More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (6 page)

“My father could be very difficult,” Carly said later. “He could be very proper and aristocratic, and then he would burp at the table. He definitely felt that he was terribly, terribly special, and that his children were terribly, terribly special too. He had that complete disregard of reality that all true narcissists have. And this, combined with his strengths, is what made him such a powerful influence on me. He was a very dynamic man, especially when he was younger. People who knew him really loved him, and loved to talk about him. Every day of my life, I still wish I’d known him better.”

T
he Simon estate in Stamford, set in the lush Connecticut countryside, was a childhood paradise for Carly and her siblings, especially during the summertime. “We were the children of the orchard,” she recalled, years later. “There was one summer when I spent the whole time up in the fruit trees in our orchard, near the play barn, beyond the huge copper beech. The apple trees were Cortland and McIntosh varieties. There were also two large cherry trees whose bark was rougher on my skin than the apple trees, and so much harder to climb. But, once scaled, the cherry prizes were more thrilling than even the tartest Mac.

“Part of the fun was to savor a sweet, dark purple cherry and then aim the pit at a target below, most often my little brother, Peter, but either of my sisters would do as well. We lived in those trees: me and Joey and Lucy, and Jeanie and Mary Seligman, my cousins. Peter couldn’t climb yet, so he ran around below us in his blue corduroy shorts, calling to us to drop him a cherry, please, or just singing or babbling to himself, the only little boy of our tribe.”

In those days, the early fifties, Andrea Simon would organize theme summers for the children. One year would be cooking, with a live-in chef. Another would be sewing, with a seamstress. Another would be painting, with an artist in residence. Andrea herself served as a singing teacher. A typical Simon dinner often ended with musical rounds—“Row, row, row your boat,” etc.—with family and guests trying to complete the round without goofing up.

“That summer I lived in the trees,” Carly recalls, “was the summer of Helen Gaspard. She took care of Peter and was also our in-house playwright and director of the productions we put on for guests in our barn. We learned the lines for
Little Women
sitting in the trees, calling down cues to each other and filling ourselves with fruit. Jeanie and I always had the lesser parts, but we were still young enough to believe Joey when she assured us that even though we only had a line or two, they were pivotal lines, and without them there would be no plot. In the play
The Monkey’s Paw,
I merely had to knock on the door. And this was OK because I stuttered… could hardly speak. And it was humiliating for me, when people supplied the word I was blocked on, or finished my sentences for me. I didn’t even have names for those fears.

“Joey bossed me around a lot. Her technique was to get her way by flattering me. She would always lead me to believe that I was the true star of the show. During the curtain calls, the audience—who were obviously in on the little joke—applauded as if I were Katharine Hepburn. So I definitely grew up with a… distorted view of fame.”

Carly: “Looking back, I think my childhood was somewhat Chekhovian.” This refers to the heartbreaking family dramas of the Russian author Anton Chekhov. “I’ve seen myself described as the outsider in my family, the black sheep, the ugly duckling. I remember that our extended family played a kind of reverse hide-and-seek game at our house in Connecticut. [This was called Sardines.] The players fanned out over the grounds, and joined each other in hiding until everyone was packed in. The last one out, still searching for the
others, was ‘it,’ and lost the game. And that was always me: the awkward, stuttering child, wandering around alone, at the end of the game—not getting it.”

Albert Einstein came to lunch at the mansion in Stamford with its imposing colonnaded verandah. This was a big deal, and there was much housecleaning and preparation. Enormous meals emerged from the kitchen run by Sula, a black cook from the islands, who delivered lobster rolls and peach Melbas to the family and their guests at the swimming pool, barefoot and balancing dishes on her head. Eleanor Roosevelt came for cocktails. The tennis champion Don Budge gave the girls lessons on the family court. Star novelists such as Irwin Shaw lounged by the pool. There were the frequent distinguished guests known as “the Two Bernards”—Baruch and Berenson. Composer Arthur Schwartz, who wrote “Alone Together,” and his wife had their own room and came to Stamford almost every weekend. (“They were my parents’ closest friends,” Carly said.) The Oscar Hammersteins were frequents guests as well, and the girls once rehearsed and performed “A Real Nice Clambake” for the famous songwriter.

Carly: “My mother would say, ‘Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein are coming for dinner tonight. They wrote
South Pacific
and blah blah blah.’ After dinner they would sit down at my father’s piano and play the score for
Showboat
. I’d enjoy this, but I didn’t really understand yet about fame.”

There was always a family ball game going on. Sometimes Jackie Robinson would pitch, when he wasn’t otherwise occupied in Brooklyn. A typical game on a humid afternoon in August 1954 might have Jackie Jr. playing second base. John Crosby, the television columnist for the
New York Herald Tribune,
is on first. (Crosby rents one of several cottages on the estate.) Don Budge at short. Peter Simon, aged seven, on third. Louis Untermeyer is in center field. Another outfielder is Jonathan Schwartz, age fifteen, who has lived with the Simons in the summer after his mother’s early death. (Jonno, as he’s known, has
a mad crush on Lucy, but then everyone does.) Kim Rosen—Peter’s best friend, who lives next door to the Simons on Grosvenor Avenue in Riverdale—is in right field.

The batter, in a floral bathing suit, is Carly Simon, about eleven. She’s holding a tennis racket because the game is softball, but with a tennis ball and racket. The pitcher is Carly’s uncle Peter Dean. He delivers a softy to her, underhanded.

