by Carly Simon
Next door, down the beach to the left of Lillian’s, was the Styrons’ beachfront house. It featured a deepwater dock and a famously sprawling lawn on which many gathered for many reasons. The Styrons were Lillian’s adored nemeses. A fiercely domineering personality, Lillian was eternally lusting after a worthy competitor. Blushing and flattering, she would often compete with William’s wife, Rose (a fine poet and translator in her own right), when in fact the last thing Lillian would have admitted was how deeply she needed Rose. It was Rose, after all, who brought into Lillian’s sphere many of the quintessentially glamorous figures who spent time on the Vineyard. Rose and Bill were at the center of the Vineyard Haven Main Street elite, which consisted of those “already published” and at the midpoint of their literary reigns. It was a well-established group—brilliant, successful, artistically and politically motivated, and proud to share in one another’s leafy, extensive shadows.
Art Buchwald, the resident guru of the island, met regularly for lunch with Jules (cartoonist) Feiffer, Mike (newscaster) Wallace, Robert (dramatist) Brustein, Sheldon (president of U. Penn) Hackney, and John (author) Hersey at the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club (I would often join in for the lobster rolls). I’m not sure what Lillian did there when others were occupied on the tennis courts slamming their crosscourt forehands at each other. But it may have involved sneaking a furtive peek at Rose’s calendar to find out who was coming for cocktails that night, leading to a plot to steal Marlon Brando for the weekend when he was meant to be visiting the Styrons.
Lillian spent winters in St. Lucia and New York, so I would know her only during the summer months, mostly on the porch of her house, where she stood imperious, conscientious, and defiant. Her interest in meeting me was connected exclusively to my recent celebrity and 1972 marriage to James Taylor. James and I were of a relatively new breed of kids who had spent our summers on the Vineyard, and in our case returned to establish a year-round life. It was through Lillian that I met Rose for the first time. The three of us were joined one early dinner at Lillian’s house by Jane Fonda. Fonda was working with Lillian on the movie Julia, which was based on a Holocaust story from Lillian’s iconic collection Pentimento.
As she cut a healthy bite off her porterhouse steak, Lillian asked, “Is Warren [Beatty, that is] really that good in bed?” Jane and I were supposed to answer in tandem, which, of course, we did, and then, to our utmost surprise and delight, Rose volunteered her own answer. (The things we don’t know about Rose might make up a singular category of interest, especially now that she’s just turned ninety at the time of this writing!)
Even before I moved full-time to the Vineyard, Rose Styron was talked about incessantly and always in glowing terms. Many people extolled her physical beauty and grace, her poetry, her translations, her relationship to and success in the world of advocacy and social justice. Rose’s reputation was well deserved, and I was immediately enthralled by her and by her four children, Susanna, Tommy, Alexandra, and Polly, each one through the years as interesting as they were the first time you had met them.
Bill Styron, Rose’s husband, was magnificent—mean and vulnerable and not all that interested in other people except as subjects to write about. He was often ruthless to Rose, mostly because he could get away with it, though no one else could, or would, or ever felt any need to. I met Bill for the first time just before his novel Sophie’s Choice was published. I remember that the letdown following the huge success of that book and the movie brought on one of his several depressions, made worse by the side effects that go along with taking the wrong medications. It became something of a chore, the delicate, eternally vigilant effort it took not to rub Bill the wrong way and become a target for the churlishness that was a cross-symptom of his personality and his depression.
Lillian Hellman’s memorial service (1984) was an underplayed, typically Vineyard affair that took place at Abel’s Hill Cemetery, where, two years earlier, John Belushi had been buried. The usual empty beer bottles, dried flowers, and mixed messages of pom-poms and silver skull jewelry had been tossed onto John’s gravestone. But it was situated in the same row as Lillian’s, and I remember feeling happy that the two of them would be able to socialize with each other in the next life. They would have liked each other immensely. John wouldn’t have had any idea who Lillian was, though certainly Lillian would have had a whiff of John’s extravagant fame.
