What Is It All But Luminous

  Also by Art Garfunkel

  Still Water

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Art Garfunkel

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Garfunkel, Art, author.

  Title: What Is It All but Luminous: Notes from an Underground Man / Art Garfunkel.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016037296 | ISBN 9780385352475 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385352468 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Garfunkel, Art. | Singers—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ML420.G2514 A3 2017 | DDC 782.42164092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016037296

  Ebook ISBN 9780385352468

  Cover image by Pictorial Press/Alamy

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v4.1_r2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Art Garfunkel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Credits

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO KATHRYN, MY WOMAN, MY WIFE.

  I remember when I almost lost you.

  It was 1996, James Arthur was six.

  We went to Canada with hope of a cancer treatment.

  I contemplated losing you. Losing my lover.

  Raising James without you.

  I couldn’t handle it. It was my absolute darkest hour—the deepest saddest trough I ever knew.

  Thinking there might be no mother, no You in our lives, I felt the huge Something you are.

  As big as my life.

  But you are here,

  in all your magnificent mystical Substantiality.

  Mom was right—God is good

  10/13/16

  With my brother Jules in back of our house in Queens, 1949

  I was a nervous wreck as I packed my things in the middle of the night on January 2, 1969. There in my exposed-brick bachelor apartment on East Sixty-eighth Street, I was leaving the life of four years of a girl-chasing studio rat—a life of global good fortune—to cast my fate among actors. As a music star with no acting experience, I was acutely aware that I was cross-hopping professions. Yes the Panavision movie camera is like the Neumann microphone (little things are so magnified) but how would I be received in Mexico among first-rate actors on a social level—amongst Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Orson Welles? I quivered with insecurity as I prepared to fly, the next day, into Mike Nichols’s third feature film, his follow-up to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate—the World War II black comedy Catch-22.

  Why did Mike cast me to play Captain Nately, the innocent? What about my famous singing partner? These are things I didn’t ask myself. Innately I felt the rightness of strengthening my half of Simon and Garfunkel. Paul was the writer. Paul played guitar. I was the singer, co-producer of the records, waiting for the songs to be written to start our fifth, our last album. In my mind, I played the underdog. I remember Paul being considered for a role in the movie. Or to rephrase—both of us were cast, Paul was dropped. Musicians don’t talk. We were too hip to share out loud hurt feelings inside. No one begrudged Ringo when he sang “They’re gonna put me in the movies.” It was held in affection. Mike knew it was my right to expect the same. Recall, he once also had a brilliant partner. In May of ’69, Mike took the film to Rome, and Paul’s writing changed from “I know your part’ll go fine”—words of a deep friendship (“The Only Living Boy in New York”)—to “Why don’t you write me?”—words of frustration.

  I have these vocal cords. Two. They have vibrated with the love of sound since I was five and began to sing with the sense of God’s gift running through me. In the sixth grade I made a friend who added sexy guitar rhythms and vocal harmony to my singing. We were twelve at the birth of rock ’n’ roll. In our twenties we made a few special recordings. They delighted our ears and those around the world. I put my name and copyright to these lovely things.

  Why didn’t I write him?

  No doubt Paul and I enriched each other’s lives immeasurably. Where could the crazy notion come from of moving on from this wonderful duo? From hurt. From crazy motion. If Paul felt Mike had given me the means to “sock it to him,” maybe I was doing just that. Why didn’t I write him? Who are these two sensitive Jewish boys whose mothers loved them so much? Who throws the stone and who throws the return stone? Whose stone is imagined? Whose real?

