by Carly Simon
* * *
WHAT’S PLAYING on the East Side? What’s playing on the West Side? Uptown? Downtown? What’s playing at the Roxy? Whenever we both happened to be in New York at the same time, Jackie and I made plans to go to the movies. In those days, if you didn’t have a newspaper handy, you called 777-Film to find out what was playing and where and at what time, and that’s how I stumbled into a little inconvenient web of cross-purposes.
I’ll tell you what was playing uptown, downtown, and at the Roxy: JFK. It was early in 1992, a few months after the release of Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded unpacking of the Kennedy assassination, and the movie was still playing at various theaters. How could we stay as far away as possible from a JFK sighting, from seeing even a poster, the one with Kevin Costner glaring through an American flag wearing his horn-rimmed glasses? The human eye would always seek out the much smaller photo at the top of the poster, of the motorcade, the chaotic aftermath. Maybe, just maybe, the eye could redirect the moment, make things work, subvert destiny. The eye can somehow keep the shots from ringing out, and have the happy, beautiful couple return to Washington after a day at the races in Dallas, Texas.
And what about the previews? Scarier, even, would be a minute-long trailer for JFK inserted before the feature-length film we’d gone to see. That one minute could end up destroying the entire afternoon.
“You pick out the movie,” Jackie had said, “and I’ll meet you there.”
I did so much homework, did so much to head off any possible encounter with JFK. I amused myself by imagining my extremely serious CEO voice demanding to speak immediately to the owner of the Sony cinema complex at Lincoln Square, telling him I needed “highly important and classified information.” Well, from all the intelligence I was able to extract, I learned that Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, was the only movie in town that wasn’t surrounded by other theaters that might have been playing JFK and that was playing at a time that was good for both of us. When I called her back, Jackie was happy with the choice, and she and I had a quick Warren Beatty moment, since he had been a mutual acquaintance. We also talked about Annette Bening, and how interesting a person she must be. I gave Jackie the address, Second Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street, and she seemed satisfied with the arrangement.
Jackie and I usually met up at the movies in the same way. When she arrived before me, I would find her inside the movie theater by going to the ladies’ room, where she would be waiting in one of the stalls. That afternoon, at the 4 p.m. showing of Bugsy, was no different. Her Gucci loafers were poking out from beneath a stall. I hummed a bar of a familiar song, in this case “How High the Moon,” which was the signal for all clear.
Jackie emerged. “I almost thought the woman who came in a minute ago was you, and I … it wouldn’t have been the worst thing, but … well, shall we go in? Oh, Carly, I see you got popcorn … what fun!”
We took an elevator and arrived at theater number two, finding nothing to fly in the face of a happy Thursday afternoon spent seeing Bugsy with your girlfriend. The theater was mostly empty, with maybe twenty other people distributed like arbitrary commas in the semidarkness. We took off our coats and put them on the seat next to us. Even though I had averted a major faux pas, I still felt terribly ill at ease.
There hung between us a palpable silence, and for some reason I couldn’t allow it. Maybe it was only three seconds, or not even two, but the silence whipped at me like some sudden freak storm. I turned to her, this friend, this woman whose burden it was to be poised, and whose responsibility it was to set an example for the rest of us.
“So,” I said, “have you seen JFK? I mean the movie. I mean the Oliver Stone movie. I mean the one that’s just out now?”
“Oh no, Carly, no. No, no.” Jackie reacted as if she had been attacked. “It’s so awful. No.”
I continued my crash into the reef of self-destruction. “I didn’t even mean to say that,” I said. “I just…”
“No, Carly, NO.” She slumped backward into her seat.
That was the end of the conversation about anything and everything JFK. I was dead. I couldn’t live past this moment. Rewind! Oh, please, rewind!
I started to cry, and I was fortunate to be able to hide it behind the opening music of Bugsy, which had just started up. I sat there motionless, shocked silly. “I’m so sorry, Jackie,” I whispered.
From my diary on that day: What sort of brain derangement sent such a signal to my wayward tongue?
