Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (48 page)

Backstage at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, everything was well appointed. There were flowers everywhere, in ultrabright colors of yellow, orange, red, and even bright blue, the latter no doubt genetically modified to assume the rich, regal hues befitting a star. I felt less like a star than a gangster’s girlfriend receiving a withering bunch of those unnatural, food-dyed azure flowers. They depressed me right away. Worse, Arlyne wasn’t around that night. No doubt she was fed up with me—I’d been nothing but drama for her, and Arlyne, like most people, had other drama to deal with—or maybe she intuited that I would fail and embarrass us both. But Lucy, my wonderful sister, had insisted on flying to Pittsburgh and attending the concert in person. She understood how much I was struggling. She got it.

It was the first time Lucy had ever shown up at one of my solo concerts, not that there’d been that many over the years, just a few short tours’ worth and various public appearances with James. Of course, in our early years, the two of us had performed and traveled here and there as the Simon Sisters. When I broke out on my own, I missed Lucy terribly. Ever since we were children, Lucy was always my boss, the sister I knew would always take care of me. Now, tonight, she had come to Pittsburgh. Had she known, somehow, that she would have to take care of me? Did she have any inkling of how dire the situation was? I doubt it. Even I didn’t realize it yet.

*   *   *

My solo act had begun one April night in 1971 at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. That night kicked off my career. I was all of a sudden on the “A-list,” being compared to Janis Joplin, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, even Julie Christie. I’d joined a new club, was given a new ladder to climb, the scene not much different from high school popularity games. In truth, each and every group to which you are assigned is illusory; the ground perpetually shifts, and new groups pop up all the time. Fame is manic and terrifying, especially when your identity and status become gradually and exclusively dependent on others’ opinions, jealousies, and rivalries. Show business is no place for any normal person, as you develop an overwhelming need to retain the highest possible position on the world’s popularity rosters, your fear of slipping a notch gradually overshadowing talent, art, creativity, empathy, and, hardest to lose, love.

Countless times over those years I’d come face to face with the Beast, which understood, intuitively, that for any one wish to come true, ten would never be granted. Whenever I was gratified by a good review, a flattering remark, or a compliment on my dress, I knew I could look forward to the next time a magazine voted me the Worst-Dressed Woman of the Year. At Evey’s, I thought I’d put the Beast to bed, but that night in Pittsburgh it returned.

Whenever James and I sang or appeared in public together, we ignited almost unimaginable amounts of excitement. I could credit our individual charisma, but as a couple, we were somehow much more than the sum of our two parts. Even as our marriage went through its agonies, James and I were still able to convey a profound, jointly held illumination. In response, the public projected something back that enveloped both of us in a radiance that neither one of us ever understood. Except that I remember that right after our wedding, I’d felt emotionally protected for life. Signing my name
Carly Simon Taylor
and thinking, Well, that’s just about the perfect place to be. For me marriage was a perfect island, one created for the two of us to live on. Outside our marriage, in public, we were a unit, singing songs onstage that promised a warm, positive, loving future not just for us but for everyone. Music’s two symbolic parental figures—still solid, still intact, still looking good, still making music. It seemed the two of us were living out an empty version of the lyrics of our 1972 cowritten song, “Forever My Love.”

I’m looking forward to looking back

From further on down the track

Together in fact

Forever my love

*   *   *

People still write to me today, with genuine compassion, claiming they were there “that night in Pittsburgh,” and their empathy never ceases to touch me. That night my energy was focused exclusively on maintaining my sanity. I also felt exceedingly nervous, even more than usual. The paradox, one I’ve confronted repeatedly over the course of my performing life, was that performing was an opportunity to detach from myself, to dive into the love of the ten thousand people in the audience, and ten thousand more waiting for the second show afterward. If only I could lose myself in the beat of the music. The more I needed the bliss of losing myself, the more losing myself felt as though I’d
lost
myself completely between drowning and bad dreams.

