Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  My mother had made a couple of stabs at asking me to ask Jackie over to her house, also on Martha’s Vineyard. “I’d love to meet her. I’m sure she’d enjoy it, too!” I never repeated the open invitation to Jackie. I would never have put pressure on her like that. Doing that made me feel even guiltier. I was being withholding, very possibly selfish and snooty. I was thinking more about Jackie’s sensitivity than my mother’s very real desire to get close to the hot hearth of the culture, that imaginary boiler room where the gears of power and money and eternity whirred and clanked and the flames were enough to burn you.

  I also recognized that Mommy wasn’t being fair or, for that matter, truthful. Why didn’t she ever ask me if other friends of mine, lesser mortals, could drop by her house? Why was it only the Clintons and Jackie? Of course, I knew the answer. I’m not totally ignorant, nor will I ever forget my father’s response when asked once, “Why are so many of your friends celebrities?” His response was, “They’re more interesting!” My mother undoubtedly discovered this on her own, or else she came to absorb Daddy’s point of view. As for why my parents thought that, well, it derived from the most universally shallow of reasons. Press agents knew, even demanded it, as they would place their young starlets newly on their roster next to Cary Grant.

  The night I hosted the Clintons at my house, my mother called me. “Why wasn’t I included? Why didn’t you invite me?”

  “Because I was asked please not to have anybody but my immediate family since it was so last-minute, and so informal, and even the time they were supposed to arrive kept changing.”

  “But I am a member of your immediate family!”

  “I know, Mommy, but please understand it wasn’t a decision I was free to make.”

  When I told Jackie about this later, she understood. “What a painful bind you were put in,” she said. “I know that kind of jealousy happens. With my sister, there was always the one-upmanship. It was predictable and inevitable. I made her so mad she used to try to outdo me. And she did!”

  My mother called again the next day, and this time she was in tears. The salespeople at the grocery store had asked her what it was like to meet the Clintons, what she thought of them, whether they were enjoying their vacation on the Vineyard. “I couldn’t give them an answer. I was so devastated!”

  “Mommy,” I said for the third or fourth time, “I couldn’t. I wasn’t even given the chance.” That was how we left it, but I’m not sure she ever forgave me.

  At the same time, she was my mother! The Mommy who held me upright when I was an infant unable to keep milk down. The Mommy who held me on her lap when I was too nervous to go to school for any variety of psychosomatic reasons. The Mommy who told me I had a great voice, a voice that carried and carried, and someday I might be a really good singer. Yes, she said some awful things, too, but when she got sick, suddenly they didn’t matter. She had done so many things so right, with whatever skills, emotional and otherwise, she had at the time. I loved my mother. I also understood her, and knew what she wanted from me, so why was I so reluctant sometimes to give it to her? Was I getting some perverse revenge for the things or attention I hadn’t gotten as a child? “Don’t be hard on yourself,” Jackie kept insisting. But I always will be. I wish I’d had forethought.

  But it was true that any time my mother got sick, or an accident befell her—like the time a swarm of bees chased her hands off the steering wheel of her car, propelling her straight into a scrub oak on South Road on the Vineyard—I would be by her side. To help her, of course, but also from the fear that our positions had reversed, struggling not to revert to my earliest position as a completely dependent child. And whenever I had a bad anxiety attack, whether I was across the ocean or three miles away, Mommy—not my doctor, not my two sisters, not my dog or my bed—was my go-to source of relief. It was always my mother’s arms I sought. I would wrap myself in them, only to be stung a day later by a poisonous comment that pushed me back out to arm’s length. I would be angry and shocked at myself that I could simultaneously be so infantile and, just as quickly, so furious and cold.

  Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, my mother would call: “Oh, darling, I never see you! Come visit! Please! I have some Mott’s applesauce and some nice cream of mushroom soup. I’ll pay for you to take a cab.”

  She would always get me with that cab offer. It took twenty minutes to travel from Central Park West to Riverside Drive, then up the Hudson Parkway to Riverdale. Mommy and I would spend a few hours averting petty arguments, and she would ask me about Cat Stevens, forgetting I had done plenty, lived plenty, since that time. She would say things I would try my hardest not to get irked by: the time before my wedding to Jim when she told Lucy, “You never give a present to the bride at her second wedding.” When I got engaged to my first husband, James, in 1972, instead of giving me the antique table that had been in our dining room when I was growing up—that I’d asked for when she asked what I really wanted—she gave me a used Encyclopædia Britannica.

  On one of those visits, I wrote in my diary afterward:

  Angry at her jaw clicking while she ate cereal mixed with Jell-O, milk, and bananas for over half an hour. She did this while telling lies. Click, lie, click, click, lie, lie, click, lie and so forth. I still see her in myself every time I click and notice Sally noticing it.

  After a few hours of soup, I would go home in the second cab she hadn’t paid for.

