With Jeff now out of the picture, Jet and I began fixing up our drafty loft in SoHo. Our days were intense and uneasy. We spent long, bleak hours talking about my family, his family, our relationship; I’m surprised the kitchen table didn’t collapse under the weight of all that verbiage. We spent weeks scraping the paint off the brick walls, and when that was done, we undertook the monumental project of building a soundproof music studio, from scratch, into a corner of the living room. As an additional distraction from my mother’s death, I was throwing myself back into my music career; writing words had once again taken a back seat.
As always, I longed for Daddy to praise my music, but also I couldn’t bear it. He would grasp my fingers and ask me to play him my new songs; when I pulled away, saying, “Tomorrow,” he would squeeze my fingers tighter until it was a tug-of-war. He offered me music lessons. He asked me to collaborate with him on an opera. He pushed; I resisted. “Frontal, frontal,” he would say every time I turned my head to avoid his attempt to kiss me on the lips. (But that in itself wasn’t so unusual; he kissed everyone on the lips.)
Harry, to his credit, had quietly refrained from putting the Fairfield house on the market. Now the East Hampton house was to be sold, and all its contents absorbed into Fairfield. Decorator Gail made the Fairfield master bedroom pleasantly dark and masculine. My father had an unusual piano installed up there: a Bösendorfer upright that sounded wonderful, and allowed him to compose late at night. The piano soon acquired the Mark of Lenny that all his pianos had: a cigarette burn or two on the keys.
Gail’s greatest gift—even beyond her decorating skills—was her ability to make the family feel good about all the changes. We could have taken offense, viewing them as attempts to erase our mother from the premises—but instead Gail, who adored our mother, made sure that every alteration was imbued with Felicia’s own sensibility. It was almost as if the new rooms for Lenny had been redesigned by Felicia herself.
Whether deliberate or not, it was our mother’s masterstroke to have created a separate place in which to die. After she was gone, that place, with all its woe, could be folded up into itself and tidily disposed of—while the Fairfield house, untainted by sadness but full of Mummy’s touch, awaited our return, so we could find ourselves there as a family once again.
But for that first fragile Christmas without our mother, the plan was to go somewhere else entirely. The four of us and Shirley, plus Alexander’s best friend, Bart, our honorary fourth sibling, went to the splendid Jamaican resort Round Hill. The bright, lazy days seemed to bring my father around. On Christmas night, as we shared a nightcap at the Round Hill bar, Daddy wandered over to a small neglected piano, sat down, and played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety—a brilliant, exuberant performance, just for us and a handful of astonished hotel guests. That was when we knew Daddy was going to be okay.
But his bronchitis seemed to have become a permanent physical state. The coughing was ghastly—and by now I had developed a Pavlovian aversion to the very sound of coughing. After a particularly awful bout, he would look very sad and say, “It just won’t go away.” And then take a drag of his cigarette.
I imagined saying to him: You know, if you really loved us, you wouldn’t risk subjecting us yet again to the misery we’ve all just endured. How about setting aside those goddamned cigarettes?? But then I’d remind myself that the strongest, harshest words I could possibly devise would not make a whit of difference. Nothing would, ever. That was the essence of addiction: to cigarettes, or to anything else.
* * *
Despite myself, the music-making inched forward. I performed my songs at the Prince Street Bar, the restaurant on the ground floor of my loft building. Friends and family came—including my father. For an encore, he accompanied me as I sang “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. I felt pretty good about the way things had gone—until the next day, when I bought the New York Post and saw the photo of the two of us with the headline “Chip Off the Old Baton.” I felt punched in the gut. But after all, what did I expect, I told myself savagely.
My next big step was to put together (and pay for) a recording session of two of my songs: a raunchy number called “Hot Tomato” and a long, complex song, “Gentleman with the Green Eyes,” heavily inspired by Jim Steinman’s magnum opus for Meat Loaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” “Gentleman” had multiple sections, elaborate backup vocals, and constantly shifting meters—the latter being a trick I’d taken right out of the LB composing playbook.
