Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (31 page)

As cars go faster and I am more aware of them, they obscure the things worth seeing in the city, like the architecture. When I was little, the cars went slowly, or we walked, and there was time to really
look
. My mother pointed out every lovely arch on every building. We had time for this kind of observation, even up to the late 1950s. And it wasn’t possible in the same way afterward, once the speed limit was higher. Whizzing by the Dakota? The Empire State Building? The Chrysler Building? What if we had no cars and more magnificent new buildings?

I am a throwback to the nineteenth century—lamplight, horse-drawn carriages, long skirts, and coats with capes. Imagine how beautiful those nights would be. The Marble Palace and Macy’s were the first department stores in the city, soon followed by B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, and many others. Bergdorf Goodman came along just after the turn of the century. I am drawn to that time period, and could sense it, just as it was totally disappearing when I was little. One’s tastes are so affected by what movies we see and at what age we see them. I saw
Little Women
a few times and
Gone with the Wind
fourteen times when I was a young girl, so they obviously had an impact, and I remember watching Henry James’s story
Washington Square
in its renamed movie version,
The Heiress
. I was born in the Village and lived there when I was little. And although I didn’t like cars even then, I could see that some of them were quite lovely. I used to step on the running board of my father’s wood-paneled Dodge station wagon from the 1940s, and I can still see him behind the steering wheel in his Don Draper hats and long tweed coats. I put one leg into the car followed by the other, and would have wanted to wear silk stockings and high heels, but Mommy said I couldn’t balance until I was at least twelve. (Instead I wore overalls almost all the time, and sometimes if we went to the ballet I wore what Chibie used to call a “frock.”)

*   *   *

I was home for the holidays, back in New York for Thanksgiving 1971, after a haze of last-minute plans. My diary for the first part of that year was lost in a checked suitcase on an American Airlines flight to Palm Springs, where I was going to an Elektra convention. Second in heaviness to the loss of my diary was the loss of my handmade Indian dress with sewn-in beads. That and a pair of chamois boots made up my alluring yet politically incorrect stage outfit (as the American Indians were being ripped off by Madison Avenue). Sure enough, so much was going on in a space of very little time that my calendars, which were luckily in my pocketbook on the plane, show a whirlwind of names, places, and momentous events that would come to shape the arc of my life.

On Thanksgiving that year, my single “Anticipation” was already high on the charts, and the album of the same name was just about to come out. I was just back from L.A. and coming off playing at the Troubadour, this time as the closing act. Drummer Ricky Marotta and I were spending time together. Our primary relationship was one of music, companionship, and the commonality of friends, and has endured many decades now. I sparked to him—his music and his humor were sexy to me.

At 7:30 p.m. on the night after Thanksgiving, I got a call from somebody in James Taylor’s camp offering me two tickets to his concert at Carnegie Hall. (“Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph,” as Allie, Chibie, and my mother all used to say when something came out of the blue.) I had no time to think, and moved fast. Ricky was up for it, and was incredibly funny in the limousine that was somehow extracted, as if by wizardry, from a garage in Queens to pick us up for the occasion. The lumbering twelve-seater was quiet as it took Ricky and me uptown, returning me to an older time in my New York psyche, back to childhood and those car rides into the shining nighttime city. Ricky and I had been smoking and writing some song or another and were dressed as we had been all day. I was wearing a white Nehru shirt made out of a cotton/nylon mix, a pair of jeans, and my red boots from Jac Holzman, all fitting for the folk-rock concert of my dreams. Rick’s handsome face was dominated by his beard and long black horsetails that went halfway down his back. As we got out of the car, Carnegie Hall looked magnificent, like something thankfully emerging out of the past.