  The day before Mommy died, in early 1994, I remember looking at her body on her bed, thinking that she was sleeping too soundly for actual sleep. My sisters and Jim were in the room, as were Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow; my mother’s nurse, Marie; and Mommy’s obsequious lawyer. In the guest room, away from her bed, I burst into a bout of keening. I was in another sphere, going deeper and deeper into it, kneeling on the floor, dipping from one side to another, wringing my hands, while Jim, Lucy, and Joey did whatever they could to calm me down. It was spontaneous. It was otherworldly. It was fierce and completely out of proportion. God only knows what it was—cellular, placental, umbilical, or something else way, way beyond the earth.

  Oh, Mother. I didn’t know that when you died I’d never be me anymore.

  As I was calling out her name, “Mother, Mother, Mother,” the first line of the poem Jackie had been referencing came back to me, the phrase lit up like a marquee in my brain.

  Oh, Lord my God,

  You called me from the sleep of nothingness

  merely because of Your tremendous love.

  You want to make good and beautiful beings.

  You have called me by name in my mother’s womb.

  —JOSEPH TETLOW, SJ (FROM HEARTS ON FIRE: PRAYING WITH JESUITS)

  The very next day, in one sitting, I wrote this song, “Like a River,” for my mother.

  Dear mother the struggle is over now

  And your house is up for sale

  We divided your railway watches

  Between the four of us

  I fought over the pearls

  With the other girls

  But it was all a metaphor

  For what was wrong with us

  As the room is emptying out

  Your face so young comes into view

  And on the back porch is a well-worn step

  And a pool of light you can walk into

  I’ll wait no more for you like a daughter,

  That part of our life together is over

  But I will wait for you, forever

  Like a river …

  Can you clear up the mystery of the Sphinx?

  Do you know any more about God?

  Are you dancing with Benjamin Franklin

  On the face of the moon?

  Have you reconciled with Dad?

  Does the rain still make you sad?

  Last night I swear I could feel you

  Moving through my room

  And I thought you touched my feet

  I so wanted it to be true

&nbs
p; In my theater there is a stage

  And a footlight you can step into …

  I’ll wait no more for you like a daughter,

  That part of our life together is over

  But I will wait for you, forever

  Like a river …

  In the river I know I will find the key

  And your voice will rise like the spray

  In the moment of knowing

  The tide will wash away my doubt

  ’Cause you’re already home

  Making it nice for when I come home

  Like the way I find my bed turned down

  Coming in from a late night out.

  Please keep reminding me

  Of what in my soul I know is true

  Come in my boat, there’s a seat beside me

  And two or three stars we can gaze into …

  I’ll wait no more for you like a daughter,

  That part of our life together is over

  But I will wait for you, forever

  Like a river …

  —“LIKE A RIVER”

  And will I see you up in that heaven

  In all its light will I know you’re there

  Will we say the things that we never dared

  If wishing makes it so

  Won’t you let me know

  That life is eternal

  And love is immortal

  And death is only a horizon

  —“LIFE IS ETERNAL”

  10

  Only a Horizon

  IN 2014, TWENTY YEARS AFTER JACKIE’S DEATH, I sat at my desk on the Vineyard and wrote her a long letter. She was always on my mind, and more so recently.

  Dear Jackie:

  It is in the future for some of us foolish souls not in the know. Perhaps you already know that Mike died, of a heart attack, a few weeks after his 84th birthday. I remember being the one who told Mike that you had died, and him crying over the phone. I heard him. It wasn’t for pretense, or an arrangement of an action. No—Mike cried. He had said in an interview once, “I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another, and wishing they were doing a third.” I don’t know for sure which of these represented his crying on the phone. It was surely a very sudden and unplanned response.

  You were important enough to him, Jackie, that I found myself by association more important to both of you. For example, if so-and-so likes Lillian Hellman, then you seek her out to underline your value. It may be a schoolyard measure, but it works in romance; it works in Hollywood; it works in the workplace and of course in friendship.

  One couldn’t reach a higher position than you did. Some are only relevant for a short period of time when their movies or records are at the top of the charts. One-hit wonders, their popularity and panache and gain-by-association are limited; rats are seen visibly leaving the sinking ship and desperate measures are taken to revive the lifeless body. Though I’d only tell you this, I experienced this loss of power several times in my life and gained it back. It’s hard to pin it down, but Mike, as you know, happened to be a measuring spoon of infinite precision. I could always tell where I stood in the overall world’s lineup based on his and my most recent interchange. I saw myself through his eyes, which had seen me through someone else’s more suitably superior eyes.

  Mike and I continued to have the ups and downs of a volatile, marriage-like relationship. One of two self-loathing Jews who needed the other’s mothering nurturing—actually the nurturing of many mothers. A few months before he died, he and Diane invited me over to his house. The visit was warm, loving, a tying-up, a P.S., an apology, an embrace. I’m so glad we had that meeting.

