More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (5 page)

G
reenwich 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 into 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.

C
arly 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.”

When Carly was nine she told her mother that she didn’t think her father cared for her. “By the time I came along, I think the novelty had worn off for my father—the third girl child, you know? And also, around then there was some turmoil in his work, and he wasn’t able or willing to be close to me. So I sincerely felt he didn’t love me.” Andrea assured her this wasn’t so, but Carly didn’t believe her. Dick Simon was distracted and distant from her; she could feel it. Family members say that Dick had indeed wanted a boy and was disappointed in a third daughter. Her father’s evident preference for her
sister Lucy made his seeming rejection even more difficult. But Carly was determined somehow to find a way into Dick Simon’s heart.

“My oldest sister, Joey, was always very sophisticated. She was born that way and allowed to be that way—very poised and theatrical. She did her own makeup from age ten. Lucy was another way: shy, angelic, sweet and soft, and adorable. I remember thinking to myself, literally thinking this… that I had to make a conscious decision to decide who I had to be in this family.

“Well, okay. The ingénue’s role had been filled by Lucy. The sophisticate’s role had been taken by Joey. So I chose my role. The comedian had not been filled yet.”

Andrea encouraged Carly in this. “I think my mother knew, early on, that I wasn’t terribly interesting to my father. She used to give me little tips on how to win him. She’d tell me, ‘Go into his room, darling, and make a funny face.’ So I developed a repertoire of faces. I did cartwheels. I made jokey noises. And sometimes it worked. He would react. He’d laugh. He’d tell me I was funny. So I felt that this was the way I could win my father over to me. You can see this in most of the photos he took of me. I’m grinning, being a goofball, showing the gaps in my teeth. I’m playing the clown to get his attention because I had to compete for it with my sisters.”

Carly began piano lessons when she was eight. But even this was fraught with difficulties when her father was around. “He was an incredible pianist, but this was only well known to his friends. A famous musician like Arthur Rubinstein would come to our house and ask my father to play Chopin so he could study his technique.

“I started to learn to play, but then I developed a phobia about the piano. If my father was around when I was practicing, he’d say, ‘No darling, you play it like
this
,’ and I would have to get up and he would sit down, and then he’d forget I was practicing and he’d play for an hour. After a year of this, when I was nine, I had to stop taking lessons.”

Carly stayed away from the piano until she wrote the melody to
“That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be” on the piano, fifteen years later.

What finally cemented the bond between Carly and her father, at least for a couple of years in the early fifties, was their shared love of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And the Simons weren’t ordinary baseball fans. Dick’s friendships with the Dodgers’ management and players ensured that when he took Carly to home games at Ebbets Field, they often sat in the Dodgers’ dugout.

Dick Simon had long been a Dodgers fan, and this ardor increased after the team broke the color barrier by signing the brilliant shortstop Jackie Robinson in 1947. Robinson was a great athlete and a ferocious competitor, whose youthful zeal matured into righteous fury when he was subjected to racist slurs, obviously deliberate bean balls, and gratuitous spikings for being the first black player in baseball’s major leagues. By 1952, Robinson was one of the most famous sports figures in America, having helped the Dodgers win the National League pennant in 1949, and having opened the gates to other black talent, including Duke Snider and Roy Campanella on his own team.

Dick Simon wanted Simon and Schuster to publish Robinson’s biography, and approached him through the Dodgers. Jackie brought his wife to Stamford for the weekend, and Andrea Simon bonded with Rachel Robinson immediately. Soon the Robinsons and their children, Jackie Jr., Sharon, and David, were regular guests on Newfield Avenue, for them a safe haven from the glare of sports celebrity and the occasional threats on Jackie’s life.

In the spring of 1952, Dick Simon started bringing Carly along with him to Dodgers home games. Joey and Lucy weren’t interested in baseball, and Peter was too young, so Carly got the job of accompanying her father by default. She was thrilled by this, and by the buzz of being a guest of the Brooklyn Dodgers and a special friend of Jackie Robinson. She learned to mark her scorecard like her dad, and memorized the batting averages of superstars such as Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges. On the way to Brooklyn, Carly would quiz
her father on baseball statistics. She became a Dodger team mascot, with her own little uniform. Phil Rizzuto would see her and say, “Hi, Carly.” So did Don Newcombe.

The Dodgers had narrowly lost the pennant to the rival New York Giants in 1951, so the new season was an exciting time to be a Dodger fan—and there was ecstasy in Brooklyn, and in Riverdale, when the Dodgers won the pennant that year. This immigrant-looking team of Italians and blacks mirrored its polyglot borough of Brooklyn perfectly, especially in 1952, when it went down to defeat by the arch-imperialist New York Yankees, the Bronx Bombers, in the World Series.

“Wait Till Next Year” was the unofficial team slogan.

The Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant in 1953 as well, and again Dick Simon and his daughter were on hand for many home games. Carly sat on Pee Wee Reese’s lap in the Dodger dugout. Father and daughter were growing closer now, and had nicknames for each other. He was Baldy; Carly was Scarlet, or Carlotta. But now that she had partly won over her father, Carly began to lose interest in him. Away from the cocoon of Ebbets Field, Dick would often shrink into himself again. Carly would soon turn for solace to her funny uncles, her mother’s brothers, especially irrepressible Peter Dean, who began to take on a more fatherly role for Andrea’s youngest children, Carly and Peter.