Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (22 page)

For the next two days, everywhere we went, the three of us went together. We hunkered down in Sean’s suite, eating Presidential Suite–quality food, reciting poems—especially Irish ones: Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats—from an anthology belonging to the Presidential Suite bookshelf, visiting the ship’s casino, attending movies and even lectures. Arm in arm in arm, we made a jovial threesome. When I think now on how Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Anita Pallenberg were spending their time, I have to laugh, thinking about how our rowdy childhood hadn’t turned us into anything but prudish schoolgirls. You almost
feel
the uniform. On the last day, we met up at the swimming pool before returning to our rooms to pack, which, in Lucy’s and my case, amounted merely to relocating our guitars into the corridor so we’d have room to drag our suitcases out from under our skinny lower bunk.

That night, with a tentative plan to meet up with Sean after dinner, Lucy and I, slightly high on champagne, went back to our room at around nine, which is when Sean usually called us. Our cramped room was still littered with the detritus of a summer spent in London. As we waited for the phone to ring, we cleared things away—a stray bus receipt, a broken eyebrow pencil, a sample of Sean’s handwriting on a cocktail napkin (Sean had given me the phone number of his New York agent). But the phone didn’t ring. Lucy and I cleaned up even more, going so far as to straighten the sheets and blankets on our beds. Into the tiny garbage bin went three-quarters-empty cough medicine and nail polish and cologne bottles. By 10 p.m., with the phone still mute, we had five garbage receptacles piled high with stuff. By now, we were motivated to clean as a distraction, as well as to cut through the tension in our tiny henhouse cabin, with Lucy and I two sister-roosters sizing each other up for a fight. A half hour later, I took a shower, telling myself that if Sean didn’t call by eleven, I’d set my hair using the beer cans Lucy and I used as rollers, my mission being to give it body and make it as straight as Julie Christie’s.

Exiting the shower, I said to Lucy, “I guess that’s it for tonight. He’s probably not going to call, right?”

Lucy agreed, adding that if Sean was planning on calling, he would have done it by now. I proceeded to dry my hair in front of the mirror lit by two lightbulbs sticking out of the wall like two different-sized human ears. My nose, I thought, has never looked so fat. The Beast was making its shipboard appearance, having been in storage during most of my stay in London. The tension which had begun infiltrating our tiny room worsened when my hair dryer bumped into Lucy’s things, knocking them onto the floor, which led to her swiping me with a poor and sarcastic imitation of Willie saying, “Well done, Simon Sister!” It was now past eleven, and the phone hadn’t rung once. There the two of us were, then. We’d had our chance, and nothing had happened. Was this situation as debilitating to Lucy’s ego as it was to mine? On the surface, the answer was no, as Lucy seemed completely unfazed, concerned only about the scattered cosmetics.

Having been the one who took the initiative in the first place, I decided to place the final call. I let it ring around thirty times, but no one answered, and I finally hung up. The Sean Connery “thing” was officially over. Reaching down into the shopping bag that held the beer cans, I reluctantly placed six of them in my hair, securing them with clips. I slipped on my nightgown, by now glad it was getting too late for a midnight postprandial drink with Sean. Now, as we neared land—probably Newfoundland, or an iceberg—Lucy was lolling fully clothed on her lower berth, reading, or pretending to read, a book.

At that moment, I felt more in love with Willie than ever before. I rationalized the feeling as follows: that the vixen inhabiting me had been attracted to Sean not because of Sean but because, as I later confessed to my diary, I wanted to show Willie how alluring I was to other men, to show him how assertive and naughty I could be. More than that, I wanted to win the lifelong competition between Lucy and me, my fantasy being that Sean would insist on seeing me alone, not that I had the faintest idea what I would have done if that happened. Willie, I knew, wouldn’t be proud of this Simon Sister losing out to Lucy, who was tame and quiet, and always played her cards close to her chest.

Hair cans in place, I pretended to turn off the phone and forget about Sean. We probably wouldn’t see him again before our boat docked in New York. Maybe we’d wave at him disembarking in the first-class line, surrounded, as I was sure he would be, with women wearing flowered sundresses, wide-brim hats, and black sunglasses, one or more of whom would be tightly clutching the arm of our James Bond, our Ginger Man, our soldier from
The Hill
, our Sean Connery. Doubling down, we were Moneypenny.

At eleven forty-five, the phone that I, the eternal optimist, had only pretended to turn off rang. Lucy shot off her bed and a second later answered it, her voice mellow and seductive. It was Sean, of course, and I heard Lucy explain that I had just washed my hair and was in my nightgown, getting ready for bed, whereas she, Lucy, was about to take a stroll on the deck to take in some late-night air.

It was the dirtiest possible sisterly trick. Pure and utter treachery. “No more duets,” I wrote later on in my diary. No more ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ sung in French. Goodbye to ‘Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.’ No more Simon Sisters,” I wrote. “I’m through for now!!”