I could hardly concentrate on Bugsy. All the while I was thinking: I have to be so careful … She is so much more fragile than we all think. Every time a shot sounded on the screen—and the film was plenty violent—she reacted physically, dramatically, her body mimicking the victim. All I wanted to do was protect her, put my arms around her.
* * *
I WAS REMINDED that day of the story of Mr. Nose, which is really a story about where a person’s best intentions can land. Mr. Nose, as he came to be known forever by my family after this fateful evening, was the unsuspecting man with a prominent nose which we—my sisters and I—were told by our parents not to call attention to one night when Lucy was five or six and I was even younger. He was one of my father’s erudite authors, and when he showed up, it was true: his nose was not charming, but it was also way too long to not notice. That night, I watched it happen. When our father introduced the man to us, Lucy held out her hand and said in her most beguiling voice, “How do you do, Mr. Nose?”
Daddy very quickly led him away from us kids, and I have no idea what happened after that, but the story of Mr. Nose does get a lot of play in the family folklore, an old standby that gets repeated frequently at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Nothing could have been a purer repeat of the essence of the Mr. Nose story than what happened to me at Bugsy.
When the movie ended, Jackie gave me a lift home in her Communicar. Again and again I thought to apologize once more, but I also knew it couldn’t be done. I knew only that I would never bring that subject up again. So many subjects to be avoided. It was the reason why it was so hard to be as close to her as I wanted to be. When I got back to my apartment, I wrote Jackie a long letter, telling her about Mr. Nose, and sent it to her office by messenger the next day. She called me directly after getting it. “Carly,” she said, “no one else would ever have been so upset or as sensitive as you were. I completely understand. I love Mr. Nose”—she laughed—“and someday you should write a children’s book about him.” She laughed again, and reassured me again, as a good mother would have. I still couldn’t get over how I had transgressed, even though it may have been more traumatic for me than it was for her.
Part of my relationship with Jackie was trying to stay out of harm’s way. I suffered from a terrible stutter as a child. And while learning to sing helped keep it in check, it is an affliction I carried into adulthood. Thinking before you speak, that natural pause, turns out to be a creature comfort that a stutterer can’t always afford. It’s complicated, because it has everything to do with being afraid that if I don’t say something immediately, I’ll begin anticipating what I’m going to say and therefore induce my stutter. My stutter certainly casts a long shadow. Is it mechanical? Do I have certain neural connections that are shorter and stubbier than most people’s?
I’ve thought many times about that night at the movie theater where I watched as my foot landed in my mouth. I knew it was—it must have been—important for Jackie to keep the luster of Camelot alive, at least the version of it she later reported to Arthur Schlesinger. For her own sake. For her children’s sake. For the sake of her religion. If it was true that she had convinced Joseph Kennedy, the family patriarch, to persuade his son that she, Jackie, would make the perfect presidential wife, then Jackie had allowed her life and her heritage to be stamped in eternity with that light.
JFK, as well as all the other crass pop culture productions intent on dissecting and distorting her life, must have been terribly disorienting. After B
obby Kennedy was killed, almost nothing could be kept in its respectable place anymore. Perhaps the perfect diversion for her, as it was for more than a few women I’ve known well, was to abandon some relationship to the “spiritual” and veer 1,000 percent toward the material. To feel comfortable. To feel free to spend as much money as will force all the unbearable pain down to a level you can deal with. Not to give a damn anymore what anyone else thinks or says. It was an issue of sheer survival. On some level Jackie knew that I understood this, which is why, as time went on, it seemed like she felt freer and freer to talk about her past, even if only in little glimpses.
Once Jackie told me, “It will take many generations to arrive at the kind of equality—if it ever comes—that undoes the idea that women are the smaller, weaker of the sexes, and that women have to rule with a craftiness their mates must know nothing about. The woman is clever and circuitous, isn’t she? A man is straightforward and stupid. The hairy ape.”
I couldn’t help but think of Ari and wonder if she was in some sly way referring to him.