After sound check, I retired to my dressing room and changed into a light pink pantsuit made of thin, shimmering satin. It clung to my bones, making my knees look like two matching medical reflex hammers. Nor did I realize before the show just how physically weak I was. An hour before I took the stage, I called home and spoke to Ben, Sally, and James, my three night-lights whose shine, I knew, would never fade, at least not until their stars led me back home. I needed that reality so badly—like hanging on to Santa with all my might.

If I didn’t conquer this fear, I remember thinking, I would soon find myself confined to my home, and
only
my home, and as the years went on, sequestered in my bedroom, and finally, simply, alone in my bed with a quilt over my head.

My opening act, a local Pittsburgh band, played for forty-five minutes. I heard the sounds of applause from out front and took one last appraising look in the mirrored wall, the fake blue flowers reflecting back at me. I looked pretty damn swank in my pink satin pantsuit. Although my bones were sticking out, overall I was feeling pretty okay. The Valium I’d taken earlier kicked in, and there was no reason to believe my Pittsburgh show would be anything out of the ordinary.

Did things fall apart because of the accumulated stresses of the past year? Ben? James? Over the years I’ve wondered: Did I fall apart that night because Lucy was in the audience, and I still felt guilty, so many years later, performing solo, as the headlining act, without my older sister by my side? I have no answers.

When I first appeared, the audience was giddy in a familiar way, but why wasn’t their energy and enthusiasm making me giddy in response? The set list opened with “Come Upstairs,” an up-tempo song of mine from my recent album of the same name, whose instrumental beginning sounds like a group of whirling dervishes. The song would have been vital, fun, and fresh, if only … if only I could reverse all the things that started to go so horribly wrong.

When I began to play the tambourine for an eight-bar intro, my body started moving in some wild gyration, like James Brown, like Mick, like a dervish. I started to sense the first of several thudding heart palpitations, like giant steps across the arid landscape that was my chest. Turning my back to the audience, I found myself facing Mike Mainieri, my musical and social director, who saw trouble on my face—or, more likely, sheer panic.

I was bent at the waist, trying to pretend I was moving along to the music, my arms seemingly groping for something, a bird-of-paradise effect that I’m afraid looked more like a wind-up monkey having a seizure. Four bars too late, and edging upstage toward the band instead of toward the audience, I began to sing “Come Upstairs,” a heart palpitation stopping me every few words, at which point I’d gaze back beseechingly at Mike, as if he had an automatic defibrillator on hand, silently begging him to scoop me up and get me into a straitjacket. I could hear the sirens now. Why? Why? Why?

By the time “Come Upstairs” ended, I had sung at most a third of the song, and was trying to comfort the audience by blaming the microphone for whatever was going wrong.

The bigger point was that I’d lost my cool. It’s a good thing audiences spend most of the opening number distracted by the visuals, yet in this case the only visual they got was the thrilling spectacle of my hunched back. “The Right Thing to Do” was up next, a well-worn slipper of a song I should have settled into easily. It was a song I’d written in 1972 during the short flight from the Vineyard to New York, with James asleep in the seat beside me, breathing softly, looking so beautiful, so loved.

That night, though, I couldn’t even seem to settle into a song I’d performed countless times. With my adrenaline still flooding me, I felt a fresh wave of dread and thirty seconds later, I stopped midsong, frozen and embarrassed, and turned my back again to the audience.

Based on the strange, halting applause at the end of the song, the audience was starting to get alarmed. By now, I was convinced that unless I left the stage right that second I would really die, with poor Lucy given the unenviable task of pronouncing the official time and cause of my death: hysteria, mixed with ventricular fibrillation, Miss Simon leaving behind her darling brave blond children, Sally and Ben, and her on-again, off-again husband, James.… Again bending over at the waist, I tried to steady my breath, make it less frighteningly erratic. It didn’t work. That’s when I stood up straight. This is your moment, I remember thinking. You can either run away from it, or live through it.

Facing the audience, I blurted out, “I’m having an anxiety attack, I guess. What’s happening is what I’m always afraid might happen.” I told the audience that it would help me immeasurably if they would be willing to come onstage with me. “If you want to sing, please do, but just … I don’t want there to be any separation between me and you.”

