Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (25 page)

Then Mick walked in. One expects superstars to be altogether too large to fit through ordinary doorways, but much to my disappointment, Mick entered the room with utter ease. My first impression was that he was like a diminutive version of Mick Jagger. He was my height, with narrow shoulders and an extremely lean chest, and I found him sexy not just from the get-go, but way before the get-go. He was like a life-sized doll, with a generous but small painted face: neat, correct, at once plush and angular. After greeting his bandmates, Mick ambled through the locker area into one of the stalls, while Keith and Danny continued jamming. Besotted by Danny’s new instrument, the boys were as cool as can be, whereas I was all smiles: Jagger was in the room!

Charisma
is an overused word. It’s different from beauty, and it’s not the same as cuteness. People who have it possess faces that change from moment to moment, from stunning to plain to gaunt to exquisite to ugly to pale to flushed, challenging you to put a name, an adjective, to what you’re seeing, or imagining, but since you can’t, you give up, not realizing you are continuing to gaze helplessly at them, still puzzled, never
not
puzzled, in fact, unable to take your eyes off a face whose angles and adjectives seem to whirl and spin before you. Right away I could tell that for Mick Jagger, all women, including me, were his, by divine right. Women existed to frame him, impress him, shimmer for him, illuminate him, jog themselves helpfully into his peripheral vision: a fast-click snapshot Mick might take out of the corner of one eye for future purposes and dalliances. By now Mick was huddling with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. I can’t remember if Mick even glanced at me that night, but my memory is he didn’t—that would come later. Nor could I bear to look at him directly. Then it was time for the Stones to do whatever it was real rock ’n’ roll bands did before a show. There were groupies in the room, and Danny and I made our way out.

Thanks to our coveted all-access passes, Danny and I were led to seats onstage, behind the speakers, across a tangle of cords, amps, Coke, root beer, Perrier, and red wine bottles, plastic cups, tools, and stools, with at least thirty stagehands busy plugging things in. Our fellow all-access-pass holders were mostly dressed in funky velvet and lace, cool motorcycle jackets, and bell-bottom jeans. The stage was already warm, so I stashed my raccoon coat and hat behind the navy-blue curtain dividing the stage from the backstage. Between sips of Perrier, Danny and I bided time until Ian called Danny over to assemble the guitar stand for Keith’s new Plexiglas guitar.

Things began pulsing, shimmering, throbbing. The stage lights flexed, lighters flicked on from the audience, and the strobe lights began a wavy rock ’n’ roll dance. Hearing whispers and shouts, I experienced a surge of excitement and energy I’d almost never felt before in my life, one I found physically overwhelming, as I heard the crowed line “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then Mick was parading, dancing with his back to me, swept up by the sound of the crowd.

The first time I saw Mick was on television, either
The Ed Sullivan Show
or
Shindig
. It was 1965, and as he sang “Little Red Rooster,” he gazed directly at the camera, toying with it, his face overwhelming the screen, his eyes fluttering and trembling in their sockets as he revolved slowly in a circle. I’d never seen another performer so bold, or in-your-face, or sexually explicit. (The only other person who did the eye-flutter trick was, of all people, Uncle Peter, but now that I think about it, his role models were the same southern blues singers as Mick’s.) A poster of the Stones hung on the wall directly across from my bed, showing Mick in profile, standing in front of the band. Mick was the first thing I saw when I awoke in the morning, and the last thing I saw before I fell asleep.

Onstage, in between songs, Mick turned my way, but didn’t look at me once. Sometimes he wiped his face with a towel. Sometimes he took a swallow of some clear liquid. Wearing a long-sleeved brown T-shirt with an inverted gold horseshoe blazing across the chest, he never stopped moving, never stopped interacting with Keith, like two young trees being tossed around in a tropical wind.