From my second- and thirdhand knowledge, Ari always seemed like a sybaritic and slothful rogue—yet Jackie had also described him as a devastatingly attractive man, who used to sing Argentinian songs to her. I knew about his secret oil fields, his smashing of plates around other wives and lovers, knew about the unsubstantiated rumors that he’d had Bobby Kennedy killed. It was all too rich for me and, I suspect, infinitely so for Jackie. She had to protect herself by putting on a new set of blinders. But I knew this much: I would not have let Jackie marry Ari if I had known her at the time. I would have done something to disrupt their courtship. Oh, of course I wouldn’t have! Who am I kidding? And, of course, Jackie would have softened under the magnetism of Ari’s gaze, and the sheer comfort of the life raft he threw out into the seas, which she so expertly reached out to and caught.
I also remember Jackie telling me that Ari was fierce, filled with illusions of supremacy. But when Ari’s son, Alexander, died at the age of twenty-four from injuries suffered in a plane crash, he became convinced he was being punished for his hubris. His guilt closed in on him. It was like the fall of the house of Atreus in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Glimpsing his own mortality, he realized he needed to become even richer, even more powerful, to combat the prospect of death. Thankfully, Jackie didn’t live to know that her son would die in the same way as Ari’s.
“One is overwhelmed by the necessity to cover up the sentiments that are needed in order to go forward with one’s life. I had to make such a grand left turn so as not to be reminded of my former life,” Jackie explained.
“The life would have to be so completely different,” I offered, “like landing on the surface of a different planet.”
Jackie continued, “I wondered if I went to the trouble of removing signs, newspapers, photographs, mementos … never mind. He wouldn’t have seen it clearly, but the reminders were walking every day with me in the bodies of my children. Their walks, their mannerisms, the memories of their births. First words, skating, riding, greetings, nightmares, Christmases, birthdays … worries that A.O. [this was how Jackie sometimes referred to Ari] could never erase.”
Even if Ari might have been sensitive about spending time with Jackie’s children, taking them for walks around his island, Skorpios, or ushering them up to the helm of the yacht and letting them press a button now and then, I could only imagine Jackie holding back tears. Had her original gratitude toward him for saving her turned to a sour, fierce resentment?
It has been written that his son’s death was the breaking point in Ari’s feelings for Jackie. He was no longer in love with her, and her manners and grace were rendered paltry, even ridiculous. In the face of the rude comments he directed at her, sometimes even in front of guests, Jackie, as a result, spent less time with Ari in Greece. His feeling of abandonment led him to retribution: more public meanness, more allusions to her overspending, and then there were the undisguised, bull-like flirtations with other women—anything to get back at her. No one could hide such strong feelings. They come out. They just do.
Jackie would toss off his behavior with cool aplomb. Still, when Ari initiated divorce proceedings, he continued to want to protect her. In effect he told his lawyer, I love her and I want you to be very fair.
“In the beginning,” I remember Jackie telling me once, “Ari had a way of ‘casting’ one. As if you were in his own private Greek mythology. He saw himself as Odysseus, and I was no one to argue. I was so in need of the kind of protection he was offering. I wanted it for Caroline and John. That’s what a woman innately knows—she has to protect her children in any and every way, no matter how far away from your innate self you have to go. I fell for that wide net he cast.”
Jackie seemed untouched by Ari’s crude indiscretions—his blatant and tasteless womanizing—and she was similarly unbothered by Jack’s. She had brought up the subject of Jack’s mistresses from time to time with no apparent discomfort or distress. Almost a year earlier, in 1991, she talked about it. In a cheerful but resigned way, she told me that of course she knew about them—she just didn’t mind their presence as much as she might have because she knew he loved her more, much more, than any of his dalliances.
Wait, I remember thinking, hearing about all the mistresses, you had to pretend to be blasé? To pretend one was simply used to this in men, because, in Jackie’s case, of one’s famously handsome and lecherous father? It was Black Jack Bouvier, a poached and distressed drunk, who seemed to have given her the overall license to accept this particular masculine trait. Her father was almost proud of the many women he left in his charming but deadly wake. At least in front of me, Jackie never gave up that half measure of rationalizing the worst, the thing that her Thoroughbred horse friend—me—wouldn’t have been able to contain. “I did so terribly much want Jack to be happy,” she said once, “and then I couldn’t divide myself into the two women I had to be, or had to act as if I were.”