At Moogtown Sound, I had my first taste of how time and money fly, fly, fly out the window of a windowless recording studio. I also discovered how personalities can chafe against one another in that tight, fraught space. And toughest of all was confronting the disparity between how I heard the songs in my head and how they actually came out.
Trembling with excitement and dread, I played my father the new tape. Afterward he said, “Jamie, you’ve GOT to do something about the balance! I can’t hear the words, those Blakeian lyrics! Why are you so self-destructive? Oh, fuck the backup band; your song is what matters—we’ve got to be able to hear those words!”
Dammit, he was right. I, too, had noticed I couldn’t hear all my lyrics in the mix—and yet I’d allowed things to go that way out of some vague desire not to be, well, loud and obnoxious?—during the mixing process. And so much money spent! Was it even worth sending this tape around? I cried all the way downtown.
For days, whenever I talked to my father, he’d say: “Come on, couldn’t you mix it again? Just bring up the vocal and bring down the guitar.” It was a perfectly rational suggestion, but I was infuriated. And I couldn’t bear the prospect of spending yet more money. My delays in learning to be financially responsible, combined with the modest trust fund I’d just received on my twenty-fifth birthday, had left me with a paralytic fear of spending any money at all.
A few nights later, at the opening of Hair the movie, my father had occasion to meet Moogy Klingman, owner of Moogtown Sound. Who was responsible for “that terrible mix on ‘Gentleman’?” my father demanded to know. Moogy said, truthfully, that he’d had nothing to do with it; he just ran the place. But a few days later, I saw two new reel-to-reel dubs of “Gentleman” on my father’s desk. Puzzled, I asked him what they were. He told me about meeting Moogy, and that these would probably be remixes, with the voice louder. I was apoplectic. Where did this Moogy, whom I hadn’t even met, get off making copies and changes on my song without even consulting me?! Secondly—no, firstly—I was furious at Daddy for meddling in my musical affairs.
The next day, he left a rapturous message on my phone machine about how wonderful the new mix sounded, he could hear all the words, how great the song was, on and on. He meant well; of course he meant well. But all I could do was seethe.
Nina’s first Mummy-less birthday rolled around in late February, and Daddy tried hard to make an extra fuss over her. On her birthday night, we all attended a preview of Steve Sondheim’s new show, Sweeney Todd. But the intense static between my father and me marred the evening. As we were walking from our hired limo to the theater, he declared that the chauffeur had been “an asshole” for having the effrontery to ask him what time the show would be over. “It’s his job to find out,” he said. I replied, “You know? You’re being a real pain in the ass today.” “No, you’re a pain in the ass,” he said, and then booted me in that very location as I went in the door of the theater.
The show was breathtaking in its pitch-black brilliance. We knew we had seen something historic. Afterward, we had dinner across the street with Steve. I told him about getting kicked, and Steve pointed out that his competitive pal Lenny was probably pretty anxious about seeing Steve’s new show. I hadn’t thought of that; my father was probably feeling extra-vulnerable—especially so soon after the debacle of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which he knew Steve hadn’t liked. And what was more, my father had probably taken an orange pill to help him get through the evening, which wo
uld have exacerbated his erratic behavior.
The next morning, Daddy told me over the phone that he felt he didn’t have much time left; he had to make friends, make love, make music, make haste before his time ran out. He apologized for the kick in the ass. “At least with kicking, there’s contact,” he added.
God, he was exhausting.
* * *
Nina was having more success than I was in drawing closer to our father. She was studying King Lear at Brearley; the real-life father and youngest daughter identified almost mystically with the Lear-Cordelia relationship. So the play was freshly on Daddy’s mind when he ran into his old pal Richard Burton on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, a few days after a concert in Mexico City. The two men arrived at the possibly alcohol-fueled idea that my father would direct Richard Burton in King Lear, and Nina would be involved in some way with the production.