We entered and couldn’t find our seats. We were late and our tickets hadn’t been held for us at the ticket window, so we stood at the back of the theater until intermission. The first half of the show sounded just as great as on the records I was already addicted to. The band was the very same—and the most perfectly fitting band ever: Danny Kortchmar (or “Kooch”), Carole King, Lee Sklar, and Russ Kunkel, who had played with me in L.A. after James’s motorcycle accident. The acoustics in Carnegie Hall then were the best in the country. James’s voice was brilliant and clear and inviting. His band was so comfortable with all the songs, which they had performed so many times and played on
Sweet Baby James
and
Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon
, the new album that had made James a major international star. As I watched him sing that title track, I could see the painting on the back cover of
Mud Slide Slim
written all over it. It was painted by Laurie Miller, and showed the “cabin in the woods” that James had written about, the one built (as the song goes) by “Jimmy, Jimmy, John, Luke, and Laurie, No Jets Construction.” (Little did I know that I’d meet all of them, and begin to see that shack come to life, only a week later.) He sang all the songs I loved and had learned by heart, material from his first two albums, as well as “You’ve Got a Friend,” the single that had gone to number 1 on the charts that summer. It was thrilling that I was so close to him. I felt a zigzagging child’s energy in my limbs, and I was smiling so broadly that my cheeks must have grown permanently wider that night.

At intermission, about forty minutes after we got there, Ricky and I walked around the lobby and were corralled by Nat Weiss, James’s lawyer, who introduced himself. “Do you want to come meet James?” Nat asked me. “The intermission lasts another fifteen minutes.”

Awkwardly, I asked Ricky if it was all right with him if I went backstage with Nat. Implying, alone. “You bitch,” he replied instantly—and continued talking to some friends he’d run into. It was funny. Our friendship has lasted far longer than my relationship with anyone else who was there that night. Nat and I went upstairs to the band’s dressing room, where food was spread out on a big table and there was a trash can of ice that had every kind of cola and spritzer and Sprite-like thing you could imagine. It served as the central fire pit of the room. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the sparks, as though there were marshmallows to roast.

James was talking to a petite beauty with a big personality and major voice, Abigale Haness, who I thought was probably his girlfriend. It turned out she was with Kooch, but I was still hit in the chest with unreasonable jealousy, just as I had been when I first saw a photograph of James and Joni Mitchell together in
Rolling Stone
at least a year before. I greeted Kooch, whom I had known since we were small children on the Vineyard riding tricycles and then bicycles down to Menemsha Village. I gave Russ a big hug. He introduced me to Carole King and Lee Sklar. I avoided looking at James with the energy of someone dying to look but not yet brave enough.

Kooch ran over the set list for the second half of the show and finalized it. Abigale slid her hand through Danny’s arm, like an animal making claims on her turf. Once I laid eyes on James, a sense of possession overtook me, as if a dog fence of little white flags had sprung out of the ground around him. The women on the periphery knew just how far back they must stay from that fence to avoid getting an unpleasant little jolt through their system. Jock, the road manager, called out, “Five minutes,” and James changed into a white button-down shirt. I noticed a turquoise belt around the waist of his pants. It was a dragon or snake of some kind. A fan had made it for him.

He turned toward me, and his eyes hadn’t even met mine when I said, before I could think, “If ever you want a home-cooked meal while you’re here in New York, I’d love to make lunch for you.”

He looked somewhere in the direction of my chin, with a quick shutter-snap of his eyelids, and answered: “What about tonight?”

“Okay, sure, sure,” I said. “Yeah, please let’s. Sure, lunch.”

*   *   *

The remaining half of the show was more of Ricky calling me “bitch” half kiddingly and sitting and watching from seats that had been vacated by a critic who’d gone home to put the flourishes on his review. Ricky turned to me at one point and teased, “How much would you pay me to convince one of the critics to say in tomorrow’s review: ‘God’s truth! James Taylor must have fallen in love between the first and second halves of his show. He was a different man—vibrant in his step and delivery … before, he was just muddling through, a man with his beer in front of the television set waiting for another night to pass.’”

There was a party in someone’s hotel room after the show. Peter Asher and his wife Betsy were hosting it, and the rest of the band, friends, partners, and lawyers were in attendance. James whisked me around the room, and I remember dancing with him fast, led by his hands and not his whole frame. He had a lot of energy or after-show buzz. I was thrust from right to left like a new thunderbird in the hands of a teenager. It was more of a polka or a square dance. Nothing at all intimate. What was the song? I don’t remember, but after it ended, I was introduced to Betsy Asher, who had a lot of power and mother-hen aura about her. She was tall and strawberry blond. Elegant and proud, first class, but approachable.