She told me never to let anyone know how much things hurt. Mike clearly agreed with this philosophy, reminding me to “keep all the cards close to your chest.” I can’t say that I was able to follow through as much as I would have liked. I was too attached to the myth that I was “living out my destiny—alone.”
Whatever her reasons for marrying Ari, I do know this much: When Ari died in Paris, Jackie’s speech before the French press was formal, and without a lot of feeling. She went for scripted, memorized words. “He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together, which cannot be forgotten and for which I will be eternally grateful.”
It seemed to me that Jackie was always looking to give her life over to the care of a stronger man. Maurice Tempelsman appeared after Ari, taking charge of her financial life. After all, he was well versed in the language of diamonds—of mines and caves and undercover dealings. Jackie compared him to the other pirates she had known and loved. Maurice was safe and loving. They were good together.
In the end, what did any of this mean? It was difficult enough to understand as it was. But with aphasia and stammering, fear of overstepping, and carefully working around the truth, it was challenging to really characterize what either one of us was saying, or wanted to say, about love and where it had taken us. I give a lot of credit to the opening-up that each of us, in our own ways, was able to do.
Once, after the annual anniversary of JFK’s death had come and gone, along with the surrounding TV and newspaper stories, I screwed up the courage to write her about it:
November 29, 1993
Dear Jackie:
As I now understand, you were to stay in Virginia until Tuesday. A very sensible thing to do considering the media coverage, the endless coverage and pounding beyond reckoning, the merciless going over of the assassination events. I don’t know how you can bear it. I always wonder how it makes you feel. I can only imagine that you have to come to some kind of system
of defense or dissociation that enables you to deal with the reminders. They don’t ask you when you want to be reminded. They just assault you whenever you innocently turn on the television set, or open a magazine hoping for a mild diversion. I’ve thought about this a lot this past week. I of course could avoid saying this to you (another reminder), but then there is something, which is so much there, that is not mentioned. I’m so sorry this has to be an ongoing part of your life, and I just wanted to tell you that I love you and have so much respect for the way you deal with everything. I try to learn from you. In fact, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t try to learn from you. But if you ever want to kick and scream and shout “No Fair” and fall apart for a minute or a year, there we will be, understanding that this is the way a Great Lady does things. What I am trying to say is that you have an enormous range and never fear exercising it. Naturally, I hope you don’t tell me to go to hell for writing you this way!
And soon after,
Dearest Jackie, I am always here for you in any capacity, and I hope you know how dearly I have come to respect your soulfulness. You have more soul than Aretha!
With lots of love, even though this is typed. It may look impersonal, but it’s not!
Carly
At the same time, it was difficult to square that Jackie—the woman from the books, the woman so central to American history and later global intrigue—with the Jackie in her kitchen on the Vineyard, on the receiving end of an affectionate hug from Maurice after he got back from a long walk or bike ride around the Aquinnah hills. Or the Jackie I once saw diving off the side of Maurice’s yacht in her white bathing cap, not at all embarrassed or self-conscious about her exposed flesh. Or the Jackie who did yoga every day on the beach in the summer, and who could, according to our mutual friend Joe Armstrong, who once came upon her during a morning stroll, place both her legs behind her neck. Or the Jackie who, in between yoga stretches, was a girlishly effusive bummer of cigarettes. Or the Jackie I remember from the night I shot a music video for one of my songs, “Better Not Tell Her,” from my album Have You Seen Me Lately?, on the beach in front of her Aquinnah house. (It was Jackie’s idea, she who was always suggesting I bring whatever proceedings I had up my sleeve—lunches, get-togethers, musical events—over to her house.) I’d hired Latin dancers to perform alongside the song’s Spanish guitar solo. The night was cool and misty; the only sound, the light crashing of the nearby waves. At one point, Jackie and Maurice drifted down from the house, draped in blankets. Jackie had brought along a thermos of hot chocolate, and I remember how badly she felt that she hadn’t made enough for all the dancers.