  I wish you were here with me right now, Jackie. There’s so much I’ve wanted to tell you. Not just things from my own life, but the lives of other people we know. Mike, of course, being first and foremost, since he was the one who brought us together in so many ways both mysterious and obvious. He was the tablecloth on which you and I set down our table settings, and when that tablecloth was whisked away at some point, I think you and I were surprised and relieved and gratified that we kept on eating and carrying on our conversation without interruption, as if we’d never needed that tablecloth in the first place or needed it only as a kind of insurance, as a security blanket.

  But now Mike is really gone, and of course the first person I thought to tell was you, you whom I miss deeply and think about every day, and will keep in the most secure place in my heart for the rest of my own life.

  My love to you always,

  Carly

  When Jackie died, I never thought I would come to think of her as belonging to the past. I would never say the words “I loved her” or “She used to…” or “Do you remember when she…?” I would never use the past tense to describe her. As long as I was in the present, Jackie was, too. Which is why writing her a letter in the days after Mike died didn’t feel remotely strange. It felt as natural as getting up in the morning or drinking tea.

  It was as though Jackie was only a phone call or a windy walk through the springtime snow away. How is death different from any long separation from anyone you haven’t seen, or spoken to on the phone, for a seeming eternity? The difference is that being alive, you can always bridge that separation by dialing their number or composing an email or letter—so how is that different from what I did on that frosty November day, just before Thanksgiving, when both Mike and Jackie were so very much on my mind?

  * * *

  I HAD COME TO REALIZE that when Jackie said that I had seen who she was, it was through the lens of my own painful relationships; I was plagued with running to men who I thought would save me. Certainly she inferred that Ari was the mistake she couldn’t avoid, “like a collision of destructive mutual needs.” I could see through her wise propaganda. Her way of keeping her cards close.

  We weren’t jealous of each other. We were proud. Nothing stoked envy of the other. Because we were of a different time period, we didn’t go into a store and want the same thing. She was the wise older one who might have been relieved that I didn’t want anything from her. Of course, I wanted her love, wanted to be a “we” and not a “them.” There was nothing to be competitive over. We were in our own ball courts, each admiring and sharing in each other’s serves and crying over each other’s problems and sorrows. There turned out to be very little that was in the way. Our friendship was quite blessed in that sense. I hope to get to know her grandchildren, whom she completely adored and spent so much time with.

  * * *

  NOT LONG AFTER my mother died, Jackie and some of her best friends were gathered at my apartment at 135 Central Park West. They included Joe Armstrong, Peter Duchin, and his wife Brooke Hayward. At Jackie’s suggestion, I also invited Ken Burns, who was finally making good on his rain-date promise. “I love Ken Burns!” Jackie told me on the phone. “I would love to meet him!”

  That day, Ken dominated the conversation, answering all the many questions Jackie put to him. About baseball, too. Who knew that Jackie had a latent interest in baseball? Or was it merely the willing orator she had found in Ken, who shines through on any subject he’s talking about? He wasted no time in congratulating her on the work she had done preserving Grand Central Terminal as a national monument. I remembered telling Jackie: “I’ve always wanted to do a concert there. Just be there, unannounced, as passengers walk through, getting off and on trains. I have such memories from my whole life, passing through en route to Riverdale, Stamford, Hudson.” I asked her, “Why did you decide to focus your efforts on this particular building?”

  “It was a romantic decision,” she explained, “as so many of our decisions are. It’s so life-affirming. Standing up for beauty, elegance, and history. I heard of its imminent demise on a day I was walking south and saw the Pan Am building rising above it, and I thought of what might happen if it mattered to no one.” She turned to me. “Oh, Carly, do a concert there. It would be like putting
an exclamation point on the city’s decision to save this masterpiece.”

  I did a concert at Grand Central Terminal a year later, in that awesome carousel of trains. I was told the acoustics would be a nightmare and that the security would be hell. They weren’t. It was a breeze. It stands alone as the most personal public performance I’ve ever given. Jackie died a year before that concert. And there it was again, hands reaching across time and space; our passions overlapping, the impossible made possible; the strength of the past indelibly imprinted on the present. I was so proud to sing in Grand Central Terminal. And I dedicated the concert to Jackie.

  That day at my house, Jackie was fully present—more than I was—and though there were a few grim reminders of how sick she really was, they were, as always, unspoken, part of our continuous smile that made up the communal mask. Only when the two of us were alone for a minute did Jackie mention the wigs she would have to wear during the hot and humid summer ahead on the Vineyard.

  Before Jackie left that afternoon, I gave her the lyrics to “Touched by the Sun,” which I’d handwritten on a piece of paper. She called me as soon as she read it—which might have been in the car, on the way back to her apartment—and she seemed as excited by it as she had been about Ken’s baseball stories. I told her that I’d written it about her, though I think she knew that already. Even if Jackie was in physical pain, she seemed tethered to the present, or at least the largest part of her was. She never let anyone see her wage war with fear. Her public commitment was to protocol. When she let her guard down with me, it was almost like the insertion of another person into the room.