What Is It All But Luminous Page 2

  Someday I will write the “show-off book.” I’ll talk about doing “Hey, Schoolgirl” with Paul on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving 1957. Jerry Lee Lewis was the other guest. I see those giant stacks of fan mail lining the studio hallways. They were sent to the dancing kids, the heartthrobs. I had my own crush, watching TV after school. Now I was at the urinal, just before airtime, peeing next to one of the young stars. And then, that year, we were part of a stage revue at the Hartford State Theater, that featured LaVern Baker singing “Jim Dandy” (to the rescue). Ten acts—we were the only whites. High school cred.

  Then in 1958 comes Betrayal. Oh so dramatic, there’s hardly a play without. Is it all perception? Is it a name for unfulfilled expectation? Is it the first stone thrown or that which is perceived as such? It is a surprise blow to the gut.

  Boy’s love is a beautiful thing. I loved my turned-on friend. One day, after “Hey, Schoolgirl,” there was a phone call informing me that Tom and Jerry was just one of the hats Paul wore as a singer. Surprise. He was also True Taylor. He sounded like Elvis. He was releasing a record behind my back. Or so it felt. Perception? He’s base, I concluded in an eighth of a second, and the friendship was shattered for life. All else is finding forgiveness. Who have I hurt while in my stride?

  But I never forget and I never really forgive—just collect the data and speckle the picture. Take the blows. Call it the Inequality of Love. Eight years later we were world-famous. You will love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.

  Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

  Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth:

  For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our Kings…

  —Shakespeare (Henry V, Prologue)

  Before there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, there was Simon and Garfunkel—an extraordinary, a singular love affair. There is no gay component in the two of us that I am aware of, but the way these two lives wrapped around each other is poetically stunning. From age eleven to today, a span of sixty-four years, Art and Paul have been at work to entertain, win the respect of, and dazzle one another. It worked so well that the whole world pulled up chairs to watch and listen.

  Tom and Jerry, high school seniors

  I can skip the smell of magnolia in the Hollywood Hills when I first came to town. But the wild aural excitement with Paul and Roy Halee, our studio engineer and coproducer, in the recording studio at Sunset and Gower stays in the story. Seven p.m. sessions would catch fire at 11. If they didn’t wind down at 5 a.m., they did by 8. They were great nights. You sang a high harmony line, suspended above “All come to look for America,” and then you drove the rent-a-car home from the studio, down over Santa Monica Boulevard with the rising sun behind the palms. Exceptional music glowed in your heart—I heard Simon and Garfunkel first. Other nights were about foreplay. Same hours. There was no AIDS. Paul won the writer’s royalties. I got the girls. Echo made the sound wet. Glory found its way to me. Fabulous foxes, slim-hipped, B-cup, little Natalie Woods. The age of the ’60s was rich America syrup, Panavision, color, a world turned on. Fellini and Michigan seem like a dream to me now, but I was aware and pleased to play my part.

  I saw George dance with his feet in place. It’s what I do in the studio control room, standing behind the engineer’s board. I feel the groove and I dance inside. George and I were in the wings at someone else’s show. I was in the presence of a Beatle.

  Paul and Carrie Fisher, Penny Marshall, and I were in McCartney’s office. Soho Square, around ’84. “My little one looks up when Linda cradles him,” he says, “and sings ‘Bright Eyes’ to her tits.”

  “There’s Ringo,” I said to myself, never having met him before. We were both checking into the St. James’s Club. He invited me up to his room.

  John and Yoko, Bowie and Coco, Laurie and I returned to the Dakota after a show. Did we all win Grammys that night? John had the gift of connecting. He did it with the world, and that night with me. Sitting on the end of his bed, he called me in.

  One night in London, at a noisy party, in a crowded club, George appeared behind my ear. Simon and Garfunkel had just done an outdoor concert in Wembley. I guess he had seen our show. Sweetly, intimately, he spoke of the vibe he perceived: “Your Paul is to you exactly as my Paul is to me.” We play the game of “larger than life” in our business. We think it’s for the fans, but even I can’t get past—this disclosure from George Harrison.

  To bridge the social gap in Ringo’s room, the choice, in those days, was reefer or booze. Ringo was a tippler then—so endearing, so much wanting to create a palship. Aren’t we in each other’s magic circle of people who most understand our lives—the fame trip, the music, the money, the road, the partner’s ego, the chicks, the microphone, the thrill? We danced a tipsy version of the old soft shoe, with invisible top hat and cane.

  “So this is Europe,” McCartney said. Wry and sly, he was poking Paul and me to get a laugh. There in his office, I posed a question to the great Beatle: “Was it always you playing keyboard on all the tunes?” “Yep,” he said. I had heard that the harpsichord interlude of “In My Life” was played by George Martin, their record producer. So I pressed him with: “On all the tunes?”

  Now John goes to work on me. Sitting next to him in his bedroom, he asks me: “Art, you just worked with Simon [“My Little Town”]. I’m being called—will I record with McCartney on his Allen Toussaint project? How was it with you two after some years apart? What should I do?” I’m to be John Lennon’s adviser. Now we have social media; here you have social genius.