There was no question that seeing Mick was the birth of something powerful in me: I remember I wanted to be a dancer, one who was watched. One who was tan, tan on the inside too, so tan that it pervaded my personality. One who ran into the water unafraid. Tan, running into the waves, perfectly lit and observed by everyone who had ever denied me anything, anyone who had ever made a black mark on my self-esteem. When I danced, trying to be Mick who was trying to imitate James Brown, I felt a lightness in my being and a strong appreciation of my long-limbed movements. It was not the dancing I was used to. It reminded me of the teenagers at Windy Gates, running down the cliffs, as if they’d never seen a mirror, only hazy reflections of themselves in the ocean as they ran into it, naked and laughing.

In the summer of 1969, I finally moved out of Joey’s Fifty-fifth Street apartment and into a great Stanford White–designed apartment on Thirty-fifth Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, the Manhattan neighborhood known as Murray Hill. Among assorted other benefits, my new apartment was convenient to Jake, who lived exactly one block north. Over the next few months, Jake and I developed an even closer rapport. I can’t really say that our times together were wall-to-wall fun. Often it was just the two of us—and sometimes I felt the Beast pull up a chair—and it was hard to figure out whether Jake or the Beast was more demonic. Overall, though, Jake’s good opinion meant almost everything to me. I worshipped him, in fact. I was no longer quite as afraid of him, or perhaps, influenced by his new girlfriend, Ricky, Jake had simply become kinder since our summer at Indian Hill. His career as a writer had taken off. He’d written movie reviews for
Newsweek
and Talk of the Town pieces for
The New Yorker
. In no time at all, he replaced Wilfrid Sheed as the film critic at
Esquire
magazine.

Around this time, I found out that an old Sarah Lawrence classmate of mine, who’d become a TV producer, was looking for a theme song to a television special called
Who Killed Lake Erie?
The show was about pollution and the public’s indifference to the quality of Lake Erie’s water. The song I wrote was promptly orchestrated into a melody that reappeared throughout the hour-long special. I was over the moon until a
TV Guide
review singled out my melody as “Weltzschmertzy.” I looked up the word. It was pretty much my first taste ever of being denigrated in public, and I knew I would have to develop a stronger response to criticism. The bigger point is that this “Weltszchmertzy” theme song would end up changing my life.

Romantically, it was the start of an interesting period, too. Jake’s best friend at the time was Terrence Malick, who was just becoming a film director and whose presence ignited a mild rivalry for my attention, though I suspected neither Jake nor Terry was as interested in me as they were in each other’s company. I didn’t blame them. I was more interested in them than I was in me. A year later, Jake would go out to Hollywood, and he and Terry would eventually collaborate on one of the best films of all time,
Days of Heaven
. Jake would also become friends with Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the producers of
Five Easy Pieces
, Jack Nicholson’s first major starring role, and begin spending time on-site, at parties and around pools, talking up new ideas as screenwriter, script doctor, editor, and probably court jester (not that anyone needed a second jester in the building with Jack around). Eventually, Jake wrote a classic film:
The King of Marvin Gardens
, starring a glasses-wearing Nicholson as a disc jockey, and Ellen Burstyn.

Raised in Oklahoma and Texas, Terry was intimidatingly smart, a former philosophy student and Rhodes Scholar who had already translated a book by Heidegger and who was now focusing on writing and journalism. In the weeks after we first met, Terry and I went on enough dates to warrant calling whatever it was we were doing an “affair.” Jake had told me that Terry was brilliant and great and deep, which turned out to be true. At the time, Terry was writing a story for
The New Yorker
about Che Guevara, and I listened attentively as he talked with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me, too. Still, Terry and I weren’t the easiest fit. If Jake and I shared a dirt driveway into each other’s sensibilities and senses of humor, Terry was on another road entirely. Our dates were complicated even more by the already somewhat confusing relationship I had with Jake, who had fallen in love with an aristocratic English girl, Erica Johnston, who was working as an editorial assistant at Knopf publishers, and whom everyone called Ricky. With her breathtaking pussycat features, Ricky might have been a girl in a Modigliani painting, and together, she and Jake made a glamorous, sophisticated couple. Jake, Ricky, and I fell into the same choreography I sometimes inspire, one where I was the third wheel on a sturdy tricycle.

