by Carly Simon
How could I say something self-effacing about a really nice party? Someone quickly explain this to me!
I’m bloated with too much social interaction and Vineyard August-ness, and just so tired, and my diary entry trails off, depleted.
Tops in the ongoing summertime social excitement was the party Jim and I went to at the renowned publisher Katharine Graham’s house to welcome President and First Lady Bill and Hillary Clinton on their first visit to the Vineyard. I remember giving Jackie a moment-by-moment account of the party, and the Clintons’ visit to my house the very next day. The two of us sat in my circle garden amid the late summer marigolds and sunflowers, drinking white wine spritzers and eating cucumber sandwiches. It was so humid and the ice was melting so fast in our glasses that it made a crinkly, collapsing sound that, to my mind at least, ice has no business making.
The morning of the party, Jackie had gone sailing with the Clintons on the Relamar, the yacht belonging to her close companion, the businessman and diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, though she declined the party itself, preferring to skip out on the official welcome.
“You would have laughed and laughed, and then it would have been all over,” I said, referring to the dinner at Kay’s.
“Who was sitting where?” Jackie asked.
I told Jackie that for whatever reason, I was placed at the “A” table, Kay’s table. She sat at the head like a much grimmer, more knuckle-rapping version of Miss Jean Brodie. There were three other large round tables in the formal dining room, along with place cards like exam grades. (Jackie, I knew, was also a place-card user, whereas I had never in my life given that kind of dinner party.)
I couldn’t really remember the cocktail portion of the night, I told her, “but I do remember every detail of the dinner, since it was so traumatic.” Jackie’s face was eager and intense, waiting to be unfurled by the gossip my expression seemed to promise. She was obviously relieved not to have been there. “Who was sitting where?” she repeated, ready to gain a mental picture of the tableau.
“Kay was at the head table. President Clinton was sitting on her right,” I went on, “with [former secretary of state] Henry Kissinger on her left. On the other side of Clinton was [former Vogue editor] Louise Grunwald, then [former attorney general] Nicholas Katzenbach, then Lally Weymouth, Kay’s daughter, followed by Lawrence Eagleburger [yet another former secretary of state], then me.
“Why do I think [former secretary of defense] Robert McNamara was there? Would he have been there?” I asked Jackie.
“Well, he’s a great friend of Kay’s.”
“Yes—in fact, Kay asked me to sing to him last summer over the phone. She wanted me to take him away from his wife, in fact … so she could marry him!”
“Oh, Carly, you didn’t follow through, did you?”
Chuckling, I couldn’t resist: “Jackie, I’m surprised you didn’t know that I’ve been pimping for Kay for years.”
Kay had recently revealed to me that her first choice in a husband was Warren Buffett. She didn’t get Buffett (I guess I wasn’t very successful as a pimp) and she would next set her sights on McNamara. Her third choice was Mike.
“Doesn’t it seem like Mike is on everybody’s list?” Jackie commented rhetorically. Then she asked me what I wore.
“Oh, my lord, I think I looked a little trampy. I wore a bustier”—bustiers were in fashion at the time, as Madonna had made them mainstream—“and very long earrings, to make me look less naked. Bill was looking at me very flatteringly. I don’t know if I was just imagining it. I wore my hair up, too, which I don’t usually do, with wisps coming and going and getting caught in the earrings. If I do say so myself, I looked fetching, and I was blushing, too, like Scarlett, or was it perimenopause?”
“What about the conversations?”
“Well, that was actually the disaster,” I said, adding that Jim was seated at Hillary’s table, and therefore wasn’t there to save me from any political mishaps. Neither did Kay take any great pains to hide a sheath of index cards on which she’d written germane questions to ask all the assembled past and present great political luminaries, crowned by the president. “The subject of the night was NAFTA! Yes, I knew the acronym, NAFTA, but its meaning [North American Free Trade Agreement] was just out of reach. I had absolutely no idea what to say if the inevitable question came around to me: What did I think of NAFTA?”
