Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (41 page)

James had been fairly cool to me the entire trip, but when we got to the inn, he emerged one night from the bathroom a shaven man. His mustache was gone. It was a complete shock: in the two and a half years we’d known each other, I’d never seen him without one. (James had appeared on an album cover without it, but I’d never seen him clean-shaven in person.) Without his mustache, he looked embarrassed, almost, to show me his face, as if he’d never let me see him naked before. He was instantly transformed into the shyest, most vulnerable southern baby. Removing that rigid Prussian-soldier barrier seemed to affect his personality, too, as all the goodness of his nature came forth, and after my period of feeling unloved and missing being close to him, we made love just like a pregnant wife would with her clean-shaven husband.

But I’d also come to a realization: James needed his space—physically, emotionally—and was liable to reject anyone who deprived him of that raw square footage. If a close friend like Ellen Salvadori wanted a hug hello, or a kiss good-bye, that was no problem, but a sharp observer could easily intuit that the whole time James was looking for the exit sign. This same hypersensitivity to closeness, mixed with James’s coolness—if not actual revulsion—to anyone who trespassed on his physical space, happened in the wake of every single one of his detoxes. His detoxes were from methadone and opiates, not alcohol. It got complicated, especially when he drank, when liquor made him want me physically. For James, those nights were double-edged.

By that September, we were both out in Los Angeles, recording. James was working on his new album,
Walking Man
, and I was working on my new album,
Hotcakes
. Jake was in L.A., too, living in Malibu, and he and I kept fiddling with songs, some of which we would put aside for future albums. In Jake’s house, he and I worked on a new song, “I Haven’t Got Time for the Pain,” whose lyrics Jake wrote right in the middle of recording the album. Originally, Jake intended for it to be an I-love-you-and-you-came-along-and-changed-everything kind of song, but when I asked him if it was about Jennifer Salt, the woman in his life, he told me it was in fact a Sufi song about Oscar, his Sufi teacher.

With me pregnant and working, and James writing and recording, we were in one of the mellowest periods of marriage ever. After a difficult summer, we’d relaxed into a nice year and a half. A good explanation of how I was feeling is expressed in a song I wrote at the time called “I’ve Got My Mind on My Man.”

He’s a lotus that opens and closes

I know that he won’t always let me in

But I’ve got my mind on my man again, my mind is on my man

Sometimes he’s sleepy, and I don’t think he loves me

I worry about his lovin’

Ain’t I crazy?

He’s a northern baby and a southern child

He’s a gentleman lost at the fair

He’s a cowboy getting drunk at the Plaza

He has a place in my heart anywhere.

From my diary:

Dec 1st, 1973:

I’m generally euphoric and more in love with James, I don’t know how it can keep growing. How much capacity do I have? It’s wonderful. I am a lover.

*   *   *

“Mockingbird” had its origins in a car, in the wake of a toasty little beach party, and maybe a glass of rum. We were in the car on the Vineyard, about to make a left turn onto Lambert’s Cove, when I said to James, “We should think about a duet we could do.”

“Do you know”—a pause for some Jamesian humming—“how about ‘Mockingbird’?” It wasn’t the better-known version parents sing to their children—the one that begins, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…” a lullaby I would eventually record on my album
Into White
, but a 1960s novelty song written by Inez and Charlie Foxx. James began singing the song right away, leaving off the introductory “Mock.”
Yeah … Bird … Yeah …
It was James who arranged the song, decided who would sing what verse, or note, but the topic of “Mockingbird” didn’t come up between us again until I offhandedly mentioned to Richard Perry that James had suggested it would make a good duet. One day, in New York, Richard brought up “Mockingbird”; he thought it was a great idea. As usual, Richard was relentless, whipping James and me into a “Let’s get it done right away, it’s a hit” mode.

The quality of the musicians living in New York in the late 1970s was so high, it was borderline ridiculous. You could simply call up the choicest musicians in the world, knowing they’d be at any one of a handful of studios, and schedule a time twenty-four to forty-eight hours later. One was Robbie Robertson, another was Mac Rebennack, otherwise known as Dr. John, and the others included drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Klaus Voorman, Jimmy Ryan, Ralph MacDonald, Bobby Keys, and Michael Brecker.

