Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  My enduring image is of Jackie dancing the tango at my “Moon Party”—as I called it—which at the time I considered one of the high points of my life, at least socially. It was a party I hosted in my barn in the summer of 1992 during a full moon, even though it was pouring lopsided rain over the enormous white tent I’d had installed over the swimming pool, which, that night at least, had a fountain in it serving to blend in with the torrent. Most of the usual suspects were there—the Styrons, the Herseys, the Buchwalds, the Feiffers, the Wallaces, assorted musician friends, as well as the resident support staff of doctors and lawyers whose job it was to keep the island bigwigs in good health and their copyrights from expiring. Jackie came with Maurice. The dress code was “all white,” and guests were invited to sing, or read, or dance anything moon-related. Various Simon and Taylor family members performed, including Sally, doing everything from reciting a self-penned moon-themed poem to singing Van Morrison’s “Moondance.”

  That night, Jackie wore a sleeveless white top over a long full white skirt. Her hair was up in a tight bun and she looked amazingly like photos I’d seen of her father, in all of his Moroccan handsomeness, deep brown tan, wide-set eyes, and gorgeous facial features. Midway through the Moon Party, around the time a few guests began tossing themselves fully clothed into the swimming pool, I spotted Jackie on the dance floor with my close friend Teese Gohl, an amazing Swiss musician and my musical director for twenty years. Teese was teaching Jackie his version of a tango, though Teese told me later he was completely winging it. The two of them, Jackie and Teese, seemed enthralled by the music and by each other. Jackie’s motions were as abrupt and delicate as a castanet. Maurice watched adoringly as her entire broad-shouldered body enfolded within the Spanish music, a lone flag gusting and snapping, eternally beautiful in the rhythms of the night. Known by all and by no one.

  Don’t wake me unless you love me

  It takes too long to fall back to sleep

  Don’t wake me unless you’re a friend of mine

  I’d rather just fall back on my dreams

  —“HAVE YOU SEEN ME LATELY?”

  9

  The Singular Moment

  WITH EVERY PERSON YOU MEET who becomes a loved one, there must be that one brilliant moment. A singular moment when you feel yourself atop a mountain of sequences, one in turn compiled of a thousand other moments, most of them conscious, and electric—shots of pure dopamine through all your synapses. There is that one greatest moment with each friend—each lover—that is the viscerally imprinted one, the one that another doesn’t top and shouldn’t even try. And the memory of that moment involves up to five senses, each one vibrating at the highest possible frequency. The pinnacle has only one space in the universe, and that place has only you as its receiver.

  So it was with you, Jackie, the time we were in your bedroom when you said to me, talking of something seemingly unrelated:

  “You called me by my name. You see through me.” We nearly looked into each other’s eyes, but instead, we intently watched the same space in the middle distance. Jackie, like a slightly shaking glass, giving off the rays of a crystal light prism for which she was both deliverer and catcher.

  What did it mean? I will remember forever how it felt. In the years since then, I looked everywhere for the other provocative line, “You called me by my name.”

  The exchange I’m remembering happened in 1993, when we were going over pages of The Nighttime Chauffeur, the last children’s book Jackie and I did together. She and I were sitting, looking out over Fifth Avenue from her bedroom, a room marked by French provincial furniture with a few discreet touches of India scattered here and there. It was a room belonging to a grown-up, as opposed to the feral undergrowth of houses where small children are underfoot, with that chaos of scuff marks and dog-soaked tennis balls and snack wrappers under the bed. When I arrived, Marta had offered me sherry—a frequent specialty of the house—which I’d accepted. I never drank sherry except at Jackie’s apartment.

  My mind shot back to a time in 1986, after the release of Heartburn, when Mike was having a breakdown of sorts and, having taken the wrong medicine, was badly affected. I was willing but very worried to be his go-to person. Who was I to know what to do? I understood and managed the challenge of finding him a doctor at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, and I bought him an exercise bike for his apartment. I talked it through with his then wife, Annabel, and she seemed only grateful for whatever help I could lend. She and Mike were still very close, but were not living together full-time.

