Rising from what had once been the greens of the Queens Valley Golf and Country Club on the edge of Flushing and Forest Hills, the mostly semidetached houses of Kew Gardens Hills popped up like an urban fantasy of suburban life: curving streets and rustling trees; freshly stamped curbs, sidewalks, and driveways; steady jobs, good schools, and playgrounds; jump ropes flashing and jacks skittering across immaculate concrete. There were people of all ethnic varieties, streets for Italians and Irish, for Poles and Asians, and even a few WASPs, though they were mostly set apart in the stone piles beneath the elms of Forest Hills. And there were even more Jews: the sons and daughters of the immigrants, still working and rising and making a place for themselves defined less by the ethnic and religious ideals of the past than by the American faith in financial and social transcendence.
To be a Jew, but not only a Jew, to be whoever or whatever you chose to become—this was the dream. As the Jewish title character in Saul Bellow’s landmark 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March introduces himself in its opening line, he is “an American, Chicago born.” Get the picture? “I go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” So it was for Louis Simon, as it was for millions of the American-born children of the Jewish exodus—because the journey couldn’t end on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, or in the modern shtetls in Newark and Brooklyn. The American promised land had never really been a particular place; instead, it was an idea, a spinning wheel, a vision of the next horizon. In the mid-twentieth century it looked a lot like the suburbs, the grander and WASPy-er, the better. And if you couldn’t get all the way to Westchester County just yet, there was always Queens.
It took the Simons a few years to find the perfect home. In 1944 they lived for a time with one of Belle’s brothers in a semidetached brick house at 136-63 Seventy-Second Avenue, across the street from where Jack and Rose Garfunkel had just settled in with the first two of their three boys, though the families didn’t know each other then. A few months later the Simons relocated a block away, to an apartment at 141-04 Seventy-First Road, and less than two years later they moved for the final time, settling into 137-62 Seventieth Road, the right half of a compact, two-story redbrick row house on a gently sloping, tree-shaded street. It was a nice, cozy home, but surrounded for blocks with houses so identical that after a long night of work, Louis would sometimes pull his car into a neighbor’s driveway and be halfway up the steps before realizing he was at the threshold of someone else’s house.
Nevertheless, there they forged their version of postwar middle-class life. For Louis, tradition held little interest, religion even less. Belle felt very differently; she was a regular at the synagogue and happily enmeshed in the community and familiar rituals. Still, Louis set the tone for the boys, and when they felt the need to worship they made the pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium, where they could stand, sit, sing, and pray according to the rituals of American baseball. When Paul was well known enough for people to care about his thoughts on such things, he made it into a joke for the sports pages. Why should anyone focus on religion when there was a pennant to win? “I never saw the point,” he said. “Though Al Rosen, the Cleveland third baseman, is Jewish. But I was a Yankee fan so he never really excited me.”
Louis was too pragmatic to worship anything, including the romantic ideal of the musician as artist. He didn’t need to waltz among the gods to draw the right sounds from his bass. He was a professional, sight-reading his parts with perfect rhythm and inflection the moment the music was put in front of him. Always neatly combed and dressed, his tuxedo and instrument rarely beyond an arm’s reach, Louis built a diverse set of regular clients, slipping as easily into orchestral performances as he did into society dance bands. He served as a staff bassist with the orchestras of several New York–area radio stations, including WCBS, WAAT, and WOR, and played for the Ballets Russes and with the Alfred Wallenstein Orchestra. Later in his career Louis earned a staff position with the CBS Radio and Television Orchestra, helping provide music to nationally broadcast variety shows by Jackie Gleason, Art Linkletter, and Arthur Godfrey. And he did it all as Lee Simms, a man who could claim every talent, skill, and virtue Louis Simon had developed or been born with, but without the name that immediately identified him as a Jew.
