More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon

by Stephen Davis

  She didn’t know what to do. She told Lucy, who wanted to pretend that they didn’t know what was going on. But strong-willed Joey was furious at her mother, and felt ashamed for her father. Some time went by. The girls didn’t tell Carly, who was in her own world, or Peter, who was too young.

  Eventually Joanna confronted her mother, and was astonished when Andrea didn’t deny anything. Instead she explained that she’d fallen deeply in love with this man who was twenty-four years younger than she. Joanna recalled, “She told me, ‘Your father doesn’t give me the support I need with Peter.’ That was her justification.” Joey insisted that Ronnie be let go, but Andrea refused. “She claimed that Ronnie’s presence was necessary so that Peter would not turn out to be homosexual. She said that if Ronnie left, she would go to pieces, and the whole family would fall apart.”

  Ronnie Klinzing stayed in the picture, to the astonishment of the older girls. “It ruined our lives,” Joanna said, bluntly, matter-of-factly, fifty years later. “I wondered about my father. Did he know? Of course he had to.” Dick Simon had his own relationship with Auntie Jo. Some thought he must have colluded with his wife’s passionate affair with the younger man. “At the time, my guess was that my father was unable to do anything about Ronnie,” Joey says. “The whole thing was so painful for me; it was something I didn’t want to admit. Later, Lucy and I have both wished we had gotten together as a family and started life anew—without our mother.”

  For a year or two in the mid-fifties, the Simon family maintained its outward composure. They dressed for supper, and one wasn’t allowed to say “shut up” at the table. Joanna continued her voice lessons and sat in the family box at the Metropolitan Opera. Lucy rode the subway to the famous Manny’s music store on Forty-eighth Street and bought a Martin guitar. She sat on her bed and practiced every night, with worshipful Carly watching every move. The girls still sang along with the radio as they washed and put away the dishes after supper. Allie Brennan’s lemon meringue pie remained a perennial family favorite. Dick Simon played the piano and still read poetry to the children some evenings. During this period, he discovered and published Sloan Wilson’s quintessential adman novel, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, which was a huge success for S&S and became a Hollywood movie starring Gregory Peck.

  But this façade of success belied the tension and hurt that hung over the family. It got worse when Ronnie was around, and he was around a lot. Andrea’s attention shifted from her needy family to her young lover. They spent a lot of time away from the house with Peter. Carly was left to herself, the odd child out. This emotional withdrawal affected her, and she began to display some alarming symptoms: night terrors, agoraphobia, a worsening stammer, and a painful constriction in her throat that their baffled family doctor described as a “worry lump.” Carly hated Ronnie, and she wasn’t sure why. She wondered if she hated her mother, too.

  “Our family used music to get through this and other rough periods,” Peter Simon remembers. “The musicales and jam sessions continued on the weekends and holidays. Our fabulous uncle Peter Dean gave Carly and me as much attention as he could, but it was never enough. I was too young to know what was going on, but I know Carly really suffered: first from our father’s rejection and preference for Lucy, and second from our mother’s emotional abandonment.”

  Carly finally learned about Andrea and Ronnie in 1955, when Ronnie was drafted into the U. S. Army and sent to Europe. That summer, Andrea sailed to France to be near him, telling her family that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and needed to get away awhile. Auntie Jo was brought in to look after the family, much to the consternation of Carly and Peter, as Auntie Jo was somewhat strict. Once, she took a hairbrush to Peter’s backside, something he never forgot.

  While his wife was away, Dick Simon suffered a massive heart attack, one that almost killed him.

  Andrea didn’t come home right away, remaining in Europe while her husband recovered. Her sisters told Carly why. Carly was shocked.

  “They said she was madly in love with him,” she recalls. “They talked about my father and Auntie Jo, that this was our mother’s revenge. I was a child in denial. Even though I saw it in front of me, I couldn’t bear to believe it’s true…. Looking back, I see now that we lived in an atmosphere of erotica. The sexual haze was so thick you could cut it. The whole thing gave me a very good sense of smell, and a sensitivity to peoples’ secrets.”

