Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  In preparation for our departure, Willie had promised to pick up our passports at American Express—for some reason Lucy and I had entrusted him with ours, and he had lost them, and we’d had to order replacements. A day before we left, Willie still hadn’t gotten them. For the first time I was openly frustrated with him, silently fuming and then apologizing for my silent fuming. Lucy and I were at Toad Hall, packing our bags and sharing emotional good-byes with friends, when Willie pulled up in front in a limousine. He was pale, I was teary, and that night we barely exchanged a single word. We slept back to back. More than once Willie had told me he’d had premonitions that we wouldn’t get married, and while I suspected that his premonitions had less to do with divine and sensory mystery than they did with his own ambivalence, I dismissed my doubts. To commemorate my departure, I’d made him a crossword puzzle, all of whose clues and answers referred to my eventual return. I told him I was counting on his memorizing at least a few of my songs so that when I came back, he could fill in for Lucy. That last night, I left him a cassette of me singing.

  All three of us took a taxi to the train that would, in turn, transport us to the inordinately fast American ship that would take us home. I cried softly the entire ride, hiding my head in Willie’s jacket sleeve while Lucy gazed out the window, smiling sweetly and pretending not to notice. Willie handed us our passports and slipped something else into my coat pocket, though I didn’t look at it then. At the station, the driver began removing our bags, but Willie remained frozen in the backseat. Suddenly he bounded out. “Wait for me, wait for me, I have something for you,” he said. I mistakenly assumed this meant he might be taking the train with us to the ship, but no. In a discreet and self-conscious way, he merely kissed me good-bye. As Lucy and I found our seats on the train, Willie was nowhere to be seen through the windows, which were now fogging over with engine steam. Whatever Willie had forgotten to give me would be secure until we met up again in a few months’ time, maybe.

  I suppose Willie was a “show business” person. A terrifying and accurate description of that showbiz type is written by Herman Wouk in Youngblood Hawke. “They can simulate anything—pleasure, anger, courtesy, love, hate, amusement, fear, grief, humility, awe, graciousness, and in a given situation, they’ll give the right reaction. They do so in order to not frighten normal people … in order to get along with them.”

  A picture Willie (left) kept in his wallet of him and J. P. Donleavy.

  As always I’m trying to follow in Lucy’s footsteps, even in an arabesque.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  moneypenny

  On the boat train to Southampton I wrote a letter to Willie. I didn’t cry any more. I was just plodding through the shock of losing my days with him. When we reached Southampton, the porter swooped in to transport our bags to the ship, though Lucy and I felt more comfortable carrying our own guitars along the gangplank. At one point I whispered to her, “Isn’t that Sean Connery?” Lucy took a quick glance. Yes. It was.

  We were twenty feet or so behind him, and maintained our pace in an attempt to confirm a positive identification. Sean Connery’s hair was light brownish-blond, almost curly, like a baby’s hair, in contrast to the coiffed, Brylcreemed look he sported as James Bond, which Lucy and I and probably every other moviegoer in the world had assumed was his real hairstyle. For whatever reasons, he seemed to be traveling alone. Sean passed through the first-class line, at which point Lucy and I lost sight of him as a small army of uniformed ship concierges and porters stepped in to transport all his belongings.

  Once we were on board and in the hands of our own steward, my sister and I boarded a tiny elevator that shepherded us down into the very depths of the boat, until we arrived at our room. It was tiny, windowless, and itchingly claustrophobic, outfitted with two extremely narrow bunk beds. A small table adorned with a small lamp doubled as both desk and dressing table.

  With next to no room for our luggage, Lucy and I decided to extract from our suitcases only the absolute necessities—sandals, bathing suits, bathrobes, scarves—and stash the suitcases under the bottom bunk, placing our guitars in the narrow closet, beneath the few hanger items that fit. This residence compared unfavorably to our Provincetown room the prior summer. In between we’d had a palace in London. An unseen fan blew constantly into the room, its noise like a continuously flushing toilet, but I had no idea how to find it, much less fix it. The only practical domestic things I’d ever been taught as a girl were how to make a hospital corner on a bed and sew a hem stitch. (Lucy, on the other hand, knew how to use a sewing machine.) In lieu of learning practical matters, I seemed to have absorbed selective lessons about the power of long, tan legs, which knee looked better crossed over the other, and never to let another person wash your underwear.

