There was also a downside to Dick. He was easily distracted, and she could see he sometimes lost interest when she spoke. His nervous tics included tapping piano fingerboard exercises on the table during dinner. There was his unusual relationship with the Simon family’s former governess, “Auntie Jo,” one that was hard for Andrea to figure out. He intimated that he had gotten one of his girlfriends pregnant, and that she was having his child. (An illegitimate son was indeed born in 1935.)
It took Dick Simon a year to propose to Andrea. It came on a June evening in 1934, after they had driven out to Long Beach in Dick’s snazzy Ford coupe. At the end of the day, he drove her back to her family’s flat under the Ninth Avenue El.
“He got out and opened my door, put his hands on my waist, and lifted me up onto the running board. He looked up at me—the first time he’d ever looked up to me. He said, ‘Let’s get married.’ My knees turned to water. I thought about fainting.
“I said, ‘I think we better do a little talking.’ He said, ‘We talk all the time.’ So I threw myself against him and kissed him until I really did think I would faint.”
Dick and Andrea went back to Dick’s apartment on West Eleventh Street and made love for the first time. Afterward, as Andrea was drifting off to sleep in Dick’s bed, she could hear him in the other room expertly playing a gentle piano nocturne by Claude Debussy.
“The next day, I told my supervisor he should forget about my request for a raise—I was getting eighteen dollars a week—because I no longer worked for Simon and Schuster. ‘From now on,’ I told him, ‘I just work for Simon.’”
Henry Luce’s Time magazine was cutting-edge journalism in Depression-era America. In the July 30, 1934, issue’s “Milestones” section, Time noted that former president Herbert Hoover’s secretary was engaged; that the Episcopal bishop of Montana had drowned in a creek; that a prominent yachtsman had hanged himself; that a five-time U. S. women’s golf champion had given birth in Philadelphia; and, somewhat snidely, this: “Engaged: Richard Leo Simon, 34, Manhattan publisher (Simon & Schuster: cross word puzzles; The Story of Philosophy; Trader Horn); and Andrea Heinemann, his office telephone operator.”
Dick Simon’s surviving notes and love letters to his intended bride over the next few months indicate that he was deeply in love with her, but the honeymoon didn’t go well. Dick took Andrea to Hawaii, but he told her he felt ill. He was very conflicted and guilty about his abiding love for Auntie Jo, and sent an almost daily stream of cables to his older mistress from the islands. The marriage, according to Andrea, was not consummated on the honeymoon. The unhappy couple returned to New York, confused and emotionally exhausted, but both were determined to make the marriage work. Dick Simon plunged into his business. Andrea jokingly introduced herself to people as “Mrs. Simon and Schuster,” which annoyed Max Schuster’s much older (and very proper) wife.
SUMMERTIME
One day in early 1935 the telephone rang in Dick Simon’s apartment at 245 West Eleventh Street. George Gershwin was on the line, elated, he said, because he had finished the score of what he’d been calling his new folk opera. He told Dick that he was coming over to play some of it, to see what he and Andrea thought of this new music.
George Gershwin, at thirty-seven, a year older than Dick, was the most important composer working in America then. It was a particularly fruitful era, as the other New York composers and lyricists of what has come to be called the Great American Songbook—Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers—were also at the top of their form. (Duke Ellington was uptown in Harlem, having his own epiphanies.) In an era that has been compared to Renaissance England or the Athens of Pericles, the popular song flourished with the twentieth century’s new electric technologies. Radio, the microphone, vinyl recordings, and talking pictures ensured that singing itself would be more vibrant, less operatic, jazzier, even bluesy. But George Gershwin’s music transcended American popular song and his Tin Pan Alley origins. The great orchestral works of his (and the century’s) twenties—the Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris—were among the first to infuse blues and jazz styles into the orchestral repertoire. At the same time, a new Gershwin musical comedy seemed to surface almost every season on Broadway, all must-see shows of the day: Lady Be Good, Funny Face, Show Girl, Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay! Gershwin’s Manhattan apartment was Jazz Central for all the hot songwriters. Dick Simon was accepted in this elite circle as a musician and even a peer. He idolized Gershwin, who returned the admiration by asking for Dick’s opinion of his newest music.
