Girls Like Us

by Sheila Weller

  For Carly’s first six years, home was two fused apartments comprising the top floor of a gray six-story doorman building at 133 West Eleventh Street. Only twelve families shared it, including Elizabeth Simon Seligmann, her physician husband, Arthur, and their daughters, Mary and Jeanie. The building was a block away from the private school, City & Country, that the Seligmann girls and Simon girls attended. (Pete Seeger guest-taught in Carly’s kindergarten class, leading the children in the rousing folk songs that, since he was blacklisted, he could perform only offstage.) The five girls were always in each other’s bedrooms: cutting out paper dolls; bunched around Elizabeth as she read them Mary Poppins; being led by Andrea in rounds of charades; trading library books—Carly loved spunky Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—while eating the chocolate and vanilla ice cream cups, with pictures of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on the inside lids, they’d buy at nearby Rosie’s. There were so many girls in this Simon generation that upon the birth of a sixth to another brother, Alfred Simon quipped, referring to the ladies’ luncheon spot, “Congratulations on the latest daughter—what a boon for Schrafft’s.”

  “Because the men were always off working by day and sound asleep at night, it was a very girl-oriented household—especially in the summer, at Carly’s parents’ weekend house in Stamford,” says Jeanie Seligmann, “where one of those closets contained a stash of Andrea’s discarded evening gowns, mantillas, and high heels that we played dress-up in. All our mothers and aunts were around. It was a household so full of strong women, so nurturing and earth-motherly that, come to think of it, it’s a wonder none of us turned out to be lesbians.” But there was one sadistic woman in the household, Carly’s Scottish nanny, Nancy Anderson, who, in an effort to get her to stay put after lights out, “put stuffed animals under my bed and said they’d come out and bite me if I tried to get out of bed,” Carly recalls. Still, as was typical of prosperous Jewish-lite families of the time (on both coasts), someone was always at the living room piano, and Carly would go off to bed singing the love ballads of Richard Rodgers (also a favorite of Carole’s) and family friend Arthur Schwartz, father of Jonathan.

  Just after the turn of the decade, the family of six moved to a grand Georgian home on a high mound of lawn at 4701 Grosvenor Avenue, in the Fieldston neighborhood of Riverdale, a kind of suburb within the city. They also retained the Stamford estate. So there were two grand homes, in two leafy neighborhoods, forty-five minutes away from each other. Both houses overflowed with lived culture—“there were books everywhere, manuscripts everywhere, photo albums everywhere, records everywhere,” the youngest Simon sibling, Peter, recalled recently—and with the makers of culture, including Irwin Shaw, Will and Ariel Durant, bridge master Charles Goren, poet Louis Untermeyer, myriad other writers and scholars, and once, even, Albert Einstein. Each of the children got his or her own room in the Grosvenor house. Carly’s was small and low-ceilinged with a single bed, in contrast to Lucy’s larger one, which was watched over by two grizzled mutts that the family called their “Manchester Guardians,” after the English newspaper.

  The early 1950s was the era of three-martini-lunching Manhattan warriors: sleek, well-bred men, train-commuting from the suburbs to do battle in the world of advertising and publishing by day, kings of their castles at night. Dick Simon discovered and published the novel that defined that era—Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit—and Simon himself lived an only slightly more bohemian version of the life the book described, a life in which only men, give or take a few brittle “career women,” powered the media business; in which wives were highball-proffering, Claire McCardell–clad soother-hostesses; in which children were bathed and in their pajamas (Dr. Dentons and flowery nightgowns, for the Simon kids) promptly after dinner. “Dick made it understood that he was to receive certain attentions,” Andrea Simon once said, “and one of them was: no children around when he came home from the office. He went to the library and closed the door.” Lucy Simon says today, “We were not heiresses. We grew up more with a sense of abandonment than privilege.”

