Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  Two weeks later, I was told that she’d made the decision to go home to her apartment and be with her family for her last days. The prognosis was terminal, and for her it was, as always, a private matter, just as her decision must have called on a strength that was inherent but also learned. I was at a loss to know what to say. I remember that pinnacle moment: “I know you see through me.” And I responded: “I want to be with you.”

  We spoke twice in that period between lunch at my house and the day of her death, our conversations warm. She veered away from telling me anything more about herself. Instead she wanted to know how I was dealing with my mother’s death. From the stories I’d told her, and Mike’s description of her, she’d intuited that my mother was formidable, and that my attachment to her was bedeviled.

  Around the time of my mother’s death, Jackie wrote me a letter on her powder-blue stationery. As she herself was so sick at the time, the energy it must have taken to sit down and write me was an act of love and pure selflessness. She said all the right things, all the things I needed to hear. That I had been a good daughter. That my mother must have been proud of me, even if she didn’t always let me see that. That I had given enough of myself to her.

  It was a letter I’d wanted to get in the mail from my own mother, but never had. One expressing a pure, tender pride in her daughter, unleavened by darker thoughts or impulses or rivalries. Of course, those blacker intervals will always be there in a family, but I also believe it is possible to express pride that doesn’t circle back to oneself, or act from a position of permanently injured sacrifice. When I finished reading and rereading Jackie’s letter, I was able to appreciate the height and width of the friendship and love that Jackie had given me for so many years. Not just her pride, her interest, her enthusiasm, but also her protection, the tender maternity she held out, and continued to hold out even through her own immense struggles.

  Exactly one month after the party I’d held for her at my apartment, I called Jackie sometime in the late morning. Marta answered the phone. When I asked her how Jackie was doing, she said, “Madame is comfortable, but she is sedated.” She would call me, she said, when she knew anything.

  Immediately I called Joe Armstrong and told him. Jackie and Joe had a very real and close relationship. Joe was the only person I could think to call other than Mike, and I was having trouble reaching Mike. Joe, who lived eight blocks away, told me to meet him at his apartment, and I did. We were comforted by each other. Both of us believed in prayer, and in the idea that the bigger the number of people praying together in the same place at the same time, the greater the strength of that prayer.

  Whenever I feel the need to intensify a prayer, I close my eyes and picture what it is I want in an extremely tense way. My eyebrows crinkle and wrinkle, and blood flushes my cheeks. It’s not calm, it’s hectic, adamant, because I want so badly for my prayer to be heard. As I prayed, I pictured Jackie in the summer that had yet to come, in her kayak, moving the paddle easily across calm water under a blue sky—a fair-weather rainbow symbolizing her return to health.

  But I also remember that Joe and I both wore expressions like the ones on children’s faces as they’re running in horror. It was almost impossible to “feel” the shock, the sadness, the missing, and the remembering showing up simultaneously. What’s more, the world had begun to intrude with its collective mass awareness, and I had no idea what place my own private feelings about Jackie really had anymore. Were they more important, less important, the same? Did it matter?

  The call from Marta came in the early afternoon. She was barely able to say the words. It wouldn’t be long now, and if I wanted to say good-bye, now was the right time. She added, “She won’t hear you.”

  Joe and I made our way across the park, from Eighty-first Street and Central Park West, going past the Delacorte Theater in the park, following paths I’d traversed more times than I could remember. We reached the East Side, and Jackie’s building. A horrible amount of sun hovered and shone down on the pavement outside. It was as if the entire energy of the planet was focused on her, in a sharply defined gash of burning heat that should have been shadows and fog. There was now nothing to hide behind.

  Dressed in jeans, my hair in a ponytail, I felt embarrassed to make my way forward like an intruder, in plain sight, through the crowds, past the barricades, my name on someone’s list. In her silent presence, Jackie was still drawing people out. She would continue to exert as much control as the moment allowed. Whose rules were these? What book of etiquette was she following? I knew only that someone, something, some belief system, would carry the rest of us through, help us know what to do in place of what to feel—for certainly very few people knew how to feel. We all pretend our feelings matter.

  Why at this moment was I searching for protocol, and not paying enough attention to my own emotions? Do the right thing, Carly. Watch the others—watch Joe—and see what they do. Follow them, Carly.

  Joe and I took the elevator up to Jackie’s apartment on the fifteenth floor, where we were told that only women were allowed to go inside her bedroom. Caroline and Ed were in the hallway. They were solemn, and understandably there was no attempt at greetings, or even nodding.

  Just then I heard an uproar coming from the library adjacent to her bedroom, and wondered if Jackie could hear any of it. Irish voices raised in song? Drinking songs? I picked out Teddy’s voice, then Pat Kennedy Lawford’s, a slurred tumble of words ending in laughter. There were Shrivers there in the apartment, too, and Smiths, and the same line of demarcation present at Jackie’s Labor Day parties—the raucous bearishness of the Hyannis Port contingent, mixed with friends of Jackie’s, and the Bouviers, as well as other relatives whose expressions were more muted and, to my mind at least, better suited for the occasion.

