Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  Thanks to our coveted all-access passes, Danny and I were led to seats onstage, behind the speakers, across a tangle of cords, amps, Coke, root beer, Perrier, and red wine bottles, plastic cups, tools, and stools, with at least thirty stagehands busy plugging things in. Our fellow all-access-pass holders were mostly dressed in funky velvet and lace, cool motorcycle jackets, and bell-bottom jeans. The stage was already warm, so I stashed my raccoon coat and hat behind the navy-blue curtain dividing the stage from the backstage. Between sips of Perrier, Danny and I bided time until Ian called Danny over to assemble the guitar stand for Keith’s new Plexiglas guitar.

  Things began pulsing, shimmering, throbbing. The stage lights flexed, lighters flicked on from the audience, and the strobe lights began a wavy rock ’n’ roll dance. Hearing whispers and shouts, I experienced a surge of excitement and energy I’d almost never felt before in my life, one I found physically overwhelming, as I heard the crowed line “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then Mick was parading, dancing with his back to me, swept up by the sound of the crowd.

  The first time I saw Mick was on television, either The Ed Sullivan Show or Shindig. It was 1965, and as he sang “Little Red Rooster,” he gazed directly at the camera, toying with it, his face overwhelming the screen, his eyes fluttering and trembling in their sockets as he revolved slowly in a circle. I’d never seen another performer so bold, or in-your-face, or sexually explicit. (The only other person who did the eye-flutter trick was, of all people, Uncle Peter, but now that I think about it, his role models were the same southern blues singers as Mick’s.) A poster of the Stones hung on the wall directly across from my bed, showing Mick in profile, standing in front of the band. Mick was the first thing I saw when I awoke in the morning, and the last thing I saw before I fell asleep.

  Onstage, in between songs, Mick turned my way, but didn’t look at me once. Sometimes he wiped his face with a towel. Sometimes he took a swallow of some clear liquid. Wearing a long-sleeved brown T-shirt with an inverted gold horseshoe blazing across the chest, he never stopped moving, never stopped interacting with Keith, like two young trees being tossed around in a tropical wind.

  There was no question that seeing Mick was the birth of something powerful in me: I remember I wanted to be a dancer, one who was watched. One who was tan, tan on the inside too, so tan that it pervaded my personality. One who ran into the water unafraid. Tan, running into the waves, perfectly lit and observed by everyone who had ever denied me anything, anyone who had ever made a black mark on my self-esteem. When I danced, trying to be Mick who was trying to imitate James Brown, I felt a lightness in my being and a strong appreciation of my long-limbed movements. It was not the dancing I was used to. It reminded me of the teenagers at Windy Gates, running down the cliffs, as if they’d never seen a mirror, only hazy reflections of themselves in the ocean as they ran into it, naked and laughing.

  In the summer of 1969, I finally moved out of Joey’s Fifty-fifth Street apartment and into a great Stanford White–designed apartment on Thirty-fifth Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, the Manhattan neighborhood known as Murray Hill. Among assorted other benefits, my new apartment was convenient to Jake, who lived exactly one block north. Over the next few months, Jake and I developed an even closer rapport. I can’t really say that our times together were wall-to-wall fun. Often it was just the two of us—and sometimes I felt the Beast pull up a chair—and it was hard to figure out whether Jake or the Beast was more demonic. Overall, though, Jake’s good opinion meant almost everything to me. I worshipped him, in fact. I was no longer quite as afraid of him, or perhaps, influenced by his new girlfriend, Ricky, Jake had simply become kinder since our summer at Indian Hill. His career as a writer had taken off. He’d written movie reviews for Newsweek and Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker. In no time at all, he replaced Wilfrid Sheed as the film critic at Esquire magazine.

