So Richard Simon’s untimely death had serious financial consequences for his family. No longer would they live in the lap of luxury. Inherently frugal, Andrea Simon was careful with money and toned down the Simon lifestyle almost immediately. The chauffeur, cooks, and other staff were let go. The lavish parties and country house weekends were over. With the Stamford estate sold, the Simons retreated to the comfortable Riverdale house and tried to get over the shock of losing the head of the family. And it wasn’t the only shock they received. Many of the obituaries emphasized Dick Simon’s precipitous decline at the expense of his considerable achievements. Bennett Cerf, the founder of rival publisher Random House, who had benefited from Dick’s friendship in the early days of his company, wrote a melancholy appreciation in the literary magazine Saturday Review that the family found embarrassing. Cerf opined that Richard Simon’s spirit had been broken by time and progress, and by the corporatization of publishing, once exclusively a family enterprise. He ended his eulogy: “Simon spent many of his last days huddled in a heavy topcoat in an overheated room, pulling down the shades and locking the doors. He had hit upon this method of shutting out death. It was the ingenious stratagem of a sorely troubled mind—but alas, it didn’t work.”
Andrea wanted to sue, but was talked out of it. “We were outraged,” Joanna said, “because it wasn’t really true. It was just Bennett twisting the knife because he was jealous of my father from their Columbia days. My father got all the girls and was much more popular.” And Simon and Schuster was a more successful company than Random House.
Carly began her senior year at Riverdale in September 1960. Nicky Delbanco went back to Cambridge, and during that academic year Carly visited him as often as she could, lugging her guitar case on the slow train to Boston, sometimes sneaking in a forbidden night in Nick’s rooms in Harvard Yard. “Carly was still shy around people back then,” Nick recalls, “but she was utterly transformed when she played her guitar.” He remembers her being very identified with Odetta, and belting out Odetta’s signature “I don’t wanna be no other womaaaan” at odd intervals, when in high spirits, which was more often than not, because Carly was truly goofy and uninhibited if she liked you.
Carly: “Meanwhile, Lucy was seriously pretending to be Joan Baez, and she had the soprano for it; and Joey was auditioning for professional operas, so in our family we had an Odetta, a Joan Baez, and an Elisabeth Schwarzkopf…. Odetta was my idol and I wanted to sing like her. I listened to Joan Baez’s records, and it didn’t seem possible that I could ever sound like her. Then, when I was a senior in high school, I heard Judy Collins.” This was the first album, A Maid of Constant Sorrow, released by the folk label Elektra Records, on which the sexier, twenty-two-year-old, Colorado-bred Collins challenged national sensation Joan Baez, barefoot darling of the Northeast’s Ivy League universities, for the throne of folk queen. “When you think you’re a singer yourself,” Carly continued, “the people who influence you are the people you sound like, people you can imitate; and Judy Collins, I thought I could sound like.”
With her boyfriend out of town, Carly had fewer distractions, and she got good grades. She spent hours miming to the radio in her bedroom mirror, swiveling her hips, wagging her finger to the female soul groups coming out of Philadelphia and Detroit. She fiddled with her hair, her look, experimenting with corsets, lift-up bras, and other devices, feeling that most of the time she looked like “a deformed zoo character.”
But, if she had wanted them, Carly could have had more dates than Audrey Hepburn. Still, she stayed true to brilliant writer Nicky Delbanco, to whom she looked—somewhat down—as a sort of protector.
In the spring of 1961, Carly was accepted to Sarah Lawrence, where Joey had gone to college. (By then, Lucy Simon had left Bennington to enroll at Cornell University’s nursing school.) The Riverdale yearbook noted that Carly Simon was rarely to be seen without her guitar. Next to her smiling, toothy yearbook photo was the encomium: “There are always crowds around Carly: admiring younger girls, distressed seniors, and bewitched lads. They know that she is sincere, that her emotions are free, and that she can feel and appreciate more deeply than many. Carly cares.”