  Marta signaled for me to come into Madame’s bedroom.

  I walked gingerly past the library, the same one where the book Jackie had made for Ari, too big for any bookcase, rested in a cabinet of rare brandies under her large antique desk. The library was where all the hoopla was coming from. All the drinking and Irish celebration made me anxious. Just maybe there was something wrong with it. Was the Kennedys’ defiance of death part and parcel of a furious star that got crossed?

  Jackie’s bedroom was in one corner of the building and looked out over both Eighty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum only a toss away. The curtains were drawn, but enough light seeped through to illuminate everything and everyone. Fifteen floors below, on the sidewalks, the large and growing gathering was tame and respectful. The crowd might have been waving silently in slow motion, or at least I imagined they were. I wanted—I needed—poetry from them. Something South American. Something from García Márquez, like the couple in love on the ship’s deck at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera. Sending everyone who had ever loved another person to seek out and find that person again. I entered Jackie’s bedroom.

  Bunny Mellon, a mahogany twist of a French braid at the back of her neck, was attired in fashionable black. She was sitting in a straight-backed upholstered chair on the side of the bed nearest the door. I closed the door as quietly as possible behind me. Her bed was canopied and feminine. Maurice stood at the end, with John beside him. I felt John’s aloneness, and wished that Christina Haag, his girlfriend to whom I felt so close, was there to support him. Even though he was already with Daryl Hannah, I still believed he would return someday to Christina. She was like family.

  At the same time, I didn’t understand the ceremony of their presence—that is, if one was even being adhered to, or if the two of them were making it up as they went along. Both men, Jackie’s close male companion and her son, looked impeccable in formal suits, light shirts, and somber ties. Their faces displayed hardly any emotion, or were they just difficult to read? Two sets of hands knotted at waist level as they watched over Jackie.

  I nodded hello to them but didn’t smile (which has always been hard for me, because I depend on m
y smile). Bunny was holding Jackie’s right hand and her other hand clutched some prayer beads. She was saying soft words half under her breath. She noticed me. “You sit with her for a bit,” she said kindly.

  I did.

  Closer to her now, I saw that Jackie’s face was peaceful and relaxed, as if after a long climb up a mountain. Close up I could see that she was more magnificent now than I had ever seen her before. A beam of light landed on her bed from the open window, and as I picked up and held her hand, there was no hint that she was assisting me, yet it was weightless, which would imply that she herself was carrying some of that weight. Was there some part of her that was conscious? I couldn’t tell. It was as though from our very different perspectives we were both looking at and seeing together the same singular and illuminated point in space.

  What were the words going through her head now? I wondered. What could she be thinking? She, whose thoughts and chatter were mercurial and word-loving, their cadence eternally scattering. Was her brain forming words like “particular,” breaking out through the octave, jumping up, ravishing the syllables with a hiccup of a vowel, streaming through like a singer carrying the final syllable with her breath? Words like “telegrams” and “visit from Ithaca” and “ubiquitous” and “needles”—but where is the thread? Did any pictures accompany or enhance those words? Could she see her late husband the president, or feel his presence? Her father’s mother? Friends from early school days? Was she girding her wildest impulses even now? Was there a monotone to her prayers? Could she have sat up and asked everybody to go home?

  Soon it would be violet light, that light within which the forgetting and the creation of a new concept of oneself merge. Would it be some uncertain station with a fine silk blanket? Perhaps one woven in the lower hemisphere of the planet? So deep blue it could almost assume the violet light that surrounded it. So smooth it could get confused in a chant from a lost century; swimming in unison between the strident fourths of the young boys’ changing voices. Without modulation. Just the smoothness and beauty and absence of all time.

  I loved this woman. Loved her. Jackie had, with me, always been so available, so accepting and present, and she had so much about her to love. And I had felt loved by her. My mind was a jumble. As I sat beside her bed, I had many reveries, but my words came out simply. I focused so hard, I wasn’t aware that anyone else in the room could hear me. I loved her. And I told her that. Quietly.

  Epilogue:

  “Will It Soar Like Jazz on a Saxophone, or Evaporate on a Breeze?”

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THAT LAST VISIT, Jim and I attended the wake at Jackie’s apartment. I brought a copy of the lyrics to “Touched by the Sun,” written out on a piece of parchment, which I handed to Bunny Mellon. I somehow knew she would be the best person to pass them along to. She would be a messenger to wherever they ended up living. She kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “I’ll put it where you want it, Carly.”