  I grew up near Jewel Avenue and Main Street in the borough of Queens in New York, the middle child of three boys. Hitler was winning in ’41, but Rose and Jack brought home a child to their new brick house in Kew Gardens Hills. Halfway between Jamaica and Forest Hills high schools, the houses were semi-attached, with driveways between and garages in back, next to 10 x 30 grass yards. Punch ball was king. Twelve of us boys played in the street. “Car,” someone called to constantly punctuate our games. My big brother Jules, Ira Landess, Bobby, Dicky Schwartz, Joel Gladstone, Michael Davidson, Henry Heitner—we played running bases, red light–green light, giant steps, hide-and-seek, two-hands touch football. I was down the manhole, into the sewer, many times, retrieving the Spaldeen. We flipped baseball cards, rode our bikes (stood on the handlebars). We caught fireflies, Japanese beetles, washed above the wrists for dinner—we called it supper—played chess by day and watched the Brooklyn Dodgers at night on TV, all on our screened-in porches. Night games were new; the Dodgers played under the lights, in white satin. Duke Snider looked good. But Stan Musial was the quiet king to me.

  The picture of a boy under overcoats

  on a screened-in porch in a thunderstorm.

  He brings his chair to the edge of where

  rain invades,

  closer to the lightning and the spray.

  He is a stowaway.

  We lived in the lower middle class. My dad constructed a drop-leaf table for me, in my bedroom with the blue linoleum floor. Brother Jerome was down the hall. We drank Starlac and Alba (fake watered milk) before school; a soft-boiled egg was stirred into it. Little disgusting flecks of albumen floated at the top. Life was meant to be a little awful. So God created Hebrew school. My Jewish training was not at all about five thousand years of religious belief. Who knows what the Jews believe? Keeping us off the playground after school? It was about the boredom of reading, of sounding out those characters without knowing the meaning of the words, about hearing the words from the back of a class, with the visor of my cap pulled low over my closed eyes. AND ABOUT SINGING THEM.

  My parents, Rose and Jack, married October 2, 1936

  At nine I was singing Nat Cole’s “Too Young” in the grade school talent shows. I played Stephen Foster in a school play and sang. Paul Simon, my schoolmate, must have been watching. I
didn’t know him yet; nor did I know the effect I was having on the girls, with my singing. But I knew in the synagogue, in the high-ceilinged temple room with the resounding wood walls, that my singing those minor-key, age-old prayerful melodies was moving grown men to tears in the aisles before me. Paul says it was SRO at my bar mitzvah.

  You can’t discover fuchsia twice

  It was only in private that I learned to sing.

  History misses everything.

  Mites under microscopes wait till the lab

  lights are out, with no scientist keeping tab.

  Everything waits to be unnoticed.

  All that’s recorded was played for the show.

  Even Einstein applauded the brilliant minds

  smarter than his that nobody finds.

  The truth is within, the compensation’s manifest.

  Napoleon’s grandeur—the inner unrest.

  Dad, Mom, Jules, Jerome, Arthur, 1949

  I met Paul Simon at our graduation play, backstage in Alice in Wonderland. We were moving on to junior high. He was the White Rabbit (late for that date). I was the Cheshire Cat. He was FUN-NY. He started to crack me up, and we have been suppressing giggles all our lives. To him, I was the blond kid who sang. To me, he was the turned-on kid in the neighborhood, the son of a bass-playing bandleader, who moved to our neighborhood from Newark. Like Dean in Rebel Without a Cause he played the fringe.

  Singing is a tickle in the back of the throat, a flutter of the abdomen, the vocal cords, called vibrato. It’s sent from God through the heart, and it is un-analyzable. Some people can just do it. They listen to the radio and begin to emulate. At five or six, I was doing the inspirational songs that I heard, like “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I heard my parents singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” in the living room—in two-part harmony. That I could do it too was a delight that took me to places where echo put tails on my notes—lovely extensions of sound. I fell in love with the magnifying effect of tiled rooms, hallways, and stairwells. When no one was listening, I sought to make beautiful vowel sounds for my own ears’ sake. It was my private joy. Walking in rhythm over sidewalk cracks, I sang my tune. Then did it again in the next higher key. I was on my way to first grade.

