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But moments of introspection can’t make up for pages of flat recitation. Describing a movie shoot, Andrews writes: “‘That’s Life!’ was a joy to make. … To a person, the cast and crew were warm, loyal and tireless.”
Regrettably, the final page sets us up for a third volume: “I would later return to Hollywood … but for now, Broadway was beckoning once again.”
TOUCHED BY THE SUN
My Friendship With Jackie
By Carly Simon
238 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
“You can’t recapture people who are gone,” Simon says in this slim, emotional memoir of her decade-long friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “Writing about someone is like describing the changing sky. Catch those cirrus clouds as they form a chiffon scarf, before turning into a swan and, a few seconds later, a swarm of pale eels swimming in a cold blue stream.”
Simon met Onassis in the summer of 1983 on Martha’s Vineyard, where they each had a home (Jackie’s a “tasteful, sane and magnificent house on the ocean”), and they saw each other frequently over the years, sharing meals and evenings out, bonding over a love of poetry. Simon performed at Caroline Kennedy’s wedding, and Onassis would later edit some of the singer’s children’s books.
Yet in all the years they knew each other, Simon extended only one spur-of-the-moment invitation for Onassis to visit her home, cringing as she ushered the former first lady into her “old-school, paint-chipped, high-ceilinged, rent-controlled, dozen-room abode with its messy kitchen, shabby curtains and oddly paired fabrics.” Onassis rarely shared painful or private worries with Simon, not even when she became ill with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “I’d seen the headlines,” Simon recalls, “but Jackie never brought it up with me.” Perhaps Onassis was right to be cautious: She would likely have been horrified by the level of intimate detail studding these pages, albeit offered in an affectionate way.
The scene that feels most intrusive is the one in which Simon visits Onassis, unconscious and dying, in her Fifth Avenue apartment. “I heard an uproar coming from the library adjacent to her bedroom, and wondered if Jackie could hear any of it,” Simon writes. “Irish voices raised in song? Drinking songs? I picked out Teddy’s voice, then Pat Kennedy Lawford’s, a slurred tumble of words ending in laughter.” Approaching her friend, “I saw that Jackie’s face was peaceful and relaxed, as if after a long climb up a mountain.” The book ends by casting its lens not on Onassis, however, but on Simon’s bedside vigil: “I had many reveries, but my words came out simply. … I loved her. And I told her that. Quietly.”