You had to do it; all the big stars already had. The Russian-born Al Jolson lived the first part of his life as Asa Yoelson. Star clarinetist Artie Shaw shortened his name from the original Arthur Arshawsky. Even the songwriters did it. Irving Berlin, another child of Russia, came to America as Israel Beilin. George Gershwin started life as Jacob Gershowitz. And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing. The great movie star Rudolph Valentino came out of Italy with the marquee-busting name of Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. Tough and burly man’s man John Wayne had to ditch the womanly Marion Morrison to establish his cowboy bona fides, while the Missouri actress-dancer Virginia McMath projected her natural elegance so much more clearly when she started calling herself Ginger Rogers.
Showbiz folk from all kinds of backgrounds and disciplines could find reasons to alter or jazz up their names. Yet more Jewish performers found it necessary for the same reason that Jews working in business, the law, or any trade that put them in daily contact with gentiles changed their names: America, as it turned out, wasn’t entirely free of anti-Semites. It was a more nuanced kind of prejudice than Jews had encountered in Europe. Physical attacks were rare, and most Americans didn’t stoop to insults—not very often anyway. Still, some colleges, including the Ivy League schools, kept their quota of Jewish students to a minimum. Major companies, particularly in the financial and legal trades, refused entry to Jewish professionals, no matter how finely educated or skilled. And even the companies that did welcome Jews weren’t likely to give them the opportunities or promotions their gentile workers received. Also, Jews, no matter how wealthy, were often barred from the tonier city and country clubs where so many of their gentile colleagues gathered to raise their glasses, trade stories, and, in the way drink and elaborate food make so easy, cut their deals. Slicing a few syllables from an obviously ethnic name wasn’t an automatic pass into the convivial gentile world, but it was, at least, a start.
The elders and the orthodox didn’t approve. To abandon your ethnic identity, your family name, was at best a cop-out and at worst a self-inflicted cultural purge. Then again, most Jews already had multiple names. Observant Jews get called to the Torah by biblical names that bear little resemblance to the family name they use in daily life. And for families who trace their lineage through eastern Europe or Russia, the chances are excellent that the family name was assigned to them by a tax collector who tracked families either by where they lived or by their patriarch’s profession. Names were rooted in European soil, perhaps, but not very deeply. And for Louis’s cohort of first-generation Americans, adopting a fresh name and identity felt like liberation, a symbolic declaration of independence so powerful that it is in no way coincidental that The Jazz Singer, the smash 1927 film that introduced sound to the movies and made Al Jolson, né Yoelson, a superstar, tells the story of Jakie Rabinowitz, a Jewish boy who turns his back on the synagogue and his cantor father in order to make it big in showbiz as a jazz singer named Jack Robin. It’s the classic story of Jewish assimilation, lovingly told by a heavily Jewish industry that would all but ignore obviously Jewish characters for the next several decades.
In an industry peopled heavily with eccentrics, boozers, and bohemians, Louis slipped from band to orchestra to recording session so unassumingly that colleagues he’d played with for years wouldn’t know he was present until they heard the agile sound of his bass. The session guitarist Al Caiola recalled Lou best for how absent he could seem even when he was standing in front of you. “Lou,” he said, “was really quiet.” Yet when Louis formed his own band in the early 1940s, the Lee Simms Orchestra did make a few ripples in New York’s dance band scene. Aimed mostly at the society circui
t in and around New York City, the band played weddings, bar mitzvahs, debutante parties, and other private affairs. It also won regular gigs at some of New York City’s busiest dance clubs, playing most consistently at Club 28, a former casino near the Brighton Beach Race Track, and at the always-hopping Roseland Ballroom (capacity 3,500), in Midtown Manhattan, where on Thursday afternoons the LSO traded sets with Latin groups. The club engagements, both of which Louis kept well into the 1960s, weren’t marquee gigs, but every so often he and his band would get noticed. In the September 30, 1959, issue of Variety, the Inside Stuff—Music column featured an item that decried the caliber of New York’s dance bands, proposing that most bandleaders could stand a class or two from Lawrence Welk on keeping things simple. The item ended with this: “I would add Lee Simms of Club 28, Brooklyn and Paul Martell of Roseland to the faculty.”
