continue to be caught up in the mendacious webs of devious people was beyond me.

  Jackie said, “We have to find somebody to handle your money and see that these terrible things don’t happen to you.” I knew she had fought her way through sharks to get what was hers. I, on the other hand, was a deer in the headlights, wide-eyed, waiting for abuse.

  I found the head of the rehab meetings intolerable, and the air quality was getting to my sinuses, and I was being a prima donna and also distrusting Jim. What was he up to? It had been less than ten days, but I wanted out. I said a big dramatic farewell to my friends and called Jim and asked him to pick me up the next morning. Marion, the program’s leader, was lashing out at me, ordering me to stay. They didn’t take any insurance, and I was a fully paying customer. I could get out if I wanted.

  “You don’t realize how serious your problem is.”

  “I don’t dispute you, Marion, I just would rather deal with it in another way.”

  “Well, you little hot shit. You’d leave all these responsible men seeking to get well and you go back to your home and dip into your stash…”

  “Shut up, Marion. I don’t like you.”

  “Now, that’s the voice of yours I’ve been waiting to hear. That’s the real Carly.”

  I went to my room and packed all my docile soft things and was out of there in half an hour. Like a released bird, I ran into Jim’s waiting arms after I was chased by a group of the well-intentioned white-coated men into the elevator.

  “What about our singing group?”

  “What about your promise to yourself?”

  “Are you giving up?”

  “You know you’re only going to go back to your reckless ways.”

  “You can’t help yourself the way we can help you.”

  “What about the baritones?”

  “Get me the fuck out of here,” I said to Jim under my breath.

  I called Jackie from the corner, from what was probably the last coin-operated pay phone in all of New York. I was armed once again with my sharps and I could kill people with my nail file if I wanted. I felt embarrassed, but also free. Had they been right? Was I a danger to myself? I hadn’t had any of my pills for a week and I didn’t notice any symptoms of detox. No shakes or jitters or crawling skin. I did locate all the spots in my apartment where danger lurked. A few old 222s from Canada and some Sinutabs. Sinutabs were an unsung song, one of pleasure and syrupy body motions. The mind slowed down and blurriness replaced overly clear visions of oncoming cars on dark roads.

  Yes, it had been Jackie that I spoke to every single night in rehab. Not Jim. But I couldn’t tell him that. I told him that when it came time to make the call, I was either meditating or rehearsing with my soul-singing group. Why did I feel the need to keep Jackie a secret from Jim? Was it my addict’s behavior? The same impulse that drove me to sneak a chip or a pellet as I savored the secret, delicious aloneness of knowing something others didn’t? Or was it simply because it was Jackie, not Jim, who listened with loving-kindness as I told her about the other patients, their stories, and my fears? She loved that I’d formed that soul band in rehab and asked each night what we were rehearsing.

  “I never got the manuscript you told me you’d sent over,” Jackie mentioned almost casually, referring to the final version of my new children’s book, The Nighttime Chauffeur, along with Margot’s illustrations. Before going into Summer House, I had left the manuscript for Jim to drop off with Jackie’s doorman, or ask a nice bike messenger to pedal it across the park to 1040 Fifth Avenue.

  “I have no idea what happened,” I said, covering. “But I’ll find it and get it right over to you.”

  Jackie was relieved and happy that I was back and she was persistently interested in my experience. “The last time you and I spoke, you had worked up that song—what’s it called, ‘Chapel of Love’?” she said. “Didn’t you sing that at Caroline’s wedding? Oh, Carly, rehab sounds like it was almost fun!”

  “Almost. The jury’s out,” I told her.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH SHE HAD TOLD ME she could well understand how and why I loved Jim, she was still unforgiving about our practical union. The first time I told her I discovered his poem to a bearded lover, she said, “Oh, no, Carly,” as if the contents of the poem proved yet another point she’d been trying to make about him. She told me I should kick him out, which of course I didn’t. Was the issue for her that he had no money? Money could make up for so many questionable details, including the alligator-scrotum-covered barstool seats on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Money could repair and restore almost anything. Should I really be so surprised Jackie believed this, as she was born during the Great Depression to a father who spent much of his life shoveling his way out of debt?

  For my part, I never understood money very well. Once when I was seven or eight, I asked my mother how much money my father made. She said, “Do you know how many quarters are in a dollar?” “Four,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, “now, can you multiply that by one hundred?” It took me a while but I finally said, “Four hundred quarters?” She made it easier for me by reframing the amount as “one hundred dollars.” She showed me a dollar bill, explaining that it was the same as four quarters.

  “Why is it paper and why are the quarters silver?” was my next question, and she said something about how when the numbers get bigger, it’s easier to show the amount on paper. “Imagine carrying four hundred quarters!” She laughed.

