Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  Jackie commented that many artists became distant in the course of doing what they had to do, no matter what their medium happened to be. I confessed to her that the whole thing made me slightly uneasy, too, especially when I considered writing the music for a film that took sides against one person I knew for the sake of another. “But I’m writing the lyrics to the theme song from Nora’s point of view, so whatever I end up writing will be from her perspective.” I told Jackie that Nora had written down a few phrases to help me get deeper into her character. “She gave me ‘burn the soufflé’ and ‘kiss the host good-bye.’”

  At the end of the movie, the Nora Ephron character leaves the Carl Bernstein character, flying off with her children to New York once it’s become clear that her husband has been unfaithful for a while. As the plane takes off, the Nora character sings “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” her hands demonstrating to her daughter the motions that match the words to the song. I knew that was a good taking-off place for me, too, and I remember sitting at my upright piano on the Vineyard, writing out new chords to “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Nothing revolutionary, mind you, just taking a few liberties here and there. And, even better, Ben and Sally and their little cousins were just at the age—between eight and thirteen—where they knew and could sing the song.

  Mike’s and my professional relationship continued throughout the eighties. In 1989, I was in the middle of recording an album when Mike asked if I’d be interested in writing the score for another film he was directing, Postcards from the Edge, starring Meryl Streep as Carrie Fisher, or at least a likeness of her, a drug addict going through rehab. I sat down at the piano one day with a cigarette, some pills, and a yellow pad, and by nighttime I’d come up with a new song called “Have You Seen Me Lately?,” which became the album’s title. It got Mike’s stamp of approval, and also made my husband, Jim, cry when he heard it. I made a demo so that Meryl could get familiar with it, as it was written for her to perform. Throughout the making of the album of that same name, the song “Have You Seen Me Lately?” went into the movie, then out, then back in again, changing singers and adding or subtracting various piano parts.

  Jackie, I remember, was so fascinated by all the machinations taking place on the movie and sound sets that she asked me to give her a daily report. “I called Meryl and sang it over the phone to her and Meryl told me she loved it,” I told Jackie, “though later Meryl told people she didn’t think she could sing it. She was too intimidated. In fact, Meryl is a terrific singer, and I wrote the melody with her voice in mind.”

  But all that would come later, when new people arrived into Mike’s life and mine. Mike’s marriage to Annabel ended in 1986, and two years later he married Diane. During that same time period, I met and married Jim Hart. The good news was that since Mike and I had one of those relationships that expands rather than shrivels up when someone new comes in, the four of us made a perfect quartet.

  Jim and Mike were just beginning what would be their own long, devoted friendship. Diane had grown up a churchgoing Protestant and was always kind, respectful, humble, and careful. The exception was that when she was in competition for a juicy interview, Diane would leave her rectitude on pause. At the same time, there were always little clues scattered here and there that I could never quite decipher. Whenever I’d call their house, apartment, or hotel, and Diane answered the phone, she and I always chatted a few minutes and then she said, “I’ll give you to Mike,” before handing over the phone. But what about Diane and me? I wondered. Was Diane only putting up with me for Mike’s sake? In general, though, I remember the delight and comfort we all took from the great nights, lunches, and vacations the four of us enjoyed together. The gifts Diane sent me during the first two or three years the four of us traveled as a pack were so grandly thoughtful as to be almost embarrassing.

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT, during one of the two summers when Mike and Diane were staying at my guest cottage on the Vineyard, I gave a party in my gazebo, which overlooks the field where the sheep, donkey, and horse grazed in bucolic unselfconsciousness. (They still do.) The day had been hot, and it was still warm at dusk when I began serving margaritas and tacos. That morning, when I was talking to Jackie on the phone, I told her about this little get-together and—naturally—invited her to come. I was surprised but thrilled when she said yes on such short notice.