During the summer of 1961, Carly toured Europe with cousin Jeanie Seligman, chaperoned by Jeanie’s parents. Nicky was hitching around the continent on his own, and met up with Carly in Paris and Rome, where they threw the prescribed three coins in the Fontana di Trevi.
Andrea Simon drove Carly to Sarah Lawrence in nearby Bronxville in September 1961. The prestigious all-girl college was located on a beautiful campus of quads and venerable buildings, and Carly immediately felt at home and at the same time thrilled to be away from her contentious real home. “I loved being a little college girl,” she said later. “I really loved my school, and I loved dormitory life. (I didn’t love the gym uniform, however.) I didn’t really want to sing, even when I was singing with my sister. I thought I could be married to a poetry professor at a small New England college. I’d serve espresso in little cups around an old farmhouse table where the napkins never matched. That was kind of life I was looking forward to.”
At the same time, Sarah Lawrence was academically rigorous, and the students were both highly motivated and competitive. Carly worked hard, especially on her language courses; she wanted to speak better French and Italian because she and Nicky were planning to live in Europe someday. It was her freshman language classes that actually caused Carly to write the first “songs” of her career.
“When I got to college, I was still stammering, feeling a little outclassed by all the budding divas among the Sarah Lawrence girls. And the only way I could remember the poetry we had to recite was to set it to music. This was after my mother had taught me to speak with rhythm. So I started adding my own melodies to these French and Italian poems with a little jazzy syncopation to them. I’d sing these in class—Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme il pleut sur la ville—that was the first one that got the melodic treatment. My classmates were entertained by my singing, and annoyed, some furious, that I was able to do it. I was lucky because I wasn’t really the scholarly type, and the other students were far superior in just about everything—other than the singing of romantic Italian verse.”
AMBITION AND THE DYLAN ENERGY
Andrea Simon made it very clear to her children that she expected them to follow in the footsteps of their father, in terms of having a successful career. For Andrea, ambition was a virtue to be pursued, achievement an imperative goal. She told her talented children that their father would have expected them to make their own way on the strengths of their considerable abilities. Andrea often quoted her Philadelphia hero Benjamin Franklin’s pithy maxims to make her point. (There was a huge bust of Franklin in the living room at Riverdale.)
In 1962, Joanna Simon made her debut at the New York City Opera in The Marriage of Figaro, and received glowing reviews.
Peter Simon inherited his father’s cameras and darkroom, and was ardently encouraged by his mother in pursuing a career in photography.
Lucy Simon was playing guitar and furiously working on songs. She was ambitious for a music career, and saw an opening between the mainstream folk stars: ethereal Joan Baez and earthy Judy Collins on the one hand, and newer performers such as Judy Henske and Carolyn Hester on the other. Lucy’s notion was to bring together original songs, lullabies, and traditional ballads in a gentle manner that tended more toward art song than folk music. She found her own soprano too unearthly and mannered for the sound she wanted to capture. But when she got her younger sister to sing with her, Lucy heard in their combined voices—hers tempered by Carly’s dusky, burnished contralto—exactly the tone she wanted to put forth in her songs. Even to ambitious Lucy, it was obvious that the Simon Sisters had a better chance at success than the shy and reticent Lucy going out and performing alone.
“I loved the way we sounded when we sang together at family gatherings,” says Carly, “but I didn’t want to make it my career…. T
he problem was that I didn’t have the same ambition that was engrained into my sisters and my brother. I was happy at school. I didn’t like singing in front of strangers. I didn’t want to be in the limelight. Why would I? It wasn’t something I craved, or even needed.”
Carly had started her second year at Sarah Lawrence in 1962. “Early on, I became attracted to capes, I think because I had a romantic nature. I’d always wanted to be a spy, so I fit in perfectly at Sarah Lawrence, where everyone wore capes and had pierced ears and was artsy…. There was a French singer, Françoise Hardy. She was the one. I used to gaze at her pictures in the magazines, and try to dress like her.