  “Is that how much Daddy makes—one hundred dollars? Does he make that in a day, or a month, or a year?”

  “Actually, Daddy has more than ten thousand dollars.”

  “So that’s what … in quarters?”

  “I’d have to do some paperwork to get the answer, but let’s just say that Daddy has plenty of money.”

  “Is that why we have a big house? Two big houses?”

  “Yes, Carly, that is why we are blessed to have most of the things we want.”

  “How much is a million dollars, say, in dog years?”

  “A million dollars is enough to pay for an airplane or a castle or lots of land or
a schoolhouse or lots of cars. Dogs don’t care about those things.”

  This was confounding, confusing, and I could tell my mother was winging it. She didn’t know a whole lot more about money than I did.

  That was all I got from Mommy on the subject for many years.

  Both Jackie and Mike had always been fascinated by my mother. Indeed, Andrea Simon was coined a “German tank” by Mike, who, when he met her for the first time at a gallery opening, was frozen in her presence and afterward told me that my mother was the scariest person he had ever met. Well, I knew she was scary, but what did Mike, of all people, find scary about the dear, diminutive, gray-haired woman with the Katharine Hepburn face and the tiny, twinkling, pale green eyes? Was it all the little stories I’d told him? Like the one about how when Mommy watched a four-minute version of a tape commemorating my twenty years in show business, she said only, “Too much of one person”?

  I remember countering, “I would never get tired of seeing Sally or Ben picking at scabs for an hour, if they wanted me to see it.”

  My mother looked down at her needlepoint. “You’d be surprised. Just wait.”

  Throughout high school, I was given an allowance, starting at ten dollars a week, and it went up by five dollars every year. In return, I did various chores around the house: weeding occasionally, polishing the cars, cleaning the bathtub, babysitting my brother, and tackling assorted other responsibilities my mother thought would help me get through life. My sisters got more than I did, in deference to their ages, Lucy fifteen dollars and Joey at least twenty-five dollars a week.

  By the time I was a senior in high school, my allowance had increased to twenty-five dollars, most of which I spent on petty stuff. Mommy still paid for big-ticket items like dresses, shoes, schoolbooks, and occasionally transportation to New York for shopping; and Daddy’s chauffeur, Junius, took me wherever I wanted to go. But getting an allowance was a way of learning how much the world cost.

  I never asked my female friends whether they got allowances, or how much, intuiting that for whatever the reason, the topic was best kept shrouded in secrecy. Money was something to be modest about in case they got less, or more, than I did. I knew it could cause jealousy or envy or something unfriendly to erupt and damage a friendship.

  When I was in tenth grade, I remember asking my uncle Peter how much money my father made. Uncle Peter took a long pause and answered: “As much as the man in the moon wants to pay him.”

  “No! Be serious! How much does he make in a year?”

  “I really don’t know, but it’s more than the copper beech tree makes. It’s more than John Luckshow, the caretaker, makes, but it’s not as much as Porgy and Bess [our two Labrador retrievers] make in a year.”

  I knew of course that he was still making jokes, and more jokes.

  “Carl-pot [Uncle Peter’s nickname for me, unless it was Carlsbad the Cavernous One], I just don’t know. It probably changes every year. Sometimes it’s a hundred and fifty dollars and sometimes it’s ten thousand dollars.”

  “Why do we have such a big house? Is it because he’s famous?”

  “No—it has to do with the cats. If the cats catch the mice, it can be a big year.”

  I knew I had to stop talking, quit asking. I would never be able to find out the answer; I’d have to figure it out from life lessons. The truth was that no one really knew unless you were Leon Shimkin, the accountant at Simon and Schuster who first handled the money, then became a partner, and finally kicked my father out of the company he founded, all the while helping himself not only to my father’s cash supply but also to the pride of his life.

  When my father died, in 1960, it was the beginning of one of my Numb Times, a time when I went inside myself, becoming less and less sure of how I felt. After his death, there was naturally a great deal of sadness, though whose sadness it was I could never be sure. Not my mother’s, who I sometimes felt wished that Daddy would die, and whose affair with my brother’s tutor had, by then, been going on for eight years. My sisters Lucy and Joey were bereft, though Lucy directed much of her sadness into anger at my mother and her behavior toward our father. As for me, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make contact with any pain. My relationship with Daddy had always been remote, had always made me feel so insignificant, and early on I’d stopped trying to win his love.

  When he died, the mystery around the money he made deepened. No one ever told me what was in his will. Later, I found out that he had left behind enough money to support his family with—compared to most people—a great deal of ease.

