More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (11 page)

Carly and Lucy both bought the nervy, haunted, shivering album
Bob Dylan
when it was released in late 1962. The record sold only about five thousand copies, but (as they joke about the Velvet Underground) everyone who bought it would later start a band of their own. By early 1963, “Bobby,” as he was then known, was the elusive avatar of the East Coast folk music scene, appearing in Cambridge, New Haven, and Philadelphia as well as the Village. Within months, Dylan would become the protégé, then the lover, of Joan Baez, who over the next year would introduce the “difficult” young singer to her entranced, sold-out audiences as she toured the college concert circuit singing ballads, civil rights anthems, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and other visionary songs of this curly-headed genius from the North Country of Minnesota.

This was the beginning of the singer-songwriter movement, a new era when the most talented vocalists began to write their own songs, instead of relying on the talents of others. This protean era, the artistic flowering of the postwar generation, would produce a crowd of musical geniuses, and eventually inspire the career of one of the best singer-songwriters of them all.

I
n the spring of 1963 the young President Kennedy was being criticized for not doing enough to help the struggle for civil rights. Andrea Simon, ever the activist, was holding benefit parties for groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at her big brick house in Riverdale, and she often asked her daughters to sing for her well-heeled guests. At one of these events Lucy Simon rehearsed some songs with Carly, and the girls got an enthusiastic reception. Afterward, they were taken aside by their uncle Peter Dean. He was now a well-known talent agent who had been important to the early careers of singers Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee, and he understood the attractions and pitfalls of show business. Until then he had never been keen on promoting the enthusiasms and aspirations of his sister’s children, but now he heard something in Lucy and Carly that made him think again.

“You know,” he told his nieces, “you girls sound terrific together.
I think you could actually have an act.” Uncle Pete pledged to Lucy that he would help her if she wanted to make a stab at his business.

This encouragement made Lucy Simon determined to get into the game. And she was determined to drag her charismatic but shy younger sister, kicking and screaming, along with her.

“I was so lucky to have Lucy to inspire me,” Carly said later. “We were raised together, you know, so we spoke alike, and therefore we phrased alike. This is so important in singing. Although Lucy is a high soprano, and I’m practically a baritone, we pronounced words the same, and this had an effect on the people who heard us. A big part of blending, really, is the pronunciation of words…. It’s actually very hard to get the words of a song to sync up so they
blend
in a harmonious way. That blend was what Lucy and I had together and, I have to say, it often sounded really great, even to us, the Simon Sisters, whose levels of self-esteem were never at what you could call a fever pitch.”

March 1963. Folk music’s dominance reached its American apogee with the ABC-TV series
Hootenanny,
broadcast nationally on Saturday nights. Each segment was filmed at a different college, with four acts delivering their songs at a breakneck pace until the show’s second season, when
Hootenanny
was extended to an hour. The show was controversial from its inception because ABC had blacklisted folk godfather Pete Seeger due to his left-wing politics, which engendered an ironclad boycott by Dylan; Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; and the Kingston Trio—all the folk stars who really interested the masses.
Hootenanny
made do with the commercial folk echelon: Ian and Sylvia, Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, the interracial Tarriers, the Limeliters, the Smothers Brothers, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Judy Collins, the Brothers Four, the New Christy Minstrels. The Chad Mitchell Trio managed to get a few quasi-protest songs on the show, such as “The John Birch Society,” a parody of the shadowy right-wing political lobby, a song banned from many radio stations. Pete Seeger was later invited on the show, but only if he signed a
loyalty oath to the United States, and of course he refused. The boycott grew, so
Hootenanny
started featuring comedians—Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Vaughn Meader, who did a dead-on impersonation of Jack Kennedy.

“We liked the Tarriers,” Carly remembered, “and we used to hang out with them because they were so funny. Marshall Brickman was in the group. [Brickman later co-wrote the Woody Allen films
Annie Hall
and
Manhattan
.] So was [actor] Alan Arkin.”

Lucy Simon wanted to sing “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” on
Hootenanny
. Soon she would get her wish.

May 1963. When Carly finished her second year at Sarah Lawrence, she was press-ganged into the Simon Sisters by Lucy, who had been working on new versions of old songs. Lucy had “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” as it was now called, and arrangements for an assortment of traditional ballads and lullabies: “Delia,” a woman shot by her man; the spiritual “The Water Is Wide”; the old Scots ballad “Will You Go, Laddie?” Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” sounded incredible when Lucy and Carly sang it. So did Bob Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

This song had appeared, also in May 1963, on Dylan’s second album,
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
and was quickly received as an emergency telegram from the postwar generation. Dylan’s first album had been a rehash of old folk forms, but
Freewheelin’
boasted eleven original songs informed by the civil rights struggle and a fear of nuclear war inspired by the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (to the ancient tune of “Lord Randall”), and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” changed the soul and spirit of the postwar American generation that summer, and established the twenty-two-year-old Dylan as the avatar of a new kind of performer, the singer-songwriter, an American balladeer who wrote his own material—sometimes romantic, sometimes topical—and performed with an authenticity shaped by influence and contact
with the older, venerable ones who sang of the dust bowl and the grapes of wrath.