“But all the girls at school I idolized were funkier and more bohemian, you know? Hope Cooke became the queen of a Himalayan country. I wanted to be a bohemian—that was the life that appealed to me. I knew by then I wasn’t going to make the grade as a scholar. And I wasn’t going to fit in with the [post-debutante] WASPy enclave, although I… kind of… wanted to. I always associated the WASPy girls with perfectly straight hair. They could whip their heads around a fraction, and make a subtle, but enormous gesture…. Even their gym uniforms looked great on them. But I was a lankier sort, with frizzy hair. And their socks never slid down, but mine always did.”
Sometime that year, 1962, Carly and Nick saw François Truffaut’s new film, Jules and Jim, at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. This movie, now a classic of the French nouvelle vague, made an indelible impression upon Carly, who had already recognized something in herself: that the love of just one man might never be quite enough for her. Later, she went to see Jules and Jim again, and then again. Jeanne Moreau played Catherine, torn between her husband, Jules (Oskar Werner), and her lover, Jim. In the end Catherine kills herself and Jim in front of Jules in a desperate attempt at reconciling her conflicting emotions. The rhapsodic soundtrack music by Georges Delerue only made the film’s tragic ending feel worse.
Carly Simon was deeply affected by this, as were audiences throughout the Western world. “That film, Jules and Jim,” she said later (and this is crucial), “absolutely ensured that, for the rest of my life, I would always be part of a romantic triangle.”
Meanwhile, folk music was going nationwide. Commercial groups such as the Chad Mitchell Trio outsold rock-and-roll records. In 1962, Time magazine put Joan Baez on its cover as a symbol of a new generation that used music to validate the national heritage while protesting social injustice, especially the cause of civil rights. The outspoken twenty-two-year-old Baez created a stir by dismissing folk music’s stylized practitioners (Theo Bikel, Oscar Brand) as hopelessly passé and calling Harry Belafonte “Harry Bela-phony” for his overly dramatized calypsos—music that was now irrelevant to the new group of young troubadours taking over the Greenwich Village folk clubs. Chief among these was a recent arrival from Minnesota who styled himself “Bob Dylan.”
His real name was Robert Zimmerman, and he’d arrived in New York a year earlier, in 1961. He was a disciple of iconic dust bowl bard Woody Guthrie, then living in a hospital in New Jersey with an incurable degenerative disease. He visited Guthrie, received his blessing, and began to play the folk clubs—Gerde’s Folk City, the Gaslight, the Village Gate. He was an immediate sensation, at the age of twenty-one, for his intense verbal delivery, his jazz-inflected harmonica solos, and his passionate guitar playing. He attracted the attention of New York Times critic Robert Shelton, who pronounced him the next big thing—an enormous boost for Dylan’s career. First regarded as a folky harmonica virtuoso, he played on a Harry Belafonte recording session, then on another for Carolyn Hester. The legendary producer John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, not long after Robert Zimmerman legally changed his name to Bob Dylan (in August 1962) and signed a management contact with Albert Grossman, who also managed Peter, Paul and Mary and other stars of folk.
Carly and Lucy both bought the nervy, haunted, shivering album Bob Dylan when it was released in late 1962. The record sold only about five thousand copies, but (as they joke about the Velvet Underground) everyone who bought it would later start a band of their own. By early 1963, “Bobby,” as he was then known, was the elusive avatar of the East Coast folk music scene, appearing in Cambridge, New Haven, and Philadelphia as well as the Village. Within months, Dylan would become the protégé, then the lover, of Joan Baez, who over the next year would introduce the “difficult” young singer to her entranced, sold-out audiences as she toured the college concert circuit singing ballads, civil rights anthems, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and other visionary songs of this curly-headed genius from the North Country of Minnesota.
This was the beginning of the singer-songwriter movement, a new era when the most talented vocalists began to write their own songs, instead of relying on the talents of others. This protean era, the artistic flowering of the postwar generation, would produce a crowd of musical geniuses, and eventually inspire the career of one of the best singer-songwriters of them all.
