Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (16 page)

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The Simon Sisters. Lucy and I agreed that our stage name sounded schlocky and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to be labeled—or dismissed—as just another novelty sister act. But in the summer of 1963, armed with only our guitars, we hatched a plan to hitchhike up to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, and score a singing job. We had a fantasy of being little-girl Woody Guthries as we went from car to truck to car up and down the Cape, landing singing gigs left and right. In this fantasy we were brave and slightly decadent. Nothing more complicated than that—and we had no illusions about being “discovered.” It was more of a lark than anything else, just one step more serious than singing at our mother’s cocktail parties.

Mommy nixed our plan. We could either take the bus, she told us calmly, or not go at all. In the end, Lucy and I took a Trailways bus from Thirty-fourth Street in New York to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where we got a lift from a friend the last fifteen miles to Provincetown.

Our first day in Provincetown, Lucy and I proceeded to stroll the entire length of Commercial Street, the town’s main drag. Lugging our guitars in cheap cases as lightweight as papier-mâché, we stopped at each and every boardinghouse and small motel, looking for a room to rent, not wanting to call Mommy and say “Help!” By the time we found a single, inexpensive “bug crawl” room (an expression for lodgings with a spider here, an ant there) above a noisy restaurant, we had been traveling all day and were both exhausted. Our room was tiny and cramped, with a sink in the bedroom and a communal bathroom down the hall.

The joys of being young and on the musical prowl were hardly lost on either of us.

It happened last night we were feeling adventurous

We put on our heels and went out for a walk

More for a drink than to have a few eyes on us

Jenny and I slipped to town for some talk

Me and Jenny, twinklin’ like crystal and pennies

Two hot girls on a hot summer night

Looking for love

—“Two Hot Girls (On a Summer Night),” 1987

Almost immediately, we heard that a local Provincetown venue, the Moors, needed a musical act, as the singer scheduled to perform had just been drafted to go to Vietnam and was leaving the next day. Without even bothering to audition us, the club owner said, “We’ll try it out—just get here at nine tonight.”

It was a good time for Lucy and me to get serious and ask ourselves: How many duets did we really know? How many chords? How many songs?

But instead of practicing, we headed for the beach, where we decided to go for a swim. There, on the cold sand, something happened that—while unimportant in the overall scheme of things—I remember as a landmark moment. Wanting to impress Lucy as much as test myself, I conjured up the mental image of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. I was going in all the way, I told Lucy, shaking my fists as I cried out, “Courage!” with Bert Lahr’s exaggerated, burring “C-C-COURAGE!” With half-girl, half-lioness bravado, I tromped ahead of Lucy into the freezing water. Lucy’s applause and laughter greeted me when I turned around and dashed back, shivering, to my towel on the sand. Even if I was only in the water for a millisecond, I realized: you can always mime yourself into something better. You can become someone “other,” taking a crucial step away from yourself, just as I’d done by singing over my stammer, or using an accent to answer the phone. Costumes, headphones, earphones, blindfolds—these were all steps away from the scary, pained, naked self.

Refreshed and exhilarated by being on the beach, my sister and I quickly adjusted to our new B and B, divvied up sides of the bed (one, two, three: shoot), and took turns in the shower. Afterward, we unpacked, hung up our clothes, and picked the least wrinkled ones to wear. We put on matching white, full-sleeved Mexican blouses fetchingly pleated and cinched in at the waist by colorful woven belts; our full, generous, knee-length linen skirts were supposed to be wrinkled anyway. Our slave sandals tied up around our tan ankles came all the way up to our calves. That night at least, we were all about our tans and youthful, head-turning bodies. Our hair was long and undone, natural, wavy, and slightly damp. Instead of focusing on the way we looked, Lucy and I should probably have concentrated on learning a few new songs to add to our repertoire, but for some reason, neither of us was terribly worried.

Dressed and coiffed to be adored, we hitched up to the Moors, guitar cases in hand, giving the finger to any and all cars that didn’t pick us up, shouting after them, “See you at the Moors!” This became an expression Lucy and I still use, indicating “A pox on you who dare to pass us by!” Tonight would be the first time Lucy and I had sung together in front of a real audience. I had sung many times at Sarah Lawrence and in various rooms at Harvard, but this was professional. We were getting paid, or at least that’s what they promised.

