Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (20 page)

In early August, within the first week of Lucy’s arrival, the Simon Sisters auditioned at a place called Quaglino’s, in the West End. In addition to two or three originals, Lucy and I sang a French version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Burt Bacharach’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “That’s What You Get for Loving Me,” and the song that had become our minor hit back in the U.S., “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod.” “Well done, Simon Sister!” Willie said to us afterward, over and over again. But nothing came of our audition at Quaglino’s, so the three of us went straight to a competing venue called the Rehearsal Room, a little club above the Royal Court Theatre, where we made a big impression on the owner, Nigel Corbett, who signed us on then and there.

Lucy had met Willie only twice when he told me he wanted to fix her up with the King of Wales. This pleased me to no end, since I took it as a sign that Willie was eager to keep me all to himself. Helpless in the face of Willie’s sardonic, adorable, long-legged, coffee-scented charm, I spun around mindlessly, thrilled, casting off any suspicions that Willie might be even remotely untrustworthy. No, it was much more fun and romantic to believe that Lucy and I were meeting the King of Wales—who turned out to be not some doddering, muttering, actual king at all, but Richard Rhys, a close friend of Willie’s from Cambridge days. He was actually a part of some royal lineage, and Willie was quick to move him up in line. From what I could tell, Willie and Richard must have been the two coolest, naughtiest, suavest upperclassmen ever to stride English soil, and I imagined that their wealth and offhanded, rumpled, imperious saunters had made them the objects of undergraduate worship across all twenty-nine Cambridge colleges.

After dinner at the Ritz, a quick stop at another restaurant, Chez Solange, and a visit to Danny La Rue’s, London’s transvestite club, the four of us took the long way home through Kensington Park. The night felt bewitched, as if any moment a common bench could have transmuted into a giraffe, a tree into a flamingo. The air was fragrant with oleander, and willows were silhouetted against a smoky, brightly lit London sky. It was clear by now that Lucy and the king were getting along exceedingly well, and when we got separated from them—
Please don’t start searching for me, Lucy
, I silently begged her—Willie and I ended up on a bench facing a pond, riveted by the sight of a golden carriage led by two horses wearing equine formal attire. The coach had footmen! Or was I drunk? No, Willie saw what I saw too, dubbing them “Frog Footmen,” words he relished repeating and which later turned into his own nickname for me:
Frog Footman.

Once the carriage vanished, Willie and I seemed to be the only people left in the park. Indeed, it turned out we were, too; the park gates were closed, padlocked. Willie sat stiffly on the bench, and even when I put my arms around him from behind, he didn’t melt in any discernible way, which both disappointed and excited me. He preferred to take his time.

“Do you find me strange?” he asked. “I mean reserved, odd … like something in me is missing and is slowly being regained?” He was clearly referring to his recent breakup with Sarah Miles. He told me she had come home from Ireland and found a woman’s shoe under their bed.

Looking back, it was one of the most perfect moments of my life: for the first time, I felt I truly belonged somewhere, in this space of no space. My arms were enveloping a man whom I wanted, and there was no chance of losing him, since he wasn’t mine. Once he was mine, and he would be, it would come into focus, the alchemy of it all, the possibility of an ending. Somehow I knew that the dynamic was perfect and I wasn’t in any danger of rejection. He couldn’t reject me yet. I was on a brilliant edge. It was a moment of pure precipice. I didn’t jump, though I was in position. As long as he didn’t give himself to me, the seductive moment of possibility hovered.
Let it stay there. Let it last as long as it can last.
I wouldn’t have liked it as well if he had pursued me at that point, if he had turned to me and given in with a little wan kiss, or a big passionate one. Instead, I relished the safety of
not yet having attained
. As a result of that heightened feeling of being, I can still remember details as though I were right there now: the vaguely crumbling oakwood bench with a wrought-iron frame holding it together, Willie’s posture, leaning forward, the elbows of his jacket bunching, his hands folded in front of him as though sitting in a chapel. I looked to the right through the enormous willows and there was Kensington Palace, lit softly by a streetlamp filtering through mist.