“Carly tags one,” Jonno later wrote. “Her run is a gawky lope around the bases. She is speaking or singing or something as she is running. She has homered, which is easy to do. Breathless and congratulated, she flops down on the grass, kind of sitting, her long legs stretched out before her. She is singing:
‘Maybe I’m right, and maybe I’m wrong / And maybe I’m weak and maybe I’m strong / But nevertheless—I’m in love with you
.’”

Jonno would later describe the Simon women: “Andrea was a legitimate sensualist…. Joanna was a chanteuse wearing lots of makeup, disguised as an adolescent. Lucy was spectacularly beautiful with almond eyes, sweeping through the apple orchards at age 13 or 14 with a sexual majesty. Carly was wonderfully gawky, with a stutter.”

The Simon manse was, for many of its habitués, a hothouse of secrets, deceptions, and estrogen.

Jackie and Rachel Robinson began to feel comfortable in Stamford, and they got the idea of buying a piece of property there and building a home. Rachel saw an advertisement in the
Stamford Advocate
for some land on Cascade Avenue, and made an appointment to see it. But when the real estate agent saw that she was a black woman, Rachel was brusquely informed that the property had been taken off the market.

So Andrea started to go around the town with Rachel and various realtors, and was soon given to understand that Jackie Robinson may have broken the color line in professional baseball, but it was going to be much harder for him to do it in the Connecticut
commuter towns of Fairfield County. Houses went off the market as soon as the two women walked in. The Cascade Avenue land had a For Sale sign, but when Andrea called, resolved to act as a straw buyer for the Robinsons, she was told it had already been sold.

Andrea was furious at this blatant racism. “My mother became an endless civil rights worker,” Carly says. “And she became very devoted to the cause of integrating Stamford. Up till then, black families couldn’t live there, and the truth of it was brushed under the carpet.” Andrea enlisted her husband in this crusade. Dick had just been interviewed by Edward R. Murrow for CBS television, and was very much a national figure. “And so my mother and father went to the community leaders—the rabbis, ministers, priests, politicians—and told them, ‘This is a potentially very embarrassing situation we’ve come to, here in Stamford. We’re in 1954, and we can’t get a piece of property for Jackie Robinson and his family? What kind of town is this? Do you want picket lines in front of your real estate agencies?’”

The Simons started dropping names—Connecticut senator Abe Ribicoff, President Eisenhower,
The
New York Times
—and the local realtors soon got the message. Carly: “And so little by little, my parents wore them down, and [the Robinsons] bought the property on Cascade Avenue. My parents invited the Robinsons to live in our Stamford house while they were building theirs, and they ended up staying with us for several months. I got to drive to Ebbets Field with Jackie for Dodger home games. It was one of the most incredible periods for our family. Jackie taught me so much about sports. He was the most incredible tennis player—no one knows this—and could even hold his own with Don Budge. Anyway, it was Jackie Robinson who really taught me how to play.

“This whole situation really energized my mother. From then on, our family was to be associated with the civil rights movement.” (The Simons were dues-paying members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, the leading civil
rights organization of the era.) “It gave my mother the spiritual resolve to have these civil rights rallies, benefits, and protests on our lawn, especially in Riverdale. [Peter Simon: “We referred to these events as ‘Mum’s Negro Rallies.’”] One day, my sisters and I were recruited to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a visiting black preacher from the South named Martin Luther King. This was before he was famous, but he was still an incredible presence, and he came to our house.”

D
uring this period, Carly’s mother was carrying on a secret love affair with her son’s much younger tutor and companion. When her daughters found out, Joanna Simon says, their world turned upside down.

It had started in 1953. Andrea Simon was worried that her depressed and preoccupied husband’s lack of interest in his son, combined with Peter’s being raised in a smothering, all-female household, would inevitably lead to the boy’s homosexuality. Someone suggested a college man be hired as a part-time companion and tutor for Peter. Andrea placed an advertisement in the Columbia University newspaper.

The ad was answered by Ronnie Klinzing, a twenty-year-old scholarship student from Pittsburgh. Ronnie was tall, handsome, athletic, virile. Andrea hired him as soon as he walked in the door. He was also talented, with theatrical ambitions, and fit right in to the family’s musical life. Ronnie could sing. He was also witty, charming, and something of a flirt. He was engaged to be a sort of camp counselor
for Peter, teaching him sports and other manly arts. Ronnie lived with the Simons on weekends and in the summer, a vigorous presence in sharp contrast to Dick Simon’s general state of depression and withdrawal. Without meaning to, Ronnie triggered an intense sexual competition between his employer and her daughters. Carly and her cousin Jeanie went through his underwear drawer shortly after he moved in. Once, Ronnie caught them snapping his jockstraps at each other, and the girls were properly mortified. Ronnie, a good sport, just laughed about it.

It was Joanna who discovered the affair. She thinks it started about six months after Ronnie joined the family. “From the time their relationship started, until it became common knowledge, was about a year or two.” When the children returned from their summer camps to the Stamford house, Joey noticed that some carpentry had been done in the third-floor bathroom. Behind a cupboard, a passage had been cut through to the closet in her mother’s bedroom. Ronnie’s room was on the other side of the bathroom. Joey, then seventeen, quickly figured it out.