Lillian’s service was attended not only by the Vineyard Haven group, but also by her close friends from the McCarthy era—blacklisted or not—and others Lillian had collected, in the way an art collector snatches up paintings that might increase in value over time. All of us laughed afterward at a remark that Bill Styron made about Lillian: “We dined together, often on close friends and an occasional deceased writer.” Lillian’s passing marked the end of the inherent tension between the two powerfully brilliant literary hostesses as next-door neighbors. Something of a letdown for tenderers of local strain and gossip. Although Jackie’s arrival a few years before, bringing with it its own quiet force of gravity, might have eased their disappointment.
* * *
I WOULD SEE JACKIE again at a party at Rose and Bill Styron’s house. It was one of those high-toned, tan-legged, post–Sophie’s Choice, Chilean-writers-in-attendance dinner parties for which, among their various other heady laureate accomplishments, Rose and Bill were known. That mid-August night, Jackie and I were seated at the same table, one of three closely squashed surfaces holding thirty people in all. It was Rose’s way of paying no attention to how furniture should be arranged, or whether or not forks matched up with spoons. It was the apex of chic in a tattered New England way, though authentically unselfconscious, too. As a result, the festivities had a Sunday night pickup dinner sensibility of ease and familiarity, like an impromptu high school reunion in someone’s wild and overgrown backyard.
Everyone there that night knew Jackie and me separately. And although Jackie and I had been introduced a few weeks earlier at the Ocean Club and run into each other a handful of times since, we did not yet know each other. The mystery of her, the weight of her history, still seemed nearly impenetrable to me. As I tried not to stare at her from across the table, I found myself entertaining a topic of conversation that might have implied, creepily, that I’d crawled under the table at some point during the evening to study Jackie’s feet. During a pause in the conversation, I stammered on the “J” of “Jackie” before somehow blurting out, “Jackie, where did you get those a-a-a-mazing s-s-sandals you’re wearing?”
For the first time that night, the focus of conversation was on Jackie, simply and fully. She didn’t look at all pleased, either, though somehow I had the impression that it was a “down” night for her in general. As I remember, she left the table and the party before the last course of cheese and salad. Only a few minutes before leaving, though, Jackie answered my question, without flourish or detail.
“I bought them at a bazaar in Pakistan.” Her gaze was direct but perfunctory.
“Very exotic,” said another guest seated to her right, and Bill Styron said he’d noticed them, too.
“I read about one of your trips, in ’62 I think? It must have been so hot and crowded back then.” That was Walter Cronkite. Several other guests chimed in, too, and I felt the support and charm of the men at the table as they patched and smoothed the conversation. At the same time, I remember being aware that Jackie, surrounded by familiar faces but also newcomers like me, was in an uncomfortable position, probably not for the first time in her life. How hard it must have been to negotiate being the Jackie having dinner with her trusted friends as well as the “Jackie” from international headlines. I can see how any question posed by someone she didn’t yet know, even an innocent one about footwear, might seem like a breach, an attempt to break through into her dark and complex and fiercely guarded history.
* * *
MY FIRST AWARENESS OF Jackie—that is to say, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the very public, very styl
ish, and always somewhat elusive figure—was back in the sixties, when I was in high school. A scattering of photographs, a collage of opinions, news stories, her all-enveloping walk through the White House. Piecing together my thoughts at the time about this larger-than-life woman, I found, not surprisingly, that most of them centered around the connection between Jackie and her brilliant, handsome husband.
I also remember wondering: How can any woman belonging to the generation between my mother’s and mine be so unlike either of us? Had Jackie had to give up her identity completely to become Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Was she at the not-so-secret mercy of the Kennedy family? If so, did she come to this realization suddenly, only when she was safe under the covers, jars of Vicks VapoRub and aspirin bottles cluttering the bedside table, faced with a new and overwhelming set of responsibilities, including being pregnant, taking care of the house, and being America’s First Lady? I imagined she was not entirely happy to find herself living in so saturating a spotlight. Jackie’s own background discouraged anything more public than birth, wedding, and death announcements, though I didn’t pick up on all that until much later on.
