Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (19 page)

“It Happens Everyday.”

Lucy and me in London, 1965.

CHAPTER TEN

frog footman

I
n the mid-1960s, London was where everything interesting and offbeat was happening. It was the world of Henry Orient and
What’s New Pussycat?
, of “Help!,” “Ticket to Ride,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and “Downtown.” Herman’s Hermits, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon, the Hollies, the Animals, and the Beatles—so much music to imitate, to interpret. Songs I could stand up and sing into the mirror, while dancing at the same time, or by singing harmony/descant or an improvised horn part at the top of my lungs. Alone in my room, I regularly sang along with the Everly Brothers, the Weavers, and other folksingers, but I was taken—captivated, enthralled, seduced—by the rhythms of rock ’n’ roll. Clearly I needed a bigger mirror, a new one that could accommodate my entire body, and maybe London would be that place.

In 1965, with college on eternal hold, Mommy, Lucy, and I were supposed to take the
Queen Mary
to Europe and stay for a month, but at the last minute, Mommy elected to stay home—she blamed Pandy, the dog, I think. Lucy, who’d come down with a bad flu, followed suit, though my sister promised to come over to England later if I managed to arrange the Simon Sisters a gig or two. So it would be just me, sailing alone to England.

A week after the
Queen Mary
left New York, the boat docked in Southampton, and I took the train by myself to London. My first few days there, I stayed with a friend on Harley Street, eventually finding a room at the Russell Square Hotel. I felt extremely homesick, and a day later was relieved to find a phone number that had been given to me by a family friend who knew any number of London-based entertainment agents and performers. The name and number scrawled on the slip of paper, which would prove crucial to the rest of my stay, not to mention life, read only:
WILLIAM DONALDSON,
18
HASKER STREET,
followed by a phone number
.
The name meant nothing to me. The family friend told me that if I ever found myself in any trouble, to “just call Willie. He will take care of homesickness.”

It seemed an overstatement, but when Willie answered the phone, the rapport and even attraction between us was instantaneous. What exactly was it that was so irresistible about even the sound of Willie Donaldson’s voice? There are some people who just do it to you, and you get them, and they get you: Willie had a magic that seduced me from the start. Before I knew it, I’d accepted his invitation for breakfast at his Chelsea town house, and when the door opened, Willie handed me a glass of orange juice.

He was attired in a loose-fitting pair of cuffed pants and a charcoal-gray V-neck sweater over a classic white button-down shirt. The town house was elegant but also funky and dressed down, four floors of raffish English charm. Willie was easily six foot two, and as he walked ahead of me up the stairs from the vestibule, it struck me that even though he was barely thirty years old, his stride reminded me of my father’s—long, unathletic, patrician, and vaguely effeminate. His accent was just as unusual. It seemed to take a particular route around his uvula, revolving up around the roof of his mouth and echoing back to his tonsils, this particular sound all driven from the sound box of his long head bones. His lips alone could have given more definition to his words, but I certainly wasn’t the one who was going to make such a suggestion.

Willie was the president of a company called Players and Writers, and had produced the traveling English comedy revue
Beyond the Fringe
.
Beyond the Fringe
was the precursor to the Rutles, Monty Python, and
Saturday Night Live
. I had seen it five times in New York with my friend Jennie Lou, and we’d both gotten to know one of the four cast members, Dudley Moore, on whom Jennie had a crush. I fell for Jonathan Miller. When I learned he was a stutterer, I knew someday we’d meet. We haven’t.

But on that July morning in Hasker Street, I had no idea who Willie Donaldson was, and knew even less what, if anything, he expected of me in return. Did he assume I’d called him in hopes of landing a secretarial position, or a part in a play, or a job as his cat walker? What had our mutual family friend told him about me? Had Willie ever heard of the Simon Sisters? I doubted it. I could still be a call girl. It could be a naughty nun reference. There was no gag on our imaginations.

The town house in which we were sitting, it turned out, belonged to Willie’s girlfriend, the actress Sarah Miles, whom I had just seen in the film
The Servant
. To my mind, Sarah was the ultimate new-age English movie actress, on par with Julie Christie and Susannah York. Willie and I sat on a threadbare, dark brown Edwardian couch in their second-floor living room (the higher the social class, the more missing threads, is a pretty dependable rule of thumb), my back facing floor-to-ceiling French windows opening out onto Hasker Street below, Willie’s face and foxy hazel eyes illuminated by the morning sun.

I already felt at ease, placed perfectly in the moment, lulled by Willie’s fast, sharp British wit. Willie was the first
man
I’d met in my life who reminded me of my grandmother, Chibie. He had her mixture of the straight-faced and the absurd. Already Willie seemed a compatriot in my favorite kind of fun—the kind based on irony and mock formality, the sort where carefully choreographed pauses and inflections play a starring role, a humor that says
Life is a game to be played, so
must
we really insist on taking ourselves so damn seriously?

For the next three hours, Willie and I sat there on the couch, pressed up against a row of needlepointed pillows covered with hair from two Abyssinian cats prowling underfoot. The cats manipulated their long gray hairs into the sofa like artisans. Willie noticed this and reprimanded them with class: “Hey, knock it off please, will you?” All the room’s upholstery looked like intricately woven pieces, fashion, faux, fabulous! He reminded me of nothing so much as a formal little boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. We talked about everything, including how my crush on Dr. Miller would culminate. The subject then turned to Lucy, and the Simon Sisters, and whether Lucy and I might be performing in England later that summer.

