Chronicles - Bob Dylan [52]
The sun had set and the solemn night was establishing itself. I was asked to stay for dinner, but politely declined. He’d been patient with me. Suddenly on my way out, my mind sprang back to another time, the time I’d seen the Leopard Girl. Sometimes you just think of things you’ve seen, old memories that you’ve salvaged from the rubble of your life. The Leopard Girl. A carnie barker had explained about her, how her mother who was pregnant with her in North Carolina saw a leopard on a dark road at night and the animal had marked her unborn child. Then I saw the Leopard Girl and when I did, my emotions got weak.
I wondered, now, whether all of us — MacLeish, me and everyone else — had been inscribed and marked before birth, given a sticker, some secret sign. If that’s true, then none of us could change anything. We’re all running a wild race. We play the game the way it’s set up or we don’t play. If the secret sign thing is true, then it wouldn’t be fair to judge anybody…and I hoped MacLeish wouldn’t be judging me.
It was time to go. If I’d have stayed any longer at Archie’s I would have had to take up residence in his house. I asked him, just out of curiosity, why he didn’t want to write the songs himself. He said he wasn’t a songwriter and that his play needed another voice, another angle — that sometimes we become too content. Walking back over the small stream, it seemed like I was seeing the small ringlets of a river. Archie’s play was so heavy — so full of midnight murder. There was no way I could make its purpose mine, but it was great meeting him, a man who had reached the moon when most of us scarcely make it off the ground. In some ways, he taught me how to swim the Atlantic. I wanted to thank him but found it difficult. We waved at each other from the roadway and I knew I’d never see him again.
Bob Johnston, my record producer, was on the line. He was calling me from Nashville and had reached me in East Hampton. We were living in a rented house on a quiet street with majestic old elms — a Colonial house with plantation-shuttered windows. It was hidden from the street by elevated hedges. There was a large backyard and a key to a gated dune which led to the pristine Atlantic sandy beach. The house belonged to Henry Ford. East Hampton, which was originally settled by farmers and fishermen, was now a refuge for artists and writers and wealthy families. Not really a place but a “state of mind.” If your balance had been severely disrupted, this was a place where you could get it back. Some folks there traced their families back three hundred years and some houses dated back to 1700 — there’d been witch trials there in the past. Wainscott, Springs, Amagansett — green expanses — English style windmills — year round charm and a unique kind of light approximate to the woods and oceans.
I started painting landscapes there. There was plenty to do. We had five kids and often went to the beach, boated on the bay, dug for clams, spent afternoons at a lighthouse near Montauk, went to Gardiner’s Island — hunted for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure — rode bikes, go-carts and pulled wagons — went to the movies and the outdoor markets, walked around on Division Street — drove over to Springs a lot, a painter’s paradise where De Kooning had his studio. We had rented the house under my mother’s maiden name and had no trouble getting around. My face wasn’t that well known, although the name would have made people uncomfortable.
Earlier in the week we had gotten back from Princeton, New Jersey, where I had been given a Honorary Doctorate degree. It had been a weird adventure. Somehow, I had motivated David Crosby to come along. Crosby was part of a new supergroup, but I knew him from when he was in The Byrds, part of the West Coast music scene. They’d recorded a song of mine, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the record made it to the top of the charts. Crosby was a colorful and unpredictable character, wore a Mandrake the Magician cape, didn’t get along with too many people and had