  When it was clear that he was circling in his head and in need of immediate hospitalization, I took him with a little suitcase, almost like a child’s—like the one that carried my ballet costume to dance class when I was five. As I was standing behind him waiting in line to fill out papers, I looked at this very thin form standing in front of me. His trousers were so loose that, without a belt, they didn’t have any chance of staying up around his narrow waist. They slipped a bit, and at the same time I noticed his hair had come a little awry. This, along with the alignment of the pants, was enough to break your heart.

  He perseverated over and over, offering one reason after another: What was the catalyst for his fall into mental confusion? What might it be? It must have been this or that. No, that. Oh, Mike. I completely belonged to you. I would never be the same person. We would always have that one frightening moment together that would probably represent, to him, some kind of failure. To me it was singular—that exceptional merging of which only human beings are capable, based on trust and love and triumph over separateness.

  * * *

  BACK TO 1993, sitting with Jackie in her apartment. I knew that Jackie was sick. Leslie’s Pharmacy in Vineyard Haven carried all the New York rags, and I’d seen the headlines, read that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But Jackie never brought it up with me, not directly, and, gripped as always by my fear of trespassing on the personal, I followed her lead. That day, as usual, she focused instead on my material. One of the topics I remember we discussed was the last-minute errata slip inside The Nighttime Chauffeur, a result of my illustrator, Margot Datz, misreading the text I’d written that referred to a crescent moon, drawing instead a full one. At that point, it was too late in the publishing schedule to do anything, and Margot and Jackie had an effective but uneasy confrontation about the mistake. Each stood her ground. Margot’s stance was that Jackie, as the book’s editor, should have caught the error. And Jackie’s stance was that Margot had not been responsible to the text. I stayed neutral, although I suspected that if Jackie had not had a serious illness to contend with, she would, of course, have caught it.

  A half hour after I arrived, Jackie said she wanted to show me something and brought out a bound, unlined leather book that she told me she’d made for Aristotle Onassis. She seemed very proud of it. The book was enormous, large enough to cover an entire coffee table. Inside its pages, she told me, she’d copied the entire text of The Odyssey, in Greek on one side, and English on the opposite page. There must have been a hundred pages of Jackie’s own ink drawings of Ari as Odysseus, depicting his long, siren-filled excursion home, complete with swirling, tsunami-like waves carrying him or, rather, Odysseus, off-course.

  The sheer effort—what she’d done—supported the idea of her own fertile imagination feeding the creation of her books at Doubleday. She must have left it on Ari’s yacht and later reclaimed it when he was sick in Paris. I don’t know what has become of that book, or who got to see it, but I remember thinking it was the most extraordinary gift of love.

  Still, the focus that day was on our book. As she held it up, Jackie mentioned how beautiful the cover looked. Margot’s illustration showed a single aged female passenger in an old-fashioned coach, led by a single, white, high-stepping horse. The night’s colors—dark zucchinis, murky pickle-water-greens—were polished and mysterious, exuding an echoing silence, the shaggy branches of trees like a
drowned girl’s hair, the park and its empty paths and swooping roads lit only by the night sky and a lamppost too far away for comfort from its nearest neighbor.

  “Someone—an editorial assistant—told me the other day that the cover looked so much like a dream,” Jackie remarked. “Which of course in the book it is. A dream of dying and coming back to life again. The idea of the ‘nighttime chauffeur’ as a metaphor for…” She didn’t finish the thought. “Maybe you hear the jingling and the clop-clop of hooves, and a white horse appears suddenly, out of nowhere, and you climb on board and are whisked off into the night…”

  I had never thought of that take on the book before. The story, at least as I imagined it, was about a little boy, Jasper, whose rocking horse comes to life one night, and his rescue of an older woman, who by the end of the book is young again. But now I could easily see another interpretation, since Jackie’s and my imaginations often traveled along the same perfumed path.