Richard suggested that Mac make the sound of a bird on the organ, while Jimmy, Robbie, Klaus, and Ralph were busy working on keys and tempo, a gumbo of ideas and inspirations from some of the most creative people in the industry. Michael Brecker and Bobby Keys (whom I’d last seen at Ahmet Ertegun’s Hollywood party) didn’t come in until later in the day, but in the meantime James and I cut the basic track of “Mockingbird” during a single afternoon, and by the time we went home that night, we’d laid down a rough track.

On the line “Everybody, have you heard…,” James swapped out
heard
for
hoid,
showcasing his Muddy Waters genes. He would always sing “Mockingbird” live that way, too, never on the first verse, mind you, where I take the lead, but on his own verse. I took it as James’s way of out-Uncle-Peter-ing me, since Uncle Peter would often incorporate the spirit of New Orleans or Chicago in his delivery by singing notes with a “black” or “jazz” accent. James and I performed “Mockingbird” live a few times, most memorably, maybe, at the No Nukes Concert at Madison Square Garden in 1979, which to me counts as one of James’s most animated performances. When the two of us were onstage together, there was often a healthy, unspoken competition, one that lifted James’s energy level up to mine, which, I should add, was always disastrously high, not on purpose but because of my ever-present anxiety levels.

When I accompanied James on tour—and I went on at least some part of every one of them until the late seventies, when it didn’t seem fair to drag our small children, Ben and Sally, along with us—“Mockingbird” was always a showstopper. Singing it together, James and I were always flexible, comfortable and sexy in our dancing and patter, eternally loose in our vocal play. James was dry and funny, and whenever I laughed at what he did, and said, it seemed to spur him to even goofier levels of outrageousness. Our two voices would do their call-and-response, dancing, jabbing, flirting, sparring with each other until the moment comes, a minute or so into the song, on the line “I’ll
ride
with the tide and go with the flow…” when our two voices, hand-holding, land deftly, perfectly on a musical fourth, my grind against his gentle upswing, that note for me, now and forever, James’s and my musical hearth and home.

*   *   *

By 1974, we had completed a new wing on the Vineyard house, plus a few new sunlit terraces, only to begin imagining other, future wings, carports, gardens, and—because I was left with too much idle, swimming-pool-construction time on my hands while James was on tour—a swimming pool. When James came home, the pool was already filled with water, its borders surrounded by dirt, mud, and sand. It was completely audacious of me, and there was no excuse for me not walking James through it beforehand, though I could have sworn I had. (Judging by his response, I hadn’t told him, but there was no way I would have gone ahead with a decision as monumental as that without clearing it with him first.) That was only one of the liberties I took that made him angry. Another was the circle garden I planted a year later. James was not happy about that, either. Both were bourgeois and selfish gestures on my part, utterly at odds with James’s cabin-in-the-woods, no frills, New England sensibility.

Mick told me once that whenever he wished to increase his emotional distance from me, he would remember the time I’d told him I had a Swiss bank account. The only problem was it wasn’t true. Back in the early seventies, I wouldn’t even have known what a Swiss bank account meant! That doesn’t matter. The point is, Mick was simply saying that I skirted around being “bourgeois,” and therefore the opposite of what he stood for. Which is another way of saying that at least two important male role models of mine, James and Mick, had “labeled” me. Hadn’t Albert Grossman told me I’d be a perfect ten if only I didn’t have money? But the irony of it was that my father had been robbed, though I didn’t know it at the time, nor did I know that there wasn’t much money left in the Simon family coffers. When would this rich-girl image quit dogging me?

James and I had other head-buttings, too, including conflicting ideas about the best color for the trim on our now-expanded, increasingly fanciful cedar-shingled house. By the mid-seventies, thanks to the forty-five-foot-high hexagonal tower James designed, which rose up four levels, it was a very visible structure. James voted for yellow trim so it would look sunny all the time through the windows, whereas I wanted an equally optimistic rosy pink color. We worked out our differences of opinion amicably by counting the trim-worthy surfaces and splitting them in half, with each one of us getting an even amount of paint. In the end, half the trim was yellow, the other half pink.