It was almost five in the morning, we were still enclosed in the park, and I was getting chilly in my thin cotton dress. Willie was being careful not to touch me or be in any way “physical.” He smoothly draped his jacket around my shoulders as the two of us made our way back to the park entrance, with me carrying the sling-heeled sandals I’d kicked off earlier in the night. According to Willie, the park would reopen at 6 a.m., but just then a bobby approached us, politely demanding to know who we were. As he was inspecting our IDs, Willie piped up that we were “friends of the Queen,” and, in fact, distant relatives of Prince Philip’s previous wife. He spoke so quickly and authoritatively that the bobby clearly believed his story, though it may have been the first and last time the word got out that Prince Philip had had a failed first marriage.

After trying and failing to get a cab in Trafalgar Square, Willie and I made our way by foot to Wilton Place by 6:30 a.m. The spell was intact: we hadn’t yet kissed. The pale blue-green color of Willie’s eyes matched the early morning sky as we approached the stone front steps of Toad Hall. Lucy, who must have been waiting up for me, called out the window that she’d be right down to unlock the door. “Behave, Simon Sister,” Willie murmured to me, and then he was gone. Upstairs, Lucy and I stayed awake, debriefing each other about our respective nights out, Lucy telling me at one point how smitten she was already with the King of Wales. Switching on the radio, the two of us danced together to “I Got You Babe,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and finally, “Ticket to Ride.” That morning, as we laughed and drank café au lait and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on sourdough bread, the Simon Sisters were blind to everything and everyone in London with the exception of Willie and the King.

*   *   *

My sister and I spent the week before our Rehearsal Room gig rehearsing, and even serenading the people whose house we lived in. Their response was extremely enthusiastic. When the day arrived, Lucy and I found ourselves backstage at the Rehearsal Room, where we were booked for the entire week. Our set was tight, nine songs, and during rehearsals, Willie told us approvingly how loose, funny, and relaxed we were both getting. In the days following our opening, I confessed to my diary that I had fleeting fantasies of marrying Willie and settling down in London, where I would launch a new career as a solo singer.

Willie was always telling me how much he’d “screwed” this person or that person, and I always thought he was speaking in a spirit of fun. He was, too, but he’d also left in his wake a long list of creditors, critics, and naysayers. I kept forgetting that Willie had little, if any, money of his own, nor did I know that what money he had he spent on drugs and hookers. Early on I’d let him know that my long psychoanalysis had drained my inheritance, but Willie likely believed my account would miraculously replenish and start yielding dividends the moment I turned twenty-five. I didn’t care. As a twenty-year-old American in London, I continued to have no concept of money, had never cared much at all about it. Even if Willie was penniless, was there anything more romantic than a sardonic, impeccably mannered, stone-broke aristocrat? Willie always acted as though nothing and no one could ever hurt him—not Sarah Miles, not any one of his creditors or critics. Was Willie consumed with self-hatred the whole time I knew him? Did he have his hands full concealing himself, or leading a double life? I didn’t know him well enough to answer.

I barely remember our shows, but Lucy and I always got a great round of applause, spurred on, no doubt, by the nightly claque assembled by the King of Wales. (As is the case with most kings, his applause was instantaneously contagious.) We didn’t get much press, but our shows went so well that our collective nerves, thus far kept in check, burst forth in a rush of manic exhilaration. We were an actual hit, and in London, no less, so much so that the rumor was being floated that the Beatles—then by far the biggest, most famous group in the world—were supposed to show up in the audience at the Rehearsal Room. Lucy and I were so lathered up by this news that we went out shopping for new clothes. At a Kensington market, I chose a brown-and-gold linen dress with a tiger motif and a low neckline. Lucy bought the exact same outfit. Still, there was the issue of which one of us would wear the dress in front of the Beatles. The solution was both of us, except before the big night, Lucy put hers in a washing machine, drastically shrinking it, as well as dyeing it blue, the dress coming out looking like a fitted, tie-dyed T-shirt, which turned out to be just as saucy as my tiger-striped version. Still, who cared? The
Beatles
were coming! Lucy and I both had the same feeling: we were in the right place at the right time, and Lord, we loved London! We loved the people surrounding us. We were living life as we’d never lived it before.