  But as the night went on, it became clear I hadn’t accurately taken the temperature of the relationship between Jackie and Diane. There was, at the very least, a sophisticated tension between them. Over the years, Jackie had said a few witty, disparaging things about Diane, and while I took in the wit of Jackie’s words, I was mostly blind to the negativity at the center of her feelings that was, as Mike had intuited, competitive. Just maybe, in the wake of Diane and Mike’s marriage, Jackie thought of Mike as the man who got away.

  As usual, I could relate to it all, while still being a spectator, out of the crossfire, should there be any. I felt very close to all three of them. Though, if truth be told, my strongest allegiance was to Jackie, who I felt truly let me in, whereas Diane could be chilly, practiced, and untouchable. I’ve come to believe that Diane is as shy as I am, but that she hides it successfully behind language and upbringing. If truth really be told, I could just as well have been a foil for all of them. Jackie! Mike! Diane!

  The night of the party, all the other guests had arrived except for the major players in the coming drama. At last they began to appear. Mike came across the lawn from my little guesthouse—the Black Honeymoon Cottage. He came alone, as Diane was taking a little extra time to summon her grace to face Jackie, who also had yet to show up.

  I was seated on the wooden bench that lines the circumference of the gazebo when my peripheral vision caught sight of a figure moving in slow motion around the circle garden, blond hair obscuring her face. Equidistant, and going at almost the exact same speed, a brunette, also alone, was making her way with casual determination past the pond on the opposite side of the gazebo, observed only by me, the sheep, the donkey, and the horse. Up the stone path to the steps came the brunette, head held high, eyes steady and bright. I still have lopsided dreams of that double image. Betty and Veronica dreams. Dreams of magnificent, treacherous girls.

  The gazebo is laid out so that there’s no way to enter it other than along a single stone path. For a few moments, it looked as though Diane would reach the path just before Jackie. I was convinced Diane must have seen Jackie and was timing her entrance so as to avoid one of those awful “comedic” moments when two people crash into each other. Jackie got there first, Diane arriving maybe ten seconds later, thanks only to a contrived, diminished stride.

  The others—there were maybe ten of us there—greeted both of them, standing, shaking hands or delivering their kisses cheek to cheek. The air zigzagged with overly zealous compliments. I watched closely as Mike maneuvered the force of his eye contact toward Diane, except for a single, barely perceptible blink, where it was clear he’d taken in the entire political performance of the two women. I remember Jackie’s straight back becoming straighter, Diane’s neck modestly bowed, swanlike, her head to one side, smiling, as she accepted the wreath of the underdog.

  wah wah be doo dah

  zop wah de doo dah

  wha wha wha de do bop be do

  za be do da

  —“UNCLE PETER”

  4

  Daddy and Uncle Peter

  HOW DO YOU PINPOINT the occasion when a friendship begins to take hold? Do you know it when it’s happening? Did it begin with the small notes, sometimes regarding the book we were working on, that Jackie had begun sending me in the mail and that I would answer, leading to a lively written correspondence that was sometimes accentuated by a thoughtful gift? Did our shared respect for and adoration of Mike make us more like sisters? Did it inspire our realization that we both were influenced by powerful fathers? Powerful in Jackie’s case in that she adored her father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, and powerful in my c
ase in that I felt pushed aside by mine—Richard Simon.

  Had Jackie grown up with the confidence to be plucky or shocking and deserving of love, whereas I turned to one man after the next to find someone worthy through whose eyes I might see myself as lovely or brave and safe? (Then again, I’m fairly certain that show business is overflowing with people who fall into the “rejected-by-their-father” category. If you can’t get the love of the first man you meet, the love of a million people isn’t enough.) Jackie had won the competition with her sister, Lee, whereas I grew up feeling like I ran in eternal third place behind my own two sisters, Lucy and Joey.