  Around this time, I found out that an old Sarah Lawrence classmate of mine, who’d become a TV producer, was looking for a theme song to a television special called Who Killed Lake Erie? The show was about pollution and the public’s indifference to the quality of Lake Erie’s water. The song I wrote was promptly orchestrated into a melody that reappeared throughout the hour-long special. I was over the moon until a TV Guide review singled out my melody as “Weltzschmertzy.” I looked up the word. It was pretty much my first taste ever of being denigrated in public, and I knew I would have to develop a stronger response to criticism. The bigger point is that this “Weltszchmertzy” theme song would end up changing my life.

  Romantically, it was the start of an interesting period, too. Jake’s best friend at the time was Terrence Malick, who was just becoming a film director and whose presence ignited a mild rivalry for my attention, though I suspected neither Jake nor Terry was as interested in me as they were in each other’s company. I didn’t blame them. I was more interested in them than I was in me. A year later, Jake would go out to Hollywood, and he and Terry would eventually collaborate on one of the best films of all time, Days of Heaven. Jake would also become friends with Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the producers of Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson’s first major starring role, and begin spending time on-site, at parties and around pools, talking up new ideas as screenwriter, script doctor, editor, and probably court jester (not that anyone needed a second jester in the building with Jack around). Eventually, Jake wrote a classic film: The King of Marvin Gardens, starring a glasses-wearing Nicholson as a disc jockey, and Ellen Burstyn.

  Raised in Oklahoma and Texas, Terry was intimidatingly smart, a former philosophy student and Rhodes Scholar who had already translated a book by Heidegger and who was now focusing on writing and journalism. In the weeks after we first met, Terry and I went on enough dates to warrant calling whatever it was we were doing an “affair.” Jake had told me that Terry was brilliant and great and deep, which turned out to be true. At the time, Terry was writing a story for The New Yorker about Che Guevara, and I listened attentively as he talked with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me, too. Still, Terry and I weren’t the easiest fit. If Jake and I shared a dirt driveway into each other’s sensibilities and senses of humor, Terry was on another road entirely. Our dates were complicated even more by the already somewhat confusing relationship I had with Jake, who had fallen in love with an aristocratic English girl, Erica Johnston, who was working as an editorial assistant at Knopf publishers, and whom everyone called Ricky. With her breathtaking pussycat features, Ricky might have been a girl in a Modigliani painting, and together, she and Jake made a glamorous, sophisticated couple. Jake, Ricky, and I fell into the same choreography I sometimes inspire, one where I was the third wheel on a sturdy tricycle.

  In my stunning five-room apartment on Thirty-fifth Street I was coming into my own as a girl about town. The couple from whom I was leasing the place had kept all the apartment’s peculiarities intact, maintaining it to nostalgic 1920s standards. The layout was unconventional, the rooms connected fancifully. The dining area, which combined a kitchen and dining room, was separated by a wicker divider and decorated to resemble an outdoor garden. Vines of all shapes and sizes snaked around the room, which was so small it could accommodate only the three-and-a-half-foot round dining table that the owners had left behind. I brought in four inexpensive thrift-shop chairs, as well as my Mexican bureau from Fifty-fifth Street, an ideal surface and receptacle for nail scissors, picture-frame parts, guitar strings, twine, Band-Aids, rolling papers, and the usual odds and ends. A winding hallway led to the other rooms, including a library and a bedroom the perfect size for a queen-size bed. Though small, the apartment nonetheless managed to seem large and, somehow, central.

  By now Ricky had moved in with Jake, and as I watched their relationship unfold, I was also busy writing songs I could sing at Jake’s parties. Jake had lots of get-togethers, his apartment overflowing with the most intere
sting people passing through town, all of whom seemed to be on the cusp of success, everyone seated at a round table where you could work, eat, or play poker. At Jake’s, for example, Terry auditioned a very young and nervous Sissy Spacek for the part she eventually played in Badlands.