  Carly was so sensitive to the precise amount of alone time she was able to wrest from this preoccupied man that, years later, she would be able to name the seasons of their singular closeness: spring and summer of 1952 and 1953. “We used to drive out to Ebbets Field almost every day the Dodgers were home, and watch them play,” she has recalled. “We’d sit and talk about RBIs, Texas Leaguers, and Carl Furillo’s batting average.” Andrea coached her in this talk. Carly sensed her mother felt insecure because of her high-school-only education—when Bernard Baruch or the Durants were over, she would race into the kitchen on some invented errand to avoid an intimidating conversation. But Andrea felt authoritative on matters of social charm, a confidence she imparted to her youngest daughter. Becoming the baseball expert for her father was something, Carly has said, that she did “to cultivate a relationship with [him]…I felt he didn’t love me. People have told me I’m wrong, but I didn’t feel it.”

  One night, in an act of daughterly coquetry—and during her obsession with Gone with the Wind—Carly asked her father, “Daddy, do you have any good-looking friends who could come to the house?” She was doing her very best Scarlett O’Hara (whom she idolized so much, relatives started calling her “Scarly”). Her father answered, “There’s a man coming today who, in fact, looks just like Clark Gable!” Taking him at his word, “I got so excited and got all dressed up, put on makeup—the works. When the dinner guest showed up, I came down the stairs Scarlett O’Hara style, and he was just a little old man with glasses. I saw my father laughing at me.”

  The pecking order among the Simon girls was clear. The two older sisters were the beauties, and each in her own distinct way: “Joey the glamorous and Lucy the lovely,” says Ellen Wise Questel. Joey, with her perfectly coiffed pageboy and her precociously made-up face, was elegant, queenly, headed for a career in opera and already acting the diva. Lucy was “almost comic-book beautiful,” Carly’s friend Jessica Hoffmann Davis recalls; “the most conventionally pretty of the sisters,” says Tim Ratner, who would soon be Carly’s boyfriend. But Lucy was so nice, you couldn’t hate her for her beauty. She was “saintly,” says Jeanie Seligmann; “demure,” Carly has said. Lucy “please[d] people,” Jonathan Schwartz noted, and, he observed, Lucy was “their father’s favorite.”

  “It’s hard to overstate how much Carly was the ‘leftover’ sister, next to exotic, chic, interesting Joanna and perfect Lucy,” says Jessica Hoffmann Davis. “Carly was skinny and lanky and wore her sisters’ clothes. She never thought she fit in anywhere, a feeling that led to this deep longing to be an insider, something that, despite all outward appearances, she never thinks she achieved.” “I [was] the gawky, awkward stutterer, which is how I sometimes see myself still,” Carly says today.

  In a photo of all four children, taken by their father, eight- or nine-year-old Carly—all limbs and angles—leans in, boyishly splay-legged in sleeveless shirt and shorts: smirking, front-toothless, the hand of her jackknifed right arm smacking the air in a goofy salute. Her gawkiness is in striking contrast to her poised, feminine sisters. This was the Carly that Sloan Wilson saw on his many evenings at the Simons’. He wrote a memoir in which he called all the Simon women—except Carly—extremely attractive, which crushed her.

  One evening during the time that Carly felt closest to her father by way of those Ebbets Field afternoons, Richard Simon was raced to the hospital with a heart attack. Alarmed and desperately worried (would her father die?), Carly performed a ritual she’d heard was supposed to work: she knocked on wood for good luck. When her father survived the night, she interpreted that ritual as the difference between his life and death, and so for the next five years she knocked on her headboard, night table, and bedroom wall—500 knuckle-whacking times—every night before going to bed. Already stuttering, Carly was soon visited by the first of a lifelong string of neuroses: she became agoraphobic, her stomach knotting up and her th
roat constricting when she left for school each morning. Panic attacks left her shaking. Andrea sent her to a psychiatrist, which meant being excused from class at Fieldston School for two hours every Tuesday and Thursday. (The teacher told her classmates her absences were because she was “complicated.”)

  Richard Simon’s heart attack led to progressive cardiovascular disease. Increasingly disabled—and eventually subject to delirium—he retreated to the shadows, playing his Chopin (sometimes easing onto the piano bench next to Carly while she was practicing a Schubert sonata and expertly taking over the piece). “Joey and Lucy got more of the vivid, attentive Uncle Dickie; by the time Carly was ready to perceive him, he was much less functioning,” Jeanie Seligmann says. “Carly’s relationship with him was never totally established” by the time he started fading into ill health, Lucy Simon has said.

