Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (26 page)

I buzzed him up, hurriedly placing my coat over my nightgown. When I opened the door, the first thing Bob said was, “I couldn’t help it…” and he placed his arms around me, holding me tight there. He had only an hour, he said. The rest of his family was still asleep in their hotel room. It was now my turn to respond, and to be perfectly honest, I had no idea what to say or do. I wasn’t even sure what Bob Rafelson wanted. Bob was funny and attractive. He also had an extra quarter-inch of what might have been foam around every sinew that skin can cover—an effect of comfort in an otherwise slender man. I liked Bob, but I also felt powerless, a slave to what I imagined Jake might be expecting me to do. Jake, I imagined, would expect me to report back on my activities, give him an interesting anecdote for the two of us to chew over. And because Bob was attractive and he’d surprised me in my apartment, he and I became off-and-on lovers, if such an expression can be used about something so short-lived, for the next few weeks. Bob eventually told his brilliant, beautiful wife, Toby, about me during a “karma cleaning” session and, by the expert way Bob must have told her, in no way did I feel uncomfortable with either Bob or Toby in the future. My brief relationship with Bob led to any number of encounters with other available or unavailable men of that clan who, after leaving Jake’s, traveled the short block south where I welcomed them into my apartment for a night, a week, or longer. “I hate to think of myself as being promiscuous,” I wrote in my diary around that time. “I know I am. I really don’t know how not to fall for people. What does it make me think about myself?”

One of the men I fell for was Jack Nicholson, who showed up at Jake’s apartment one evening with his arm around his gum-chewing girlfriend, regaling the table with stories from the making of
Five Easy Pieces
, which had just wrapped. I was goaded to play my musical repertoire for the guests, which had expanded to include a song I’d recently written called “Alone,” an amalgam of “I Am a Rock” and “I Am a Rock” again.

I could tell that Jack was enjoying my performance. He asked me, very seriously, what more had to happen before I amassed enough songs to make an honest-to-goodness record. I had no idea, but immediately began explaining how I would produce it, first laying down the guitar part, followed by me singing on a different track, to be overlaid eventually with strings. “Yes,” I concluded, “there will be a plethora of strings.”

After a long pause, and everyone else staying quiet in anticipation, Jack repeated, “Plethora?” in that way only Jack could, and when he did, I felt the same rush of love that I’d had with Willie, and also with Jake: perfect timing, an elastic stretch of irony mixed with a hint of challenge and possibly even menace. Before I knew it, it was time to say good night to Jack’s gum-chewing girlfriend, who, in her Mary Janes and her dress with its puffed-up short sleeves, looked like an extremely attractive eight-year-old girl. When she was gone, we all remarked how adorable she was and how, as she was leaving, she waved at Jack and said, “Thank you, I had a very nice time.” Alone now with Jake and Ricky, Jack trained the full force of his attention on me, and when I rose to sing another song, he seemed to take it personally, as if I were singing to him alone. The song was “I’m All It Takes to Make You Happy.”

“What if we go over to your apartment?” he said when we were sitting alone.

He was unbelievable, and it was outrageous, the idea of returning to my apartment alone with Jack. There was a flicker of evil amusement in Jake’s eyes as he sent Jack and me off into the night. It was as if he were already imagining the delight Jack and I were about to find with each other, one that might conceivably provide me and Jake with a future lyric. Thankfully I was a little stoned, as well as drunk enough not to be too nervous, and Jack and I ended up in my living room, with its smoked-mirrored walls and fake-fur foldout couch. Jack lingered in the living room as I prepared a pot of coffee. When I returned holding two cups, I took a seat on the couch across from Jack, who was perched on the piano stool. We chatted for a few moments and then he said, offhandedly, “Do you ever drink coffee in your bedroom?”

I was inebriated enough that I literally couldn’t remember how to arrange my body in the right way for intimacy, though it was one of the few times in my life that I was wearing the perfect undergarments. When the two of us awoke the next morning, Jack immediately needed to make a bunch of telephone calls. The phone was on my side of the bed, and Jack sat up, propped against the pillows, while I lay there trapped underneath the long curlicue cord. Jack’s phone voice—and his entire persona—was supremely assured. At the same time, I couldn’t help but think he was trying to impress me with the caliber of the people he was calling. He tossed out nicknames left and right. Candice Bergen was “Bugs,” Art Garfunkel was “Artie the Garf,” and it took me a few seconds to realize that “Mike the Nick” was Mike Nichols. I lay in bed next to him, unable to come up with any witty things to say, and feeling dumb about it, too, so I remained quiet.

That evening, Jack was back, after another day spent shooting
Carnal Knowledge
with Bugs, Artie the Garf, and Mike the Nick. He showed up late, explaining that the Lexington Avenue bus had run into traffic. It was winter, and cold out, and more than anything, I was amazed that Jack Nicholson ever took a bus anywhere. He and I proceeded to have an almost domestic evening, watching television, with a few bits of frolicking thrown in. That same night, Jack told me that he was starting to see a woman he felt serious about. He’d been seeing her all winter, and there were children involved, and the two of them were on the verge of moving in together. The discussion he and I proceeded to have was extremely rational. “I really like seeing you,” I said, “and I’m glad you told me before I invited you to my wedding in which you were my groom.” Jack told me I was a “funny one” and he was glad I understood.