I explained how Kay was very formal, as always, and she went around the table in order of seating. When it was close to being my turn, I thought about going to the bathroom, my old trick from school that I called on whenever I was afraid to answer a question and thereby exhibit my stammer to the classmates. But lo and behold, what to my wandering eyes should appear but a late arrival. Webb Hubbell, the Arkansas lawyer and writer. Most important, Bill Clinton’s close friend.
“Oh, no, what a relief.”
“Anyhow, as soon as Webb arrived, I was home safe,” I told Jackie. “He and I were both terrified by how formal everything was, and we turned toward each other and started making small talk. ‘What was Little Rock like at Christmas?’ ‘How long have you lived there?’ ‘How long have you, Carly, lived here?’ ‘Where is your husband?’ ‘What does he do?’”
“CAWWLY,” boomed the voice of an evil stepmother, “BRING IT BACK TO THE CENTER!”
I looked up at the person who had broadcast the command: Kay, her hands and fingers stretched out like lobster claws. Her face was unspeakably fierce. But it was also the way she’d said my name. A lot of sphincter pressure was placed on the first syllable as she bore down on the AW-syllable. It wasn’t a friendly, rounded R, but a CAW-LEE, the sound of a large crow being beaten to death with a bat.
“How embarrassing. How awful. What was she doing that for? Why didn’t she blurt out the same thing to Webb Hubbell?”
“I suppose Webb was spared because he was a friend of Bill’s.”
Amid my extreme self-consciousness and embarrassment, I was also praying this wasn’t presaging the inevitable question about NAFTA that I was dreading. “What was NAFTA? NAFTA, let’s see. It was a treaty! Was it anything like perestroika? Or maybe détente? Oh, Jackie, I know nothing. I forgot everything!”
“You don’t—don’t be silly. You just weed out the boring things.”
“Then—thank God—after I faced the table as Kay commanded, Beverly Sills [the opera singer] arrived for dessert. She sat down between Webb and me. I launched into a feverish discussion with her about my opera singer sister, Joey, with whom Beverly was great friends. If only I’d been sitting next to Jim, he would have saved me. Or Rose [Styron]. Where in the world was Rose?”
“When she’s not everywhere, where is she?”
“So I was deep in that close, face-to-face discussion with Beverly, who did not know the Kay rule that everyone’s face had to be pointed to the center.” Then the stern, fearsome, malevolent voice of the wicked stepmother called out for a second time, guillotining all conversation:
“CAWLY … BRING IT BACK TO THE CENTER!”
“Jackie, I was completely mortified. I looked at the president, and he was looking at me as though he realized and understood I was being systematically tortured. Which made me start tearing up. I teared up and up and up, until a few tears made little paths down my cheeks. I think Bill was about to say something and, in fact, did. He changed the subject completely to something about the Vineyard.”
I was aware that Jackie was loving this story as much as I was horrified telling it. It was obvious she knew every person I was talking about, and no doubt had her own “reveal” about them, which she might have kept to herself only because I was putting so much energy into my own story. More likely, she was being discreet.
“If nothing else did, it was his sheer empathy that made the relationship between the president and me so immediate. He really was appalled, and he told me that later.
“After dinner,” I continued, “all the guests repaired to Kay’s white living room for
coffee and dessert. It was there that, after treating me like a truant kindergartner, Kay had the audacity to ask me to sing. I don’t mean to do Kay any disservice,” I said, “but truly, it didn’t look good. I mean for her.
“Ignoring my sour attitude, she asked me to sing ‘My Funny Valentine.’ She’d hired another musician I know slightly, named Jeremy Berlin, to play cocktail music, and if I’d known she was planning to ask me to sing, Jeremy and I could have rehearsed, or at least prepared something. Instead, Jeremy sat at a small electric piano, like Schroeder in Peanuts, and I began singing … well, whatever the first note was that came to me. I certainly don’t have perfect pitch, and I didn’t mean for Jeremy to follow me, but it was too late, the note had already hit the air. It was obvious to both of us I’d chosen an unplayable key. Poor Jeremy! As he poked around for the notes, I kept trying to help him by changing my note to match his. My funny valentine-valentine-valentine, up and up, trying to land on the right note.”
“Oh, no! And were people sitting or standing or singing along?”