* * *
There was a sadness about the boy. Even as a baby, Paul would gaze from his swaddling clothes with a look of despair in his dark brown eyes, as if he’d already glimpsed things, terrible things, things that could never be unseen. At first Louis and Belle were concerned, but soon they made a joke of it, referring to the little one as Cardozo, after the pickle-faced Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo. Paul grew into a bright-eyed, inquisitive young fellow, a reader and a listener and an affectionate older brother to Eddie, who looked up to him with the same eyes and was soon big enough to catch the balls Paul tossed, and then toss them back. The boys both took on their father’s willful nature and his teasing sense of humor.
Smart, athletic, and personable, Paul was a lot like the other kids at school, except in one way: he was a lot smaller. Small like a mouse. Small like a pipsqueak. Small like the punch line to every short-guy joke the other kids could imagine. Did he live in a dollhouse? Did his mom bring him to school in her pocket? They’d swipe his Yankees cap and throw it among themselves, until Paul finally balled up his fists and went after them. He might have been short, but he definitely wasn’t a pushover. He was stronger than he looked, and when it came down to it he could be pretty mean himself. In fact, Paul’s penchant for schoolyard fisticuffs unnerved some of his teachers. He’d get his hat back, thank you very much, and make you think twice about ever snatching it off his head again. When the bell rang, he’d march back to the classroom with a vengeance, ripping through the assignments ages before the others, acing tests that reduced other kids to sweat and tears. And he wasn’t shy about pointing it out, either: “You thought that was hard? Huh. It seemed kinda obvious to me.”
It was more difficult to silence the self-directed abuse, to hush the voice that reminded him just how small he really was, and just how his body’s failures would always undermine him no matter where he was or what he was trying to do. And it was only getting worse. Months turned to seasons, seasons turned to years, and while the others stretched upward, gaining weight and strength as they grew, Paul was lucky to add a fraction of an inch. That wasn’t all. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t like the chubby cheeks, flat nose, and heavy beetle brows that greeted him—even then, he knew there was nothing he could do about it except to do everything as well or better than anyone else.
Paul found his archetype for triumph on Louis’s knee, the same pinstriped vision that had enraptured his dad thirty years earlier: the visions of glory that were the New York Yankees. Like his father, Paul came to the sport early. When Louis had the time to sit in the kitchen and take in a game, he’d let Paul climb up into his lap and he’d regale the boy with tales of Yankees heroes Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Ruth, the mightiest baseball giants of their age, or any age, the heroic ones, the team that won when the odds were with them and when they weren’t. And even if they came up short, as Lou Gehrig did when he discovered he had the fatal neuromuscular disease that would soon bear his name, they still went down in a golden cloak, speaking verse from home plate.
Today … I consider myself … the luckiest man … on the face of this earth …
Paul dreamed pinstriped dreams and wore his deep blue NY cap with a disciple’s pride. When Louis took him to Ebbets Field to see the Brooklyn team, the Dodgers, during their pennant-winning 1949 season, the seven-year-old wore a Lone Ranger mask, lest someone mistake him for a follower of the Bums, whose glorious season would end in tears at the hands of—yes, that’s right—the New York Yankees. Therein lay the distinction between a soulful, hardworking team and a victory machine staffed with superheroes. If you could choose between them, why would you ever go with the also-rans? “I felt there was enough suffering in real life,” Paul said later. “Why suffer with your team?”
A natural athlete, the grade-school-age Paul spent endless hours with his little brother, playing wild indoor basketball games they narrated as dramatic clashes between rival brothers George (Paul) and Mickey (Eddie) Muffchatiery, one of whom (it varied) had come out of retirement for this final fraternal battle. They wrestled and played indoor hockey, and when they felt inspired they’d organize their games into the Simon Olympics, a kind of decathlon with a complex scoring system designed to balance the scales between older and younger brother. When they got a little older they staged boxing matches, hurling punches they would pull a fraction of inch before hard knuckles hit brotherly flesh. The real victory was in outthinking and outmaneuvering each other.