  After a day of tumult on the English Channel, Lucy and I settled into the womblike comfort of our tiny room. After pouring my heart out in the letter to Willie, he’d replied via a telegram that read, simply, “Come home, little fellow.” If I’d thought I missed Willie on the boat train, and had written him telling him so, I missed him twice as much now. I adored him, was overwhelmed by him, believed I was ready to give myself to him forever, though at the moment, if I were being honest with myself, what I really wanted was to feel more secure about him.

  Part of the boat’s entertainment featured daily films, and the movie screening that afternoon was The Hill, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring none other than Sean Connery in the role of a British military prisoner. Lucy and I were in the audience, and when it was over, we walked the many stairs back downstairs to our cabin. I was about to write another letter to Willie when I had a sudden inspiration. I would write Sean Connery a fan letter, and invite him over for tea, or a drink! (Willie had always encouraged my “cheeky” side.) In short order, I wrote something along the lines of:

  Dear Mr. Connery:

  My name is Carly Simon and my sister’s name is Lucy. We are not your ordinary “fans.” We are traveling from London, where we were singing at the Rehearsal Room. We are both educated college girls, and our father was Richard Simon, who founded Simon & Schuster, the firm that published The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy. We understand that you are going to New York to do a Broadway production of the play based on that book. Would you come over to our very cozy little room and have a cup of tea or a preprandial cocktail?

  I included our room number, closing off with We would love to meet you. Sincerely, Carly and Lucy Simon. I knew I could hook Sean Connery with preprandial, which meant simply “before dinner”—I was using that word because I thought it labeled me “brilliant”—though when I showed the letter to Lucy, she seemed taken aback, even shocked. “I don’t really want anything to do with that letter,” she said after a while. “Please write me out of it,” adding that in her opinion, I was making a fool of myself. No amount of persuasion or badgering could convince her, so I rewrote the letter, this time leaving out Lucy’s name, and handing Henry, our room steward, a five-pound tip to deliver it to Sean Connery in his Presidential Suite.

  It took less than fifteen minutes for the phone to ring. All I could think of was how proud Willie would have been of me. (“Well done, Simon Sister!” I could hear him say.) Four rings later, I casually picked up the phone. The voice on the other end introduced himself as, well, Sean Connery. He was in the middle of getting a massage, but might he accept my kind invitation in twenty or so minutes? Of course, I said, thinking, Where am I going to hide Lucy? After proposing she take a walk on the deck, or inspect the game room, I was sort of relieved when Lucy told me she’d be a good sport and stay. Safety in numbers and all that.

  Lucy and I both took a few minutes to groom ourselves under the ghoulish lighting. Even without her newly applied lip gloss and Veronica Lake hair, my sister was beautiful under any light; it was me I was worried about, but I didn’t have time to obsess over it because just then a knock came at the door, and I opened it.

  There he was: the same man we’d se
en in The Hill, Dr. No, and From Russia with Love. The same Scottish burr. The only difference being that Sean Connery was far handsomer in person, and his manner nothing like it was in any of those films, which convinced me what a good actor he was. Lucy and I took up residence on her bed, the lower bunk, while Sean took a seat in the only available chair. I wonder if he thinks he’s slumming it, I thought, remembering to file away details about this encounter for Willie.

  Sean was obviously impressed by how I’d advertised myself as the daughter of the legendary publisher, Richard L. Simon. (We were still both very proud of Daddy’s legend.) Over the next half hour, we dropped even more names: uncles, aunts, houseguests, dogs, professors. At one point I caught Sean gazing at our long legs.

