Fire and Rain (23 page)

Four years earlier, when they were considering hiring Lewis as their manager, Simon and Garfunkel had met Lewis at his apartment for a meeting. There, Lewis introduced them to his wife, a pale, delicate-looking, blue-eyed beauty from Nashville fifteen years Lewis' junior. For Simon, it was hard to know what was more shocking: Peggy Ann Harper's relative youth or the fact that she was still in curlers and a robe. Born in Newport, a small town in Tennessee hill country, Harper was a child of divorce; her father, a housepainter, broke up with his wife when Peggy (born Margaret) was twelve. Since the family had to live on welfare, Harper was able to enroll in Berea College, a tuition-free school for poor students from the area.

Leaving school before graduation and unsure of a direction, Harper wound up waitressing in New York, then Atlantic City. There, she met Lewis, who was managing the Brothers Four, a commercial folk group that tapped into the Kingston Trio-fueled boom of the early '60s. Harper was dating one of its members, but soon, she and Lewis hooked up, marrying in 1965. Harper tended to keep to herself, which conflicted with Lewis' need to schmooze music business types; more often than not, she'd opt out of nights out with people in her husband's line of work.
Around the time she first met Simon and Garfunkel, she and Lewis had had a trial separation, then divorced soon after. When Harper moved by herself to the Upper East Side, Lewis didn't understand why she'd chosen to live in such a faraway part of the city—until he realized his ex-wife was now living close to Simon.

Lewis had no idea Simon was even interested in Peggy, but he didn't know the whole story. After her divorce, Harper spent time in London; by coincidence, Simon, who had a girlfriend there, was also in town and wound up spending intimate time with his manager's estranged wife. Soon enough, Harper, two years older than Simon, was sharing his East End Avenue home with him. In
Songs of America
, she made a rare public appearance, walking through a field with both men. But even then, her need for privacy came through: She was seen from the back, and only fleetingly.

Garfunkel's apprehension about Harper and Simon hooking up was largely for business reasons: He was rightly concerned they'd lose their manager in the process. As it turned out, Lewis wasn't terribly troubled by the relationship. The one person who truly had a right to be concerned was Garfunkel, especially when Simon and Harper announced they were planning to marry. Simon was so devoted to his art—continually obsessing over song lyrics and chord changes—that chances were he only had room in his life for one full-time partner. The remarkable coincidence that both New Yorkers were in relationships with women from Tennessee was small comfort.

In September 1969, Simon purchased another home, a Dutch farmhouse outside New Hope, Pennsylvania, for $200,000. The seven-room, three-floor house, nestled inside seventy acres of Bucks County real estate, felt several worlds removed from the claustrophobic intensity of Manhattan. He and Harper began spending weekends there, Harper starting a vegetable garden for their new health-food regime.

As Harper had already learned, Simon could be difficult to read. It
was hard to know how he felt at any given time, and he could be moody. Whether in conversation or in interviews, he would quietly chew over a question for many minutes before delivering a carefully thought-out, precisely articulated response. (In a sign of how many qualities they shared, Garfunkel could be the same way.) He knew all too well he was beginning to lose his hair and was pained by it; Garfunkel told one friend that Simon was so sensitive that touching his head was out of the question.

In his new country home, Simon had the time and space to dwell on it all, with no one but Harper as company. He could listen to his soul and gospel records, his Schoenberg, Bach, and Bartók works, and try to determine what came next. Garfunkel, the Greenwich Village folk clubs, and the days of hustling around the Brill Building felt like ghosts from the past.

On Tuesdays, Simon returned to his weekly, early-evening commute down to the New York University building in the East Village. Teaching the songwriting course had been his idea from the start. “I wanted to do it for a while,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “I like talking about songwriting.” Besides, he added, “Nobody teaches anything about popular music. You have to learn it on the street.” With that in mind, he'd reached out to School of the Arts dean David Oppenheim, a former Columbia Records classical-division head who'd worked on
Inside Pop: The Rock Revolution,
a 1967 CBS TV special among the first to take modern rock seriously.

Each week, Simon arrived by himself. With his baseball caps and jeans, fans hunting him down probably wouldn't have recognized him anyway. Yet even in such an informal setting, Simon brought to the class with the same scrutinizing seriousness which he approached his music. The dozen students—who included the Roche sisters but not Ron
Maxwell or Joe Turrin, the fledgling theatrical composers from the audition period who were deemed too advanced—would sing or play a new song, and Simon wouldn't hesitate to let them know if it was up to muster or far below it. He told one—Melissa Manchester, an eighteen-year-old New Yorker who'd attended the High School for Performing Arts and was already an adept pianist—that she'd been absorbing too many Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell albums. During her audition, Simon passed along one of the bits of career advice he occasionally doled out in class: “Say what you have to say as simply as possible,” he told her, “and then leave before they have a chance to figure you out.”

