Touched by the Sun by Carly Simon

Author:Carly Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

How could I say something self-effacing about a really nice party? Someone quickly explain this to me!

I’m bloated with too much social interaction and Vineyard August-ness, and just so tired, and my diary entry trails off, depleted.

Tops in the ongoing summertime social excitement was the party Jim and I went to at the renowned publisher Katharine Graham’s house to welcome President and First Lady Bill and Hillary Clinton on their first visit to the Vineyard. I remember giving Jackie a moment-by-moment account of the party, and the Clintons’ visit to my house the very next day. The two of us sat in my circle garden amid the late summer marigolds and sunflowers, drinking white wine spritzers and eating cucumber sandwiches. It was so humid and the ice was melting so fast in our glasses that it made a crinkly, collapsing sound that, to my mind at least, ice has no business making.

The morning of the party, Jackie had gone sailing with the Clintons on the Relamar, the yacht belonging to her close companion, the businessman and diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, though she declined the party itself, preferring to skip out on the official welcome.

“You would have laughed and laughed, and then it would have been all over,” I said, referring to the dinner at Kay’s.

“Who was sitting where?” Jackie asked.

I told Jackie that for whatever reason, I was placed at the “A” table, Kay’s table. She sat at the head like a much grimmer, more knuckle-rapping version of Miss Jean Brodie. There were three other large round tables in the formal dining room, along with place cards like exam grades. (Jackie, I knew, was also a place-card user, whereas I had never in my life given that kind of dinner party.)

I couldn’t really remember the cocktail portion of the night, I told her, “but I do remember every detail of the dinner, since it was so traumatic.” Jackie’s face was eager and intense, waiting to be unfurled by the gossip my expression seemed to promise. She was obviously relieved not to have been there. “Who was sitting where?” she repeated, ready to gain a mental picture of the tableau.

“Kay was at the head table. President Clinton was sitting on her right,” I went on, “with [former secretary of state] Henry Kissinger on her left. On the other side of Clinton was [former Vogue editor] Louise Grunwald, then [former attorney general] Nicholas Katzenbach, then Lally Weymouth, Kay’s daughter, followed by Lawrence Eagleburger [yet another former secretary of state], then me.

“Why do I think [former secretary of defense] Robert McNamara was there? Would he have been there?” I asked Jackie.

“Well, he’s a great friend of Kay’s.”

“Yes—in fact, Kay asked me to sing to him last summer over the phone. She wanted me to take him away from his wife, in fact … so she could marry him!”

“Oh, Carly, you didn’t follow through, did you?”

Chuckling, I couldn’t resist: “Jackie, I’m surprised you didn’t know that I’ve been pimping for Kay for years.”

Kay had recently revealed to me that her first choice in a husband was Warren Buffett.

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