It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the rags began devoting serious attention to salacious gossip about Jackie, now Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. That was a different era, suddenly less oblique and guarded. The marriage between Jackie and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis was reported to be on the rocks. The press was leaking more and more details, and the reverence for Jacqueline Kennedy deteriorated for a while into a trashier but still fascinating aura—that of Jackie O. As more information was revealed about Jack and Jackie’s past, John F. Kennedy’s character and behavior with women other than his wife fell under the microscope. These “other” females posed and sprawled bustily over front pages. They were gangsters’ wives, wives of close friends, blondes, brunettes, and some obvious, cleavage-happy Hollywood types.
Facts got twisted and played with. We, the peanut gallery, sat in the far-back seats, adjusting our spyglasses, assessing what we knew, or believed we knew, about the marriage between Onassis and Jackie. I was, like most people, somewhat fascinated. What was she thinking? Why go from universally revered Jack Kennedy to a character like Aristotle Onassis? But more than the facts, what toyed with my imagination were Jackie’s reactions to what the newspapers were reporting. How much did she care? How did that concern show itself, or affect her comings and goings with her children? How did she protect them from what were some fairly unlovely details about their father?
For that matter, how much had she always known? Did she have sleuths or spies, or those in her close circle who played both sides? Whether it was the truth or a projection on my part, I felt certain that Jackie was capable of holding a grudge. She would have had to. Did she savor a grudge, love it, roll it on her tongue like a pearl, shifting it back and forth? From the first big hurt until it felt almost irrelevant, just another pearl, slicked over by time but always kept close by. She knew the secrets of the great queens: keeping it all close to the chest. Each fresh, painful image popping up in a dream or on a supermarket tabloid cover just might be rendered harmless, no longer relevant. But these impressions were from a time when I was just a girl who knew Jackie only as a figurine, not yet even a figure, certainly not a person, and some miles and years away from being a friend.
* * *
WITH ANY NEW FRIENDSHIP there are moments when another person lets you in, lets you see different notes, moods, colors, shapes. A friendship is like a house in that way. In the first weeks and months, you become meticulously and even overly familiar with the front hallway, the mirror, the hooks, the sneakers and shoes, and the living room, the candles with their black wicks on the mantel. Maybe you go into the kitchen, with its coffee smell, plates, and a bowl recently washed and drying beside the sink. A few visits in, it’s now the upstairs—bedrooms, half-opened closets with fast glimpses of belts and scarves, and even the basement with its folded cardboard boxes, the wood stacked up, the window fans and retired kids’ toys and wedding presents that never made the cut.
In that way my friendship with Jackie was like entering a stately, vaguely intimidating house, with columns and gardens, a house that showed up in both the National and Social Registers. But I found out that more rooms existed than I would ever have imagined, rooms that kept showing themselves to me over the years. One opened up a few years after we met, when I sang at her daughter Caroline’s wedding to Ed Schlossberg. It was 1986.
We were already friends, but not what I was used to in a friendship: close contact, sharing of pain and issues of love and loss. That hadn’t happened yet. I sort of understood why she asked me over, say, Pablo Casals or André Malraux. They were dead, but you get my point. I already knew some of the Kennedy family—Teddy, and some of the cousins, Chris Lawford and Steve Smith—I was a part of the tribe who had homes on the Cape/Vineyard, part of the “family-at-large.” When Jackie asked me to do this favor for her, I immediately felt that she had become my friend in a different way. I was now in the room where the fire was lit and the coffee was on the stovetop. There was two-day-old fruit compote in the kitchen and no one was at home but us.
In truth, Jackie didn’t ask me to sing directly, not specifically, but she did ask whether I knew of any great bands that could play dance music. Just to think of the musicians or poets she might have had access to and who would have jumped at the chance to help, to be at a “Kennedy” wedding, made me so pleased she had enlisted my help. The wedding of John F. Kennedy’s daughter. Jackie’s daughter. Their only daughter: Caroline.