“What a good idea.” Eyebrows raised, and not even bothering to ask me if I minded, Willie spontaneously requested Lucy’s number and reached for the phone. He was putting on a show for me, as I would find out he did for so many people. “Good morning,” he said, practically singing his greeting and yodeling the syllables from high to low. When my older sister picked up, “Is this Simon Sister?” Then, “Have you had your orange juice yet?” Clearly the answer was no, because Willie suggested she fetch a glass, “and then we can talk about your hasty getaway from New York and get you over here at once, so you and the other Simon Sister can perform at the Palladium, and a week or two later, at the Albert Hall, and we can all make a great deal of money, not to mention in cash, too.”

I was beyond delighted to be in the presence of Willie and could have spent the rest of the day sitting across from him. I felt uncannily comfortable being who it was that I was in his presence. Willie and I shared in easy bite-size pieces descriptions of our personal lives which trumped anything he might ever do for me as an agent. His brand of “funny” was a straight-faced absurd variety, followed by no applause signs. Willie was one who would take you over the line until you were bending back then tilting forward with the kind of laughing that often releases tears. But fearing I was overstaying my welcome, I finally picked up my bag, telling him what a great time I’d had. Assuring me he would easily find Lucy and me a job—“I’ve done it before,” he said—Willie rose and, peering down the street to the left from the second-floor window, called out, “Taxi, taxi! Taxi for Miss Simon Sister!”

A few days later, over tea and biscuits, Willie and I figured out a plan to bring Lucy over to England—I would give Willie the money and he would be in charge of buying and sending Lucy a ticket, which he actually did—and plotted out a way for the two of us to audition properly for clubs and television shows. In less than a week, Willie had become the focus of my days, and already I felt closer to him than I did to many friends I’d known my whole life. He showed me London, walking the narrow streets with their cramped, unnamed pubs. We browsed boutiques, sat in outdoor cafés, leaned into the angles and sweeps of energy in the English summertime air. The streets and squares teemed with beatniks, as well as style mavens sporting new big hair: voluminous, full of colorful extensions, clenched in leather strands or Indian feathers or teased into beehives. We discussed whom we were going to meet, and what, exactly, we would say to them when that time came. Willie, we agreed, would introduce me to my future husband, Dr. Jonathan Miller, as well as to Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and not least, Queen Elizabeth—for whom I, naturally, would sing.

Willie’s optimism and confidence were infectious. When Lucy came over, and if Willie was somehow able to find work for us, as he’d promised … by this point I actually would want to perform. For me,
wanting to perform
was an entirely new feeling. More than anything, I was eager to be a part of the physical movement of the music I loved, to shed my nervousness and allay my anxiety by simply moving my hips. Another thing, too: after only a few meals, gallons of tea, long walks that always ended too soon, I was also falling head over heels in love with Willie.

Over our third or fourth lunch, Willie told me of a possible rift in his relationship with Sarah Miles. In turn, I told him about Nick and how, despite our closeness, he and I were ready to part ways. Still, if either Willie or I was in the dumps about our romantic circumstances, you would never have known it. In the days and weeks that followed, I learned all about Willie’s dominant mother and his indifferent father, who, as the head of the Donaldson Shipping Line, had the privilege of getting a ship sunk by the Germans during the Blitz. Another cup of tea, another glass of wine, and it was again my turn to talk, this time describing my own indifferent father, and Chibie, and how much Willie reminded me of her. I elaborated on my schooling, and my family. We talked about the vacations we would take using the money Willie planned to earn producing (or convincing someone else to produce) any number of West End shows. Despite Willie’s infectious confidence—he was like a little boy, dreaming big ideas—I was slightly skeptical that he had a drop of what it would take to carry off his ambitions. Still, he and I felt like coconspirators, rollicking toward some eventual erotic “showdown.”

It took a week to get Lucy over to England, and when she did we immediately rented the top floor of a house at 6 Wilton Place, a few paces off Brompton Road in Knightsbridge. The house itself had a plaque right outside the front door, with the words
TOAD HALL
engraved in bronze, and I loved it on first sight, even the five-flight walk up to our bedrooms overlooking Kinnerton Street. I loved having Lucy around, but her presence also led me into the usual old paranoid thinking, that even though I’d already fallen hard for Willie, he was bound to become enamored of my older sister. “There’s nothing to it but my endless-seeming competition with Lucy,” I wrote in my diary, adding, “but I think I interest Willie more. I am his ‘kind’ of trouble.”

For the next few weeks, Lucy and I polished our repertoire, which to my ears sounded surprisingly good. We both felt confident enough to audition for whomever Willie could find, the only problem being that the London labels didn’t want to release our albums since neither Lucy nor I had any plans to stay around to promote them. But I didn’t question Willie’s judgment, or come down on myself too hard. In fact, I talked back to them when they gave us dismal answers, as only an American can, making jokes I knew they wouldn’t understand, and I remember how much Willie loved my freshness and sauciness. Still, the fact of the matter was that Lucy and I needed to get lucky, fast, and soon enough we did.