  Despite Carly’s phobias, her deep worry for her father’s health, and her sense of being overshadowed by her dazzling sisters—or perhaps in reaction to those things—she seized on and burnished two personal assets. The first one was performing. “Joey and Lucy had nice singing voices, but Carly was amazing; Carly was lit from within—she was a performer from day one,” says Jeanie. In her small bedroom, Carly would sing songs into her small handheld mirror, imagining herself performing a movie score. At the family recitals that Andrea endlessly staged, Carly (inspired by her Uncle Peter’s girlfriend, singer Betty Ann Grove, who was often around) would belt out the bouncy Teresa Brewer hit “Music, Music, Music” (“Put a-noth-er nick-el in, in the nick-el-o-de-on…”) and Rosemary Clooney’s vampy, suggestive “Come on-a My House”—singing both songs “with demonic energy,” Jeanie recalls, “but like a grown-up, despite the fact that she was missing two teeth. Everybody thought she was a very special talent. On our drives up to Martha’s Vineyard, where my parents had a house, Carly would tell such funny stories from the backseat, my father almost drove off the road, he was laughing so hard.”

  Carly’s other offensive line was sexuality. Preadolescent Carly loved the word “sexpot” even before she knew what it meant; and she was so curious about menstruation that one day, enlisting Jeanie as her partner in crime, she rummaged through the maids’ rooms at the Stamford estate, rooting in the wastebaskets for their soiled sanitary napkins—“and there was something exciting when we found them,” admits Jeanie. But nothing matched the celebration that occurred—at Andrea’s insistence—on that sparkling summer day when Carly got her own long-awaited period. As if taking the coded term “I fell off the roof” to new literalness, Andrea grandly announced a rooftop toast to the moon. Champagne bottle and three flute glasses in hand, Andrea rustled Carly and Jeanie up to a flat area atop the Stamford house, gazed into the heavens, and raised her goblet to the celestial clock of the menstrual cycle—Carly had become a woman!—after which the girls took sips of the bubbly alcohol.

  In seventh grade, Carly transferred to Riverdale Country Day Girls’ School, a half mile up the leafy, mansion-lined road from Fieldston. Jessica Hoffmann was the other tall girl at the back of the line there. She had transferred from the nearby private school her mother owned and ran, the Hoffmann School; Jessica and her family lived in the apartment above the classrooms. Who, Jessica wondered, on that first day of seventh grade, was this “very tall, very skinny girl, her clothes a little too small,” lined up next to her? “She looked like she would trip over her hundred-feet-long legs; she looked like she was wearing somebody’s hand-me-downs, which she probably was. Her teeth were fabulous—big, wonderful front teeth with a space in between,” which meant, at lunch, “when she laughed, she would spit her milk across the room. She would start laughing and—pshew!!—it would be a fountain.” Jessica viewed this “very funny, very cool and offbeat” girl as being as out of place as she was.

  Where Fieldston had been liberal, Riverdale in the 1950s was starchy and pious. The girls—who wore pale, circle-pinned Shetlands over Oxford shirts tucked into gray pleated skirts—took their lunch at small tables, and when the teacher sat down (the better to monitor manners that were expected to be impeccable), a dozen penny-loafered feet slapped the floor as the girls stood at attention—the same way they popped up from their school desks whenever a teacher entered a classroom. At assemblies the girls sang the school anthem: “It is the spirit that quickeneth, thus sayeth the Lord…and thus sayeth Life, confirming the Word. This truth, O Riverdale, help us live!”

  Both Carly and Jessica had a Christian mother and a Jewish father; in the mid-1950s that latter fact mattered to society gentiles on guard against a perceived stealth invasion by Jews who might “pass.” So when Jessica and Carly were the only girls in the class not invited to a dance at Riverdale’s Christ Church, Andrea Simon, now a civil rights activist, was quietly outraged. So was Jessica’s mother. Both women goaded the head of the school to complain to the church; Jessica and Carly were invited to its next dance.

