Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie by Carly Simon

Author:Carly Simon [Carly Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374277727
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

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THE DAY AFTER the memorable night at Kay’s, the First Family came to my house for lunch. It was planned at the very last minute, and the amount of preparation was slim. The rules were just us, meaning my immediate family: Jim, Sally, and Ben. No one else.

What I remember most vividly was the presence on my property of a team of Secret Service men and women. Some were nestling in trees with instruments to survey the grounds, and others ventured inside the house to check all the closets and other places where they just might stumble across enemy soldiers still in hiding from the Korean War.

There were also “tasters”—the intrepid personnel tasked with sampling the soup and the quiche, the carrots and the corn, the breads and the pies, before they touched the lips of the First Family. It was one of the tasters, in fact, who told me the chicken soup I’d made just that morning tasted “funny.” Well, yes, because I’d been expecting the Clintons for lunch, but their arrival kept getting delayed by round after round of golf, so by 5 p.m., when the taster brought the spoon to his mouth, the soup was contaminated by overcooking and 98 percent humidity, and yes, it did taste “funny,” which was a polite way of saying “inedible.” Assuring the taster that I was not involved in a sinister plot, that it was simply a matter of timing, and of me, the cook, not paying sufficient attention, down the kitchen disposal it went. I quickly phoned a local friend, a professional chef, who said she could put together a quiche and a salad with goat cheese within the hour.

During this whole time, as I was getting more and more concerned as to where the Clintons could possibly be, I kept in constant phone contact with Jackie, who kindly put up with my hair-pulling and growing tension, saying finally, as only Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could or would, “Oh, Carly, for Christ’s sake, it’s just another president!”

The Clintons and their daughter, Chelsea (then eleven years old), arrived at around 6 p.m., which coincided with seventeen-year-old Sally and fourteen-year-old Ben’s arrival off the plane from China, where they’d vacationed with James. My caretakers, Jimmy LeRoux and his wife, Wendy, were there to help me coordinate everyone’s comings and goings. They also treated one of the tree-spy Secret Service men for a nasty wasp sting he’d gotten as he scrambled down out of a nearby white birch. The Clintons, Jim, Sally, Ben, and I all sat at my small round dining room table. Bill and Hillary were both dressed in short-sleeve sport shirts, and Hillary wore plaid Bermuda shorts, while Chelsea flatteringly imitated the way Sally had her hair up in a knot, crisscrossed with a chopstick to hold it in place. Bill and Hillary took turns describing the day they first saw each other in the Yale Law School library. The story still seemed thrilling to them, despite how many times they must have told it.

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