Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie Read online

  * * *

  RETURNING MY CONSCIOUSNESS to the dining room, I felt a funny, sudden wooziness. I got up from the table, feigning lucidity, and took my own time swanning past the tables of chic diners appreciating the salmon four ways—a specialty of the house—until I got to the ladies’ room.

  The mirror above the sink revealed a stunned, pained, worried, pale face. “Change that expression, darling, it makes your pretty face so ugly!” my mother used to say to me. My shame glared back at me, magnified by its exposure in the mirror. I looked as though I’d been caught naked in church. I still blamed myself for my panic attacks, as if they were an indication of a weak character, a flaw. An undeveloped will. Should I call Jackie? Try to track her down at the office or her apartment? What if she’d been struck down on the street? Removing my antique pill case from my fancy pocketbook, I furrowed through pellets of all different colors and sizes until I found the one I wanted. Sliding it out, I checked the color (yellow, with a cutout heart in the center, like some grown-up, devilish version of children’s candy) before crushing the Valium between my teeth, mixing it into a chalky paste, and swallowing it. Please, please, Jackie, come.

  Jackie and I were relatively new friends and there was still so much we didn’t know about each other—so much adapting still to do to each other’s rhythms (would we?). I hadn’t told her about the boy who had introduced me to sex in our pool house in Stamford, Connecticut, when I was only eight years old. Or about the very low depths my self-esteem sometimes scraped up against. I hadn’t told her much about my ex-husband, James Taylor, or how sad I’d been growing of late, the sadness like some dark bubble around me, strangling all air and circulation. I longed to reveal myself to her. To cut out the fluff, excise the formality. I longed for her to reciprocate, but knew it would be out of line, out of time, out of the question. I wanted to cry, to tell her how sometimes I felt so out of my mind I could barely leave my apartment—and yes, I was prone to exaggerating, but I also believed my exaggerations! But telling her what a wreck I could be would be too messy, too intrusive. She probably had some notion already.

  For the next ten minutes I sat frozen on the closed toilet seat, waiting for something, not knowing what that something was, responding to one or two knocks from outside with the strained brightness of a parakeet: “Sorry!” and “I’ll be out in a sec!” After a minute, I heard another knock on the door. “Just a minute,” I said, the parakeet replaced by some sterner bird.

  I got up, faced the mirror, and put on some blush and lipstick—enough so that I looked alive, at least—and quickly brushed my stringy, damp hair. When I got back to my table, the seat across from mine was still empty. But there was good news. Everything is well, the waiter confided. Ms. Onassis was in an elevator that got stuck in her office building, but she’s fine and will be here in five minutes.

  Somewhere in those pre-cell-phone days, and in the depths of my mind, I must have known Jackie was all right all along. She had been through so many fearsome experiences that getting stuck in an elevator was probably the equivalent of “The soufflé didn’t rise all the way,” or “The dog threw up behind the couch.”

  * * *

  JACKIE WAS GOOD to the waiter’s five-minute prediction. As she came toward the table, I stood up and rushed to embrace her.

  “Jackie, what happened? I was so worried! Tell me the whole story—you got stuck in an elevator? That’s so appalling! What floor did it stop on?” I was rushing my words.

  “Oh, Carly, it was fine. Everyone was very scared and some of the people…”

  “How many people were in the elevator?”

  “About fifteen of us.”

  “An elevator man?”

  “No, it was an automatic. Some of the passengers got quite panicky, and”—Jackie’s expression was bright, almost merry—“I was trying to show them I was calm.”

  “But were you? Weren’t you terrified?”

  “Not at all. I knew it would be all right. I was like a stewardess.” Her giggle was charming and deep-throated. I loved her “nostalgie de la boue.”

  Jackie had removed her suit jacket. As usual, her clothes were purposely understated (I guess one can make that one of the highest class distinctions)—a mixture of wools, tweeds, and silks, all in beiges, sands, and grays. Her shoulder-length hair was parted on the side and was a darker-than-usual shade of brown. It looked the way it did in several of those candid portraits taken in Hyannis Port—her hair curling with a lovely insinuation of carelessness, as if the photo had been snapped at exactly the right moment, prevailing through even the storms outside.

  “Does hair know where its curl goes?” I remember asking her. “Does the curl stay in the same place as hair grows out, even if you have all your hair cut off? Does a curl know that at three and three-quarter inches it will bend to the left and then bend back to the right at four inches? Does everyone in the world but me know the answers to these questions?” I went on, “And does Kenneth [Jackie’s hairdresser] know the answers, too, and secretly depend on them?” The idea delighted Jackie. Laughing, she motioned to the waiter and in French—a piquant, seductive touch—ordered something with bitters.

  I was still flushed from the anxiety that had led me to the bathroom and the Valium. I told her again how amazed I was by her equilibrium in the face of a stalled elevator in a huge office building. Then, throughout our salmon four ways, Jackie and I returned to a subject we’d begun to explore the last few times we’d seen each other, love: its breadth, depth, definition, development, and possibility. For us and others, but mostly us.