At least a hundred audience members took my words seriously, clustering up front, with the guards standing sentry ultimately allowing about fifty people to join a stage already populated by musicians, amps, wires, and scrims. It felt almost as though having invited my neighbors over for a spontaneous glass of holiday eggnog, the entire block had shown up, and now had little to do other than circle a shaking, frozen singer whom some liked, others possibly revered. Most took seats on the edge of the stage, as though I were a living, barely breathing funeral pyre, a woman in flames flailing, disintegrating, atomizing.

Somewhere inside me, a small voice ordered me to sing “De Bat,” one of the songs off
Boys in the Trees
, which was about bringing Sally home in my arms one night. That will make you lose yourself, I told myself.

Good idea, wrong night. Still, I began singing and was able to animate the images, impersonating, or trying to, the bodies of the bat and the cat.

As I waited for my heart to resume its normal beat, I could only hope that “De Bat” was just what the doctor ordered and could get me back on track. Oh, how different it would have all been if I could have had the dispassion to survey the scene onstage from a great height, or even as a member of the audience. My brain began the following argument with itself, a sequence of unrhyming lyrics:

“Hey, I’m doing okay. I’m getting through this.”

“No, you’re not, did you just feel that? That was a palpitation. You’re not going to live much longer.”

“No—you can control it.”

“No, Carly, this is hardwired. The phobic process is a loop that feeds on itself. You’re doomed. You always have been. You always will be.”

The back-and-forth monologue alerted my adrenal glands. With my adrenaline in free-flow release, my heart palpitations now went into overdrive. Then there was this: I was also hemorrhaging from between my legs. What began as a near-imperceptible slow drip turned gradually into a single hot stream. My bed was burning, the sheets on fire.

What was happening to me? By now my sister Lucy had made her way onstage and was sitting beside me, along with a dozen or so audience members. They sat there, rubbing my feet and ankles. “Carl, you’re doing great,” I remember Lucy saying, and I couldn’t help wishing that she would grab the mic and finish the rest of the show for me.

One fan said, “I love that song,” and sang “De Bat” along with me.

A second one said, “I get anxiety attacks too.”

A third one said, “Can we stay up on the stage with you, even if you don’t get better?”

The fourth one had this to say: “You have blood on your pants.”

I began to address the audience in their seats—“I’m just going to run into the bathroom for a second, and I’ll be right back”—but excited to be part of a “happening,” most were yelling so loudly they could hardly hear me when I said it. Handing my guitar to Lucy, I started exiting the stage, whereupon the audience began to boo.

After such an extraordinary show of support, why would they boo me?

I was mistaken. What resembled booing was instead
Don’t go! Don’t go!
After a moment’s hesitation, I reversed course and Lucy gazed back at me strangely. “It’s okay, I have to stay,” I told her.

“Are you all right?” Lucy said, though I sensed she was concealing deeper concerns. “It sounds great.” I ran to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and was back on stage in a flash. The audience was thrilled and glad that they’d helped.

I started to sing something, anything, followed by “You’re So Vain” and “Anticipation.” I was holding my legs tightly together. I still had little idea what was happening, but my chest palpitations were easing up, which in turn allowed me to focus on a Kegel exercise, squeezing tightly to keep the blood flow to a minimum. By now, I’d reached a point of complete indifference as to whether I lived or died. I kept looking over at Mike, who was nodding up and down in an exaggerated way as if conveying to the audience—and me—that everything was going to be all right.

Once I’d finished singing “Anticipation,” the audience gave me a standing ovation. Some fans were even standing in their seats, or flocking the aisles, hoping to trade places with the fifty or so fans onstage. By necessity, the guards seemed less vigilant than usual in keeping the peace, but as it turned out, they were at precisely the right height and distance to see where the blood had soaked into my pants.

Soon enough, it became clear where everybody should focus his or her gaze. Things were made official when one college-age boy, who’d been patting my leg as if consoling an injured, scared child, or animal, took away his hand. All at once, everyone in the band and the audience could see that his hand and my two pant legs were saturated with blood. I won’t go into any more detail. I will say, though, that if you can recall a night as strange as that, it serves as an excellent gauge by which to compare the other highs and lows of your life.