  As a child of six or seven, when my stammer was full-blown and my front teeth were sprawling across the universe that was my mouth, my father may have looked at me as a caricature. I took advantage of this perspective and encouraged his artistic eye to envision me as a character in a Jerry Lewis skit or perhaps even as a hitherto unknown, recently born Marx brother. Whatever the reason, he began to take pictures of me, and not just of his more beautiful daughters and his wife, Andrea. I knew that, compared to them, I looked silly, and I responded by posing like a big silly clown. In those photos I look desperate.

  “Daddy, please look,” I’m saying. “I won’t try to be pretty for you, but I am funny. Can you see that, Daddy? I’m funny!” Or, more likely, “I hope I’m funny.”

  When Daddy never seemed to look back with any appreciation, I went further into my pent-up, abstemious, closed-off affect, which probably worsened his attitude toward me. I thought I was the only human who could get their feelings hurt.

  The story I tell myself was that I grew up with a father in name only, a third daughter, the only one born with the Semitic features he thought he’d left behind in some foreign country. Yes, Daddy was a king of a father to my sisters, Joey and Lucy, whose looks and bearing were almost Prussian in their bladelike fineness. If it weren’t for Uncle Peter, my mother’s brother, who distracted me from the uneasiness I always felt around my father, I’m not sure how I would have survived that painful part of my growing up.

  Thank goodness for Uncle Peter! Uncle Peter, who taught me chords on the ukulele, who sang, “Yes sir, that’s my baby” on the porch of our house in Stamford. He, with his brother Dutch, started a band when the two of them were stationed at Fort Dix. Peter played anything that Louis Armstrong could play, but better in one unusual way—all the sounds came directly from his mouth, with no horn in between. It was naughty, lively Uncle Peter, the epicenter of joviality, who laughed me around kitchen and dining room tables and up and down the seesaw of life. Uncle Peter, into whose hand I slipped my own during Father’s Day in pre-kindergarten, my other hand gripped loosely in my father’s, which felt so alien.

  As Uncle Peter tilted into old age, his eyes might have lit up a little more slowly, but he was still gorgeous, still laughing, still delighted by life, an aging autumn poplar a beat or two less wild in the wind. When he died, I was desolate. Uncle Peter felt like my real father, the Daddy who genuinely loved me, and whenever I look for warmth in men, I always expect it to have the face of Uncle Peter.

  Jackie was so taken with the stories that had entered our conversations that when he died, she asked about many more details of his life. Particularly, she loved the story that at his funeral there were at least seven women who introduced themselves to me and, with a wink and a nod, revealed that they had lived in my apartment on Thirty-fifth Street from time to time. At LEAST seven, all either Cuban or African. They would circle the room and come back to talk about him some more. Uncle Peter’s wife was a fine, upstanding woman. I’m sure she would not have approved of these Murray Hill luncheon trysts. Even Peggy Lee (whom Peter had managed) told me she had visited the Murray Hill apartment a number of times as well. She made no secret of the fact that she was very involved with my uncle, my own version of Black Jack.

  “Uncle Peter has always sounded so much like my own father,” Jackie said once. “Isn’t it just like us to meet at that transit, the crossroads of role models?”

  I wondered: Had I spent my life idealizing, glorifying, and chasing after the absent male? During the final days of my first marriage, I remember thinking that James looked at me as a man might when regarding a faded flower that he had once picked and now, with difficulty recognizing the beauty for which he picked it in the first place, discards it. It was a feeling that Jackie, apple of her father’s eye, would probably never know.

  A few years before Uncle Peter died, Jackie was intrigued enough to want to hear his albums, so on a late afternoon I went to 1040 Fifth Avenue, following an explicit request to bring some of his music. It led to one of the most intimate conversations we ever had. I had made a cassette, my most favored form of copying music. It was easy to pick out ten of my favorite Peter “Snake Hips” Dean songs. By then he’d made four solo albums with a pianist who was also a great friend, Buddy Weed. He’d never imagined that there would be a demand for live shows. Who would have guessed he’d hit the road at seventy-three with a band? He played the ukulele and danced while he was playing.