Peter, Paul and Mary released their version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a single, and the record spent the summer of 1963 at the top of the charts. Lucy and Carly translated Dylan’s song into French as “Ecoute Dans Le Vent,” and it became an audience favorite.

So now the Simon Sisters were a high-end folk act, a savvy combo of the sensual and the intellectual, hard-wired for the college concert circuit.

Carly: “We got the name of a dressmaker on Lexington Avenue and had some matching dresses made. I had stage fright and didn’t really want to be a singer, but I did it for my sister. I trusted her judgment, so I did whatever she said, almost no questions asked. That was the beginning of the Simon Sisters.”

Lucy: “I was still in nursing school at Cornell, and Carly was at Sarah Lawrence, so at first it was just something to do on our summer vacations. We packed our things—the matching outfits—and our guitars—maybe six chords between us—and took the bus to Province town, at the tip of Cape Cod. We didn’t have much money, so we rented a room with a double bed in a boarding house on the edge of town. We proceeded to audition at all the local clubs, but got turned down by everyone. Finally we were hired to sing at The Moors, a pub whose resident folk singer had just been sent to Viet Nam. The Moors was way at the other end of Provincetown from where we were staying. So we started hitch-hiking to work in our matching dresses and peasant blouses [plus cross-gartered sandals from Greece, very fashion-forward]. Even with our guitar cases, it was sometimes hard for us to get rides. We taunted those who blew by us: ‘Ha ha, you idiots, we’ll see you at The Moors!’”

The sensational Simon Sisters caught on at the Moors. Their sexy mix of ballads and lullabies contained authentic human heartbreak and astounding close harmony, the kind that only blood relatives can achieve when they sing,
ensemble
. Soon the place was filled with
eager young men early in the evening, waiting for the girls to go on. Lucy’s soprano was enthralling. Carly tried to lay back, a presence more muted and deferential, but her singing could be much more assertive, as if to make up for Lucy’s natural reticence.

“At The Moors, we realized we were ready,” Carly later wrote. “We had hope, harmony, and expectations.”

A New York talent agent, someone Lucy knew named Charlie Close, caught the Simon Sisters’ act in Provincetown. He worked with Harold Leventhal, who managed a stable of folkie godfathers that included the Weavers and Pete Seeger. Uncle Peter looked at the contracts and made sure the girls weren’t getting screwed, financially at least. So now the Simon Sisters had serious management, and their career began in earnest.

As the summer of 1963 went on, Carly spent time with Nick Delbanco at an old fishing camp he rented in Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard. The dilapidated shack was on a hilltop and looked out over Menemsha Pond and the hills, toward remote Gay Head. Carly told Nicky about the Simon Sisters’ big adventure, and Nicky, very ambitious himself, seemed both proud of her and slightly envious of her budding career. He had an idea for his first novel, he told Carly, and he was going to Europe in the fall to research and write it. An old farmhouse in the South of France was being made available through a friend of the family for Nick to write in. Nick wanted Carly to come with him, keep him company while he wrote; she could use the time to write songs on her own. Nick made the romantic Riviera sojourn sound like the lost days of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Carly told Nick that France was very tempting, but right now she was still in college and committed to this project with her somewhat driven sister, to whom the success of the Simon Sisters seemed to mean the world.

Carly’s grandmother Chebe died that summer, a real blow. Andrea Simon was renting puppeteer Bil Baird’s house on the Vineyard when she got the news. She collected Carly from Nicky’s house
and together they drove down to New York for the funeral, crying the whole way.

August 1963. Harold Leventhal booked the Simon Sisters into the Bitter End, the brick-walled folk club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was late summer, and only tourists were around, but the famous folkie venue still sold out almost every night. The sisters performed four sets a night in cable-knit sweaters, white pedal pushers, and flat shoes, their hair ironed straight, their lipstick matching. Soon the Simon Sisters were the Bitter End’s resident opening act, working two and three weeks straight, supporting established folk stars and rising young comedians—Bill Cosby, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, even the outlaw satirist Lenny Bruce. One night, backstage at the Gaslight, the basement folk club on MacDougal Street, after Woody Allen’s Brooklyn intellectual shtick had really bombed before an out-of-town audience, Lucy and Carly eavesdropped as Woody’s veteran manager coached him in timing and intonation, especially his use of hard consonants to make his points. And so the Simon Sisters were exposed to the bare bones of the New York cabaret world in the autumn of 1963. On several occasions, Andrea and Ronnie came to the Village to cheer the girls on. Nicky Delbanco came, too, as did Peter Dean. Peter Simon shot a dozen or so rolls of film with his father’s Leica camera.

Meanwhile, Carly was still trying to go to college. “We were playing the Bitter End and the Gaslight, opening for various soon-to-be-famous people. Afterward, we had to catch the last trains from Penn Station, very late at night, back to our schools. These were fancy schools, quiet campuses. The dorm mothers frowned on my late night arrivals—several times my mother had to intervene—and the professors thought even less of my overdue papers.”

Something had to give. Carly’s college days were numbered.