ME AND JACKIE O:

Carly Simon’s special friendship with Jackie Onassis

On paper, they’d seem unlikely friends. But when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis met free-spirited singer songwriter Carly Simon, a rare and wonderful friendship was born. In a new book, Touched by the Sun, Carly reveals the intimate time she spent with Jackie in the decade before her death in 1994 and the deep kinship they formed.

It was the summer of 1983 when Carly Simon, by then famous for such hits as Nobody Does it Better, You’re So Vain and You Belong to Me, attended a dinner at the Ocean Club in California’s affluent summer playground, Martha’s Vineyard. Also there that evening was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was accompanying her son, John Kennedy Jr, himself a sometime Martha’s Vineyard resident and acquaintance of Carly’s, and he introduced the two women briefly. Conversation haltingly began and soon they were bumping into each other more frequently – with an invitation to Carly’s home on the island issued not long after.

This would prove the birth of an incredible friendship which would see them share long lunches, dinner dates, trips to the movies and theatre as well as insights on love, life and the most intimate of secrets. Now, more than 35 years since that first chance meeting, Carly has shared her memories of the woman she came to love and cherish in a new book, Touched by the Sun. Following is an edited extract Carly granted exclusively to The Australian Women’s Weekly.

JACKIE AND I USUALLY met up at the movies in the same way. When she arrived before me, I would find her inside the movie theatre by going to the ladies’ room, where she would be waiting in one of the stalls. That afternoon, at the 4pm showing of Bugsy, was no different. Her Gucci loafers were poking out from beneath a stall. I hummed a bar of a familiar song, in this case How High the Moon, which was the signal for all clear.

Jackie emerged. “I almost thought the woman who came in a minute ago was you, and I… it wouldn’t have been the worst thing, but… well, shall we go in? Oh, Carly, I see you got popcorn… what fun!”

We took an elevator and arrived at theatre number two, finding nothing to fly in the face of a happy

Thursday afternoon spent seeing Bugsy with your girlfriend. The theatre was mostly empty, with maybe 20 other people distributed like arbitrary commas in the semi-darkness. We took off our coats and put them on the seat next to us.

There hung between us a palpable silence, and for some reason I couldn’t allow it. Maybe it was only three seconds, or not even two, but the silence whipped at me like some sudden freak storm. I turned to her, this friend, this woman whose burden it was to be poised, and whose responsibility it was to set an example for the rest of us.

“So,” I said, “have you seen JFK? I mean the movie. I mean the Oliver Stone movie. I mean the one that’s just out now?”

“Oh no, Carly, no. No, no.” Jackie reacted as if she had been attacked. “It’s so awful. No.”

I continued my crash into the reef of self-destruction. “I didn’t even mean to say that,” I said. “I just…” “No, Carly, NO.” She slumped backward into her seat. That was the end of the conversation about anything and everything