A few weeks later in New York, my father invited Richard Burton and his new wife, Suzy, to the Dakota, where Nina met them for the first time. Nina told me that after half an hour of chat, Daddy bizarrely announced that he had dinner plans, and would Richard and Suzy please take Nina out to dinner with them. Miserably, Nina went along on this awkward expedition. At the restaurant, Burton began arguing furiously with Nina about the comparative value of words and music. He repeatedly excused himself from the table, returning each time in a yet more combative state. Suzy grew pale and quiet, and finally demanded the check halfway through the main course. The three of them went up to the couple’s hotel room, where Suzy poured her husband into bed, explaining to Nina that Richard was taking Antabuse and was not supposed to be drinking—but obviously he’d fallen off the wagon that night.
When Nina told me all this, I wondered whether our father had a clue about the multiple pressures he was inflicting on his seventeen-year-old daughter. In social situations, he was repeatedly putting her in the wife role, even as his own behavior grew more unpredictable. This Lear was demanding an awful lot from his young, motherless Cordelia.
Alexander finally graduated from Harvard, having left partway through and returned to finish a couple of years later. It had been a long, joyless ordeal for him, but he’d done it. When people arrived at the Fairfield house for the celebratory weekend party, they encountered Alexander’s Harvard diploma impaled on the front door with a kitchen knife.
One of the features of the party was a string quartet playing outdoors during Sunday brunch. Alexander knew his chamber music, and could regularly astound Daddy with his knowledge of repertoire from Mendelssohn to Schumann to Ravel. When Alexander, Nina, and I were together, we were always playing records and sharing our in-jokes.
“What shall we play now?”
“Let’s play ‘Shepherd on the Rock.’”
“Okay, I’ll be the rock.”
This was all in the age-old family tradition. Daddy had endless musical in-jokes with his own siblings, many of them involving special lyrics. For Shostakovich’s Seventh, they’d sing: “Jerry Robbins, won’t you do, Jerry Robbins, won’t you do a new Petrushka . . . BRAND-NEW Petrushka, BRAND-NEW Petrushka . . .” For the big tune in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, they’d sing: “Up . . . your leg . . . with a meat hook . . .”
We had our own treatment for that tune: it was one of the many melodies that lent itself to being trilled the way Bugs Bunny sang in the bathtub while soaping his back with a scrub brush. “Tyuhh, tuh-tuh tyuhh, tuh-tuh tyuhh, tyuhh . . .”
One piece Alexander and I doted on was Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique; we’d memorized every note of it by the end of that Philharmonic tour in 1968. Years later, the two of us were driving in separate cars to Fairfield, keeping up with each other on the Merritt Parkway. Suddenly Alexander’s window went down as he slid his car perilously close to mine. “Turn on QXR!” he yelled. I did, and sure enough, the radio station was playing good old Symphonie Fantastique. For the rest of the drive, we conducted at each other through our open windows, risking life and limb at seventy miles per hour for the Witches’ Sabbath finale.
Another beloved piece from our school days came back into our lives when our father passed along a pair of tickets for the Verdi Requiem, performed at Carnegie Hall by the LA Philharmonic, with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting. It was unusual for us to be attending someone else’s concert—and it was a stupendous performance. Renata Scotto hit one note that was so exquisite, tears literally popped right out of my eyes. (It was the very same pianissimo “Requi-eeem” that had given us such fits when sung by Galina Vishnevskaya.)
The gentleman to our left glowered at us throughout; Alexander and I could barely keep still or quiet. Alas, we had inherited some of Daddy’s—and Aunt Shirley’s—bad audience habits. Both of them were incorrigible. When our father sat in a concert audience, he was essentially still conducting: making not-so-subtle gesticulations and audible comments like, “Oh, why didn’t he take that accelerando?” Meanwhile Shirley was a compulsive whisperer—except that her whisper was as loud as her talking voice. It was a mortifying torture to sit with the two of them at the theater, and movies, as well; every time they asked a question about the plot, they’d miss the next crucial bit of dialogue during our hurried explanations, resulting in further rounds of questions.