The stage of the Moors was an eight-foot-wide makeshift slab of plywood two feet higher than the rest of the floor. The audience clustered around tables that came so close to the stage they nearly grazed the plywood, both sexes sporting a sea of tattoos and denim—not exactly the same kinds of people who strolled along the paths and lawns of Bronxville and Cambridge. There was no backstage. Lucy and I used the tiny, funky restroom off the greasy, french-fry-smelling kitchen to apply our final coat of lipstick. From head to toe, the Moors had the distinct feeling of being smudged, and by the end of the week, despite appearing in our clean white blouses, my sister and I most certainly felt smudged ourselves.

As soon as we were introduced by the geeky, hillbilly, cross-dressing owner, Lucy said something and it got an immediate laugh. In fact, everything we said got a laugh, including “Hi folks, we are the Simon Sisters, Lucy and Carly.” Our first song was “East Virginia,” which we’d learned off Joan Baez’s debut album. When we got to the lyric “There she laid her head upon my breast,” the crowd at the Moors went wild, regaling us with wows and whews and yows and whoops and barking laughs.

Only later did we learn that the Moors was a gay-and-lesbian bar. What the mostly uncombed, ripped-jeans-and-motorcycle-jacketed audience made of these two sisters is lost to time. Lucy and I had taken our wardrobe at the Moors pretty seriously, and in return the audience probably thought we were twin milkmaids from Switzerland, or escapees from a nearby carnival. But anyone paying close attention would have seen how hard I, Carly, the younger sister, was trying to look and act like Lucy, the older sister. I was now taller than Lucy, but emotionally speaking, Lucy was still the high-up one, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my grounding influence, my heroine, my pilot.

Together, our voices made for an interesting, nearly ideal blend: the exact same pronunciation of words mixed with an entirely different vocal quality. Lucy has a pointed tone and delivery, whereas I have a lower, more smoldering voice. She provided the clear point to my husk, and in the end, we sounded like a single voice. We performed a few more songs: “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” (Lucy’s soon-to-be-famous song), “Delilah’s Dead and Gone,” a Serbian folk song from the Theodore Bikel songbook, which required five chords—Lucy and I knew four and a half apiece—and two or three Harry Belafonte songs, of which “Day-O” was the unquestioned crowd-pleaser.

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Charlie Close was a good friend of Lucy’s, and may in fact have been pursuing her romantically at the time. He was business partners with Harold Leventhal, a well-known music manager, and together they managed Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Alan Arkin, Woody Guthrie, Judy Collins, and many other performers. Charlie came to see us at the Moors one night, and over the next few days taught us F# minor and a cool way to play an E major up the frets. In retrospect, he was grooming us for future management, as he was certainly in a position to escalate our careers. That week, Charlie, Lucy, and I went out to restaurants, cafés, and beaches. We talked about concepts, songs, clothes, and harmonies, and by the time Lucy and I took the bus back home to New York in mid-July, an idea had been hatched: the Simon Sisters would try to break into the Village folk scene. First, though, we had to audition for Charlie Close’s business partner, Harold Leventhal.

Harold was a diminutive man, and when Lucy and I walked into his office and Harold stood up behind his desk, I kept thinking he was going to stand up straighter, but no, he leveled off a few inches over five feet. Alan Arkin, who started his career as a folksinger, was also in the room, playing a song called “Jenny Kissed Me.” I developed an instant crush on him. More to the point, Harold, who’d been impressed by “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” and Lucy’s songwriting skills, wanted to represent us, which was a major jump, though at the same time I felt I was only along for the ride, tagging along behind my older sister. Under her sweet, angelic appearance, Lucy, after all, had much more confidence than I ever did. After signing a contract with Harold’s management company, we auditioned for Freddie Weintraub, the owner of the Bitter End, the nightclub, coffeehouse, and folk music venue that’s still standing on Bleecker Street. Freddie promptly booked us at the Bitter End nightclub for the fall, two three-week stints in all, and we were off and running. This all took place so quickly that I really forgot I was still a college student, still Nick’s girlfriend and plenty in love, and still scared stiff at the notion of performing live on a real stage.