  “Do you think you intended that at all when you were writing it, Carly?”

  “Not at all, Jackie!” I said, though it was true that at the time my thoughts were focused on death, my mother going in and out of the hospital with one medical crisis after the next, followed by the news about Jackie, which I’d only learned through the most distant side doors.

  “Even if you didn’t, it’s very interesting that someone would say that … Especially a younger person, since what do they…”

  It was then, still looking down at the cover of the book, she said those words. You see me, Carly … you called me by my name.

  At the time, I assumed the words were from a childhood poem, stanzas she and her classmates were made to memorize at Farmington as part of the school curriculum, or something she remembered from the many books she’d read. You called me by my name. A poem that everyone in the world knew by heart—everyone but me, that is—one written by Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost or maybe even Archibald MacLeish, one of those moody, sun-weathered midcentury poets who remained in the greater consciousness. Or else it was a ditty taught by a childhood governess, singsong and eerie. It might even have been a rhyming slogan from a 1950s advertising campaign for sleds, or butter, a tagline heard on TV so many times a day that viewers began humming it over their kitchen sinks.

  * * *

  JACKIE AND I OFTEN quoted our favorite lines of poetry to each other, and once we had a long conversation about one poem by the English poet Stephen Spender. The first line of “The Truly Great” is “I think continually of those who were truly great.” It was one of JFK’s favorites, if not his most favorite poem, and one he quoted regularly. No doubt Jackie always gave him his due in regard to the poem’s unnamed subjects, who, “born of the sun … travelled a short while toward the sun,” since unmistakably he was one of them.

  There is no question that when I wrote my own song “Touched by the Sun,” after learning that Jackie was gravely ill, I borrowed from the Spender poem, both in language and in content. Things were going badly for her. In late 1993, while out riding, she had fallen from her beloved horse, Frank, and in January 1994, a week or so after we’d met at her apartment, we had a long and ultimately curious phone conversation. I was in the bath and it started out as usual—warm and witty and full of references we both understood and embellished along the way. Then, out of the blue, Jackie called me by the wrong name.

  “Louisa?”

  “Louisa?” I repeated. “This is Carly.”

  “Louisa?” she said again. Until then it had been so obviously a Jackie-Carly conversation that I knew she had gone to another place in her imagination or catalog of memories. But I glossed over it, ending the conversation hastily by saying I would see her later that week.

  When I got out of the bath, I picked up my guitar and started playing, a little angrily, in B minor, a downstroke with a lot of power, while singing, If you want to be brave / and reach for the top of the sky / and the farthest part of the horizon / do you know who you’ll meet there … and then I put in a few names: JFK. Onassis. Martin Luther King. That didn’t work at all.

  I began singing instead about great soldiers, and seafarers, and artists, and dreamers / who need to be close / close to the light. They need to be in danger of burning by fire. I changed key, and went to a high note, since I wanted the melody and lyrics to soar. But I couldn’t sing as high as I wanted to go, not naturally, at least, so I sacrificed that first note for one with more of a “striving” quality. I found it, too. I want to get there / I want to be the one / who is touched by the sun / one who is touched by the sun. Obviously, Jackie was already touched by the sun, and that calling-out was my wish for myself, maybe, that I could someday be half as radiant or luminous as she was.

  I wish I were brave, was my next thought, and the next few lines flowed out: Often I want to walk / The safe side of the street / And lull myself to sleep / And dull my pain / But deep down inside I know / I’ve got to learn from the greats / Earn my right to be living / Let my wings of desire / Soar over the night.

  The song was my own little plea to myself: Let me be more like this woman. Let me be who I am and be it all the way and never let my faith leave me.