Peter Asher was so many things to me over so many years, including being Peter of the mid-sixties pop act Peter and Gordon, but he was largely James’s manager and producer, and my impressions were all good. He and Nat Weiss were both running the show at its highest level. James depended on Peter and Betsy like Mom and Dad. They were a sounding board for his new songs, and he’d lived with them in London when he made his first two albums. Of course I was anxious about the impression I was making. James and I were dancing pretty wildly—putting on a show.

This night … this night was going to mean so very much to me.

Intending to figure out later what the home-cooked lunch was going to mean at this hour, James and I walked to the East Side and then downtown on Christmas tree–lit Park Avenue, all the way to Jake’s apartment on Thirty-sixth Street. James wanted to get some weed, and I figured Jake would be the most likely candidate. Jake’s social life spun its net in his Bloomsbury-like living room, and there was always pretty much whatever you wanted in the way of intoxicants. I rang the bell and Jake was in, and probably quite surprised (Jake is hardly ever really shocked) to see me standing there with James Taylor. I don’t remember the conversation except, as we were getting ready to leave, James put on Jake’s shoes by mistake. Jake said something that wasn’t meant to offend James, but did. He quoted the Dylan line from “Positively 4th Street”—“If you could stand inside my shoes, you’d know what a drag it is to see you.” He could have misquoted the line, but whatever, the words hurt James’s feelings, and as we left Jake’s apartment and walked the block to my place, I saw the same sensitive side of James as I did in so many of his songs that I already knew and loved. The hurt little boy coming out was very appealing to me.

I was nervous riding up in the elevator in my building, which was old-world and slow. Once inside my apartment, we smoked the joint we’d started at Jake’s house and then, with the grace of a couple of gazelles just learning to walk, made our way to the kitchen and the refrigerator for the promised home-cooked lunch, which was Sara Lee banana cake, first one whole loaf and then another. Perfect for our first meal together.

I’m sure we were thinking along the same lines: What next? I want to kiss him—will he think I’m forward? Should I kiss her? Oh my, I feel a little too stoned. And other baby gazelle thoughts.

I have a peevish urge to show off new things that I’ve just recorded. It’s an unattractive trait, as I see it now—overanxious and forward. It was a crack in the façade that the Beast could find its way into. As I had just brought home the mastered version of the album
Anticipation
the day before Thanksgiving, I was eager to show something of myself to James, hoping it would cut the mustard. I played a few songs and James was getting either fidgety or tired. He said, “Can we go lie down on your bed? I do mean just ‘lie down.’” He spoke like a southern gentleman asking if he might remove his rain boots in the mudroom.

We moved into the bedroom, where the bed was still unmade and clothes were all over the cramped space. I turned off the light and lit a small candle. Only some muted sounds of traffic out on Thirty-fifth Street altered an otherwise perfect silence. James undressed quickly, left on his jockey shorts, and got under the covers. I took off my clothes, almost as if we were camping out together, trying to underplay the obvious sexual tension, and left on just a black silk camisole and white cotton underpants. I got halfway in bed, beside him. The revelation was as shocking as I thought it might be. The connecting of our skin went more than inches. It went flesh to bone, seemed to move with our blood, through vein and artery pumping back through lungs. I was aware that my heart was beating fast. The soft and the hard, the first kiss on the lips, lingering and marveling at its perfect pressure. I moved away, down just a little, beneath the soft sheets and quilt. Then, I stabilized my hand on his arm, pulled gracefully away from his face and his perfect warm lips, and eased my way into his angles, as if I’d always known them. I looked for his eyes. It was almost completely dark in the room. I didn’t know if he saw me. Then I lay half on top of him. Slung like a gun in a holster, ready to make a move. It was the nicest contact I could ever know, could ever have asked for, or ever remember. We were the same length in limbs. He was four inches taller and his torso was much longer than mine, but it felt as though a manufacturer of bodies had copied our limbs and made them a perfect double.