When George Gershwin arrived at the Simons’ apartment, he put the handwritten score for Porgy and Bess on the piano, sat down, and played most of the new songs and themes of his opera about the trials and tribulations of the colored folk on Catfish Row. Andrea and Dick listened, in awe, to the composer playing “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” “I Loves You, Porgy,” and the sublime “Summertime.” Gershwin, normally reserved, seemed elated as he played, and this was matched by the growing excitement of his tiny audience, the first (astonished) people to hear this avant-garde, inspiring opera based on American blues and spirituals.
Gershwin thanked his friends for the praise and then asked a favor. Here are the lyrics for “Summertime.” Would Andrea mind singing them, with Dick playing piano? This way, Gershwin could hear the song for the first time with fresh ears. This was daunting, but Andrea said she’d give it a try. Dick ran through the piano arrangement once, and then Andrea began to sing.
It didn’t work. “Summertime” has melodic curves that soar over operatic octaves, and Andrea wasn’t much of a sight reader. Then she went off-key, and Dick banged the keyboard. “No darling,” he scolded her, peevish. “Not like that. Like… this.” He played the passage again, but Andrea couldn’t get it right. It was the first time that Dick had ever expressed disappointment in her. She felt humiliated, but Gershwin consoled her, and told them he hadn’t realized that “Summertime” might be the most difficult thing to sing he had ever written.
Two years later, in 1937, Gershwin died of a heart attack in Hollywood, not even forty years old. Dick and Andrea were as shocked as everyone at the loss of an indispensable American musical genius. An inscribed photograph of Gershwin reposed in a silver frame was in every Simon family living room in which Carly grew up.
Andrea Simon’s first child, born in 1937, was named Joanna by her father, after his two mothers, Anna and Auntie Jo. (This name wasn’t Andrea’s first choice.) “Joey” was the first grandchild in the family, and was much doted on and fussed over until 1940, when a second daughter, Lucy, was born. World War II began for America in late 1941, and a third daughter, Carly Elizabeth Simon, was born toward its conclusion. Carly was named after Carly Wharton, the wife of one of Dick’s colleagues. During the war years, Andrea left the children with nannies while serving five days a week as a uniformed driver for senior military officers in New York. She later said that her preoccupied husband never learned of this job, and would have disapproved. She would arrive home before he did, change from uniform to house dress, and tell Dick the children had run her ragged all day.
In 1944, Dick and Max sold Simon and Schuster to the mercantile tycoon Marshall Field III, who owned the Chicago Sun-Times, with the proviso that both men stay on to run the successful company. This sale made Dick Simon a millionaire, and the family’s situation now changed with this new wealth. First Dick bought an entire apartment building, at 130 West Eleventh Street, where he installed his growing family and those of his brothers and sister, now Mrs. Seligman. Andrea’s two brothers, Peter and Fred, also had flats, and both Chebe and Auntie Jo lived there, as did other Simon friends and retainers. Then Dick bought a large sporting estate in rural Stamford, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive north. The sixty-four-acre property featured a colonnaded mansion on Newfield Avenue, conveniently near the Merritt Parkway; a large swimming pool and a tennis court; mature orchards and playing fields where the dogs c
ould run; a gentleman’s barn and cottages that Dick rented to favored S&S authors in the summertime. Andrea remade the Stamford estate into a home/ resort/ summer camp, with comfortable guest accommodation, and for the next fifteen years the Stamford house was a playground where Dick and Andrea’s children gamboled in the idyllic landscape and where Dick entertained celebrity authors such as Albert Einstein and Pearl Buck, star-quality professional athletes (Jackie Robinson; tennis hero Don Budge), famous academics (historian Louis Untermeyer was thought to be adequate in left field in family softball games), and musical friends from Broadway and the arts. A weekend invitation to the Simons’ house in Connecticut was a coveted prize in the New York of the late forties and early fifties. Andrea and a staff of cooks, nannies, housekeepers, gardeners, and chauffeurs pulled all this together, whatever was needed. “Publishing is very social,” she later recalled. “My husband, as they used to say, was a guest in his own house.” Dick’s intensely competitive card games, fueled with tobacco and gin and tonics, went late into the summer nights while the children slept upstairs. This was mostly bridge, and a variation of bridge called Fornication (also known as Oh Hell!), because the winner usually ended up screwing his opponents. Bandleader Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, was a regular at Dick’s card table during those years.