  It was around that same table, invariably littered with wineglasses, empty beer bottles, ashtrays, and games, that Jake and I first spoke about collaborating on a song. I still had the melody I had written for Who Killed Lake Erie?, the first one I’d ever written on the piano, with chords that drifted into minor during the verses, backing up to a strong major feel in the chorus. I asked Jake if he’d be interested in taking a stab at a lyric. At first, Jake had no confidence he could write a song, and didn’t really want to, either. He wrote for The New Yorker, not for Tin Pan Alley. Still, I went home and made a cassette, and in response, Jake, who had never written a lyric before in his life, wrote a perfect one his first time out, though being Jake, he waited a day before even bringing up the subject. Finally, he passed me a sheet of handwritten lyrics. We hadn’t even discussed what the subject of the song should be. In the past, he and I had spoken about how every woman of my generation felt the pressure to get married, while not exactly loving what we’d seen of our own parents’ marriages and lives. Then there was the beginning, the lines about “my father,” which Jake picked up from hearing me talk about him. When I asked him how he’d moved so easily into the deep basements of my brain, Jake told me he’d had no trouble whatsoever. As for the phrase “me first, by myself,” Ricky’s recent move into Jake’s apartment had made him acutely aware of his own loss of privacy and independence.

  Jake kept an upright piano in his living room. One night, when Bob Rafelson and his wife Toby were sitting around the circular table with Ricky, Jake escorted me to the piano, where I sang the song he and I had been working on together. It was then called “We’ll Marry.” Facing the wall, I struggled to play it smoothly, but it turned out that the song wasn’t dependent on “smooth.” The response we received from our collaboration—my music and his words coming together in “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”—was electrifying. When the song ended, the room was utterly still, then my small audience applauded rapturously. Campfire redux. Everyone loved it, or at least said they did. I can’t recall anyone else who was there that night aside from Jake, Ricky, and the Rafelsons, but the applause that Jake and I got lasted years. It was the beginning of a beat to a bigger life.

  * * *

  I was still so puzzled by my feelings about Jake that I simply followed his lead. Unlike me, he seemed to know what he was doing, at least in his head. Early on, during the first year of our friendship, I realized that some things will never be clarified, or straightened out, at least in this lifetime. They just go on and on, and Jake’s and my friendship fits into that category. The two of us lasted as a songwriting team because he could almost magically interpret my experiences. With cunning insight, he kept close watch on my “path.” What’s more, he interpreted that path with a sophisticated irony that gave voice to my most profound, secret feelings. Jake told me later that in those days a lot of people considered him Svengali-ish, but he put it better: he was less interested in people (myself included) than he was interested in creating “situations.”

  Early the next morning, the night after the public debut of “That’s the Way…,” my doorbell rang. Still in my nightgown, I went to the house phone and asked who was there.

  “Bob Rafelson.”

  I buzzed him up, hurriedly placing my coat over my nightgown. When I opened the door, the first thing Bob said was, “I couldn’t help it…” and he placed his arms around me, holding me tight there. He had only an hour, he said. The rest of his family was still asleep in their hotel room. It was now my turn to respond, and to be perfectly honest, I had no idea what to say or do. I wasn’t even sure what Bob Rafelson wanted. Bob was funny and attractive. He also had an extra quarter-inch of what might have been foam around every sinew that skin can cover—an effect of comfort in an otherwise slender man. I liked Bob, but I also felt powerless, a slave to what I imagined Jake might be expecting me to do. Jake, I imagined, would expect me to report back on my activities, give him an interesting anecdote for the two of us to chew over. And because Bob was attractive and he’d surprised me in my apartment, he and I became off-and-on lovers, if such an expression can be used about something so short-lived, for the next few weeks. Bob eventually told his brilliant, beautiful wife, Toby, about me during a “karma cleaning” session and, by the expert way Bob must have told her, in no way did I feel uncomfortable with either Bob or Toby in the future. My brief relationship with Bob led to any number of encounters with other available or unavailable men of that clan who, after leaving Jake’s, traveled the short block south where I welcomed them into my apartment for a night, a week, or longer. “I hate to think of myself as being promiscuous,” I wrote in my diary around that time. “I know I am. I really don’t know how not to fall for people. What does it make me think about myself?”