  For the next fifty-plus years, the Simon sisters (and their various psychotherapists) referred to all this as “the Ronnie material.”

  When Andrea Simon finally returned home, she found the family in a terrible state. Joey, eighteen, was openly contemptuous. Lucy, fifteen, was cool to her. Carly’s stammer had reached the point where she could hardly speak. So Andrea plunged back in. When Carly stumbled over a word, Andrea encouraged her to sing it instead, which sometimes helped. The “worry lump” made it hard to swallow, and Carly had lost weight. She had become obsessed with her sexuality and had made up pet names for her female parts. She loved keeping (and not keeping) secrets, and told anyone who asked that she wanted to be a spy when she grew up, and indeed eavesdropped on Joey and her dates, crawling behind and under the living room furniture to see what Joey was up to. Carly often tried to peek at Lucy while she was dressing to see her developing bust, which Lucy was shy about revealing. (“I was completely in awe of my sister’s breasts,” Carly said later.)

  One morning, Carly freaked out at the breakfast table. She was eating Cheerios and telling her mother about the air-raid drills at school and her fears of airplanes and bombs. Then she had a panic attack. “I ran upstairs and started whirling around the bathroom. I wanted my mother to call the ambulance because I thought I was going to die. My mother somehow subdued me and got me into bed. I think I must have cried it out.”

  Andrea took Carly to the pediatrician, and Carly overheard her mother telling him, “Carly is often hysterical”; she later looked up the word in the dictionary. The doctor wanted Carly to be evaluated by a psychologist, and this led Andrea to send Carly to twice-weekly sessions with New York psychiatrist Edith Entenmann. By then, Carly was in the sixth grade at Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Carly was excused early from class to go to the doctor. She felt shame at this, and indeed was somewhat stigmatized. Teachers told her fellow pupils that Carly was “complicated.”

  “Ronnie,” Carly told her therapist, “is the most horrible person in the world.” When she couldn’t think of anything to say, she made up dream stories to tell. The worry lump came back. She would start to gag before leaving for school in the morning, terrified that the teachers would call on her to speak. Andrea wanted desperately to help Carly, but then she would completely withdraw when Carly complained about Ronnie.

  “My mother was best in her role as a mother when you really needed her. She wanted desperately to be needed.” Carly would call from school crying because she was unable to recite a poem or give a report. “My mother would tell me, ‘Carly, you are an artistic soul, and artistic people have nervous problems. We can conquer this.’ It was a terrible situation. I needed her the most, but he took up her time and most of her emotional energy.”

  Dick Simon was a different man after his heart attack. He seemed frail, and barely played the piano. The evening readings of Whitman, Tennyson, and Shakespeare’s sonnets became infrequent. Carly was terrified her father was going to die. A friend told her to make a wish and knock on wood, so she started praying to God and knocking on wood five hundred times, every night. This went on a long time—“my private magic.”

  Carly: “I remember one night, I was really tired, and I went to sleep after only 132 knocks. He didn’t die then, so it reduced itself to 200 knocks, every night, for years.”

  ALL SHOOK UP

  In 1956, Carly started the seventh grade and, helped by her mother and others, including a speech therapist, began to learn to speak. “Up until then,” Carly told an interview
er, “I had a very serious stutter from about the age of six. I was in agony in school because I knew the answers to the questions they asked, but I couldn’t say anything because I was scared. My whole face would become distorted as I tried to get the words out. Sometimes kids laughed, and imitated me. It was a harrowing experience.

  “I would be at the dining room table with my family. I’d want to say, ‘Please pass me the water,’ but I wouldn’t be able to. So what happened next is that my mother told me, or taught me, to speak in a rhythm. If I stammered, she’d say, ‘Just slap your thigh, like Uncle Pete—you know, scat-sing—and add the please-please-pass-the-water, baby, please-pass-the-water-right-now, yeah—please-pass-the-water-right-now!’”

  This worked.

  “So she taught me to add a little syncopation to it, something maybe about this from our genetic make-up, and so I learned to speak with a very bizarre sense of rhythm that my teachers could never quite figure out. But, at least, I started to be able to function in school like a normal person.”