  I arrived at Jackie’s apartment at 4 p.m. It was a Thursday in early 1989. I was about to go to Florida for a midwinter vacation with my husband Jim, Jake Brackman (my collaborator and close friend), and his girlfriend, along with Sally and Ben and their friends. From there, it would be out to L.A. for the Oscars. I had been nominated because of Mike—because of my song “Let the River Run,” in the movie Working Girl. I was terribly depressed and had no conscious reason why I was, though depression had been my frequent companion, called by many different names through the years. I had wanted to ask Jackie about depression, knowing she had suffered that awful disease, probably accompanied by post-traumatic stress disorder, but I left it alone for now.

  Marta, Jackie’s housekeeper, answered the door. I’d walked across the park and wore a heavy coat that my friend Marsia had made for me. I felt like Anna Karenina in it. It was long, to the ground, lined in burgundy-colored cashmere, with a trim that resembled snow on a lamb’s fur. Jackie and I talked about the coat and about how we both loved Russian style.

  “Have you read Troyat’s biographies of Peter the Great? Of Tolstoy?”

  “I love the Tolstoy biography even more than the one about Catherine the Great, which is saying something, as I thought that was going to be my all-time favorite book.”

  “What about Stefan Zweig’s biographies?”

  I don’t know which one of us said what, but it was another example of our shared taste in and passion for reading. She later gave me a book about four great Russian palaces, a big volume containing plates of interiors and exteriors of these Russian national monuments, and suggested that if I needed some good decorating hints, I should study them. It was the kind of witty remark that I would expect and want from her—from anyone who knew my taste, really—but particularly Jackie, with whom I shared a love of certain styles, although, given her general penchant for understatement, not others.

  After my coat was taken, I sat on the couch facing the museum side of Fifth Avenue. Jackie was on a chair with her back to the view.

  “Did you bring it?” she asked.

  “I think it’s our lesson for the day! Yes, shall we put it on right away?”

  “I think we may have to remove the rug.”

  “We’ll be dancing tonight!”

  Marta asked if she could watch, and we clapped our hands like toreadors for some reason, after which she announced the option of “sherry or port or tea or coffee.”

  “It’s not that kind of music, Marta,” I explained. “It’s my uncle Peter!” I was very proud of him.

  “Shall I put the tape on? Any particular song?”

  Marta went into the kitchen, soon returning with a large pot of tea in a Russian samovar, with glass cups. There was jam for sweetener.

  The tape started with “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home.”

  “What a lovely voice.” Jackie noticed Uncle Peter’s gentle tenor deliver
y and his rhythmic rounding off of the notes.

  She just listened and sat still.

  Then came on “Four or Five Times,” a duet with his niece, me. Its tempo got us both up. It was as though a Spanish dance troupe had just entered the room and we were its partners. All three of us started dancing independently of one another. Jackie asked Marta to turn the volume up. Then Uncle Peter broke into a scat section where his voice was the trumpet.

  “How does he make that sound?” Jackie asked with a note of incredulity. “That is something I have a feeling no one I’ve ever known would be able to do.”

  “Here, I’ll show you.” I closed off my throat and pushed the air through a small space left for just that purpose. Maybe you could use that space for other reasons, such as swallowing gnocchi or something slippery with a little sauce, but it certainly worked well for making the sound of a jazzy muted trumpet. Then came a great song of James’s that Uncle Peter wanted to record: “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.”

  “I don’t know why I decided to include it. Probably just to suffer a little bit.” The conversation paused, and we allowed it to. Then I looked up and past her, out the window to Fifth Avenue, where the sun had shifted and the clouds revealed a more golden afternoon. Contemplatively, Jackie evoked a frequent and resonant topic:

  “What makes it love?”

  We continued on as if engaged in a musical duet.

  “How does it know?”

  “Is it different in some countries?”

  “What is the difference between like and love?”

  “Does love always include like? Does like always include love?”

  “What are the symptoms physically, if any?”

  “Is it altogether different if it’s lost its luster and maybe its lust?”