More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon

by Stephen Davis

  A few months after I met Carly, I accompanied her mother and brother to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Cape Cod, where her family had spent many summers of her childhood. Andrea Simon wanted to buy a house on the island, and Peter and I kept her company while she was shown various properties. This was early June 1968.

  One day we were swimming at a spectacular beach called Zack’s Cliffs, then owned by the Hornblower family. Peter was trying to tune in a New York Mets baseball game on his portable radio when we heard a bulletin that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in Los Angeles while running for president. Suddenly a beautiful day turned into something else.

  That night we were all exhausted, and Peter went to bed early. Andrea and I stayed up, talking about what had happened that day. We were smoking, taking cigarettes from her pack of Kools on the kitchen table.

  “Andy,” I said, “I thought only black people smoke Kools.”

  Carly’s mother looked at me and laughed.

  “Why, dahling,” she said with a laugh, “don’t you know?—I am black.”

  I asked her to explain, and for the next hour or so Andrea Simon told me a story, a fantastic tale, about her mysterious grandmother, and the king of Spain.

  Part

  ____

  I

  ____

  LADY OF SPAIN

  In the time of King Alfonso XII, in the 1870s, a young Moroccan girl was working in one of the palaces in Madrid when a member of the royal family got her with child. No one would say who the father was. The king’s own legitimacy was often questioned, since his mother, Isabella II, had reputedly been profligate with her guardsmen before she was driven into exile.

  As often happened in cases where the royal family required discretion, the young maid was spirited out of the realm, in her case to Cuba, Spain’s thriving colonial possession across the Atlantic. There she gave birth to a daughter, and disappeared from history. The little girl was put up for adoption at a Catholic orphanage. Only the name her mother had called her, Chebe, and her nameless mother’s registered identity, “a Moor,” were left as clues as to whose child she was. (“Chebe” is very close to cheba, an endearing term for a young girl in Moroccan Arabic.) But the nuns gossiped that the little Moorish maid had indeed told them who the baby’s father was. The Mother Superior in Havana let it be known that the Sisters had something really special for the right family seeking to adopt a child.

  In any event, this possibly royal child was adopted in Cuba by a family called Del Rio and taken by steamer to New Orleans. Her name was now officially Elma Maria Del Rio, but somehow, inexplicably, the name Chebe stayed with her. Around the turn of the twentieth century, she grew into a beautiful young woman with curls around a cherubic face. By the time she was sixteen, she could speak five languages, not all that unusual in polyglot New Orleans. Before she was twenty she was married (or married off, thinks her eldest granddaughter) to a man from Philadelphia named Heinemann, who took her to live in that city’s leafy suburb Germantown.

  Chebe, as she was still called, then produced two sons, Fred and Peter. In 1909 her daughter, Andrea, was born. The family, nominally Catholic, lived with little money in a state of shabby gentility, and then was abandoned by Mr. Heinemann when Andrea was three years old. Genteel poverty followed, but Chebe insisted on certain standards, and while sometimes there wasn’t enough food on the table, they always had tickets to the opera and properly stylish clothes to wear. Sheebie was extremely secretive about herself, and where she came from. She told her children about the connection to a royal person of Spain, glamorizing her origins, but would never say anything more, possibly because that was all she’d learned, or could remember. (One family legend has her born in Valencia, Spain. In this telling, a maid was ordered to throw her off the ship carrying her and her mother to Cuba. The maid refused, or hid the child, and then presented her to the Cuban nuns.) When Andrea and her brothers begged for more information, Chebe would only smile and tell them, “When I die, you will know nothing about me. But… nothing!”

  Andrea Heinemann was a star from the beginning. Like her mother, she was petite, dark-skinned, with long curly brown hair and deep brown eyes. She had a sensational figure, was a natural athlete, and sang with a trilling soprano that enlivened many a night spent passing sheet music around the piano. Andrea left junior high school at fourteen to support her mother, working first at John Wanamaker’s opulent department store. Then, around 1930, having learned that her drunken husband could be found, literally, in the gutter, Chebe relocated to New York with her three children. Andrea quickly found work as a sales clerk at B. Altman, the great department store on Fifth Avenue. She rode the streetcar to work every day, and by the time the Great Depression began to shut down the American economy, she was the sole means of support for her mother, her brothers, and a boyfriend.

  Andrea was also a face in New York’s night life, a girl-about-town, popular in both bohemian circles in Greenwich Village and post-debutante society on the Upper East Side. She had an unusual style, pairing her mother’s elegant velvet dresses with saddle shoes and no makeup. She was so pretty, so funny, so intelligent, and sang like a lark ascending. She was sexy, the life of the party, great at games and outdoor sports, fun at the beach, and everyone loved her.

