Words Without Music

by Philip Glass

  I first met Candy Jernigan when I was flying from Amsterdam to New York in 1981. I had been working in Europe, and she was changing planes on her way back to New York from Berlin. Candy was already sitting down in the plane when I got to my seat next to hers, and she seemed preoccupied with reading a magazine, pretending not to notice me at all.

  Over the next ten years I would sometimes ask her, “How was it that you were sitting next to me on the plane?” but she never would tell me. Apparently what had happened—related to me later on by people to whom she told the story—is that she recognized me, and when she found out I was on the plane, she went up to the person whose seat was next to mine and said, “Mr. Glass is a friend of mine, would you mind changing seats with me?” As I was sitting on the aisle, the seat next to me was not a seat that was hard to swap, because people never want to sit in the middle. Not surprisingly, that person switched seats with her, and by the time I sat down it was a fait accompli.

  It was a rather daring thing to do, and as I got to know Candy I could not imagine that she was that kind of person. But she knew my music, and she wanted to meet me. Once I met her, I never wanted to let her out of my sight.

  In a funny way she never wanted to talk about how we met, and yet the meeting itself was remarkable, because it was a meeting of two people who somehow knew that they wanted to be together, and she knew that before I did. Why she knew that, I can’t say, but we began talking and there was an immediate rapport, as can sometimes happen. There was a flow of intelligence, an almost poetic way of talking, that we fell into almost immediately, so we didn’t need to talk about very much. It turned out that she had recently separated from a man she had lived with for a long time, so she was alone. I was not alone, but from the moment I met her, I was suddenly in a place where something very unexpected but profound had happened in my life, and that was the presence of a person with whom I would spend the next ten years.

  Candy’s hair was long and raven dark when I met her. Later on, at different times, she might dye it orangish, or purplish red, but that was a passing thing. She wasn’t tall, maybe five foot two, and she wore glasses with black plastic frames. She liked to wear vintage clothing, a lot of black, with black tights and big, wide black or red belts. Her style showed a sign of taste but not of wealth. She was always able to look distinctive without spending very much money.

  Candy’s grandmother on her mother’s side was from China, a fact that no one in her family talked about for some reason. Candy only discovered this when she found her mother’s passport and learned that her mother was born in Shanghai. She also found a photo of her mother as a little girl being carried in a palanquin with her grandmother. If you knew about Candy’s Asian ancestry, you could see hints of it in the shape of her face and in the quality of her skin, which had a kind of porcelain transparency.

  By the time our plane reached New York, we were reluctant to part, though I was really in no position to make any arrangements to see her again, because at the time I was married, and it wasn’t something I wanted to get out of or change in any way. But it became impossible for me to think about not seeing this young woman again. I happened to have an apartment downtown in the East Village that I had used as a studio, so instead of going home, I went to that apartment on Fourteenth Street between First and Second Avenue. Candy happened to be living on First Avenue and Eleventh Street, so I was just around the corner from her. That wasn’t planned, but that’s how it was.

  Candy was twenty-nine and I was forty-four, which doesn’t seem like such a great obstacle, though at that time it seemed she was very young. Many things might have bothered me, but nothing to the degree that could dissuade me from immediately pursuing this friendship, and in fact, from then on we were hardly separated. There were some very uncomfortable and unhappy moments when my marriage fell apart, without my meaning it to, but without my being able to stop it. It did take a little time to straighten things out. It wasn’t very easy, and it wasn’t very happy for anybody.

  Candy was a painter, and her friends were painters, writers, dancers, and musicians, the same kind of people I had worked with all my life. That was her world, too, one that sustained her and seemed to fill every minute of the space and time that she had. Her day job was working for Paul Bacon, a celebrated book cover designer. When I met her, she was working in figurative oil painting, but soon thereafter she went into different kinds of painting and art making. Her work was part of a different art movement than the one I grew up with, which was abstract, heavy-duty masculine artists like Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra, who were making large powerful pieces in public places.