  We talked about Sean’s recent trip on LSD, and about books. Later in my diary I wrote that Sean’s eyes had no soul—as if he were all actor inside, with no one at home. Then I thought, No—he’s looking for something in us. I also couldn’t help thinking that he was like a jungle animal who’d found his way into the smallest cabin on the world’s largest ocean liner, and was now foraging to see if he could drag any remarkable grub back to his magnificent cave seven flights up, a room Lucy and I would be permitted to see sooner than we both imagined.

  The next day, Lucy and I had just returned to our room from a showing of A Day at the Races when the phone rang. It was Sean, this time inviting us to his suite for cocktails and dinner. A few hours later, Lucy and I were ensconced inside Sean’s Presidential Suite. The suite’s three rooms were ten times larger than Lucy’s and my little room downstairs. There was lots of shrimp, bottles of champagne, laughs from the throat, laughs from the gut. Tom Jones, a Welshman to Sean Connery’s Scotsman, serenaded the room from enormous stereo speakers with “What’s New Pussycat?”

  Eventually Sean took a seat on the couch between us so we could all study the dinner menu. The shrimp scampi and the vichyssoise, he said, were both a must. Sean poured us all more champagne, which it was possibly a mistake to accept, as I was almost drunk already. Lucy, I could tell, was flirting with him, which made me irritable. She hadn’t been gutsy enough to cosign her name to the letter we wrote Sean, so why did she feel she had the right to flirt with him? The waiter took our order and left, and then Sean proposed that the three of us dance—all together—until dinner arrived.

  Lucy and I both got up from the couch and stood there facing him, two feet apart, as though awaiting orders from a square dance caller or an Israeli hora teacher. I hadn’t the slightest idea what we were supposed to do, and was puzzled by my own feelings. Could three people dance at once? How? Sean pulled us both close to him, murmuring something to the effect that we all might as well make the most of this night. “Ah, girls, you’re so beautiful,” he kept saying. “You’re so funny … come here, you adorable college girls…”

  Instead of Tom Jones on the turntable, a Dean Martin record would have better captured the atmosphere in the room. At the time, neither Lucy nor I were considering the possibility of a “Simon Sisters Sandwich”—an expression, or a hunch, Willie came up with later. Maybe Sean had simply assumed that anyone who used the word preprandial in a note would be equally well acquainted with ménage à trois, and want one, too!

  As it turned out, Sean’s expectation of fun for the evening ended up going nowhere, as it was beginning to dawn on him, sadly, that do-si-do square dancing was closer to Lucy’s and my speed than any Simon Sister Sandwich. To his credit, he didn’t force or even bring up the issue. He was extremely polite and not remotely aggressive. With the wine and champagne making us sillier and sillier, Lucy suggested that she and I sing some songs before dinner showed up. We sang two songs a cappella: “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.” Sean seemed bemused by our performance, as it must have solidified his impression of us as square finishing-school girls, well-heeled, well-bred folkies. Or maybe he couldn’t figure us out at all.

  Having cast aside the sandwich idea, and with both Lucy and me clearly adrift in the Cabin of Bond, Sean now sought out conversational entry points. What was it like being a nursing student? he asked Lucy. The conversation then moved to whether or not Prince Philip was circumcised—one topic generally following the other—though I can’t remember what, if any, conclusion we reached. He asked if we owned any pets, where we lived, if we had serious boyfriends, and what sports we liked, or played. He asked me if Lucy had introduced me to the guitar. Every answer we gave was polite, while also struggling to be witty and sophisticated. Why didn’t we have our act down by now? By midnight Lucy and I had taken our leave, thanking our host repeatedly, and making a plan for the following night.

  For the next two days, everywhere we went, the three of us went together. We hunkered down in Sean’s suite, eating Presidential Suite–quality food, reciting poems—especially Irish ones: Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats—from an anthology belonging to the Presidential Suite bookshelf, visiting the ship’s casino, attending movies and even lectures. Arm in arm in arm, we made a jovial threesome. When I think now on how Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Anita Pallenberg were spending their time, I have to laugh, thinking about how our rowdy childhood hadn’t turned us into anything but prudish schoolgirls. You almost feel the uniform. On the last day, we met up at the swimming pool before returning to our rooms to pack, which, in Lucy’s and my case, amounted merely to relocating our guitars into the corridor so we’d have room to drag our suitcases out from under our skinny lower bunk.