  A highly gifted competitor, perhaps just past his prime, was he irked when he crossed his office to the piano? Certainly goaded, this bantam cock among his barnyard peers, Paul pounded out a white-hot “Lady Madonna” in a minute and two. He was fiercely brilliant. Never in my life have I heard the likes of that performance. Quietly he left the keyboard. “It was always me.”

  George took me up to the turret atop the castle he owned in Henley. We looked out on a four-story-high papier-mâché Alp in the yard. The space in the turret was tight. George and I were very close. Disturbing? Thrilling?

  A stranger removes your shoe and sock. She works her thumbs between your third and fourth toes. You open up. You bring your head to her bosom. Her cleavage of milk and honey surrounds your face. She opens up. It is mutual transcendence.

  I say to John: “Return to the harmony. If you loved making the sound with him, forget personality, forget all history, go for the jelly roll.”

  Grammy night, 1975. (Left to right) David Bowie, Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Roberta Flack

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer. At the end of a four-year period of glory and gloriously hard studio work, we were tired of each other. The riffs’d been run. “Tom, get your plane right on time” has poetic heart as a song line, but the heart of the friendship was thin. We made our albums with pauses of several months, while Paul wrote the next bunch. In a pause in the winter of 1968–1969, I stepped up to career opportunity, requiring Paul’s accommodation. I wasn’t interested in kicking over S&G, they were extraordinary in their musical fusion, and had more albums in them. I sought a rest from him in 1970 and he couldn’t abide the use I made of it—acting.

  Secrets weary of their tyranny:

  Tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  SINGING IS TAKING FLIGHT. TO VIBRATE THE VOCAL CORDS, ON MIC, WITH VOLUME, AND COMMIT TO SUDDENLY “BEING THERE” IN THAT FIRST ONE-HUNDREDTH OF A SECOND OF A SYLLABLE SUNG (LIKE THE HIGH “A” AT THE END OF “AND I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU”) IS A LEAP OF PUBLIC COURAGE—A DIVE FROM THE LEDGE.

  (Left to right) Paul and Artie with Roy Halee, recording engineer and co-producer, in the control room of Columbia’s New York studio, c. 1968

  Authorship may be trumpeted. It may be declared. It may be declined.

  Suddenly in my iPod, in the Southwark Stati
on underground,

  is Enrico Caruso. He sings an aria from The Pearl Fishers.

  Recorded at the dawn of vinyl records, it reached me in our

  living room in 1946. Heartbreaking, glorious, tenor vocal

  performance infected me when I was five.

  What was it doing around the house? Who authored the gift?

  It wasn’t my mother who brought the Victrola into our home.

  Whose was the heart that cried with Caruso and set me on a

  lifelong course? I pretend I didn’t know you very well, dear

  Father, yet twenty-five years after your passing, here in the

  London tube, how close you are to me. Like the double helix

  of DNA, how we entwine. It was you who showed me the dive

  from the ledge, the breast of the bird, the vaulting line.

  YOUR beautiful musical soul is the author of mine.

  I had an awful hard time with Paul’s dad. He made me feel misbegotten. Maybe we were unhip suburbanites to him. (He played on Arthur Godfrey’s show.) He seemed proud to inform me of his discovery: “Not everybody likes everybody, and I just don’t like you.” I was twelve. Paul’s mother had the normal heart: love came across. She was our grade school teacher and, like my mother, wonderfully bright.

  The end of S&G slipped in on me. There never was an ending. Just “Later…” I started my solo recording career with Angel Clare, recorded with Roy Halee in San Francisco. At the end of the next album, Breakaway, in ’75, I fell deeply, completely for Laurie Bird. Are we always reactive, counteracting? Do we forget to return to our own equilibrium, our moral compass first? Did the loss of boyhood’s friendship and of the charmed circle I shared with Paul bring me to the beautiful arms of Laurie? Why was her remoteness good enough?

  We lived in L.A., at the Bel-Air Hotel, and in Malibu. I discovered I liked to party. I made Carnal Knowledge for Mike Nichols and played alongside Jack Nicholson, to creditable reviews. Four successful albums in the ’70s, including Watermark (’77), established me as a solo. At the end of the decade, I was in the makeup chair, shooting Bad Timing in Vienna and London for Nic Roeg, while my #1 record “Bright Eyes” was on the radio. I was soon to come home to the New York City penthouse that we shared to find Laurie had taken her life.

  Here a silent pause to honor private pain.

  Is it only in my perspective that the ’60s were America’s age of bust-out dynamism? Jack used to say that the failure to take the idealism—the visionary excitement of the decade—and put it into a legislative agenda turned our faith into disenchantment. Indeed, I perceived that the “money god” replaced all other values at the turn of the decade. The Beatles were over in 1970, Vietnam held us in its hopeless grip. Nixon became our leader, and young Americans, like Simon and Garfunkel, knew that the nation belonged to someone else.

  HOPES AND DREAMS HAVE SPLIT!

  Hope’s with Teicher now that Ferrante’s

  seeing whey of Curds and Whey.