  Still, things got bad for Andrea and her family in 1933, as the Great Depression kicked in. The country was in a terrible slump, and the new president, Franklin Roosevelt—Andrea knew his playboy son Jimmy—was driving economic reforms that would change the country. Andrea’s hours at B. Altman got cut back. Through some musical friends, she took a job at H. Ditson and Company, the old music store on Thirty-fourth Street, off Fifth Avenue. There she waited on many of the great figures of Broadway and popular music, especially the hot young composer George Gershwin, a regular customer.

  “I liked working there,” she remembered, “selling sheet music and records and just talking about music. The only problem was that I was standing and walking, all day, and my feet hurt all the time. I think I weighed about ninety pounds.”

  Then one day, on her lunch hour, Andrea bumped into a friend named Jack Goodman, who was a young editor at Simon and Schuster, the famous publishing company. Jack asked Andrea how she was, and she told him that her feet were aching.

  “Jack then mentioned there was an opening at his company for a switchboard operator, with experience preferred. I said, ‘Oh Jack—anything to sit down.’ I told him I had no experience at operating a switchboard, but that I was absolutely brilliant at connecting with people. He suggested I come over that very afternoon and he would arrange an interview.

  “I couldn’t go to Simon and Schuster in my casual work clothes, so I went to B. Altman and borrowed something smart from a rack the store kept for employees who might need to change clothes. I went over to S&S, and told them that I was a telephoniste par excellence. Jack Goodman put in a good word, and the next day they told me I’d gotten the job.”

  That summer, Andrea started working at S&S, commuting to its Fifty-seventh Street offices via the Third Avenue elevated train. She learned the spaghetti cords of the switchboard system quickly, and soon was a popular and crucial employee. Jack Goodman introduced her to colleagues who, over time, became publishing legends, such as S&S co-founder Max Schuster and the marketing genius Nina Bourne, who was then secretary to the firm’s other cofounder, Richard Simon.

  Mr. Simon, Andrea noticed, wasn’t around the office as much as Mr. Schuster. He was always out meeting people, having long lunches with his authors, handling the social side of the business, while Mr. Schuster minded the shop. Judging by the large number of calls from young ladies that she directed to Mr. Simon’s office, Andrea inferred that the thirty-four-year-old publishing mogul was a serious ladies’ man-about-town. One day she put through a call to Mr. Simon from Mr. Gershwin, and discovered the two men were good friends.

  She finally met Dick Simon when the tall, balding, charismatic publisher came striding down
the hall one day and suddenly stopped by her switchboard. Andrea flashed her incandescent smile. He looked down at her for a second and said, “Hello, little woman.”

  She said, “Hello, big man.”

  “He was six foot four inches, you know,” Andrea recalled forty years later. “And right off the bat, when I saw Dick—the minute I looked at him—I knew that there was going to be something between Simon and me. And, God—was he handsome! Devastatingly handsome. Absolutely… beautiful. What is it, about those tall men?”

  THE PIANIST

  “Actually,” says Carly, “my father wanted to be a pianist more than he wanted to be a publisher.” This was from one of her earliest press interviews, in 1971. “It was just one of those flukes. His father was a businessman who said, ‘Now, sonny, you’ve got to be into business too.’ So my father started a publishing company with a friend of his from college, Max Schuster, but they weren’t sure what they wanted to publish. They rented an office on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, just one little room. Anyway, the story goes that they went out to lunch on the first day and had to hang a sign on the door that said Simon & Schuster, and they just decided, ‘What the hell? Books!’ So they were book publishers from then on. I don’t know how true it is, but that’s the story they told me.”

  Dick Simon was born Richard L. Simon in New York City in 1899. His father, Leo, was a prosperous merchant who imported rare feathers and silk ribbons to adorn the lavish hats that fashionable ladies wore in Edwardian times. The family lived in a town house on the Upper West Side. Dick’s mother, Anna, had three other sons and a daughter, and all five children were given liberal private educations—the family was Jewish but secular and assimilated; spiritual guidance was provided via the New York Society for Ethical Culture—and were exposed to the music of the era’s greatest concert halls. All the Simon brothers, except Dick, would have distinguished professional careers in some area of music. George Simon would be a talented drummer and jazz writer. Henry Simon was a musicologist and opera expert. Alfred Simon became a programmer on radio station WQXR. Their first cousin, Robert Simon, was the first music critic at the fledgling New Yorker magazine. But, then, Dick was the most talented musician in the family.

  He took to the piano and its classical literature with great passion and an incredible facility. He practiced every chance he could. He would go into raptures just talking about Beethoven and Wagner. Already tall by the time he was sixteen, with powerful hands and long fingers, he enjoyed a physical mastery of the mighty Steinway piano in the Simon living room, and constantly practiced the most difficult works of the German composers—Brahms, Schubert, Schumann. He would go into a trancelike state and play Chopin’s piano music for five hours at a time. Dick had ideas about serious piano studies in a proper conservatory. He was naturally charismatic, with ferocious energy and a serious, instinctive understanding of the piano repertoire. His teachers told him he could easily enjoy a professional career, but his father insisted he attend Columbia College instead. There he became expert in bridge, gin rummy, and other card games. He also developed into a talented amateur photographer.