Lucy didn’t get back to our cabin until 5:15 a.m., just as the ship was pulling into the Hudson. As we passed the Statue of Liberty, I knew that I had officially graduated from the world of Henry Orient into the world of probable sisterly treason and lies. I couldn’t let it in; this was too dangerous an area. On one hand, my sister had every right to do whatever she wanted with Sean. She wasn’t the Simon Sister who would be returning to London soon with a hi-fi system and a wedding dress in tow. Matter of fact, I should have handed Sean over to her from the beginning. I’d re-created, inevitably, a familiar triangle: Lucy, me, a man standing in for our father. But where was my grace? If only need didn’t always grip me so tightly all the time. The next day, I remember daydreaming about someday singing a song for a James Bond movie, a recurrent fantasy that would culminate in 1977 when I recorded “Nobody Does It Better” for
The Spy Who Loved Me
. Roger Moore was an exceptional James Bond, but every time I sang “Nobody Does It Better,” I pictured Sean Connery in my head, hoping he would hear it wherever he was and think back to 1965, and the two surprisingly prim Simon Sisters. But that night the Beast had me in its grip.

In retrospect, I was probably looking for a reason, a hook, a justification, to separate from my older sister. Willie had told me over and over again that I could have a very good performing career in the UK by myself, and the prospect of singing and dancing alone, mixed with the fantasy of becoming Mrs. William Donaldson, was tantalizing. I spent less time worrying about how much I would miss Lucy than I did contemplating the possibility of a break, a movement, a shift in the direction of my life. It was almost as though Lucy leaving me that night on the boat to walk the decks with Sean gave me tacit permission to break free from my lifelong identity as the younger sister toted around the world by her older sister. It was, I realized later, when I felt it was all right to break away. As much as the concept frightened me, it was time. Maybe. Though Lucy was like no other. Ever.

Lucy and me back home in Riverdale. We both felt it was all right to break away.

One minute a star on the English stage—the next, a guitar teacher and senior girls’ counselor at Indian Hill.

CHAPTER TWELVE

jake was the hub

F
or the first few weeks, there was a letter from Willie almost daily. Endless phone calls and quirky promises. Then, around the beginning of October, the correspondence stopped. I received nothing from him—not a letter, not a call. Finally, on October 24, just as I was calling around to all of his friends to find out if they’d seen him, I received one of the most elegant Dear John letters anyone could have ever concocted. It was erudite, honest, painful, and deeply compassionate. The gist was the news that, indeed, he had gotten back with Sarah.

I called my friend Jonathan Schwartz and told him. He’d been following my relationship with Willie, as he knew him from his days in London. I took a taxi right uptown to Jonno’s apartment and he let me cry for a little bit, but we ended up playing piano and singing. Jonno was soon to become a D.J. and had an important role in starting the airplay of “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” my first single.

I was completely shell-shocked. Drained. Despondent. I’d been planning on returning to London in two or three months—assemble all my belongings, tie things up with Nick, and say good-bye to my friends and family. I had already packed up my KLH stereo in a carton, in preparation for returning to London and Willie’s apartment on Wilton Place, and was imagining our future residence, a modest duplex in Kensington Gardens, that would overlook an alley with a charming pub at one end. The idea of not returning to London, and to Willie, affected me physically, as if my whole being had been carved out. It was as though I’d had the fleeting opportunity to fall passionately in love with my boyfriend version of Uncle Peter, and now it wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t call anyone for weeks, and felt emptier, more confused, and less desirable than I’d ever felt in my life. By now having memorized its most tender targets, the Beast pulled in for an extended stay, knowing precisely where best to pry me open, leaving me vulnerable to all sorts of attacks, from within and without.
You are a shameful person. You stutter. You can’t even open your mouth without embarrassing yourself.

How much had I loved Willie, anyway? Had I loved him, or only parts of him, or maybe just the idea of him? He and I had spent such a ridiculously abbreviated time together. How was it even possible that I could be in love with someone I had known for only six weeks? In London, away from home, out from under various family thumbs, I had become my best self, and apart from the moon itself, London in the mid-1960s had to have been one of the most thrilling destinations in the cosmos. But had my own rose-colored glasses altered and possibly distorted who Willie really was? At the same time, Willie had altered my thinking, my desires, my core belief in myself. Without knowing it, he had changed my voice, pushing me toward saying the things I wanted and needed to say, a transformation that would stay with me forever. Not every moment was sweet, but the moment of the precipice—those golden, beautiful seconds before the liftoff—was just as good as any culmination. Subtly, through Willie, I was beginning to belong, finally, to myself.

Coming back to Manhattan meant that my sister Joey and I were once again roommates, with Lucy living right next door. A perfect sorority of sisters. Joey, as ever, was the boss of everything. I had never really “fit” inside her apartment at Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue, and my presence there now made the fact more obvious than ever. I didn’t fit
literally
, either. Joey had taken, and reupholstered in blue, almost every single piece of Victorian furniture from Stamford, and as someone in the habit of slouching, how was I possibly expected to maneuver my long body into those prim blue chairs perched on those parquet floors? How could I live in a place that had a window cleaner who came regularly, in a neighborhood notable for supermarkets and dry cleaners and postwar skyscrapers? Let’s face facts: Joey was a woman, I was still a messy girl.

By now Joey was traveling fast in the corridors of sophistication. She had always been a prima donna, but now it was official: she was a bona fide member of the New York City Opera company, flying off to Vienna and San Francisco, savoring the success she’d worked so hard to achieve. She was working alongside great conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Herbert von Karajan, Eugene Ormandy, and Charles Munch, great men who occasionally stopped by our apartment, and whose hair I could now and then find in my bathroom sink (which doubled as a guest bathroom). It was like watching a movie called
Joey!
, which added to the majestic theater of it all. As for Lucy and me, we were back together, working with a choreographer to reconceive our musical set.