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The rest of the summer I spent with Nicky in Cambridge, comforting him about everything he feared would happen to me once I entered the big bad world of show business. Nicky was aghast at the idea, convinced that my new future would consist of late nights and exposure to all kinds of seductions. Nick had brought me into the world of the intellect, and he feared I would ride into a
Sunset Boulevard
world while sacrificing a deeper, more thoughtful side. He had always insisted that I sing for the Harvard boys, but at the same time, he would probably have preferred to remain my own personal impresario. Why would I crave a bigger audience when, after all, I had him? I promised Nicky that the luster of showbiz wouldn’t change me, or make me love him any less, nor would I attract the attention of all the playboys of the Western world.

Yet as Nick claimed to worry about my head being spun in all directions, it would be his head that turned first.

It happened in August of that summer. When Lucy and I got back from Provincetown, Nick and I rented a house in Menemsha, the little fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard. It was a one-room house with multipaned windows all around, an outhouse, and an outdoor shower in the back. There was a stream beside the small driveway and a path meandering over a wooden bridge, past flowering bushes, honeysuckle, and columbine. Nick was working for a local fish market, delivering bales of fish to various seafood stores and restaurants on the island, and I was spending a few weeks hanging out and visiting friends. Sometimes I could hear him typing, and other times, he and I played gin rummy on the dock. Nick was also trying to teach me how to play chess. Lucy was in New York starting a semester at Cornell Nursing School.

One beautiful afternoon, I collected the mail from the post office and drove back to our little house on the pond. I planned to spend an hour or two on the beach while Nick was working, then come home and cook dinner for him and Max and Yvette Eastman, longtime friends of my parents. First, though, I riffled through that day’s mail. There was nothing much: a bank statement, as well as an overstuffed envelope from a mutual friend of Nick’s and mine from his Fieldston School days, now a student at Radcliffe. The envelope was addressed to Nick, but against my better judgment, and since it was from a mutual friend, I opened it anyway. I shouldn’t have. Our friend said she was acting as a go-between. The other, more important letter in the envelope was from a girl named Nini. Among the things Nini wrote: “I can’t bear to go around hiding our love in the shadows.”

I sat on the bed and leaned back on my elbows. I was hyperventilating. I was taken over by fear. I was shaking. From what I could tell, Nicky and Nini’s romance had been going on at least since the spring. Then again, might I possibly be misinterpreting things? Being wrong, in fact, was the only thing that could save me. The bubble of trust was suddenly burst, replaced by a feeling of pure invasion and hatred. I hadn’t ever wondered whether Nick was unfaithful to me; I simply knew he had been faithful. As Jung once said, when you know something, you don’t have to believe. Well, Jung—or I—was dead wrong.

When the truth hit me, everything flooded and broke. I went around our house, crying, smashing everything in sight. I broke dinner plates, wineglasses, even the big wooden salad bowl. I took some of Nick’s shirts and shredded them with a pair of scissors. It was monstrous, but didn’t this situation call for that? In my head unspooled a noir scene, all shadows and hair knifing the dark. Nini, the Radcliffe girl, wearing black tights, a long dark cape billowing behind her, golden hair knotting, creating wind in a rainstorm, red lips moist, calling out through the fog. Mastroianni in pursuit. I got in my mother’s station wagon and sped to the Leventhals’ house on the North Shore, which my mother was renting. She wasn’t home, so I raced down about fifty wooden steps to the beach before making a left turn, running a quarter of a mile as fast as I could, slowing only when I began to lose my breath.

When Nick returned to our busted-up cottage, he knew exactly where to go: my mother’s rental house. I’d left my car in her driveway, and knowing me as well as he did, Nick knew I’d be on the beach. As I tore down the sand, I was already making an emotional transition from “me” to “her,” as if I were the character in a story. Not me,
Carly
, running, distraught, navigating razor-edged rocks, but some unnamed
her
, jilted, betrayed, and scorned, morphing into a heroine in search of a sandy spot where she could collapse, slumping and sobbing and moaning.