  His mother died when Dick was eighteen, and it changed his life in many ways. In her final illness she had been taken care of by a Swiss woman named Josephine Hutsmacher, who had become a dear family friend. After his wife died, Leo Simon asked her to stay on and look after the family. Aunt Jo, as she was called, took Anna’s place at the age of about thirty-six, but not in Leo Simon’s bed. The bed she shared was Dick’s, as the attractive and intelligent immigrant spinster and the grieving younger man became lovers not long after Anna’s death. This intense relationship—Dick and Aunt Jo—would last through the whole of Richard Simon’s too-brief lifetime. At one point he asked her to marry him, and was turned down by the warm and loving but very practical woman.

  In 1922, with a fresh degree from Columbia College, Dick Simon again contemplated studying to become a concert pianist, but again he followed his father’s advice: this time that he get a job and support himself. The job he landed was with the Aeolian Piano Company, where he quickly became one of the firm’s star salesmen by dazzling potential customers in the showroom on Forty-second Street with rippling impromptus by Chopin and Liszt. He was au fait with all the latest music—Debussy, Ravel, Satie, George Gershwin. Dick Simon could make a piano flutter like the wings of a moth or chime like bells in a cathedral. He was that good.

  One day in 1923 he paid a sales call on an acquaintance, to try to sell him a piano. This was Max Schuster, whom he’d known at college. Schuster was about Dick’s age and had an interest in trade journals and stationery stores in Harlem and the Bronx. Simon and Schuster bonded over a new biography of Beethoven that Schuster had on his desk. Over several meetings the ambitious young men decided to go into publishing together, with Dick as the idea man and marketer and Max as the editorial presence. They raised eight thousand dollars from family and friends and opened the firm of Simon and Schuster on West Fifty-seventh Street in Midtown Manhattan in late 1924.

  Their very first product took off. At the time, in the Roaring Twenties, there was a craze for crossword puzzles, which appeared in the daily and Sunday newspapers. Dick had an aunt who was addicted to the puzzles; she often complained that she had to wait a whole day before the next puzzle appeared. Dick’s idea was to commission 50 new crossword puzzles and bundle them into a book, with a yellow pencil attached. Within a year S&S had sold 370,000 puzzle books and the young firm was a phenomenon in the staid world of publishing.

  Dick Simon was brimming with ideas, a razzle-dazzle marketer. He advertised his new books, individually, in newspapers and magazines. This was unheard of then, since books were expected to succeed by positive reviews, bookseller recommendations, and word of mouth. He wanted to put popular books between soft covers and sell them cheaply. He wanted to get his products out of stodgy bookstores and into populist dime stores. He persuaded the bridge expert Charles H. Coren to share his secrets, and the book Contract Bridge for Beginners sold 997,000 copies in the first year. He published Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which became a bible for salesmen and sold in the millions, for decades. Seeking to enter the juvenile market, Dick partnered with an obscure Wisconsin company, Western Publishing, and came up with Little Golden Books. S&S published popular novels such as James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and Will and Ariel Durant’s multivolume histories of philosophy, big books that were ordered by every public library in America. Robert Ripley’s highly popular Believe It or Not! was a major bestseller. Albert Einstein and Leon Trotsky were both signed up by Dick. Simon and Schuster is generally credited with pioneering the sales techniques of the modern publishing industry. When twenty-four-year-old Andrea Heinemann arrived at the company’s switchboard in 1933, S&S was the hottest mainstream publisher in New York, and Dick Simon was already a wealthy and influential man.

  MRS. SIMON AND SCHUSTER

  Andrea Heinemann, working the telephones at Simon and Schuster in 1933, began dating one of the firm’s writers. Neil Vanderbilt, author of Farewell to Fifth Avenue, was actually Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, the charming heir to one of America’s greatest fortunes. At the same time, Andrea was enjoying a flirtation with her boss, Dick Simon, who often looked into the switchboard/ reception area to see how she was getting along.

  Andrea remembered: “Neil would pick me up in his chauffeured Duesenberg, and we’d go to the Plaza Hotel, or the Ritz, the Biltmore—anywhere we could have dinner and dance. Neil was a great dancer and very attractive. He wasn’t my type at all, but at least I was eating well. These were hard times, you know, so eating out was a big attraction. The first time I requested a doggie bag for my untouched prime rib supper at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Neil was so mortified that I thought he would drop under the table.”

  “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.<
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  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.”