Simon might not have been adept at reading sheet music, and at times he looked nervous, but his technical skill was apparent. He taught them about the circle of fifths—a circular diagram that lays out the major and minor keys in music and the relationships between different chords—and explained that the students' songs would be more commercial if they devised harmonies in thirds, rather than fourths and fifths, citing the Everly Brothers as an example. Those in the class who had no idea that Simon and Garfunkel were once Tom and Jerry were caught off guard. “To me, Simon and Garfunkel were a break from something like the Everly Brothers or something very pop,” recalled Terre Roche. “So it was a surprise that he was working in a very commercial pop vein. To see that those were his roots was an eye-opener.”

Simon also invited a few select music-industry friends to address the class: classical violinist Isaac Stern and Al Kooper, the former Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears singer and keyboardist and noted session man (that was his organ churning away on Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone”). Simon and Kooper had known each other as teenagers in Queens, sometimes sharing a stage at swanky society gigs, where they'd strum standards like “Stardust” before Simon would stand up and sing a modern rock and roll song. Simon told the class the occasional backstage tale, like the time he visited Bob Dylan's home, saw crumpled
pieces of paper strewn around—each containing fragments of lyrics—and stuffed as many as possible in his pockets. To the astonishment of the students, he sometimes brought stray musical ideas for new songs and played them, often asking their reaction, as if he himself were searching for his way.

Simon's singing partner was never one of the guests, and Simon rarely mentioned him. Few in the class thought anything of it. To students like Roche, who could still remember the exact moment in her New Jersey bedroom when she first heard “The Sound of Silence,” Simon and Garfunkel were such a part of the cultural fabric that the idea they wouldn't exist was inconceivable. The only hint of anything unusual came one evening when Simon paused to talk about how hard it was to write a follow-up to a hit. Once you have one, he told them, everyone expected another, and the pressure was enormous. “To me, he was on top of the world,” Terre Roche remembered. “The idea that anything he did was problematic was fascinating to me.”

Simon never alluded to one specific incident that year: a lawsuit over the copyright of “El Condor Pasa.” Before recording the song, Simon had been told it was a traditional South American melody, when in fact it wasn't: “El Condor Pasa” had been written by Peruvian songwriter Daniel Alomia Robles almost forty years before. Robles died in 1942, but his son sued over the credit. After they realized the mistake, Simon and his lawyer Michael Tannen settled, with no hard feelings on either side. Yet the suit was one more distasteful reminder to Simon of what had gone into the creation of one of the year's biggest-selling albums.

To those at Mission Control or any of the few watching the live feed from home, the words were almost inaudible. “I'm afraid this is going to be the last moon mission for a long time,” Jim Lovell glumly reported to
one of his capsule mates. Lovell knew of what he spoke: At that moment, he and his two crew members in
Apollo 13
were adrift in space, two hundred thousand miles above earth.

The space program had emerged at the same time as Simon and Garfunkel, in the late '50s; like them, it had been pushed into orbit a few years later. In some strange way, the two entities were connected. Even John Kennedy's vision of outer space—“There is no strife, no prejudice, no hate,” he told a Rice University audience the following year—seemed in sync with the emerging civil rights era (and could have been an early Simon lyric).

But what exactly was happening in the country and beyond during the first half of the year? It wasn't merely the bombs being detonated, or the fears of a looming recession, or the way a postal strike crippled the Northeast when almost a quarter of the country's postal workers left their jobs to protest low wages. Everything seemed to be taking an unexpected, unwelcome left turn compared to a few short years earlier. Unexpectedly, the most obvious example of collapse was the news that the
Odyssey
command module and its connected LEM module were stranded in darkness.

The space program hadn't been remotely glitch free, as anyone who recalled
Apollo 1
in 1967—the explosion on the launch pad, the three astronauts in the capsule dead from suffocation—knew all too well. But by decade's end, Kennedy's call to the nation to put a man on the moon had become a reality. Barely a year before, in July 1969,
Apollo 11
had actually landed there; four months later,
Apollo 12
set down near the Ocean of Storms. A month after, an adventure film called
Marooned
—about three astronauts stranded in space when their electrical power dies out—arrived, but it felt more like over-the-top science fiction than something that could actually transpire. By the time
Apollo 13
set out, on Friday, April 11, 1970, the country was so blasé about space launches that not all the networks carried it.

The launch had gone according to plan, but two days in—April 13, of all days—an oxygen tank overheated and exploded, draining the power from the main capsule. Since the mission hadn't yet reached the moon, the plot of
Marooned
was played out in real time on live television. For three days, engineers in Houston struggled to find a way to bring back the astronauts and some part of their ship, and eventually did: In what amounted to a feat of engineering genius, NASA used the moon's gravity to rocket the ship back to earth, and on April 17, the
Odyssey
nosedived into the Pacific.

Although its mission was aborted and it never landed on the moon,
Apollo 13
was dubbed a “successful failure,” a triumph of man's ingenuity over possible disaster. But the happy ending didn't extend to the program itself. NASA would continue with its remaining planned missions for two more years, but the seeds of its decline had been planted with the mishap of
Apollo 13
. By year's end, eighty-four thousand jobs in the aerospace industry would be eliminated. California alone lost out on almost one billion dollars in NASA contracts. The Kennedy dream had been blown out.