  Candy was making art that was much closer to the casual inclusion of materials that you’ll find, for instance, in Robert Rauschenberg’s work. With Rauschenberg, he always asked the question “Can this fit into my painting?” and the answer was always yes.

  Like Rauschenberg, Candy also followed the gesture of opening up the canvas or the artwork to anything that you could put in it, but she did it in a different way, so that her work became a form of documentation. She would find objects, which could be as unalike as a cooking pot that had been run over by a truck, crack vials she found on the street, and a dead rat she had stuffed and mounted, and then she would ask the question “Is this art?” In her case, the answer she gave was “Let’s just put a frame around it.”

  We were living together very soon after we met. I had the kids, Juliet and Zack, plus two cats, and she had two huge blue-and-gold macaws who were fiercely loyal to her and just fierce to everyone else. She became very close to Juliet and Zack right away, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. For a couple of years, we lived in a kind of haphazard way. She had an apartment a block and a half away, where she would go to change clothes, and I had my own apartment, a small place where the four of us managed to live together.

  By 1984 we were actively looking for a bigger place. Candy and I had been looking in SoHo for a loft or apartment, but wherever we looked, the prices were out of our range. Then my friend Richard Savitsky, an attorney in entertainment law and real estate, called me excitedly and said he had found a home we could afford, a redbrick town house in the East Village. I was so doubtful about the possibility that we waited several weeks before even bothering to look at it. The house was off Second Avenue and not so deep in the East Village as to make it a long walk to the subway. But it was clearly at that time a drug-infested neighborhood, with the entire street teeming night and day with drug sellers and users. The owner lived in Texas and had, under the circumstances, given up looking for a sale.

  We loved the house and, for Candy and me, by that time both practically East Village natives, the neighborhood was not an unmanageable problem. Because the area was then so undesirable, the seller was expecting only a 10 percent down payment, but even so we didn’t have the cash. I had ten grand from Sony as an advance on my album Glassworks, and I borrowed five grand each from Juliet (sixteen at the time) and Zack (thirteen), which had been gifts to them from their Akalaitis grandparents. The last ten grand I borrowed from an old friend, Rebecca Litman, on a 60-day loan, which I actually paid back in 120 days.

  The plan was that we would live in the upper two floors and rent out the lower two as a duplex. I registered the duplex with a real estate agent on East Fourth Street, but there was not even a single inquiry during the next three months. However, somehow I had made the first three mortgage payments on time. Accordingly, I removed our listing with the agent and we took over the whole house.

  It was a perfect home for us. The downstairs was a kitchen and living room, and the floor above it had a painting studio for Candy and a music studio for me. On the third floor were a bedroom, a bathroom, and a library with empty shelves on all four sides, leaving only space for three windows. The top floor belonged to Zack and Juliet, where they also had their own bathroom and even a small kitchen. Candy’s two vicious parrots, Jack and Carol, by general demand, had to stay in her studio.

&n
bsp; Our house became the center of our lives. Candy would come home from work and we would have dinner with the kids. We took turns cooking, ultimately making a list of sixteen or seventeen meals that we taped to the refrigerator door. Each night we would look at the list and pick a meal, saying, “Okay, let’s make number seven.” As a vegetarian, I was good at making pizzas with homemade dough—potato pizza was a specialty of the house—and I also learned to make lasagnas and all kinds of pasta. I was also good at home-fried potatoes and a dish I called Martians in the Himalayas, mashed potatoes with green peas mixed in. Candy, in turn, enjoyed Southern dishes like sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top. I used to tease her about that because that’s something you find in Jewish homes. I couldn’t believe that she was cooking sweet potatoes with marshmallows: it’s much too sweet and can’t possibly be good for you.