“Our family had a house in Stamford,” Carly said much later. “The house had a large barn, a play barn with a stage, and we used to put on plays, most often musical productions. We rehearsed, had my mother’s old ball gowns and mantillas for costumes, lots and lots of hair and makeup. That’s really the way we got into music, my sisters and I. We put on ballets, all kinds of plays. And my older sister [Joey] wanted to be an actress, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be that, or a ballet dancer, or an opera singer. So one night at dinner, some famous writer asked Joey, who was maybe 12, which she wanted to be—actress, dancer, opera star—and she earnestly asked back, ‘Which one has more maids?’
“This brought the house down. Someone told Joey that opera singers had the most maids. Joey began to study opera.”
Carly Simon’s earliest memories are of these two family homes, the cozy brick building, smelling of home cooking, in the West Village; and the imposing but relaxed country house in Stamford. Unlike her two older sisters, Carly was an insecure baby, who then became a crying toddler who could find consolation only in the arms of the family’s housekeeper, Allie Brennan, who would rock crying Carly to bed when the child woke up, frightened by her troubled dreams.
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Greenwich Village in the late 1940s: cobblestone streets, old redbrick buildings, leafy streets in September. The Richard Simons have the first television in the communal apartment building. The black-and-white screen is the size of a toaster. The kids watch Howdy Doody in the evenings. The adults watch Dodger games from Brooklyn and Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Carly follows her sisters to the City and Country School, a progressive private school favored by the neighborhood’s well-off bohemians and socialists. Carly is a head taller than the tallest boy, and this makes her self-conscious and nervous. In kindergarten her music teacher is Pete Seeger, who is earning a modest living teaching kids after being blacklisted from show business for his erstwhile membership in the American Communist Party. “He taught us all the old Lefty songs,” Carly recalls. “‘This Land Is Your Land.’ Woody Guthrie’s songs. ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ He played his guitar or his banjo, and we kids were just enthralled.”
It was a relief to her when her brother was born, because she was no longer the youngest in the family. Now the spotlight was directed elsewhere, yet Carly remained an awkward shadow of her two older sisters. She took ballet lessons when she was four, from Lucy’s teacher, but it didn’t work. “Actually, they kicked me out, because I stuck my tongue out to the side of my mouth, quite innocently and quirkily, while learning first, second, third, and especially fourth positions.” She entered the musical life of the family when she sang in Uncle Henry’s choir in their building at 133 West Eleventh Street. Henry Simon was the musical editor of Simon and Schuster and an authority on the history of the Metropolitan Opera. He took it upon himself to organize the Simon family into singing weekly rehearsals of classical pieces on Sunday afternoons. (The building’s Italian super was the lead tenor.) But Carly couldn’t keep a straight face during the rehearsals. She was always goofing off, cracking up Lucy and their cousins. This drove Henry Simon crazy. “This would be a good choir,” he would fume, “if it weren’t for those annoying Simon sisters.”
Sunday evenings often featured family musicals. The girls would sing show tunes, accompanied by Dick. Joanna displayed the fruit of her vocal lessons. Uncle George Simon was a drummer who had helped organize the Glen Miller Orchestra and was a prominent jazz critic. Andrea’s brother Peter Dean managed cabaret acts—Peggy Lee was an early client—and played a mean ukulele. He teamed up with his brother Fred, called Dutch, to entertain with funny songs and jazzy rhythms. The whole building on West Eleventh Street was a music box, almost every Sunday.