THE SIMON SISTERS
In the spring of 1963 the young President Kennedy was being criticized for not doing enough to help the struggle for civil rights. Andrea Simon, ever the activist, was holding benefit parties for groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at her big brick house in Riverdale, and she often asked her daughters to sing for her well-heeled guests. At one of these events Lucy Simon rehearsed some songs with Carly, and the girls got an enthusiastic reception. Afterward, they were taken aside by their uncle Peter Dean. He was now a well-known talent agent who had been important to the early careers of singers Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee, and he understood the attractions and pitfalls of show business. Until then he had never been keen on promoting the enthusiasms and aspirations of his sister’s children, but now he heard something in Lucy and Carly that made him think again.
“You know,” he told his nieces, “you girls sound terrific together. I think you could actually have an act.” Uncle Pete pledged to Lucy that he would help her if she wanted to make a stab at his business.
This encouragement made Lucy Simon determined to get into the game. And she was determined to drag her charismatic but shy younger sister, kicking and screaming, along with her.
“I was so lucky to have Lucy to inspire me,” Carly said later. “We were raised together, you know, so we spoke alike, and therefore we phrased alike. This is so important in singing. Although Lucy is a high soprano, and I’m practically a baritone, we pronounced words the same, and this had an effect on the people who heard us. A big part of blending, really, is the pronunciation of words…. It’s actually very hard to get the words of a song to sync up so they blend in a harmonious way. That blend was what Lucy and I had together and, I have to say, it often sounded really great, even to us, the Simon Sisters, whose levels of self-esteem were never at what you could call a fever pitch.”
March 1963. Folk music’s dominance reached its American apogee with the ABC-TV series Hootenanny, broadcast nationally on Saturday nights. Each segment was filmed at a different college, with four acts delivering their songs at a breakneck pace until the show’s second season, when Hootenanny was extended to an hour. The show was controversial from its inception because ABC had blacklisted folk godfather Pete Seeger due to his left-wing politics, which engendered an ironclad boycott by Dylan; Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; and the Kingston Trio—all the folk stars who really interested the masses. Hootenanny made do with the commercial folk echelon: Ian and Sylvia, Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, the interracial Tarriers, the Limeliters, the Smothers Brothers, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Judy Collins, the Brothers Four, the New Christy Minstrels. The Chad Mitchell Trio managed to get a few quasi-protest songs on the show, such as “The John Birch Society,” a parody of the shadowy right-wing political lobby, a song banned from many radio stations. Pete Seeger was later invited on the show, but only if he signed a loyalty oath to the United States, and of course he refused. The boycott grew, so Hootenanny started
featuring comedians—Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Vaughn Meader, who did a dead-on impersonation of Jack Kennedy.
“We liked the Tarriers,” Carly remembered, “and we used to hang out with them because they were so funny. Marshall Brickman was in the group. [Brickman later co-wrote the Woody Allen films Annie Hall and Manhattan.] So was [actor] Alan Arkin.”
Lucy Simon wanted to sing “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod” on Hootenanny. Soon she would get her wish.
May 1963. When Carly finished her second year at Sarah Lawrence, she was press-ganged into the Simon Sisters by Lucy, who had been working on new versions of old songs. Lucy had “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” as it was now called, and arrangements for an assortment of traditional ballads and lullabies: “Delia,” a woman shot by her man; the spiritual “The Water Is Wide”; the old Scots ballad “Will You Go, Laddie?” Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” sounded incredible when Lucy and Carly sang it. So did Bob Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
This song had appeared, also in May 1963, on Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and was quickly received as an emergency telegram from the postwar generation. Dylan’s first album had been a rehash of old folk forms, but Freewheelin’ boasted eleven original songs informed by the civil rights struggle and a fear of nuclear war inspired by the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Girl from the North Country,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (to the ancient tune of “Lord Randall”), and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” changed the soul and spirit of the postwar American generation that summer, and established the twenty-two-year-old Dylan as the avatar of a new kind of performer, the singer-songwriter, an American balladeer who wrote his own material—sometimes romantic, sometimes topical—and performed with an authenticity shaped by influence and contact with the older, venerable ones who sang of the dust bowl and the grapes of wrath.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 7