After finishing two sets with not a single Beatle in sight, Willie, the King, Lucy, and I had a few drinks and walked home. The Beatles rumor, it turned out, had been a publicity hoax dreamed up by the owner of the Rehearsal Room. As we made our way back to Wilton Place, Willie and I stopped in Hyde Park, making ourselves at home on a freestanding lounge chair by the banks of the Serpentine lake. “Frog Footman,” Willie said to me solemnly, “you are the cleverest, wisest, most perfect girl there ever was.” He grinned suddenly. “Well done!”

Was I the cleverest, wisest, most perfect girl ever born? If I was for a brief shining period, it was Willie who made me that way. He created whatever glitter tumbled in shiny clumps from all over him, and inspired whatever witticisms fell off my lips. He’d felt extremely possessive of me back at the club, Willie went on—jealous of the attention I was getting from other men between our two sets. That’s when he leaned over and kissed me. When our lips touched, there was that moment of Okay, this has been there all along. I was right. Later that night, simultaneously, we moved toward each other, kissing again, this time for so long I could hardly believe we made it all the way to Willie’s apartment. It was the very kiss, in fact, that kicked off the perfect love affair.

He started to introduce me as his wife; the “next Mrs. Donaldson,” he would say. Our love life couldn’t have been better. I felt quite possessed, in a wild and terrific way. Willie could be both tender and sentimental. Neither one of us, I remember, ever wanted to be seen naked, so we made love in the darkest of rooms.

I had already been in London for three weeks, and knowing that in three more weeks Lucy and I would be returning home to New York, the remaining time I spent with Willie felt urgent and enthralling, with an edge of desperation to it. We laughed at everything the other person said. We kissed the moment we found ourselves alone. Every day and night we went out: for music, for shopping, for lunches and dinners, for parties with Lucy and the King of Wales, and Peter Sellers, and Spike Milligan, as well as the casts from various West End shows, which now included David Steinberg, the American comedian and actor, and his girlfriend, the photographer Mary Ellen Mark. It reached a point where the two of us even began planning for the future, even the possibility of marriage. We had long talks about what my family would think of him and where the two of us would end up living. I couldn’t picture Willie living in America, but at the same time, neither of us believed I would ever come back to England. We’d have to see.

A few days before our departure, Willie withdrew from me ever so slightly, which had the unfortunate effect of making me want to draw closer to him. Funny how that happens. Leaving London for a meeting, he promised to call me “every other minute.” I took Willie’s word more literally than I should have, camping out in my apartment waiting for the phone to ring. Willie called that night, and we had a long, loving conversation, but the next day he didn’t call at all, and when I tried his hotel in desperation, the front desk had no record of any Willie Donaldson. The next day the phone remained silent, and at five that afternoon, Lucy ordered me to have a beer with her at our local pub. As the two of us were leaving our building, I glanced up to see Willie entering his flat two doors away. Naturally, he pretended he’d just this second returned home and was planning on bathing first before popping by to surprise me.

I had no reason to believe him, he was such a skilled and quick-witted fabulist. This particular lie wouldn’t fly, not this time. But, overwhelmed with distrust and anger, I froze up. Immediately, I went to that place inside my head where I’d gone when Nick told me about Nini: denial. His lie wasn’t true. I’d make up one I liked better. For the rest of the night, Willie couldn’t have been more adorable, making love to me in a way he’d never done before. I couldn’t help feeling he’d recently been in the company of a woman who had taught him a thing or two, but I bit my lip and feigned wonderment. There was no reason to seethe, or panic. It would all be over soon anyway.

In preparation for our departure, Willie had promised to pick up our passports at American Express—for some reason Lucy and I had entrusted him with ours, and he had lost them, and we’d had to order replacements. A day before we left, Willie still hadn’t gotten them. For the first time I was openly frustrated with him, silently fuming and then apologizing for my silent fuming. Lucy and I were at Toad Hall, packing our bags and sharing emotional good-byes with friends, when Willie pulled up in front in a limousine. He was pale, I was teary, and that night we barely exchanged a single word. We slept back to back. More than once Willie had told me he’d had premonitions that we wouldn’t get married, and while I suspected that his premonitions had less to do with divine and sensory mystery than they did with his own ambivalence, I dismissed my doubts. To commemorate my departure, I’d made him a crossword puzzle, all of whose clues and answers referred to my eventual return. I told him I was counting on his memorizing at least a few of my songs so that when I came back, he could fill in for Lucy. That last night, I left him a cassette of me singing.