Caroline, Ed, and I went to see a band called the Supreme Court during a rehearsal at the Embassy Hotel in New York. They were both totally won over, especially by the lead singer, Marc Cohn, who was on the verge of solo stardom. The next thing I knew, Marc, his band members, and I were rehearsing together. The set list included a couple of “just in case” songs I might end up singing at the wedding reception. Caroline and Ed went on to see the Supreme Court at the China Club and got familiar with their music. They called to thank me for introducing them to such a perfect band.
I couldn’t get it through my head that Jackie considered me enough of a friend to help with such a significant occasion. I think that was the first time I understood.
* * *
THIS, OF COURSE, made it all the more mortifying that I was half an hour late to Caroline’s wedding on Cape Cod. Not out of any Queen-of-Sheba complex, but because whoever was in charge of those things forgot to send a shuttle bus back to pick me up at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, where I was getting dressed at Rose Kennedy’s house. Since there was no need for me to get to the church early, I hadn’t gone with the rest of the family. I had no idea how to get from the compound to the church in Centerville, the next town over—and in a panic I called the local police. In the end, a cruiser driving ninety miles per hour with its sirens shrieking dropped me off at the church.
With a rotating cast of exceptions, Jackie’s table was saved for family. She was wearing a very pale green silk cumberbunded dress that skirted her knees. Without the benefit of a concealing midsummer tan, Jackie looked a little tired, dealing with the myriad matters concerning the event, although her eyes were lit with obvious delight at the occasion.
I sat for a while at Jackie’s table, along with George Plimpton and a few others involved in the merriment. As was his wont and way and even talent, George was in charge of that night’s fireworks display. The night sky was bleary and wet, and George wanted to set off the fireworks before it got even foggier, but the band took a while to get their instruments tuned and plugged in, and we couldn’t get ready any faster. I’m not sure if George ever forgave me for making him put on his fireworks display in the coastal fog.
Dinner was followed by toasts from Teddy and cousins one after another. The dance floor filled up fast as the Supreme Court played just the right mix of Stones, Beatles, Bob Marley, Bill Withers. I was encouraged by the lady in green
silk to kick off my shoes and go up there and sing with them. I did without any of my usual nervous fluttering about. Marc and I sang “Chapel of Love,” “Is This Love?,” and “Lean on Me.” Jackie made a motion that I should do a song of mine. I sang a few of my self-penned or -recorded songs: “The Right Thing to Do” and “Nobody Does It Better.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger standing at the edge of the dance floor, looking as though he was wondering which of the guests he was going to crush between his two fingers. Teddy came to the stage and asked the band to play “Jump.” Marc asked, “Which ‘Jump’—the Pointer Sisters’ or Van Halen’s?” The senator obviously didn’t know the difference, hiding his ignorance with a smile. “Just ‘Jump,’” he said, walking away toward Arnold.
After the band went off at the end of the night, Marc approached Jackie and thanked her for giving him the opportunity to play at Caroline’s wedding. Jackie responded: “Yes, it’s just like a day at the fair!” Everyone was happy. It WAS like a fair. Except one of us was wearing the most beautiful short-sleeved wedding dress and looked particularly spectacular.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS after the wedding, Jackie called me. As an executive editor at Doubleday, one of her job responsibilities was convincing famous or interesting people to write their autobiographies. On the phone, Jackie told me that she thought my life would make a “fascinating” story. Yes, I told her, but there was that “but,” followed by a second “but.”
I was all the things one might have imagined a person in my position to be: immensely flattered, feeling not up to the job, and worried about being honest—of course about my parents, and especially about what I would have to leave out, the nucleus of the story, in fact, which was my mother’s long, adulterous, secretive relationship with my younger brother Peter’s tutor. After a month or two of phone calls, and me coming up with various excuses, and Jackie coming up with other, gentler angles—“You could just concentrate on your relationships with different people: your mother, your sisters, you and Mike [Nichols, the film director, a mutual friend], and, of course, James and your kids!”—I finally told her the truth.