  Write the poem out loud

  Authorize the heart

  Burn the Bridge and

  Be the work of art

  My singing was a serious gift that I respected all through my childhood, my life. I was skinny, a lefty, a Scorpio. My father called me “Whitey Skeeziks” but I identified with the “A” of Arthur. It was steeple-shaped, upward aspiring, hands in prayer. I loved my white satin collar when I sang in the temple. I was the angel singer and I felt “touched.”

  I went for the songs that had the goose bumps. “If I Loved You,” from Carousel, did it for me, Nat Cole’s wonderfully different “Nature Boy.” And I went to singers I just knew could sing: How easy was Bing Crosby’s “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” How brunette smooth was Jo Stafford’s “Fly the ocean in a silver plane.” How open-throated Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” How extraordinary “It’s Not for Me to Say” (Johnny Mathis). I saw Little Richard at the Brooklyn Paramount in ’55 stand on the piano in a purple cape. He ripped through “Long Tall Sally” and took the night. I fell for the great groove records. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” had it (Jerry Lee Lewis). So did “Don’t Ya Just Know It” (Huey “Piano” Smith). Frankie Ford’s “Won’t you let me take you on a Sea Cruise” was as good as it got for me.

  On Saturday mornings, in 1953, in Keds sneakers, white on white, I took my basketball to P.S. 165. We played half-court ball, three on three. Or else I listened to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom on the radio. I loved to chart the top thirty songs. It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun. I was commercially aware through the Hit Parade, as well as involved in the music. Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” the Crewcuts’ “Sh-Boom,” Roy Hamilton ballads, “Unchained Melody” reached me. Soon the Everly Brothers would take me for The Big Ride.

  As I entered Parsons Junior High where the tough kids were, Paul Simon became my one and only friend. We saw each other’s uniqueness. We smoked our first cigarettes. We had retreated from all other kids. And we laughed. I opened my school desk one day in 1954 and saw a note from Ira Green to a friend: “Listen to the radio tonight, I have a dedication to you.” I became aware that Alan Freed had taken this subversive music from Cleveland to New York City. He read dedications from teenage lovers before playing “Earth Angel,” “Sincerely.” When he played Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” he left the studio mic open enough to hear him pounding a stack of telephone books to the backbeat. This was no Martin Block.

  With Jules, between Bobby and Dicky Schwartz, 1955

  Maybe I was in the land of payola, of “back alley enterprise” and pill-head disc jockeying, but what I felt was that Alan Freed loved us kids to dance, romance, and fall in love, and the music would send us. It sent me for life. It was rhythm and blues. It was black. It was from New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia. It was dirty music (read “sexual”). One night Alan Freed called it “rock ’n’ roll.” Hip was born for me. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis. Bobby Freeman asked, “Do you wanna dance, squeeze and hug me all through the night?” and you knew she did.

  I was captured. So was Paul. We followed WINS radio. Paul bought a guitar. We used my father’s wire recorder, then Paul’s Webcor tape machine. Holding rehearsals in our basements, we were little perfectionists. We put sound on sound (stacking two layers of our singing). With the courage to listen and cringe about how not right it was yet, we began to record.

  We were guitar-based little rockers. Paul had the guitar. I wrote streamlined harmonies whose intervals were thirds, as I learned it from the Andrews Sisters to Don and Phil and floated it over Paul’s chugging hammering-on guitar technique. It was bluesy, it was rockabilly, it was rock ’n’ roll. We took “woo-bop-a-loo-chi-ba” from Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” We stole Buddy Holly’s country flavor (“Oh Boy”), the Everlys’ harmony (“Wake Up Little Susie”). Paul took Elvis’s everything (“Mystery Train”). As he drove the rhythm, I brought us into a vocal blend. We were the closest of chums, making out with our girls across the basement floor. We showed each other our versions of masturbation (mine used a hand). “The Girl for Me” was the first song we wrote—innocent, a pathetic “Earth Angel.” In junior high we added Stu Kutcher and Angel and Ida Pellagrini.

