More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon (8 page)

Lucy Simon, meanwhile, had a poetry assignment at the Fieldston School. At the age of sixteen, she had plenty of her own issues. Some were similar to her sister Carly’s. “I had some problems putting things together at school,” she says. “Today it might be called dyslexia. It was very hard for me to memorize anything, especially poetry, which was terrible for me, because my father and I were close and he loved to hear poems recited, especially in the evening. There was this assignment when I had to memorize and recite a poem of my choosing, and I chose Eugene Field’s nursery rhyme, ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.’ It was a favorite of my father’s, but I had an impossible time getting it right. It might have been my mother who suggested that I sing it instead. So I put the rhymes to a melody with the guitar chords I knew, and turned it into a song. I wrote out the melody, sitting on my bed, and I distinctly remember Carly sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, watching me intently as I sang the poem for the first time.

“So now I had this song, and instead of reciting it like the others, I got up in front of the class with my guitar and sang it. The other kids liked it and clapped, and the teacher gave me a good grade. So that’s really where the Simon Sisters started out.”

September 1956. Dick Simon rejoined his family at home in Riverdale. The Dodgers won the National League Pennant, and were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series. Publishing tycoon Marshall Field III died, and Simon and Schuster was bought back from
Field’s estate by Max Schuster and other partners in a deal that did not include Dick Simon. Historians of the American publishing industry who have scrutinized this dirty deal guess that S&S executives excluded the cofounder of the firm because he was profoundly demoralized by both ill health and a much-diminished role in the company. Max Schuster’s attorney later claimed (in 1989) that Dick Simon himself chose not to buy in, and so the company’s executives went ahead without him.

Even somewhat debilitated, Dick continued to publish important and successful books, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
The
Decisive Moment
and Philippe Halsman’s
The Jump Book,
which caught celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe (and Dick Simon) in midair. But at home Dick, at the age of fifty-seven, was a semi-invalid who worried that his career was over.

“My husband was full of anxieties, all his life,” Andrea Simon said later. “He suffered a great deal from them. He worried a lot, largely about his business. It took a lot out of him.”

Frank Sinatra’s brilliant, disconsolate
Wee Small Hours
album was huge on the Simon household’s turntables. (Carly used to listen to it, lying facedown on her bed, several times in a row.) Lucy played her guitar in her bedroom along to records by their old teacher Pete Seeger, sometimes recorded by brother Peter on the family’s new wire recorder. Carly Simon’s earliest recordings date from this period. And now Carly wanted her own guitar.

Dick Simon had another heart attack in 1957, but one less serious than the first. In the evenings, he sat in his bedroom quietly smoking. Then he had a minor stroke that left him unable to sleep. At night the family could hear him moving restlessly around the house in his bathrobe, turning off lights, before closing his bedroom door. Carly kept knocking on the bedpost and praying to God that her father wouldn’t die before he learned to love her.

I
n 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. The Simon family took this very hard.

Carly Simon started high school, having left Fieldston, along with her younger brother, for the more traditional Riverdale Country School. This large private academy was at the time split into separate schools for boys and girls, so Carly was thrown into an unfamiliar, mostly female milieu. There were some social tremors at first, as she found it difficult to fit in with her new classmates, was considered too tall for the “social” private dancing classes, and pointedly wasn’t invited to a couple of parties. There were murmurs of anti-Semitism, even though the Simons weren’t really Jewish. Andrea used her considerable diplomatic skills to smooth this over. Carly soon made friends and began to fit into Riverdale’s preppy, late-fifties scene, using her comedienne’s skills to make people like her—for example, by laughing so hard in the lunchroom that her mouthful of milk would spritz through her prominent teeth and spray across the room, making everyone else laugh as well.

By then, as fourteen turned to fifteen, the disparaging terms
gawky
and
awkward
and
gangly
weren’t being used to describe Carly Simon anymore. She was developing curves, ironing her hair, allowing her madcap sense of humor to win friends and influence people. She made the cheerleader squad in her sophomore year. One of her first dates, in 1957, was with a tall and very popular Riverdale boy, a couple of years older, named Chevy Chase. Carly remembered: “I was invited to ‘the hop,’ our school dance. Chevy was two years above me, and I was surprised that he asked me. I wore a red bouffant dress, and he came to collect me in a pin-striped suit that was slightly too short. He had a corsage for me, and was a perfect gentleman, telling me jokes, and making me laugh all night. After our night of dancing, he took me home and we sat in the kitchen with the dogs, waiting for the evening to end. He made me laugh by offering a biscuit to one of our dogs, and then eating it himself instead.”

Carly: “I was a typical cheerleader, a very rah-rah high school girl, out to be the most popular. It was a very Ivy League trip…. But, in matters of both substance and style, I followed my sister Lucy. I emulated her life. I wanted to
be
her. I lived Lucy’s life all during high school. In fact, I have such a pure recall of the details of Lucy’s life that it still amazes her. I studied every detail. I copied her style, to the letter. I wore tight skirts and tight sweaters. When she wore her hair with a dip over her eyes like Veronica Lake did, I did too.

“Basically, I
was
Lucy for a number of years. Then, when I was in the tenth grade, she went off to Bennington College, and she became a beatnik. Lucy had her ears pierced. Black leotards. She started wearing peasant blouses and blue jeans that were slightly cut off and frazzled at the edges. She grew her hair long and played the guitar. So, immediately, I became a beatnik too. I started a trend at my school: ethnic clothes and long braids down the back. Other girls started copying my look, and I seemed to be an innovator, but in reality I was still following Lucy.