“All three. As Jeremy and I searched for a landing place, some people took seats. There were white couches everywhere. You know what Kay’s living room is like. It makes you…”
“… have the urge to spill a nice big glass of red wine?” Jackie had finished my thought for me, and as we poured more wine into our glasses, we giggled.
“Was John Kerry there?” Jackie asked.
“I think he was not. But I don’t know. There must have been forty people there!”
“I like John a lot,” Jackie said. “You know he has the same initials as Jack.”
Jackie’s laugh made it sound less than serious, though it didn’t seem an unlikely match, either. She and John Kerry shared a similar patrician tallness—an unswerving head atop a long neck. John Kerry and JFK were alike, too, in other ways. They’d learned their manners from similar prep schools in the Northeast, and they’d gone straight into Massachusetts politics. And they have the same initials.
“Did you ever … ‘take a walk’?” I said, using Edna O’Brien’s strange and lovely euphemism, feeling as though it was permitted because it was obscure, and also it was beginning to rain and I felt heady from the wine. She changed the subject with charm and a practiced alacrity and we resumed talking about “My Funny Valentine,” how it finally found its key and how even Kissinger sang vit hiss Cherman accent oll srue de song.
“Afterward I was completely giddy with laughter, and Bill sat with his arm around Hillary, and once it was over, the illustrious—and yes, I do mean illustrious—gathered around. How did you ever get used to it, Jackie?”
“It all gets just like the cast of The Howdy Doody Show after a while,” she said. “You know, you forget you’re sitting next to the person who signed some treaty you’re supposed to know the ins and outs of … and then ‘Oh, look,’ you say, ‘there’s that very famous, familiar man,’ and you should remember his name, and well, you remember all of a sudden that … it’s just Teddy! Except he’s wearing a tuxedo! Your mind just flips back to when you helped him with his math homework. It seems so close. It is so close. It’s absurd, isn’t it?”
By now the rain was picking up and I asked Jackie if she felt like going inside, though before I did that, I took a long look at her. She looked so beautiful and translucent in her white peasant blouse, her hair swept back in a bun at the nape of her neck. I’m not at all nervous with her now, I thought. This is the best I’ve ever felt with her. It might have had something to do with the surrounding flowers, especially the wayward cosmos and overgrown mint, and how the rain seemed to merge the scents and beauty of the garden, and of her, as one.
But she wanted to know even more. “What else did you sing at Kay’s? Did anyone else sing?”
I told her that the best was yet to come. “Hillary said, ‘Do you know any Everly Brothers songs?’ And, of course, who doesn’t, so Bill chimed in and requested ‘Dream.’ That one was easy to find the key for, and everyone in the room, all those secretaries of state, Walter Cronkite and Susie Trees, and Beverly Sills, and the Grunwalds, and Mike and Mary Wallace, Bill and Rose, and even Jim joined in and sang most beautifully.”
When I want you in my arms, when I want you and all your charms, whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream, dream, dream, dream …
That wasn’t the end, though, I noted. When “Dream” was over, someone called out, “What about ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’?” “Bill began singing it,” I said, “while Hillary tapped her thighs, and somehow the electric piano found the right notes. I sang harmonies, but Kay thought I was singing the melody, and tried to follow me. After it was over, or at least we thought it was over, Henry Kissinger—I mean, Jackie, you can’t imagine how truly, amazingly, dauntingly funny it was—started a brand-new verse. It was something about ‘Sittin’ on the morning swing, I’ll be sittin’ when the evening rings…’ and everyone just let him go on by himself, and once it was over the whole room burst into applause and laughter. I think it was the high point of the musical history of the Vineyard.”
“In retrospect,” Jackie said, “I wish I had decided to come.”
* * *
THE DAY AFTER the memorable night at Kay’s, the First Family came to my house for lunch. It was planned at the very last minute, and the amount of preparation was slim. The rules were just us, meaning my immediate family: Jim, Sally, and Ben. No one else.
What I remember most vividly was the presence on my property of a team of Secret Service men and women. Some were nestling in trees with instruments to survey the grounds, and others ventured inside the house to check all the closets and other places where they just might stumble across enemy soldiers still in hiding from the Korean War.