  One of the men I fell for was Jack Nicholson, who showed up at Jake’s apartment one evening with his arm around his gum-chewing girlfriend, regaling the table with stories from the making of Five Easy Pieces, which had just wrapped. I was goaded to play my musical repertoire for the guests, which had expanded to include a song I’d recently written called “Alone,” an amalgam of “I Am a Rock” and “I Am a Rock” again.

  I could tell that Jack was enjoying my performance. He asked me, very seriously, what more had to happen before I amassed enough songs to make an honest-to-goodness record. I had no idea, but immediately began explaining how I would produce it, first laying down the guitar part, followed by me singing on a different track, to be overlaid eventually with strings. “Yes,” I concluded, “there will be a plethora of strings.”

  After a long pause, and everyone else staying quiet in anticipation, Jack repeated, “Plethora?” in that way only Jack could, and when he did, I felt the same rush of love that I’d had with Willie, and also with Jake: perfect timing, an elastic stretch of irony mixed with a hint of challenge and possibly even menace. Before I knew it, it was time to say good night to Jack’s gum-chewing girlfriend, who, in her Mary Janes and her dress with its puffed-up short sleeves, looked like an extremely attractive eight-year-old girl. When she was gone, we all remarked how adorable she was and how, as she was leaving, she waved at Jack and said, “Thank you, I had a very nice time.” Alone now with Jake and Ricky, Jack trained the full force of his attention on me, and when I rose to sing another song, he seemed to take it personally, as if I were singing to him alone. The song was “I’m All It Takes to Make You Happy.”

  “What if we go over to your apartment?” he said when we were sitting alone.

  He was unbelievable, and it was outrageous, the idea of returning to my apartment alone with Jack. There was a flicker of evil amusement in Jake’s eyes as he sent Jack and me off into the night. It was as if he were already imagining the delight Jack and I were about to find with each other, one that might conceivably provide me and Jake with a future lyric. Thankfully I was a little stoned, as well as drunk enough not to be too nervous, and Jack and I ended up in my living room, with its smoked-mirrored walls and fake-fur foldout couch. Jack lingered in the living room as I prepared a pot of coffee. When I returned holding two cups, I took a seat on the couch across from Jack, who was perched on the piano stool. We chatted for a few moments and then he said, offhandedly, “Do you ever drink coffee in your bedroom?”

  I was inebriated enough that I literally couldn’t remember how to arrange my body in the right way for intimacy, though it was one of the few times in my life that I was wearing the perfect undergarments. When the two of us awoke the next morning, Jack immediately needed to make a bunch of telephone calls. The phone was on my side of the bed, and Jack sat up, propped against the pillows, while I lay there trapped underneath the long curlicue cord. Jack’s phone voice—and his enti
re persona—was supremely assured. At the same time, I couldn’t help but think he was trying to impress me with the caliber of the people he was calling. He tossed out nicknames left and right. Candice Bergen was “Bugs,” Art Garfunkel was “Artie the Garf,” and it took me a few seconds to realize that “Mike the Nick” was Mike Nichols. I lay in bed next to him, unable to come up with any witty things to say, and feeling dumb about it, too, so I remained quiet.

  That evening, Jack was back, after another day spent shooting Carnal Knowledge with Bugs, Artie the Garf, and Mike the Nick. He showed up late, explaining that the Lexington Avenue bus had run into traffic. It was winter, and cold out, and more than anything, I was amazed that Jack Nicholson ever took a bus anywhere. He and I proceeded to have an almost domestic evening, watching television, with a few bits of frolicking thrown in. That same night, Jack told me that he was starting to see a woman he felt serious about. He’d been seeing her all winter, and there were children involved, and the two of them were on the verge of moving in together. The discussion he and I proceeded to have was extremely rational. “I really like seeing you,” I said, “and I’m glad you told me before I invited you to my wedding in which you were my groom.” Jack told me I was a “funny one” and he was glad I understood.