  After dinner and homework, the children would go to bed and Candy would go to her studio. The room she painted in, every inch of it, was an extension of her, with drawers and cabinets filled with her artwork and the materials she had collected to use in her work. Our studios were separated by two sliding doors, and both the music room and the painting room were filled with our personal artifacts. Candy would buy a six-pack of beer and a couple of packs of cigarettes and she’d paint until one or two in the morning, this being her regular painting time. We were together almost all the time, except that she would stay up late and I would go to bed early. She liked to work at night, and I liked to sleep at night—I had to get up with the kids, so I was on a different schedule. She wasn’t interested in having children of her own, but she was very close with mine.

  Even before we met, Candy was a completely articulated personality, and yet when I look at her work now, I realize it underwent a very big change almost from the day we met. Suddenly, she had a whole new community of friends. My friends became her friends, and her friends became mine. I was told that she changed personally as well. One of her friends who had known her before said she could be mean and sarcastic. He was always afraid she might say something cutting. But she was never that way with us. It was almost as if, when I met her, she found a home. She felt so comfortable that there was nothing to be mean about. We all loved her, and she was part of our life, and it seemed to happen overnight.

  Above all, Candy was passionate about her work. In almost all of her paintings, there is an element of humor, and a slight distance, which is always interesting, that separates her from the work itself. It was this slight angle that she was coming from that gave all her paintings their tremendous humor and quality. Ten Kinds of Beans, a painting of ten different varieties of Goya-brand canned beans, is subtitled Homage to Goya. A single square of pink toilet paper from a bathroom in the Louvre is mounted, framed, and labeled April in Paris.

  She liked my music and she designed album covers for a number of pieces—The Photographer, Dance, and In the Upper Room among them. She was particularly curious about writers. She had many friends who were writers, some of whose book covers she designed, and she collected first editions, which are still today upstairs in my library.

  During those years, Candy could often arrange a leave of absence from Paul Bacon’s studio and travel with me when I had a music tour. She assembled a whole series of travel journals on our trips: Mexico, Brazil, India, Africa, Italy, the American Midwest—fourteen of them in all. She carried with her all the things that she needed for collecting specimens: glue, containers, wax envelopes, labels, pieces of string. She was a professional cataloguer, and she traveled with a bag full of the things she picked up along the way: bottle caps, postcards, pop-tops from aluminum cans, matchbooks. She even collected dust in little plastic bags—dust from the Louvre, dust from the Vatican. The travel books were usually being made in the planes or the cars or the taxi while we were traveling. She would take out the things she had collected the night before, and she would take two open pages, and those things became her journals, which in addition to being priceless diaries of our travels became works of art in themselves, all of them archived and preserved.

  We took numerous trips with our friends Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, the art publishers and collectors who founded Gemini Press, which produced so many lithographs, prints, and books by Rauschenberg and Johns, among other well-known artists. Stanley and Elyse had been hosts for the Mabou Mines theater group when we first performed in Los Angeles way back in 1970. Our trips together to India, Italy, and Brazil were documented by Candy in her journals. One journey took us from Quito, Ecuador, to Manaus, Brazil, a five-day boat trip down the Amazon. In India, a country she found incredibly colorful and exhilarating, we visited Kalimpong in the northeast and went south to Kerala to see the Kathakali.

  Some of the travel could be quite rough. When I was working on Powaqqatsi, we took a memorable trip to Africa. At one point we were in the Gambia and supposed to go to Mali. We went to the airport to catch our flight, but there we learned that the president’s wife had decided to go shopping in Paris. Our plane was gone and there was no other plane to take. We were told we could go by land from Banjul, the Gambia, to Bamako, Mali, but first we had to cross the estuary of a river so wide it reminded me of the Amazon. To make the crossing, people used peanut boats, maybe twenty-five or thirty feet long but only four feet wide—no wider—with a motor that went putt-putt-putt-putt. You could count the putts, it was really that slow. The boats were filled with peanuts, not even in bags. It was just a boat filled to the brim with loose peanuts.

  Foday Musa, my Gambian musician friend with whom we were traveling, said, “Just get up there and sit on the peanuts.” So Candy and I got in the boat, and Zack, who was traveling with us, got in, as well as Michael Riesman.

