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

by Stephen Davis

  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.

  “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.”

  IDYLLS OF STAMFORD

  The 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.”

  THE RONNIE MATERIAL

  During 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.