  That night, with a tentative plan to meet up with Sean after dinner, Lucy and I, slightly high on champagne, went back to our room at around nine, which is when Sean usually called us. Our cramped room was still littered with the detritus of a summer spent in London. As we waited for the phone to ring, we cleared things away—a stray bus receipt, a broken eyebrow pencil, a sample of Sean’s handwriting on a cocktail napkin (Sean had given me the phone number of his New York agent). But the phone didn’t ring. Lucy and I cleaned up even more, going so far as to straighten the sheets and blankets on our beds. Into the tiny garbage bin went three-quarters-empty cough medicine and nail polish and cologne bottles. By 10 p.m., with the phone still mute, we had five garbage receptacles piled high with stuff. By now, we were motivated to clean as a distraction, as well as to cut through the tension in our tiny henhouse cabin, with Lucy and I two sister-roosters sizing each other up for a fight. A half hour later, I took a shower, telling myself that if Sean didn’t call by eleven, I’d set my hair using the beer cans Lucy and I used as rollers, my mission being to give it body and make it as straight as Julie Christie’s.

  Exiting the shower, I said to Lucy, “I guess that’s it for tonight. He’s probably not going to call, right?”

  Lucy agreed, adding that if Sean was planning on calling, he would have done it by now. I proceeded to dry my hair in front of the mirror lit by two lightbulbs sticking out of the wall like two different-sized human ears. My nose, I thought, has never looked so fat. The Beast was making its shipboard appearance, having been in storage during most of my stay in London. The tension which had begun infiltrating our tiny room worsened when my hair dryer bumped into Lucy’s things, knocking them onto the floor, which led to her swiping me with a poor and sarcastic imitation of Willie saying, “Well done, Simon Sister!” It was now past eleven, and the phone hadn’t rung once. There the two of us were, then. We’d had our chance, and nothing had happened. Was this situation as debilitating to Lucy’s ego as it was to mine? On the surface, the answer was no, as Lucy seemed completely unfazed, concerned only about the scattered cosmetics.

  Having been the one who took the initiative in the first place, I decided to place the final call. I let it ring around thirty times, but no one answered, and I finally hung up. The Sean Connery “thing” was officially over. Reaching down into the shopping bag that held the beer cans, I reluctantly placed six of them in my hair, securing them with clips. I slipped on my nightgown, by now glad it was getting too late for a midnigh
t postprandial drink with Sean. Now, as we neared land—probably Newfoundland, or an iceberg—Lucy was lolling fully clothed on her lower berth, reading, or pretending to read, a book.

  At that moment, I felt more in love with Willie than ever before. I rationalized the feeling as follows: that the vixen inhabiting me had been attracted to Sean not because of Sean but because, as I later confessed to my diary, I wanted to show Willie how alluring I was to other men, to show him how assertive and naughty I could be. More than that, I wanted to win the lifelong competition between Lucy and me, my fantasy being that Sean would insist on seeing me alone, not that I had the faintest idea what I would have done if that happened. Willie, I knew, wouldn’t be proud of this Simon Sister losing out to Lucy, who was tame and quiet, and always played her cards close to her chest.

  Hair cans in place, I pretended to turn off the phone and forget about Sean. We probably wouldn’t see him again before our boat docked in New York. Maybe we’d wave at him disembarking in the first-class line, surrounded, as I was sure he would be, with women wearing flowered sundresses, wide-brim hats, and black sunglasses, one or more of whom would be tightly clutching the arm of our James Bond, our Ginger Man, our soldier from The Hill, our Sean Connery. Doubling down, we were Moneypenny.

  At eleven forty-five, the phone that I, the eternal optimist, had only pretended to turn off rang. Lucy shot off her bed and a second later answered it, her voice mellow and seductive. It was Sean, of course, and I heard Lucy explain that I had just washed my hair and was in my nightgown, getting ready for bed, whereas she, Lucy, was about to take a stroll on the deck to take in some late-night air.