  Me and Paul and my bedroom wallpaper in Queens, New York, 1957

  All the while, I did a lot of homework, the shy kid’s retreat. My geometry page was a model of perfection. Anything worth doing is worth doing extraordinarily well—why not best in the world?

  My mother could prettify anything.

  If Darth Vader appeared in my

  bedroom, live at 3 a.m., and I was

  nine—my mother would say to him,

  “Dorothy, put down the mask, you’re

  no Lancelot, then come down for

  mah-jongg and crumb cake.” And the

  girls called him “Dot.”

  At twelve I was in my seventh year of being a singer when Paul and I got together. We became rehearsal freaks of fine exactitude. We did our version of doo-wop, copying Dion and the Belmonts. We wrote “A Guy Named Joe.” We fused rock ’n’ roll with country (rockabilly), the way Buddy Holly did. But it all took flight when Don and Phil Everly started having hits in 1956. We fell out over their sound. Every syllable of every word of every line had a shine, a great Kentucky inflection, charisma in the diction. From moment to moment they worked the mic with star quality. The Everlys were our models. Paul and I wrote our songs together and practiced getting a tooled, very detailed accuracy in our harmony. We came together, with mouths, a foot apart, under a dome of very fine listeni
ng, and fashioned a sonic entity of its own.

  At a sock hop, 1958

  I mustn’t tell a soul that I’m doing this puzzle—

  a thousand pieces of Vincent van Gogh.

  Looks like a sower in a flat March field,

  or an April fool at sunset.

  I am with Vincent and the gorgeous madness,

  riot of beauty gone over the top—

  salmon purple, lime and brown,

  dusty rose and gold.

  Under the South Pacific, I have seen the fish

  at the Barrier Reef, their sides beyond Matisse,

  their vibrancy more beautiful

  than anything I have seen on earth.

  Except for Vincent

  I want to leave this jigsaw and get on with my day,

  but piece by piece, I am held in awe

  by the fractured profusion,

  the jaw-dropping genius of magnificent dissonant

  color.

  So I am found in my aerie bound to the brain

  of the insane Dutchman of days gone by.

  How we suffer sensitivity.

  Stayin’ in. Cast in our spells. Talent will out.

  Beauty compels.

  Having skipped a grade, we reached our senior year of high school about to turn sixteen. We were discouraged in our attempts to be a popular duo. At the end of the summer of ’57, we met up. Paul: “Did you hear ‘Hey, Doll Baby’ over the summer?” I had. We groped to remember it and sketched out an entire song. By the time we heard the real Everly tune, we saw it was quite different from our sketch. Our “Hey, Doll Baby” was our own creation. We called it “Hey, Schoolgirl” and took it to Sanders recording studio on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan to make a demo for seven dollars. It was to be our last shot before we gave it up as an act. But a man named Sidney Prosen with his own small label, BIG, was in the waiting room. He bombarded us with enthusiasm when we came out. We knew the Brill Building. It was petrifying to go with the guitar on the E train from Queens and try to interest (what felt to me like) sleazy businessmen with our stuff. “Anybody looking for material here?” Rejections came after our fifteen seconds of sincere, heart-in-your-mouth auditions. “What else ya got?” It was so good that Paul and I had each other—so amazing we had the guts to cross into their world, but that was the world of the records we loved and bought. We read the record company addresses off the labels. One guy, Morty Kraft at 1650 Broadway, signed us and locked us away from all competition for six months. So we knew that trick. With Prosen we demanded the release of our record within ninety days. And he gave it to us. That fall at Bell Sound, on Thirty-fourth Street, we recorded “Hey, Schoolgirl.” Paul’s daddy played bass on the session. It went to #40 on the national charts, selling 150,000 copies! Suddenly we were a something in school. We had cred. We were the guys with the record on the radio. We were Tom and Jerry.