Carly: “Being the youngest girl, I always felt I had to perform in order to get any love at all in my family. I had two older sisters who were both very beautiful and very talented and very much the apples of my father’s eye. And, I suppose, my mother’s eye, too. I remember all this, from very early on. It is who I am today. When I was four years old and Peter had just been born, Lucy was seven and very angelically shy. Lucy was incredible even then—very attractively innocent and reticent. Hard to get. And Joey, our older sister: ten years old, very sophisticated, good makeup already—a budding actress and singer. Friends of my parents—some of them famous—would come over and ask Joey to sing.
“I remember that baby Peter had a nurse who came to the family just after he was born. Her name was Helen Gaspard and she was introduced to the rest of the family, to the three girls in order of age. Joey came first and, in a very dignified voice, greeted her with, ‘How do you do?’ And Lucy also said, ‘How do you do?’ And I thought, My God! Here are my two sisters, and they seem to have taken up the whole road. You know? These girls have got all the corners filled. What do I do to be… different from them? So I jumped up on the coffee table. I’d just been taken to see The Jolson Story at the movies. I jumped on the coffee table, spread out my arms, and said to her: ‘HI!’
“Looking back at this, I obviously felt I had to be different—in a performing sense. The pressure was somehow put on me—at the age of four—to stand out in my own way. Not just to be normal, or to be whatever I felt like being. I had to choose a role early on. That was what my family obviously wanted from me.”
It was also around the age of four when Carly began to have serious fears in the night. She would come out of her room, after being put to bed, shaking in terror at the dark. It took tremendous energy to calm her and convince her she wouldn’t die during the night. A Scots nanny hired by Andrea made the situation even worse. “This woman put stuffed animals under my bed,” Carly recalls. “She told me they would come to life and bite me if I got out of bed one more time.”
One night when Carly was eight, she had a high fever. Her mother was sitting with her, pressing a cool cloth to her forehead. In her delirium Carly told her mother she could see tiny panda bears crawling up the floral wallpaper in her bedroom. “My darling,” Andrea soothed, “you have such an imagination.” This was the first time Carly heard that word.
In 1950—the year the Weavers were hot on the radio with the Israeli folk song “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” which spent thirteen weeks at number one and was a big jam in the Simon household—Andrea Simon told her husband that she wanted to raise their children in a greener environment. This was fine with him, because he’d just received his umpteenth traffic ticket for parking in front of his building. Dick Simon quickly bought a large brick house in the Fieldston section of Riverdale, a suburban enclave in the northern Bronx. The Steinway piano and the large portrait of Brahms were moved i
nto the new house’s spacious living room. Dick added a library wing to the right of the dining room and built a state-of-the-art darkroom for his photographic hobby. Carly and her teddy bear were moved into the smallest of the six upstairs bedrooms, her bed and bureau tucked under low eaves. This is where she tried to fall asleep as her restless father poured out his pianism in the evenings, downstairs, sometimes for hours at a time.
In this era, Richard Simon was becoming somewhat abstracted from his family. There were difficulties at Simon and Schuster, where he felt shunted aside by younger editors and was no longer the boss. His emotional life was complicated by his feelings for Auntie Jo and a general estrangement from Andrea after Peter was born. (Andrea, years later: “I think he thought I was too black.”)
Ever the dutiful son-in-law, and whatever else, Dick now installed Chebe and Auntie Jo in a comfortable apartment of their own on the Upper West Side. The old girls liked to watch TV in the evenings, in their bathrobes.
When he moved his family to Riverdale, Dick Simon would arrive home in the evening and retire to his library, to unwind behind closed doors. Andrea had strict instructions that he not be disturbed until he emerged from his smoke-filled lair. He would have his supper, and then play the piano after Joanna’s vocal exercises were complete. He often gathered the children to listen as he read favorite poems aloud. Sometimes the verses, especially those of Walt Whitman, would make Dick Simon mist over.
THE ARTFUL DODGER
Carly Simon remembers her childhood with very mixed emotions, because she was only barely comfortable in her own skin. “I was the little girl in the back of the line in first grade, kind of hiding because I’m so tall.” Carly’s clothes didn’t really fit her, having been inherited from her older sisters, the hems let way out so she could wear them. She was very shy in school because she stuttered when under pressure. “I was scared of answering questions in class, of giving a speech, or reading a poem.”
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 3