Both the press and the people who loved us, I knew, imagined our lives on the Vineyard in a glamorous, seaside mist, as a musical Camelot on the edge of the stormy, crashing sea, but our day-to-day life was a lot more pedestrian than that. People sawing and hammering eternally on a house that, it seemed, would never be done, never cross the line of being able to be “lived in.” I cooked almost constantly. I got to be friends with a lot of Vineyard hippie girls, especially Kate, Jeannie, and Brent Taylor, James’s sister and sisters-in-law, with many of us pregnant at the same time, our aprons billowing white jibs over our swelling stomachs. Kate was having a very successful singing career at the same time.

Mixed in with home and domestic and pre-childbirth matters were the typical worries of two people in a very tough business. James and I would often swap concerns about the state of our careers. One day he would console me, and the next it would be the other way around. This show business stuff, I once wrote in my diary, is for people narcissistic enough to put themselves through hellish reductions for the occasional ego gratification. What’s more, the appetite for more attention, more hits, more publicity, more triumph, simply increases. I added, “It’s good to have James as a mate—so constantly understanding and comprehending of every career situation. He is so fine. I love every hair on him.”

*   *   *

By that November, James and I had moved out of the Murray Hill apartment into a larger place, a four-story brownstone on East Sixty-second Street, between Second and Third Avenues, where we would “live” for the next three years, even though we were spending most of our time in L.A. or the Vineyard. We had the first three stories to ourselves, and we rented out the top floor. New homes mean new faces, new carpenters, but James, I remember, was especially husbandly and sympathetic to me, his newly pregnant wife.

If ever a girl baby didn’t want to leave the womb, it was our daughter, Sarah Maria. She was three weeks late, and James and I spent practically all that time with Dustin and Anne Hoffman. Dustin, I remember, had a plan: he would make me laugh so hard it would induce labor. While we waited for
that
to happen, the four of us whiled away the time by playing cards, eating hot Indian food in our brownstone, going to restaurants and shows—including a Peter Cook–Dudley Moore night on Broadway—and listening to Dustin read aloud from
Lenny
, which he was just starting to shoot. Dustin was determined to induce my labor, but as it turned out, the one time I
wasn’t
trying—for Dustin’s sake—was one night I went to bed on the early side. That night, I recall, the moon was closer to the earth than it had been in twenty-three years. The night was brisk and clear, and I had a sudden thought from out of nowhere: I should clean all the copper in the house. The next morning, at around 6:30 a.m., my water broke. In a panic, James called for Lydia, our housekeeper and cook, telling her there was water everywhere.

Lydia wrapped a couple of towels around my waist as James hightailed it onto Sixty-second Street to hail a cab. I’d had a bag packed all month, and as Lydia placed my winter coat around my shoulders, all I had to do was pick it up and delicately pile inside the cab next to James. It was January 7, 1974, and as we sped to the hospital, it felt to me as though we were driving right into the moon, which was still full, still bright. Beside me, James was doing his best to maintain calm, though he made it a point to keep the towels around me at just the right level to keep in check the possibility of a backseat flood.

But this baby, Sarah, was going to take her sweet time. She had other plans. She would wrap her umbilical cord around her darling little neck, and once we got to the hospital, with the help of Demerol, I would end up pushing for seven hours. James and I had attended a few childbearing classes in tandem, where he learned a few techniques about what would be most helpful during the contraction stage, but they fell away once my contractions started, since no one—no one—had instructed James to sit by my bedside, pretending to be a seagull flying high above the beach in Menemsha. Every time a contraction came through, James, in full seagull form, murmured, “Carly, Carly … the wave is coming in gently … Carly, go with it now … relax…” By now it was harder and harder to relax and I’d start shrieking, but James’s seagull-voice rose up to meet my volume. “Carly, relax … the wave is coming in, it’s breaking gently at the shore…”