  The rest of the music followed, and by the time I had finished, I’d memorized the chords and sung and played the song to myself over and over again. When Ben came home from the gym that night, I played it for him in the kitchen. He loved it, calling it my “best song ever.” Sometime in the next few weeks I recorded a demo. I did not at that time tell Jackie anything about the song.

  There had been another sensitive moment where art and life intermingled with Jackie the summer before. We had been at her house on the Vineyard when my album Have You Seen Me Lately? came out. There was drama around the making of that album, which I had shared with Jackie. The drama was a result of Meryl Streep in the end not singing the title song because of an altercation between me and Sam O’Steen, the editor of Postcards from the Edge, over the song’s absence from the opening credits and its consequent departure from the film. I was, of course, terribly disappointed by the loss of the song, but that’s showbiz.

  Jackie, however, had been livid. It was her “let’s get ’em” attitude that tickled me so much. She was like one of the Jets in West Side Story—so tough she might have put her dukes up. She couldn’t understand how O’Steen had any say in the matter. “Mike should have come to your defense!” she insisted. “The song would have been perfect!” she declared, along with other claims of the song’s obvious merits and how it should be in the movie, sung by Meryl in the opening, just as I had intended it to be! Jackie was adamant. We were having a late lunch at her house, and I put on the album at her request. John and Christina Haag, his longtime girlfriend, with whom I had a very warm relationship, were there.

  When the song “Life Is Eternal” came on, we noted the Catholic prayer that played a part in the lyrics:

  Life is eternal

  And love is immortal

  And death is only a horizon.

  Life is eternal

  As we move into the light

  And a horizon is nothing

  Save the limit of our sight

  Then my lyrics went on, another verse reading:

  And will I see you up in that heaven?

  In all its light will I know you there?

  Will we say the things that we never dared?

  If wishing makes it so,

  Won’t you let me know …

  As the song was playing, John went to answer the phone and returned with the news that his uncle Stephen Smith had died. The song was too close, too much on the mark. Jackie was visibly upset and she began to cry. It was the first time I had ever seen her shed tears. I knew Jackie felt particularly close to the Smiths.

  * * *

  OVER THE YEARS, Jackie and I had talked about extended and immediate family matters. I had told her so much about my family and how growing up, I’d always been incredibly proud of my mother’s beauty. I didn’t realize it when I was a child
, but she was also sexy. She exuded a charismatic, pleasing energy, and I often lingered at school whenever she picked me up, pretending I had an unfinished chore, so that people would have more time to see her.

  Over the past few years, my mother’s health had started to decline. First there was a renal aneurysm, followed by increasing confusion. I remember once, when she was in bad shape and had “soiled” herself, I carried her through the crowded lobby of the Falmouth Inn, where we had stopped on the way from the hospital in Boston to the ferry. Although she had only almost made it to the bathroom, she had emerged 80 percent cleaned up and exhausted. Anyone else would not have wanted to be seen. But my mother somehow still had just enough energy to call out over my shoulder in her perfect Kate Hepburn tones, “You all know my daughter, Carly Simon, the singer, don’t you?”

  My relationship with my mother began with my terrific need for her, followed by even more need, followed by my feeling of being rejected by her, followed by her feeling rejected by me. Then came anger and resentment, accompanied by my guilt for feeling like such an unworthy, ungenerous daughter. I felt like I pushed her away over and over again. At one point, she wrote me a letter expressing her pain. She felt excluded from my life, she said, and mortified by that exclusion. I realized why I was so embarrassed whenever I would say I was going over to Jackie’s, or that I’d been invited to the White House, or was commiserating with Mia Farrow about Woody Allen. Even just mentioning dinner with our best friends “Mike and Diane” may have sounded to her as if I was showing off. I wasn’t. At the same time, I didn’t want to make her feel left out, or in any way “less than.” “Most of us when we do a caddish thing harbor resentment against the person we have done it to,” W. Somerset Maugham wrote in Cakes and Ale.