“The big change in my life happened when Lucy left Bennington
and went to nursing school at Cornell. I somehow couldn’t see myself as a nurse. She had changed a lot in that phase, and I grew to love her even more, but not identify with her as much. At that point, finally, I became much more myself than ever.”

Carly has said that her mother had her fitted for a contraceptive diaphragm when she was fifteen, which, if accurate, certainly says something about teenage Carly in the generally repressive sexual atmosphere of the time. It also speaks volumes about the eroticized atmosphere of the Simon household, in which Andrea was living more or less openly with Ronnie. Birth control was extremely avant-garde, and made Carly something of a sexual pioneer at her school, where rumors of heavy petting and “going all the way” could stain a girl’s reputation. But Carly Simon could give her classmates (if they had something going with a boyfriend) the name of the doctor who had fitted her diaphragm. Certainly Andrea Simon’s notion of preventing pregnancy, instead of ignoring the risk, was a decade ahead of its time, and also spoke to the sexual aspects of her own life.

The Simon family’s animals were a big part of Carly’s childhood. Carly’s Scottish terrier, Laurie Brown, was very dear to her and inspired an early dog ditty, “Lorelei Brown.” Lucy’s dog, a terrier called Bascomb, suffered from seizures and inspired Lucy’s caring and maternal instincts. (The family accused Lucy of spoiling Bascomb.) Peter had a mutt called Besty, because her owner thought she was the best dog. Prowling the house were a variety of cats, including Guarder, Slinky, and Magellan. The comforting presence of these and other pets was one of the touchstones of Carly’s somewhat fraught adolescence.

Odetta Holmes, Carly Simon’s idol, had released her first album,
The Tin Angel
, in 1954. A stolid black Alabama native (born in 1930) with a big guitar sound and a burnished female baritone voice, Odetta sang an almost operatic mix of blues songs, southern ballads, and old spirituals with the moral authority of an African American priestess. By 1958 she was a favorite in the Greenwich Village coffeehouses and
folk clubs, and would soon be opening for superstar Harry Belafonte, and then headlining on the lucrative college concert circuit along with the Kingston Trio. (Bob Dylan later wrote that Odetta inspired him, in 1958, to switch from rock and roll to folk music.) Carly studied Odetta’s 1957 album,
At the Gate of Horn,
and realized that her own deep singing voice matched Odetta’s almost perfectly. This was a major inspiration, and Carly spent many nights sitting on her bed, the door closed, singing along to her idol’s hypnotic recordings. Andrea Simon said later that she used to eavesdrop outside Carly’s bedroom, tearful with joy as Carly sang along to Odetta’s records—in perfect harmony. (Carly’s high school yearbook for her senior year described her as “Riverdale’s answer to Odetta.”)

Carly: “I remember, in those days, Lucy sitting on her bed with her guitar. She had a turntable on her bureau with an LP playing. It might’ve been Pete Seeger. It might have been Harry Belafonte. She was trying to imitate what the sounds were. She taught me the C-chord and the other two chords she knew—she was excited to share them with me—and then we switched the guitar back and forth… until I was finally on the subway down to Manny’s on 48th Street, with thirty five dollars, to buy a guitar of my own. We were young and malleable, and willing to get our fingers calloused and dirty.”

Carly loved the way she and Lucy sounded when they sang together. She thought there was something ineffable in Lucy’s sweet soprano voice, a pitch and a sound that she described as “Scottish”—an ethereal presence that perfectly balanced the deeper tones of her own contralto. Carly had always loved to sing with her sisters, especially the three-part choir arrangements for standards such as “Ave Maria” that Joey was bringing home from her college’s music library. But there was
something
about the way she and Lucy sounded, alone, that moved Carly deeply. “The sheer
excitement
when we blended our voices—it just thrilled me,” Carly said later on.

In 1959, Carly began taking guitar lessons at the Manhattan School of Music. She was also one of the best singers in her school,
and a soloist in the chorus of the musical that Riverdale put on every spring. That year, it was George and Ira Gershwin’s 1930
Girl Crazy
, featuring “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You.” Soon she began dating the show’s male lead, senior Tim Ratner, a tall and handsome high school hero type. One day Carly brought Tim over to the house and casually showed him the photo portrait of George Gershwin—inscribed to her parents—in its silver frame in the Simons’ living room. (When Andrea Simon got a load of this new boyfriend, and the gleam in Carly’s eye, was probably when she hauled her daughter to the doctor for that diaphragm.) Soon Tim and Carly were
the
campus sweethearts of ’59, two star-quality kids strolling hand in hand, evidently in love with each other. They sang show tunes, sang doo-wop, Danny and the Juniors, the Contours, “Get a Job.” Late at night, on “study dates,” they locked themselves in the Simons’ book-stuffed attic and stayed up until two in the morning, snuggling, listening to Frank Sinatra mournfully croon “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

Having fallen in love at sixteen, Carly found that her stammer had almost disappeared.

In the summer of 1959, Tim often visited Carly in Stamford. He saw the whole scene: the increasingly dysfunctional father, the highly organized (but preoccupied) mother, the glorious older sisters, the funny twelve-year-old kid brother who published a mimeographed family newsletter, the
Quaker Muffet Press
. It seemed to Tim that Carly’s mother had a much younger boyfriend living on the property, which generated chagrin in his girlfriend, who didn’t want to talk about her family, as if she were ashamed or embarrassed by them. At summer’s end, Tim went off to Dartmouth. Carly, still in high school, wrote to him often, but eventually met someone else.