  Carly got her period for the first time on a midsummer June evening when she was thirteen. In celebration, Andrea, ever the romantic, took Carly and her cousin Jeanie up to the roof of the Stamford house and opened a bottle of champagne. They clinked their glasses and drank a toast to the moon, the stars, and Carly Simon’s brand-new womanhood.

  Carly still didn’t feel right. She struggled with a persistent case of acne that lasted into her early twenties. The way people reacted to her made her think she was ugly. “People would come to the house and say, ‘Oh Lucy! You’ve gotten so beautiful.’ And, ‘Joey—you look so elegant.’ And then they’d turned to me and say, ‘Hi Carly.’ I took that to mean I wasn’t even in the ballgame.”

  Her family kept trying to reassure Carly. They told her she was very pretty, and that her father loved her very much. She still had an awful feeling about herself. This was validated for her, years later, when novelist Sloan Wilson published a memoir that described the Simon family as very glamorous—except for ugly duckling Carly (who had since become a huge star). “There it was—the horrible truth—finally confirmed,” she said sadly. She added that there’s still a carry-over from those days. “Even now,” she said recently, “I don’t want people to concentrate on my looks, because I don’t think they’ll like what they see.”

  In the summer of 1956, Dick Simon was in Florida recuperating from his heart attack. Andrea took the family for a holiday on Martha’s Vineyard, the old whaling island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Dick and Andrea had been renting old farmhouses and beach cottages on the Vineyard since the forties, usually in the westerly “up-island” town of Chilmark. Electricity was primitive and sporadic back then, and ice blocks were delivered to the houses twice a week so the fish and produce wouldn’t spoil.

  In those days some of the Vineyard’s more remote beaches (all privately owned) allowed nude bathing. Dick Simon’s photo archive from their early days on the Vineyard has entire rolls of his gorgeous young wife splashing naked in the waves off empty beaches such as Windy Gates, Quansoo, and Zack’s Cliffs.

  The island community then consisted of farmers and fishermen, and a summer colony of theater people (Katharine Cornell), writers (Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Max Eastman), movie stars (James Cagney), photographers (Alfred Eisenstadt), and artists. There was a sizable contingent from the publishing world, and the families that owned The New York Times and The Washington Post had private estates. Up-island, the legendary Missouri painter Thomas Hart Benton presided over a folkloric musical scene that included talented locals and successful professionals such as Burl Ives, who all got together for Saturday hootenannies at the Chilmark Community Center.

  Another large family that summered in Chilmark in those years was that of Dr. Isaac Taylor, who taught medicine in North Carolina. Like the Simon family, the Taylors were very musical, and their five children were likewise exposed to the Vineyard’s music scene in that fertile period.

  That summer on the Vineyard, teenage Lucy Simon was taught a few guitar chords by Davey Gude, a future sixties jug band member. When the family returned home later on, Lucy started putting some of the music she’d learned on the Vineyard to good use.

  Autumn 1956. The Simon family is back in Riverdale after the long summer. Joey has gone off to college at exclusive Sarah Lawrence, a few miles north, in Bronxville. The family watches Elvis Presley—all shook up—gyrate on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show. Rock-and-roll radio beams in with Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino over WINS, 1010 on the dial. The Simons like Harry Belafonte’s breakthrough album Calypso, the first LP to sell a million copies, a collection of old Jamaican mento songs energized by a trained actor who’d studied with Marlon Brando at the famous Actors Studio. Belafonte’s mannered, sold-out concerts coincided with the burgeoning civil rights movement, empowering a new generation of black performers—Josh White, Odetta, Leon Bibb—who dedicated themselves to the changes that had to come for still-segregated America’s salvation from the legacy of slavery.

  Lucy Simon, meanwhile, had a poetry assignment at the Fieldston School. At the age of sixteen, she had plenty of her own issues. Some were similar to her sister Carly’s. “I had some problems putting things together at school,” she says. “Today it might be called dyslexia. It was very hard for me to memorize anything, especially poetry, which was terrible for me, because my father and I were close and he loved to hear poems recited, especially in the evening. There was this assignment when I had to memorize and recite a poem of my choosing, and I chose Eugene Field’s nursery rhyme, ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.’ It was a favorite of my father’s, but I had an impossible time getting it right. It might have been my mother who suggested that I sing it instead. So I put the rhymes to a melody with the guitar chords I knew, and turned it into a song. I wrote out the melody, sitting on my bed, and I distinctly remember Carly sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, watching me intently as I sang the poem for the first time.