  There were two trusts, A and B, containing just under a million dollars apiece. The interest from trust A went to my mother, and the interest from trust B was divided four ways, between me, my sisters, Joey and Lucy, and my brother, Peter. My share came to around $750 a month, and in the sixties and early seventies, that was more than enough money to cover my rent, especially since I lived for a time with my older sister Joey, and she and I pooled our monthly expenses. I continued to receive my share until 1974, when I was cut out of the monthly stipend. I’m not sure who made that decision, but as a result of my marriage to James, and the fact that I was making quite a bit of money at the time from record sales (I had had three hit albums by that point), I was asked to put my monthly income from Daddy’s trust back into the pie, which would then be divided among my siblings.

  It made sense, I understood completely—Joey and Peter could benefit more from the extra money, and it would have been a crude and stingy thing for me to refuse—but in some illogical, emotional, deeply rooted way, my feelings were terribly hurt. Never having felt like the apple of my father’s eye, or even the lychee, I ended up feeling like I belonged even less to my family: the bad seed, ugly duckling, interloper.

  I also knew what was coming: I would be removed in part from my mother’s will. It was one of the deeper cuts of my life, deeper than what felt reasonable. I already felt guilty about my success.

  A month before my mother died, in 1994, I was sitting in the library of her house when her lawyer said he had an important issue he would like to discuss. It seemed that despite my willingness to forgo my share of the trust income after my marriage to James, my mother’s will stated I would inherit whatever income I would have received from 1974 to 1994, around $100,000. It was a gesture, the lawyer said, a rather obsequious interpretation. Was it one my mother really “meant” but one she would also prefer I didn’t accept? Huh? What did that mean? My mother left me that money in writing, but never meant it? It was a joke all along? Whose idea was this? Did Mother really will me nothing?

  However much it hurt, we were all children of privilege, and I knew no one was going to go away ravaged by poverty. It was, as Jake would say, a problem of the rich. Rich people were sometimes the worst, outdoing each other at every million-dollar turn. I wouldn’t be affected, I told myself. Yet no matter how relieved I was by the bottom line of my checking account, the slight might as well have been the extra hotdog Mommy gave Joey rather than me; the boy who liked Lucy and not me; the father who didn’t think I was pretty. I felt nothing but sad, furious, and suspicious. At the same time, as they rationalized our mother’s request, they put their arms around me and told me they loved me and they’d never hurt me. I’m pretty sure if I’d been in their place I would have acted as they did. In fact, we came through it because we could see ourselves in each other and had to forgive the humanness that created the greed and, in my case, the inability to overcome the power of the past. They are so much my blood and I theirs. Each of them is every bit as talented as I am, and it’s only timing and luck that brought me out in front of a public audience in a more visible way. I point out to my siblings often enough that there are no divorces in their families, and they have more stable nervous systems. But the currency that twisted itself into occasional bitterness was wealth and fame. I have always wondered if guilt over my variable success wasn’t part of why I shied away from going on stage. I felt broken, and torn
from my family.

  Maybe it was into that very tender breach that Jackie stepped.

  We have no secrets

  We tell each other everything

  About the lovers in our past

  And why they didn’t last

  —“WE HAVE NO SECRETS”

  8

  Fairy Princess in a Spin Cycle

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS OF 1988 when Jackie asked me if I had heard Never Die Young, James’s most recent album. I answered her honestly, that no, I hadn’t listened to it, with the exception of the title song, and that I would have to be alone in my car with no one else around in order to do so. “I told you I would listen to it and, well, Carly, it’s so interesting, you know I just really paid attention to that first song. I read the lyrics and I thought very hard about it…” Jackie let this thought go. “What does it mean to you? What I mean is, what does hearing your husband, who is no longer … here, you know, no longer in your life … what does it make you feel?”

  Oh, it was so tender (“sweet,” as Jackie would say). I wondered if she had said the word “dead” to herself before editing it and going for the euphemism instead. No longer in your life. I thought of the thousands of times we, the people in this country, and on this planet, have heard the voice of JFK being electronically recalled. I wanted to say something but got stuck. Jackie picked up the thread and, as she so often did, switched to a third person, impersonal way of speaking.

  “I think…”—Jackie spoke very slowly—“one is always on guard … I mean, you don’t know when you go into a grocery store, if you’ll hear that song. And you must think…” And then, as she often did, she became hesitant, aphasic. She would almost complete her sentence and, unable to find or decide on the word, begin a new one. “You would think … those words about ‘circle around the sun’ … I know that you used to sing that song, also, and then the poooo-etry”—Jackie elongated the word—“in that line that describes the two of you … ‘They’re a little too sweet, they’re a little too tight … not enough tough…’”