  Kurt Munkacsi and his wife, Nancy, however, said, “We’re not getting in the boat.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to go to another city, we’ll take a bus, and we’ll get to Mali,” Kurt said. They had already found an alternate route. “We’ll be there in about three days.”

  All we had to do was get over to the other side of the river and we would get there a lot quicker.

  Soon after we got on the boat, it started getting dark. A young fellow with a can was sitting in the center of the boat, and as soon as we left the shore, he began bailing out water. He had a permanent job, as far as I could tell.

  When we got to the middle of the river, I couldn’t see the shore behind me and I couldn’t see the shore in front of me. I knew that if that motor stopped, we would sink like a stone. The only thing that kept us going was that little motor—putt-putt-putt-putt—that kept us moving through the water.

  Because I was taking Zack, who was about fifteen at the time, JoAnne had said to me before the trip, “Now you be sure you bring him home.”

  It took us about forty or fifty minutes to cross the water, and the whole time I was thinking, Oh my god. What if I lose Zack? She’ll kill me. And what if I lose myself? She’ll kill me, too.

  But somehow we got to the other side and scrambled off the boat.

  Land travel in the Gambia was generally shaky. When we traveled overland, we’d rent a car, and we’d also rent a mechanic to go with us. The mechanic sat up front next to the driver, and there were two rows of seats behind them where we sat. The car would go for a while, maybe ten or fifteen miles, and then it would stop. The mechanic would get out and fix it somehow, then he would get back in, they would start the car, and we’d get moving again.

  We managed to get around pretty well, but the form of travel was extremely primitive, and accommodations could be sketchy. In one small town we stayed in a place that called itself a hotel, which meant basically that the room had a bed, and the bed had a sheet on it. The sheet looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while. Kurt took one look and said, “I think I’ll sleep standing up in the corner tonight.” Candy called that particular lodging “the bucket hotel,” because the bucket in the room took the place of running water.

  Candy
wasn’t fazed by the travel conditions we encountered, because for her these trips were a way of collecting material for her art. This was a woman who affirmed her existence by collecting what she called “evidence.” In fact, she was always collecting. When we went off the beaten path, we got very exotic stuff, and you couldn’t get more exotic than the countryside of Africa.

  Candy liked the music in Africa, she liked the people, and she could eat more of the food than I could, given my vegetarian diet. Foday Musa once took us to a butcher shop that was a kind of lean-to with a cement floor, with parts of an animal laid out on the floor. You didn’t know how long that animal had been there, but there was an ax, and if you wanted something, the butcher chopped it off with the ax and gave it to you. I saw the men who were going hunting carrying what looked to me like muskets—really old-fashioned-looking guns. They had gunpowder and everything. It was like hunting in the nineteenth century.

  “Where they going?” I asked Foday Musa.

  “They’re going hunting.”

  “They’re going hunting with those things?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  EVERY SUMMER, WE PACKED CANDY’S PAINTING and drawing supplies into the car, and with the two kids we drove a thousand miles north to Cape Breton, often staying there for two months. Usually friends came throughout the summer, so the cabins around the main house were full and the kitchen was never empty. The first thing I had to do was get under the house and fix the pipes, because they would always break over the winter. There were a lot of other repairs needed to keep the house going, but somehow I had time to write music.

  The main house was very big, and I had one studio apart from that, an A-frame in which I’d write. The front room was Candy’s studio. Sometimes she brought her dance-theater group, the XXY Dance/Music Company, for which she designed sets and costumes. They worked in a boathouse down by the water that later on would become Zack’s house. Everyone worked in his own cabin during the day and met at the big house at mealtimes. It wasn’t unusual to have fifteen to twenty people gathered around the picnic tables in the evening sharing a good home-cooked meal after a day spent making art or taking day trips to the many rivers, beaches, forests, or to Cape Breton Highlands National Park.