More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (4 page)

“I didn’t know you had a dog,” he stammered.

“Oh yes,” she lied. “I have three.” She was thinking of her two brothers and her boyfriend, Ernest.

In the spring of 1934, Neil invited Andrea to the Kentucky Derby, where Vanderbilt horses were in the running.

“When Neil asked me to the Derby, I felt I had to ask Mr. Simon if Simon and Schuster had a company policy about employees dating the writers.”

Dick Simon looked at her. “Why do you ask?” She told him.

“As of now, yes, there is a policy.”

“After that, I couldn’t get rid of him.” It was embarrassing at the office. Instead of huddling with Schuster in the Inner Sanctum, the conference room between their offices, Simon was loitering around the switchboard.
Let’s go have lunch. There’s Gershwin music at Carnegie Hall tonight. Let’s go to a show.

“Finally I conceded. He took me to Longchamps for dinner, and laughed when I asked for a doggie bag. He wasn’t embarrassed at all, unlike poor Neil.”

She loved being around him. There were many more dinner dates. “He was charming, fun, delightful to be with. He took me to so many concerts, mostly piano recitals, and then we would go to his apartment in Greenwich Village and he would play the same music as the pianist at Carnegie Hall—only better. And I just loved to look at him. I loved to sing, and we’d perform together in his apartment—German lieder, show tunes. I’d sing and he would play. Cole Porter, you know? ‘Night and Day.’ He was just an incredible pianist, and could have been a major artist if he’d been encouraged to.

“So now, when his girlfriends called the office, I would say I was sorry but Mr. Simon is tied up. He’s in conference. He isn’t in today. I threw the message slips away, and wondered if they asked him why he hadn’t called them back.”

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.

O
ne 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 could 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.