In my stunning five-room apartment on Thirty-fifth Street I was coming into my own as a girl about town. The couple from whom I was leasing the place had kept all the apartment’s peculiarities intact, maintaining it to nostalgic 1920s standards. The layout was unconventional, the rooms connected fancifully. The dining area, which combined a kitchen and dining room, was separated by a wicker divider and decorated to resemble an outdoor garden. Vines of all shapes and sizes snaked around the room, which was so small it could accommodate only the three-and-a-half-foot round dining table that the owners had left behind. I brought in four inexpensive thrift-shop chairs, as well as my Mexican bureau from Fifty-fifth Street, an ideal surface and receptacle for nail scissors, picture-frame parts, guitar strings, twine, Band-Aids, rolling papers, and the usual odds and ends. A winding hallway led to the other rooms, including a library and a bedroom the perfect size for a queen-size bed. Though small, the apartment nonetheless managed to seem large and, somehow, central.

By now Ricky had moved in with Jake, and as I watched their relationship unfold, I was also busy writing songs I could sing at Jake’s parties. Jake had lots of get-togethers, his apartment overflowing with the most interesting people passing through town, all of whom seemed to be on the cusp of success, everyone seated at a round table where you could work, eat, or play poker. At Jake’s, for example, Terry auditioned a very young and nervous Sissy Spacek for the part she eventually played in
Badlands
.

It was around that same table, invariably littered with wineglasses, empty beer bottles, ashtrays, and games, that Jake and I first spoke about collaborating on a song. I still had the melody I had written for
Who Killed Lake Erie?
, the first one I’d ever written on the piano, with chords that drifted into minor during the verses, backing up to a strong major feel in the chorus. I asked Jake if he’d be interested in taking a stab at a lyric. At first, Jake had no confidence he could write a song, and didn’t really want to, either. He wrote for
The New Yorker
, not for Tin Pan Alley. Still, I went home and made a cassette, and in response, Jake, who had never written a lyric before in his life, wrote a perfect one his first time out, though being Jake, he waited a day before even bringing up the subject. Finally, he passed me a sheet of handwritten lyrics. We hadn’t even discussed what the subject of the song should be. In the past, he and I had spoken about how every woman of my generation felt the pressure to get married, while not exactly loving what we’d seen of our own parents’ marriages and lives. Then there was the beginning, the lines about “my father,” which Jake picked up from hearing me talk about him. When I asked him how he’d moved so easily into the deep basements of my brain, Jake told me he’d had no trouble whatsoever. As for the phrase “me first, by myself,” Ricky’s recent move into Jake’s apartment had made him acutely aware of his own loss of privacy and independence.

Jake kept an upright piano in his living room. One night, when Bob Rafelson and his wife Toby were sitting around the circular table with Ricky, Jake escorted me to the piano, where I sang the song he and I had been working on together. It was then called “We’ll Marry.” Facing the wall, I struggled to play it smoothly, but it turned out that the song wasn’t dependent on “smooth.” The response we received from our collaboration—my music and his words coming together in “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”—was electrifying. When the song ended, the room was utterly still, then my small audience applauded rapturously. Campfire redux. Everyone loved it, or at least said they did. I can’t recall anyone else who was there that night aside from Jake, Ricky, and the Rafelsons, but the applause that Jake and I got lasted years. It was the beginning of a beat to a bigger life.

*   *   *

I was still so puzzled by my feelings about Jake that I simply followed his lead. Unlike me, he seemed to know what he was doing, at least in his head. Early on, during the first year of our friendship, I realized that some things will never be clarified, or straightened out, at least in this lifetime. They just go on and on, and Jake’s and my friendship fits into that category. The two of us lasted as a songwriting team because he could almost magically interpret my experiences. With cunning insight, he kept close watch on my “path.” What’s more, he interpreted that path with a sophisticated irony that gave voice to my most profound, secret feelings. Jake told me later that in those days a lot of people considered him Svengali-ish, but he put it better: he was less interested in people (myself included) than he was interested in creating “situations.”

Early the next morning, the night after the public debut of “That’s the Way…,” my doorbell rang. Still in my nightgown, I went to the house phone and asked who was there.

“Bob Rafelson.”