When Belle called, they’d come thumping down the stairs for dinner, taking their places at a table with an empty setting where Louis was supposed to be. It was the evening, and more often than not he’d be recording half a dozen commercials in some Manhattan studio or hunkered down in the back of a nightclub or hotel ballroom, scribbling lead sheets for yet another performance of the Lee Simms Orchestra. Sometimes he missed the boys when he was right there in the house, walled off in a fog of stress and middle-aged frustration, thinking that he had made all the wrong calls in his life, that his career wasn’t going anywhere, and that if he’d only gone to graduate school he could be a college professor by now: tenured, secure, and admired. Only he hadn’t, and he wasn’t, and for Christ’s sake, where’s that racket coming from? Why aren’t those boys studying? They should go to graduate school, they should be the lawyers, doctors, or businessmen he didn’t have the vision to become. Belle told Louis to stop being so critical; they were boys, for heaven’s sake. Give them a chance to have fun before they grow up.
So he would. He’d tell jokes and make them laugh. He’d go outside and toss a ball for a while. But then it was time to go to work again, and he’d shoo the boys off to do their homework, change back into his tuxedo, and lug his bass down the front steps and into the car for another evening of professional musical conviviality—and another night of knowing that he was working beneath himself and that the time had come to discover the real purpose of his life.
CHAPTER 3
OUR SONG
One spring afternoon in 1952 the school buses scheduled to take the kids home from PS 164 were running late. Rather than keep the students cooped up in class, the teachers herded everyone into the school auditorium. Who knew some jokes? Did any of the kids have some kind of talent? One of the fourth-grade teachers had a student who liked to sing for his classmates. Did he want to come onstage and give it a try now? Artie Garfunkel nodded eagerly and came bounding up the aisle. What would he like to sing? Well, his new favorite was Nat King Cole’s “They Try to Tell Us We’re Too Young.” Sounds like a lovely choice; whenever you’re ready, the teacher said. The slim boy with blond curls positioned himself at the microphone. When he opened his mouth, the voice that emerged was high and clear, something like bells, only warmer and incredibly rich and sweet.
They try to tell us we’re too young
Too young to be in love …
Every note was issued without hesitation, his confidence nearly as mesmerizing as his voice. Everyone was riveted, the girls positively bedazzled. Hundreds of restless grade-schoolers went completely silent and still. Including another fourth-grader, who had been thinking musical thoughts as of
late—and he wasn’t just watching the stage. Looking around him, Paul Simon picked up on the excitement, the feminine ardor, all because one of their schoolmates had stood up and sung to them. It was a revelation—the performance, the applause, the cheers. Could he do it, too? Hard to say, but he knew one thing for certain: someday he wanted to get a slice of those cheers for himself.
Paul kept an eye out for this Garfunkel kid, catching glimpses of him in the halls or on the playground, and feeling that familiar tug of admiration mixed with envy whenever he popped up at talent shows or in one of the school musicals. As Paul came to understand, nearly everyone in the neighborhood either knew or knew of Artie Garfunkel. He was, as Paul remembered, “the most famous singer in the neighborhood.” Playing coy, Paul didn’t say a word to his classmate for two years, until both boys, now twelve years old, were cast (Paul as the White Rabbit, Artie as the Cheshire Cat) in PS 164’s nonmusical production of Alice in Wonderland.
Artie could tell that Paul was trying to start a friendship; he was so attentive and enthusiastic. They clicked immediately. Both were smarter than most of their classmates, and neither was shy about mentioning it. They had the same spiky sense of humor and a growing passion for Alan Freed’s wild new show on WINS-AM. They lived just three blocks apart, so when school ended in June it was easy for them to find each other and hang out, often for hours at a time, talking about songs they’d been hearing on their radios. Didja hear this one? One of them would start singing. If the other boy knew the song, he’d start singing along.
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