  One of us, I can’t remember who, quoted what our friend the director Mike Nichols said once: If we can only give up the need to destroy what is good in love, and put aside the need to seek out the new, like Christopher Columbus did, we can end up on our feet. But wasn’t it also Mike who told me during my second marriage, to Jim Hart, Everything, including love, is political, Carly. So keep the power, keep the advantage. Don’t play all the cards? The conversation—this trying to get to the bottom of the eternal question—seemed funnily like the issue of “curls”! Jackie, like me, loved to figure things out with the benefit of an anecdote containing metaphors. Or try to, anyway.

  By the time we got up out of our chairs, it was almost dark. Before leaving the restaurant, I said my silent adieux to the girls on the wall—my dream-selves, my allies. What secrets, I wondered, did these friends keep between and from each other?

  Jackie had a town car waiting outside. It was clear she would at least offer to give me a lift home, just six blocks north. But before she could do that, we were both gustily ushered into the back seat by Jackie’s driver, who, in turn, was whisked by the wind, which by now was blowing up from the south and therefore going our way.

  Jackie greeted him. “Joel, we’re going to Seventy-third and Central Park West, and then we’ll continue on to New Jersey.” It was when she had a weekend house in Peapack and wanted to get a jump on the Friday night traffic.

  Even though Jackie’s car seemed modest, it was different from any other town car in which I ever had ridden. Along with being three or four inches longer than other cars, it also had certain similarities to the residence of some imaginary Swiss ambassador. Not a crumb, not a fleck, not a single fluff-end of lint on the seats or the floors or the armrests. It was tempting to conjure up images of chambermaids licking every leathery square inch in one fast, last, lapping touch-up. Much like Jackie’s office at Doubleday, where she was an editor, the cars that took her around the city may have looked understated, but chances were if you lifted up and peered inside the back seat, you would find a refrigerator and a bathtub and maybe even a reflecting pond stocked with sleepy trout.

  Both of us were tipsy, warm, and wet. Settling back against the seat, Jackie pulled the burgundy cashmere scarf down and fluffed her hair, which only managed to redistribute the huge, winking, still-intact snowflakes. I rearranged my own hair, which was and is completely useless, wet or dry. It may sound
unbelievable, but I felt, as I had before and would again and again, that at the end of the day Jackie and I were just two girls. Two girls with a few surprising things in common and other things (the most obvious ones) not. Two girls leaning forward eagerly on a late-night dorm room bed, listening to Sgt. Pepper, sharing a cigarette and talking lightly, urgently, about love and boys and the people we knew in common, swapping news and gossip and all the other captivating tidbits we just had to tell each other. Two girls taking turns on the swings, each of us playing to the other one’s material, braced by the sheer conspiracy of each other’s company.

  Out of the west

  Of Lambert’s Cove

  There’s a sail out in the sun

  And I’m on board

  Though very small

  I’ve come home to stop yearning

  Burn off the haze

  Around the shore

  Turn off the crazy way I feel

  I’ll stay away from you no more

  I’ve come home to stop yearning

  —“TERRA NOVA”

  2

  An Alliance with a Famous Person Is Always a Dangerous Thing

  NO ONE IS MORE INTERESTED in famous people than other famous people. The level of starstruck-ness among well-known people is deeper, more religious, more out of control. To understand why, one would probably have to consult the courts of Caesar. Yet, even given the truth of the theory, who would ever think that Jackie would be so fascinated? Then again, she was always a reader, a storyteller, a fantasizer, a magic-lover, a romantic. And stories about famous people are most often romantic.

  Contrary to what a lot of people believe, celebrity can be isolating. It cuts you off from other people in ways that you’re generally late to realize. Understandably, no one to whom you admit this will have even a shred of sympathy for you. The world tells you who you are, and if you start believing those altered versions of yourself, you will grow deluded, transformed, and find yourself hanging out solely with your pet monkey, strangely disassociated from the person you actually are. For some, the only option is to spend time with others who are also suffering to some degree from this unusual condition. In that way you’re able to match your experience against theirs, and maybe come to a closer understanding of how phantasmagoric and ridiculous the whole thing is.

  I first met Jackie in the summer of 1983, at the Ocean Club restaurant in Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard. Jackie had bought land in Aquinnah, then known as Gay Head, earlier that summer, and had been busy building her tasteful, sane, and magnificent house on the ocean. Jackie’s arrival on the island inspired a lot of mixed, behind-the-scenes emotions. Some feared her coming would change the character of the Vineyard. Who would she invite over to dinner, and who wouldn’t she? “An alliance with a powerful person is never safe,” my father had told me a few times when I was growing up, quoting the Greek philosopher Phaedrus (his best friend, I always assumed). Yet who would have not wanted to meet Jackie, get to know her, see her up close, sit down next to her, capture her attention, maybe even her complete attention?

  Something in me didn’t want to want those things.

  Everyone on the island, at least most everyone I knew, was going out of their way to remain calm and unflustered but to still include Jackie in social activities, and there were already plenty of people on the Vineyard in whose realms she was accustomed to socializing: the Marquands, the Buchwalds, the Feiffers, the Herseys, and, of course, the Styrons—Bill and Rose—whom Jackie had known since her college years. There was also a mixture of Kennedy family members and associates, plus one or two of Jackie’s post-Onassis friends. Ari had been dead for eight years.