  I get to imagine it at the will of the wind, high in the skies over Paris, the hills of Spain and Africa, the rivers, the oceans, dipping now and then into that dark and loving night where there is no more chaos. Serene sun and grass waving, fertile fields, white clouds, up higher—close to the light.

  * * *

  I STARTED THESE PAGES by describing how hard it is to recapture a person you love. How despite all your efforts, in the end you’re left with only bits and scraps of clay and color, partial versions of the real thing, half notes, not full ones, the effect that a funnel of the sun or moonlight has on a rug or an empty corner of a bedroom rather than the full sky itself. But maybe, as Jackie liked to tell me, I’m being too hard on myself.

  Maybe those quarter tones and ounces and dashed-off moments and resting arms and fleeting gazes and traces of remembered laughter are what anybody is, and the person we try so hard to remember, and to complete, is just their holder, an estuary for those thousands of small things. So it is perhaps with Jackie, who resists capture and retains her privacy and mystery. But aren’t we all participants in that very same mystery? I do know that some individuals are able to cast bigger, longer shadows than others, and what are shadows created by if not by light? Not light from a new or full moon, but light from a sun that selected Jackie early on as a favored native and let those in her small circle fill and replenish with reflected warmth, majesty, and kindness.

  If she, Jackie, was touched by the sun—and she was—we, her friends who loved her, were touched by that sun, too.

  If you want to be brave

  And reach for the top of the sky

  And the farthest point on the horizon

  Do you know who you’ll meet there

  Great soldiers and seafarers

  Artists and dreamers

  Who need to be close, close to the light

  They need to be in danger of burning by fire

  And I, I want to get there

  I, I want to be one

  One who is touched by the sun

  One who is touched by the sun

  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

  I need to let them say

  “She must have been mad”

  And I, I want to get there

  I, I want to be one

  One who is touched by the sun

  One who is touched by the sun

  I’ve got to learn from the greats

  Earn my right to be living

  With every breath that I take

  Every heartbeat

  I want to get there

  I want to be one

  One who is touched by the sun

  One who is touched by the sun

  —“TOUCHED BY THE SUN”

  Acknowledgments

  First, to my dear friend Jessica Hoffmann Davis, whose floor I played dolls and jacks on, who I wrote my first song with, and stayed close friends with while she was writing books and holding a chair in education at Harvard and raising one of the largest families on the East Coast. Jessie stayed with this book from the first to the last page. In addition, I happen to love her.

  To Peter Smith, my genuinely gracious and hugely engaging friend, whom I have grown to adore. He took the book in hand and helped to form it. He made sense out of my overgrown stacks of notes called things like “flat footed horse” and “Mr. Nose.” I can only hope he will be a part of, an all-seer of, a tracker of, everything I endeavor to do.

  To Colin Dickerman, my editor. You all know “company men,” but you might not know that they are real people who not only pat you down but who encourage you and keep you in line and go to Morocco when your acknowledgments are due. They also, by the way, happen to edit your book. Don’t let the dust blow in your eyes, advisor.

  Also at FSG, thank you to Mitzi Angel, Janine Barlow, Thomas Colligan, Daniel del Valle, Nina Frieman, Jonathan Galassi, Ian Van Wye, and Sarita Varma.

  Then to Bill Clegg: editor, friend, and agent. A formidable trio of responsibilities. Never has anyone been so crucial in the making, breaking, and supporting of a book. I was starstruck when I first met him because of the largeness of his literary persona. But he turned out to be just another passenger, and a terrific one, thank the Lord.

  I am also very grateful for the love and support of Lucy, Joey, and Peter, my siblings, for simply being born and giving me their love and reflecting mirrors to help me see who I am. Also, to the family of Jackie Kennedy, who rounded out so much of what I was charmed to see in her. They chose me to be included in Caroline and Ed’s wedding, which was really the start of our friendship.

  To Richard, my captain, for reading through many drafts of the book and providing insight after insight, thus tightening up the book, originally 897 pages, down to somethi
ng a little tidier. You don’t know how much you mean to me.

  To Sally and Ben, always.

  And to the following people for just being around and supportive and helpful to the process of the often formidable task of writing a book, any book:

  Al; Andreas; Arlyne; Billy Bob; Blue; Bodhi; Carinthia; Dana; Dean; Father Edward; Fernanda; Forte; Frank; Geoff; Harold; Irv; Jake, Misha and Zaya; Larry; Laurel; Laurie; Matt and Andy; Meghan; Marc; Mia; Noah and Jules; Richard P.; Rose; Russell; Said and Ronald; Saw; Teese; Terrence; Trish.

  ALSO BY CARLY SIMON

  Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carly Simon is a songwriter and singer of songs. Her children are Ben Taylor and Sally Taylor Bragonier. She has one grandchild: Bodhi Taylor Bragonier. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard and is the author of Boys in the Trees. You can sign up for email updates here.

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