  “So now I had this song, and instead of reciting it like the others, I got up in front of the class with my guitar and sang it. The other kids liked it and clapped, and the teacher gave me a good grade. So that’s really where the Simon Sisters started out.”

  September 1956. Dick Simon rejoined his family at home in Riverdale. The Dodgers won the National League Pennant, and were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series. Publishing tycoon Marshall Field III died, and Simon and Schuster was bought back from Field’s estate by Max Schuster and other partners in a deal that did not include Dick Simon. Historians of the American publishing industry who have scrutinized this dirty deal guess that S&S executives excluded the cofounder of the firm because he was profoundly demoralized by both ill health and a much-diminished role in the company. Max Schuster’s attorney later claimed (in 1989) that Dick Simon himself chose not to buy in, and so the company’s executives went ahead without him.

  Even somewhat debilitated, Dick continued to publish important and successful books, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and Philippe Halsman’s The Jump Book, which caught celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe (and Dick Simon) in midair. But at home Dick, at the age of fifty-seven, was a semi-invalid who worried that his career was over.

  “My husband was full of anxieties, all his life,” Andrea Simon said later. “He suffered a great deal from them. He worried a lot, largely about his business. It took a lot out of him.”

  Frank Sinatra’s brilliant, disconsolate Wee Small Hours album was huge on the Simon household’s turntables. (Carly used to listen to it, lying facedown on her bed, several times in a row.) Lucy played her guitar in her bedroom along to records by their old teacher Pete Seeger, sometimes recorded by brother Peter on the family’s new wire recorder. Carly Simon’s earliest recordings date from this period. And now Carly wanted her own guitar.

  Dick Simon had another heart attack in 1957, but one less serious than the first. In the evenings, he sat in his bedroo
m quietly smoking. Then he had a minor stroke that left him unable to sleep. At night the family could hear him moving restlessly around the house in his bathrobe, turning off lights, before closing his bedroom door. Carly kept knocking on the bedpost and praying to God that her father wouldn’t die before he learned to love her.

  HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL

  In 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. The Simon family took this very hard.

  Carly Simon started high school, having left Fieldston, along with her younger brother, for the more traditional Riverdale Country School. This large private academy was at the time split into separate schools for boys and girls, so Carly was thrown into an unfamiliar, mostly female milieu. There were some social tremors at first, as she found it difficult to fit in with her new classmates, was considered too tall for the “social” private dancing classes, and pointedly wasn’t invited to a couple of parties. There were murmurs of anti-Semitism, even though the Simons weren’t really Jewish. Andrea used her considerable diplomatic skills to smooth this over. Carly soon made friends and began to fit into Riverdale’s preppy, late-fifties scene, using her comedienne’s skills to make people like her—for example, by laughing so hard in the lunchroom that her mouthful of milk would spritz through her prominent teeth and spray across the room, making everyone else laugh as well.

  By then, as fourteen turned to fifteen, the disparaging terms gawky and awkward and gangly weren’t being used to describe Carly Simon anymore. She was developing curves, ironing her hair, allowing her madcap sense of humor to win friends and influence people. She made the cheerleader squad in her sophomore year. One of her first dates, in 1957, was with a tall and very popular Riverdale boy, a couple of years older, named Chevy Chase. Carly remembered: “I was invited to ‘the hop,’ our school dance. Chevy was two years above me, and I was surprised that he asked me. I wore a red bouffant dress, and he came to collect me in a pin-striped suit that was slightly too short. He had a corsage for me, and was a perfect gentleman, telling me jokes, and making me laugh all night. After our night of dancing, he took me home and we sat in the kitchen with the dogs, waiting for the evening to end. He made me laugh by offering a biscuit to one of our dogs, and then eating it himself instead.”