Did I? It seemed to me I had a few options. I could see myself as a girl unable to keep Jack Nicholson’s interest, or I could tell him off, or I could act the way I felt, which was like a stupid, rejected fool who felt like crying, and who would never, ever attract anyone ever again. I did none of these. Jack was a handsome, famous, funny, clever man whom I’d met three or four times. I wasn’t in love with him. My ego may have taken a momentary whack, but the end of my brief fling with Jack was akin to a promising summer rental that gets canceled at the last minute.

In the wake of Jack, I was gently passed around, as if in a fraternity, not the first woman to experience this and not the last, either. Beginning with Bob Rafelson, his brother Don, Pierre Cottrell, and Michael Crichton, it felt like a club in which Jake was the hub, one where you had to please the man just below in order to graduate to the next. I didn’t feel unappreciated, though I was always aware I was giving myself away too cheaply. In college I had read Margaret Mead’s
Coming of Age in Samoa
, which described sex as natural, guilt free, and causing no deep feeling or rivalries. Could sex be casual, or was it reserved exclusively for two people who had dedicated themselves to a lifetime together, as my own mother had spuriously tried to instill in my brain?

Mommy’s words still resonated in my head as though I were twelve years old. If I had sex with someone I had no intention of marrying, I felt guilty, fake. Nevertheless, by 1970, I’d had sex with boys and men who, unlike Nick or Willie, were nowhere close to potential marriage material. Nobody, it seemed to me, had it right about sex, especially my mother. Sex was up to me to define, and I’d do it my own way. The only issue was finding coherence in all the dogmas I’d heard my whole life, while still feeling responsible toward myself. Did sex really have to be as formal as an evening at the opera? Couldn’t some encounters be as casual as a midnight swim? Like so many women, I was trying to reconcile these competing thoughts, the difference being that all of a sudden I had a vehicle to explore them—the sheer wonder of an original lyric. The more I sang it, the truer it became. To help define what I needed to know about aspects of myself as a woman, I needed the help of the only man I loved so deeply without the encumbrance of romance. Together we wanted to know the deeper truths of our time, and what we might risk as we found our way.

The couples cling and claw

And drown in love’s debris

You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds

But soon you’ll cage me on your shelf

I’ll never learn to be just me first

By myself.

When Jake gave me those words to the music I’d written, his lyrics matched the melody perfectly. I sat before my Tonk piano in my south-facing Murray Hill apartment, singing the song over and over again, alone, poised, at least in my mind, to live a life where I was far more than just the “girl.”

Jake Brackman and me writing our first song, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” 1970.

My first band hits the road. Clockwise from left: me, Jimmy Ryan,
Andy Newmark, Paul Glanz.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

record numero uno

E
verything felt new for me in 1970: my Murray Hill neighborhood, my physical and emotional proximity to Jake, and the fact that for the first time in my life I was living alone, just me and my fluffy fake-fur foldout couch, my clothes, my shoes, and my music, strewn around five wildly imaginative Stanford White rooms. (It was a look, a style, and a kind of architecture that I would try to copy everywhere I went from that time on.) I’d set up my new sound system—containing all my newest, highest-fidelity equipment—in the room I called “my office.”

One night, during the winter of 1970, Jake invited me over to his house for an Indian takeout dinner. (Dinner at Jake’s was pretty much an ongoing invitation.) Janet Margolin, an actress who’d starred in the film
David and Lisa
, was there, along with her husband, Jerry Brandt. Jerry was a music manager who managed the Harlem Boys Choir, among other acts. I wasn’t entirely sure if Jake had choreographed this introduction for professional reasons, but sometime in between the raita and the naan, Jake asked me to play our new song.

When I finished singing “That’s the Way…,” Jerry was incredibly enthusiastic. “Can you and I get together?” he asked. “Would you like to make a record?”

“Actually,” I said, “I’d love to be a writer more than I’d like to be a performer.” Being a performer just wasn’t something I was ready for, I went on. “I never really loved being onstage with my sister, and now I just want to sit back and write songs and be the”—what was the word?—“composer-at-arms.”

“Sure, sure,” Jerry said, knowing, as he must have, that anything was possible under the tutelage of Jerry Brandt. Jerry suggested that he drop by my apartment for lunch the next day, before asking, slightly opaquely, if I happened to have a copy of the
I Ching
. I didn’t have one, so Jerry said he would bring his.

Jerry arrived the next day with his
I Ching
under one arm. He was handsomer than I remembered, and had a thrilling, contagious energy. We made some intense small talk, Jerry’s black eyes on me the whole time, and I offered him a Swiss cheese, chutney, and red onion sandwich on rye. Jerry seemed to delight in the strangeness of this combination. “Is this some style thing?” he asked. “Anything with anything?” He then suggested that we “throw the
I Ching
,” and asked me if I’d ever done it before. I hadn’t, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t intrigued. From his pocket he took out a few ancient-looking coins. “Ask a question,” he said.

I demurred. “
You
ask one. This was your idea, Jerry. You must have some reason.”

He did, too. “Will it be to our mutual benefit to work together professionally?”

Jerry tossed the coins, translating their meaning by turning to the page the coin pattern referenced. Then as now, I’m an
I Ching
novice, and I suppose the answer was likely to be interpreted in whatever way the coin tosser chose. In this case, if I’m remembering it right, the answer had to do with a bear declining to step on the foot of the mouse and choosing instead to take on bigger challenges, like, say, a
moose
. It could have been something else, but whatever it was, the bigger question of whether Jerry and I should work together was
Yes
.