There were also “tasters”—the intrepid personnel tasked with sampling the soup and the quiche, the carrots and the corn, the breads and the pies, before they touched the lips of the First Family. It was one of the tasters, in fact, who told me the chicken soup I’d made just that morning tasted “funny.” Well, yes, because I’d been expecting the Clintons for lunch, but their arrival kept getting delayed by round after round of golf, so by 5 p.m., when the taster brought the spoon to his mouth, the soup was contaminated by overcooking and 98 percent humidity, and yes, it did taste “funny,” which was a polite way of saying “inedible.” Assuring the taster that I was not involved in a sinister plot, that it was simply a matter of timing, and of me, the cook, not paying sufficient attention, down the kitchen disposal it went. I quickly phoned a local friend, a professional chef, who said she could put together a quiche and a salad with goat cheese within the hour.
During this whole time, as I was getting more and more concerned as to where the Clintons could possibly be, I kept in constant phone contact with Jackie, who kindly put up with my hair-pulling and growing tension, saying finally, as only Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could or would, “Oh, Carly, for Christ’s sake, it’s just another president!”
The Clintons and their daughter, Chelsea (then eleven years old), arrived at around 6 p.m., which coincided with seventeen-year-old Sally and fourteen-year-old Ben’s arrival off the plane from China, where they’d vacationed with James. My caretakers, Jimmy LeRoux and his wife, Wendy, were there to help me coordinate everyone’s comings and goings. They also treated one of the tree-spy Secret Service men for a nasty wasp sting he’d gotten as he scrambled down out of a nearby white birch. The Clintons, Jim, Sally, Ben, and I all sat at my small round dining room table. Bill and Hillary were both dressed in short-sleeve sport shirts, and Hillary wore plaid Bermuda shorts, while Chelsea flatteringly imitated the way Sally had her hair up in a knot, crisscrossed with a chopstick to hold it in place. Bill and Hillary took turns describing the day they first saw each other in the Yale Law School library. The story still seemed thrilling to them, despite how many times they must have told it.
Day turned into night, and after a lengthy tour of my house, we swung on the outdoor swings and felt a fr
iendship I hoped we would preserve. The line of black cars pulled out of the drive at 9 p.m., and we, the Simon-Taylor-Harts, sat down to relive the day’s highlights, including the moment Bill Clinton condemned in no uncertain terms how unfairly he thought Kay Graham had treated me. He whispered in my ear: “She sure did give you a hard time.”
All that night, Bill looked at me with the same keen, kinetic energy he’d displayed at Kay’s party. Which one of us had entered the other’s magnetic field is questionable, but the combination of “it’s nothing personal” and “it’s exceptionally personal” made me consider the misunderstandings he would experience later on in a different light. He never lost the heady aroma of his visceral being.
Bill Clinton has “the Glint,” I told Jackie afterward—the Glint being a subtle knowingness, a certainty of your effect on others, the assurance that just maybe you know more about them than they know about themselves. It all comes through the eyes. “At Kay’s, I couldn’t look directly into his eyes for more than a second. I noticed that unmistakable grasp of my energy meeting up with his.”
“The Glint,” she said. “I just love that as a description.”
I know everything there is to know about the Glint, I told her. “I have it, too! So I always recognize the feeling when I’m doing it, or when I’m being ‘done to.’” The first time I remembered having the Glint was back in sixth grade. I was sitting in a classroom, eight rows in, and staring at the shoulder blades of a boy named Kenny who was seated in the first row. The Glint I aimed at his back made him turn around, and when he did, our eyes meshed. My energy practically forced him to look back at me. Or so I told myself. Was I deluded? Was it some party trick? It wasn’t like I had a crush on Kenny, not like the one I had on another boy who sat on the other side of the room. I had no idea what I was doing when I sent out the Glint, or what its ultimate purpose might have been. “When I did that to Kenny, I owned him,” I told Jackie. “Seriously! I’m not making it up! The Glint isn’t necessarily sexual—but it’s not unsexual, either. The Glint has something more to do with some crazy, charismatic, weirdly adrenalized power.”