  The Ocean Club, where Jackie and I met, was a local restaurant and the energy collector in Vineyard Haven—an ideal melting pot for islanders, located a mere block away from the squarer, more reliable Black Dog. Throughout the eighties, the Ocean Club had a cool, white-powdery, jazzy reputation, edgy yet underplayed, and was at frequent risk of getting busted by the cops. Small groups would collect there for dinner and drinks at 7 p.m., following the club’s BYOB mandate with bottles of vodka and rum, equipped with name tags like children’s clothes at camp and stowed under the bar counter. After dinner, these same groups would get inside their cars and drive twelve minutes or so to Airport Road, where a nightclub, the Hot Tin Roof, could be found inside an old airplane hangar.

  Since 1978, I’d been one of three partners in the Hot Tin Roof, and it had been an immediate success. I can’t say why. Sometimes things just work for no good reason, and the Hot Tin Roof worked. The club had live entertainment two or three nights a week, jazz on Sunday afternoons, and dancing all the other nights, with my brother Peter and my friend Tommy Styron as disc jockeys lending the greatest “vibes” to the dance floor. People came there to dance as much as to see and hear the musicians and comedians onstage—Peter Tosh, Delbert McClinton, Cyndi Lauper, Bonnie Raitt, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Rick Nelson, Martin Mull, and Steven Wright, for starters. Even waiting on line gave off a certain twirl and possibility: marriage, babies, nights of bliss, though definitely not in that order.

  I had seen John Kennedy Jr. at the Ocean Club earlier that summer, but he’d recently begun bringing his mother along for dinner, wanting to introduce her to a few of the locals he knew and liked, some of whom were busy working at the complex of buildings that was starting to be called “Jackie’s house.” One day I was having an early dinner there with a well-heeled, martini-drinking group when John came over to our table. He directed the invitation to me: Would I like to meet his mother? I excused myself, aware of being singled out, and took a seat at their table. Trying my hardest not to stare, I told Jackie and John how well they seemed to be blending into the island environment. How was the house coming along? Had she run into any construction problems? Small talk, but our connection felt instantaneous and, for some reason, familiar. Had the weather been conducive to the carpentry going smoothly? Was she already kayaking, even though the water was only sixty degrees?

  Over the next few weeks, I ran into Jackie at the Ocean Club a few more times. She was always with her son. “You have to come and see the house!” John said more than once. I had still yet to see it when John came over to my house with his friend Barry Clifford, an underwater archeologist who had devoted his life to excavating the Whydah, a shipwreck off Cape Cod. I gave John and Barry a full tour, from the basement all the way up to the tower. John seemed to like my decorating style, or “aesthetic,” and afterward said to me, “I’d love to bring my mother here. It’s so different.”

  In contrast to my Vineyard house—which people who visit describe as something out of a fairy tale, a tilted, crowded, teacup fantasy—when I did visit Jackie’s house in Aquinnah, I saw she was likely influenced by her close and most stylishly impeccable friend, the horticulturalist and style icon Bunny Mellon. It was all Nantucket whites and light blues, airy, never cluttered. If I was mad as a hatter, she was as cool as a glass of iced tea.

  Everyone on the island wanted to see Jackie’s house as it was being built. Someone told me later on that Jackie didn’t share John’s love for my taste in decoration, but I also overheard the opposite, and that she was especially enamored of my circle garden, where, later in our friendship, the two of us would sit and drink tea or white wine and talk about the various people we knew in common.

  If, as Auden said in his poem addressed to Yeats, “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” then increasingly popular Martha’s Vineyard, with all its intellectual vigor and competition, pleasured the summer dwellers into more cocktail, luncheon, and dinner parties than any other place on the map. In a stretch less than ten football fields long and facing the Vineyard Sound lived at least twenty authors, presidents of universities, political pundits, film and television personalities, theater people, and Hollywood producers or writers.

  From the island’s ferry, their houses appeared to be strung like modest gold charms on a twisted green hemp bracelet. Interspersed among t
hese houses were sundry upper-middle-class homes. Not mansions, but the inhabitants (many year-round) without exception considered themselves most fortunate to just so happen to live between the likes of the playwright Lillian Hellman and the novelist William Styron. In fact, I rented one of those houses in 1980, “the secret house,” I called it, to be my “writer’s abode” when I was working on an album and the gray sky was dying into the steely winter and the songs were reflecting the oncoming cold.

  We were in the eighties—a jumble of old and new blood. The literati seemed to be focused around this mile along the water in Vineyard Haven, where the ferry pulled in multiple times a day. Lillian Hellman’s house and garden faced north toward the dock, her rosebushes traveling down a few yards and ending at the water’s variable edge. It was a good location for Lillian, as it was for the writer Peter Feibleman, her live-in companion, an author as talented as all the other prizewinning writers who lived on that one-mile stretch of road. Peter inherited most of what Lillian left behind when she died in the summer of 1984.