  Simon’s got chondroitin,

  Garfunkel glucosamine—

  even chlorine and sodium

  after a millennium

  have called a halt to salt.

  My life, so far, is a two-act play. Bridge Over Troubled Water ended Act I. I arrived at a summit. The introversion of my early years tempered my nature. I was an angel singer, a homework nut; an underground man—lover of all beautiful asses, beautiful faces, beautiful bodies, boys and girls. I should have been a sculptor. So I loved James Dean and I produced a beautiful sound to express my private joy.

  My brother Jules, going out with his friends, would pass me in the kitchen. I was the stay-at-home, copying the charts, in my pajamas. Al Hibbler sang “Unchained Melody,” and Roy Hamilton sang the big goose-bump ballads. There was no such thing as pizza yet. English muffins were new. It was 1954.

  With Jack Nicholson, shooting Carnal Knowledge, 1971

  Then came “A Rose and a Baby Ruth.” I could sing “Flip, Flop and Fly” (Joe Turner) in school onstage with my new friend, Paul Simon. We had a sound so we kept practicing in my basement in Kew Gardens Hills. Upstairs at night in my bedroom, I worked at good school grades (how nerdy!) and entered Columbia College in ’58. I Vespa’d across Europe in ’62. I hitchhiked across America in ’63, then picked up on my estranged friend, Paul, in the year of Freewheelin’. Dean became Dylan. We were in. The next is history. It’s not this book.

  What is this book? It is Act II: What follows the pinnacle? Sex on the road, just for the thrills, reading books to calm it down, the Road to walk it off, Kathryn Cermak to ease my soul, and children to end the aloneness. Singing, recording, film acting, stage entertaining, writing (hello, dear Reader), always singing, so there’ll be a work life. Years roll by this way. It is my response to grand good fortune.

  And this is what you think about:

  MAJOR REVELATIONS

  A) OUR ACTIONS ARE DRIVEN BY WE KNOW NOT WHAT

  B) AMBITION IS MIDDLE-CLASS

  C) GILLETTE COULD MAKE A BLADE THAT WOULD LAST A LIFETIME IF THEY WANTED TO

  D) WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR FEELINGS

  E) LIFE EATS LIFE

  F) IT’S ALL WHERE YOU OBSERVE IT FROM (RELATIVITY)

  G) IF ALL THINGS ARE CYCLES (NIGHT FOLLOWS DAY, SO DAY FOLLOWS NIGHT), THEN DEATH FOLLOWS LIFE, AND…

  H) ALL IS VANITY.

  I’ll go back to my first days in Europe, to the House of the Moroccan Students fifth arrondissement early August 1963. Paris. Feverish in bed. Vespa waiting in the street cast off my soggy bedsheets enough elixir learn the bike cobblestones drive out of town through the Bois de Boulogne. Break there shirt change fever passes the woods are cool. Ribbon all lyrical two-lane road to Le Mans southwest into the wheat fields the open field with wheat-smelling air everywhere no helmet (first time on a bike). Cut loose from the city from home from pedestrian ways compelling skies perfect clouds on Monet blue, bike at thirty-two mph, swiftest snail. Rain at four of course wet shoes wet pants evaporation sundown beautiful beautiful France.

  Near dark I stopped at a tavern to eat. What was it in my demeanor that made the owner call out to me in the night of naïveté in a half of a century’s past, in the personal pronoun: tu as perdu ton écharpe.

  By the 1980s, I had sung solo on records that did well. I sustained the very painful loss of a beautiful girl. I did the Concert in Central Park with Paul in ’81, then toured the world. I spent wonderful times with Penny. Then in 1983, released from touring in concert, on a BMW motorcycle, in the mountain passes of Switzerland, I began to write.

  I’m in a turret of an old hotel in Scarborough. I’ve come to record The Animals’ Christmas with the London Symphony Orchestra. Jimmy Webb will play piano on the session. It’s his cantata and these are his notes on the musical charts taped around the cylindrical wall of this ten-foot-diameter Renaissance tower. Brass, percussion, woodwinds, strings, a window view out on the end of the strand. It’s neap tide. I’m Noah. Christmastime is here. The Fair is in the past.

  Since Laurie died I live in my own rarefied air. I put the “e” in “artist” every day. Monteverdi, Proust, Kubrick, I sit reclusive in the park, at the sailboat pond, near Hans Christian Andersen, and write.

  I let the notebook run—December 29, 1983. Les Arcs, ski village, France. Ineluctable modality…a rower’s heart, a simple water-drinking bard. [J] is Stephen Dedalus and I am Leo Bloom, his twenty-two: red and yellow ready: my forty-two and rather “at sea.” [J] has taken over, I cater to his day. The American European. A writer’s holiday. Having read six hundred pages of Ulysses, the heroes have begun to intertwine. Tomorrow we leave on the Grande Vitesse. He is the young marquis, he’s early O’Toole, rich in frailty, he is beautiful. He tells me he’ll pull me back in the world. I think of James Fox in The Servant:

  So he asks me to clean his syringe for him

  while the medicine goes to his head;

  “Do you still have the Blistex we came with?

  Put it on
me,” he said.