  Once the school dance hurdle was crossed, dancing school became the girls’ shared bête noire. They were both so tall that none of the boys asked them to dance, so every week Carly and Jessica were left to dance with Mr. Yule and Mrs. Yule, the near-geriatric instructors. “Dancing with Mrs. Yule was the deepest humiliation,” Jessica recalls. Carly was still stuttering (in a year or two she’d have conquered it)—and “with the stuttering, and her spitting milk through her big-spaced teeth, and her curly hair and too-small dresses, she was almost a match to me, with my too-short Buster Brown bangs and terrible skin and braces.” Both girls were obsessed with keeping their hair straight—“Carly kept two brushes in her coat pocket; we ironed our hair, we used big rollers…” Carly dealt with her awe at her older sisters’ beauty through gossip: she passed notes to Jessica about who Lucy was dating and whether or not they made out.

  Next to Jessica’s apartment, Carly’s house was a castle—a castle full of music. “I remember walking up the path to Carly’s house and hearing this beautiful, incredible music…her father playing. I sat on the step, listening. The door opened, it was him. I was embarrassed to be sitting there. Like my father, he was very tall. Of all the daughters, Carly looked the most like him.” From Richard’s classical piano, to Joey’s opera, to the after-dinner standards and light-opera songfests, “the musicalness of Carly’s home was a standout,” Jessica says. “There was always someone singing instead of speaking in the house, and everyone knew all the words to Eugene Field’s poems and everyone had a great voice—harmony singing was a group activity, like sports in other families.”

  Jessica was impressed that Carly’s mother was an activist; Andrea had started a campaign to force the town of Stamford to sell a house to her friends Rachel and Jackie Robinson, an ambitious goal at a time when adjacent Darien still had anti-Jewish covenants. When the legendary Brooklyn Dodger and his wife couldn’t find anything in Stamford “available” for purchase, Andrea announced to the real estate agents that she would assemble a group of clergymen to picket their offices. A home for the Robinsons materialized.

  Somewhere between Carly’s tenth and twelfth birthday—as her father, who had never relinquished his emotional closeness to Auntie Jo, slipped into seriously ill health—Andrea hired a young Columbia University scholarship student named Ronnie Klinzing to be a companion and baseball and tennis coach for Peter. Her son was awash in a sea of women, and Andrea believed he felt at least passively neglected by his infirm father. (“I can count on one hand the number of times we did anything together,” Peter Simon, today a photographer specializing in landscapes after an eclectic photography career, recently said of him.) Ronnie Klinzing had a husky, chiseled handsomeness, reminding Carly of Rock Hudson. When Jeanie Seligmann saw Ronnie on the relatively recent occasion of Peter Simon’s birthday, she was reminded of how “really very magnetically sexy he was,” a quality that must have been much more intense when he was a college student. He also had a robust voice. Sometimes he stood at the Simon piano, during the family musicales, singing Kurt Weill. Ronnie lived at the Columbia d
orms and commuted to the Riverdale house on weekdays. He had his own room at the Stamford house on weekends and in the summer.

  But was Ronnie’s true purpose merely role modeling for Peter? One day, Carly’s older sisters discovered not. Behind a dresser in a bathroom next to Ronnie’s bedroom was a passageway that led to a closet in Andrea’s bedroom. When Joey confronted her mother with the suspicion that Ronnie was her lover, Andrea did not deny it.

  So here was Andrea Simon—whose mother had slept with her boyfriend and whose husband had fallen in love with the older woman who had been his siblings’ surrogate mother—implanting in her house a lover young enough to be the beau of any of her daughters. It was at once stunning and unsurprising. “Carly was very confused and troubled by the revelation of her mother’s affair with Ronnie,” remembers Jessica. “She didn’t understand it.” For her part, Jessica—upon hearing the true nature of the relationship—earnestly reported to her school-principal mother, “Mrs. Simon has a…paramour,” to which Mrs. Hoffmann bemusedly huffed, “You’re not supposed to know what a paramour is!” Jeanie Seligmann remembers that, at age twelve, “Carly hated Ronnie with a passion.” She devised a code name for him—“Hark”—after the wicked duke/henchman in James Thurber’s fable The Thirteen Clocks. One day, the girls ceremonially recited, “Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark / The duke has found a kitten,” as Carly pulled Jeanie into Ronnie’s room, closed the door, and opened his dresser drawers. She rummaged around until she found what she was looking to sabotage: Ronnie’s jockstrap! She whipped it into the air. The bedroom door sprang open. Ronnie caught Carly red-handed. He made a mock-lunge for both girls but treated the incident with good humor.