Daddy, Shirley, Alexander, Nina, and I—our new nuclear family—attended a matinee performance of Cats, at which Shirley and her brother were particularly audible in their dislike of the proceedings. Afterward, there was a new flavor of embarrassment awaiting my siblings and me at Sardi’s, where we all went for dinner. My father had known Vincent Sardi for years, so a great fuss was made over us when we arrived, and we were given a swell table near the entrance (where Vincent Sardi could be sure that everyone who entered his restaurant would behold the glamorous clientele). Alexander had been in the same elementary school class as Paul Sardi, whom Vincent and his wife had adopted. So Alexander nearly had a stroke when Vincent came over to our table to say hello, and my father, after giving Vincent a big hug, said: “And this is my sister, Shirley, and these are my three ‘adopted’ children: Jamie, Alexander, and Nina!”
It was a kind of cerebral short-circuit that Daddy experienced quite often. Somewhere in the depths of his brain, he knew that Vincent Sardi had an adopted son. But this wisp of knowledge had surfaced in the form of an impulsive, lame joke about his own cute little wastrel kids. Vincent blanched, but remained affable. After he’d left the table, Alexander quietly exploded: “Do you realize what you just did?!”
Just another night on the town with our dad; we never knew what adventures lay in wait.
But the incident at Sardi’s evolved soon enough into a touchstone of teasing and family hilarity. Our father was generally a good sport about being teased. He knew, most of the time, that he had it coming—and that it was our crucial escape valve for the chronic annoyance of putting up with him.
* * *
A year had passed since our mother died. There was a ceremony at the gravesite, which I declined to attend. I was making a declaration: I didn’t accept that any part of Mummy that mattered to me was in Brooklyn. Daddy took it especially hard that I wasn’t there; that was probably my intention.
Father Puma held a memorial Mass for Mummy at his little church in New Jersey; I went to that one. I played a song on the guitar and nearly passed out from fear in that small, unassuming space, with that modest handful of congregants. I could see my scarf bouncing against my chest to the rhythm of my thudding heart. Could stage fright be a genetic trait? It certainly appeared that I’d inherited my mother’s malady.
A few weeks later, I had a pair of gigs at a new club called the Fives, way over west on 57th Street. In the days leading up to the first performance, I got a raging sore throat and was drenched in dread. My friends who came to the shows were full of compliments—but as usual, I suspected I’d made a complete fool of myself.
My father didn’t come to the Fives; he was touring with the Philharmonic in the Far East. The tour was a smash, but Daddy continued to
be out of sorts. He told me on the phone that he was tired—and lonely. There is no moment more lonely, he said, than to finish conducting Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and have thousands of people screaming at you for twenty minutes while you’re up on the stage—then have no one to go to off the stage.
But he wasn’t lonely for long. That fall, he did find a source of companionship in a pleasant young guy named Bobby K. Bobby folded fairly comfortably into our family life—though Shirley was resentful, and Uncle BB, never comfortable with his brother’s gay side, maintained a careful distance. Alexander, Nina, and I got along just fine with Bobby. He was more or less our age, and seemed almost like a friend. Almost.
But everything was driving me crazy: my family, my boyfriend, my music—everything. To escape, I drove up alone to Martha’s Vineyard in my father’s little red Fiat Spider, which had never performed correctly for him and which he’d passed along to me. (He now drove a magnificent vintage cream-colored Mercedes convertible sedan; the license plate said “MAESTRO 1,” but the 1 was too close to the O—it looked like “MAESTROI.” Oy.)
I arrived at the funky, briny guest cottage across the lawn from Bill and Rose Styron’s house. The rest of the Styron family hadn’t arrived yet; there was only Bill in the big house. Upon seeing me, he was boisterous and affectionate, and seemed interested in my music career. He offered to introduce me to his friend, pop artist Carly Simon, who had a house up the road there.
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