But “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” a catchy single, ravishingly sung, got on the radio in both New York and Boston and entered Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 chart at number seventy-three on April 25, 1964. The girls and their family were thrilled to hear the song broadcast on WMCA and WMGM in New York. Their booking agent now got more offers for them to perform; the record company exercised its option to cut a second Simon Sisters album; and the producers of Hootenanny offered them a slot on America’s premier music program of the day. This was big—national TV exposure during prime time on Saturday night, coast to coast—and the Simon Sisters were properly terrified.
They of course knew about the boycott of Hootenanny. Pete Seeger had been their kindergarten music teacher at the City and Country School, and they were loath to appear on the program, but their management and record label insisted. In late May 1964 they arrived at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where they would appear on a filmed Hootenanny bill headlined by the Smothers Brothers, supported by the Carter Family and the Cumberland Trio. The show’s stage manager, the future impresario Fred Weintraub, wanted the sisters to appear in cheerleader outfits, which they refused to do. They rehearsed their two numbers—“Winkin’” and (cheekily) Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!”—and nervously waited their turn to sing.
Carly: “Before our set, Lucy and I were both numb and shaking. Different parts of our anatomies shook and were numb. Lucy’s voice shook. My hands and knees shook, which made it hard to play the guitar or assume a graceful pose. We were so stiff, like scared mannequins, like young clenched fists with mouths and vocal chords.”
But after being introduced by the leering Tom and Dick Smothers, the Simon Sisters performed beautifully in their demure matching dresses and low heels, both girls strumming their Martin guitars. After their segment was filmed, the director told them they’d been sensational. Lucy remembered that, afterward, a smirking, fidgety Dickie Smothers sidled up to her and said, “You girls are sisters, and Tom and I are brothers, and maybe we could kind of team up, and maybe do something together sometime.” Lucy said that would be great, but Dickie interrupted. “Actually, I meant something… um… sexual.” But that didn’t happen.
The Simon Sisters pretty much stole the show when Hootenanny aired later that summer. The girls sang like lusty virgins and looked angelic, with a black-and-white, cathode-ray TV aura. Carly’s mellow, burnished harmonies descanted Lucy’s Highlands soprano perfectly. They were so purely musical that everyone who saw the program, and knew anything at all about music, noticed and remembered them. (One of these viewers was Jac Holzman, the boss of Elektra Records, which, along with Vanguard Records, was the premier folk label in America. Holzman had loved “Winkin’” when he’d heard it on Jonathan Schwartz’s radio show in New York, and now that he saw the Simon Sisters on television, he filed away their indelible image for possible future fruition.)
The Simon Sisters recorded their second album, Cuddlebug, in late June 1964. Production values were higher this time, with members of Count Basie’s orchestra playing on some of the sessions. The title track (cowritten by Alan Arkin of The Tarriers) is a sort of ironic bossa nova about a security blanket. “If You Go Down to the Water” is one of the songs Carly worked on in France with help from Nicky Delbanco. It has a gospel feel, with some tricky shifting tempi. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” is a lovely rendition of Pete Seeger’s adaptation of verses from the Book of Ecclesiastes (and follows Judy Collins’s version from the year before). “Ecoute Dans Le Vent” is “Blowin’ in the Wind” in French. “Hold Back the Branches” is pure art song (with an oboe solo), translated from the Spanish poet Lope de Vega and sung by Carly.
The rest of the album is filled out with traditional material: “Motherless Child” follows the a cappella version sung by Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers. “Dink’s Song” has a sultry lead vocal by Carly, while “No One to Tell My Troubles To” has a strong lead by Lucy. She also sings “If I Had a Ribbon Bow” in her sweetest solo voice. “My Fisherman, My Laddie O!” is an old Scottish ballad credited to the blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt. “Feuilles-Oh” is another of Lucy’s translations, this one from the song “Leaves,” by Lee Hays. The album concludes with a new song by Carly, “Pale Horse and Rider,” in a country-and-western arrangement that is almost proto-folk rock. The sisters were told that their new album would be released in the autumn of 1964.
Nick Delbanco came back to New York around then, his novel almost finished. He took Carly to one of the inexpensive French restaurants along West Forty-ninth Street, and they shared a celebratory bottle of wine from the Grasse region where they had lived. That night, for the first time since she returned home, Carly suffered the strange body tremors that had plagued her in France. She talked this over with her psychiatrist.
“It wasn’t difficult to put two and two together, and realize it was due to an allergy to the wine,” Carly later said. “There can be a lot of things that will spur a person into analysis, and for that reason I often distrust that a lot of my anxiety symptoms are purely psychosomatic. I learned to look for chemical, including hormonal, reasons why I may be feeling out of sorts, terribly depressed, or vaguely suicidal.”
Around this time, the Simon Sisters were forced to cancel a few engagements because Carly had a sore throat. Out came her tonsils, and Carly stopped singing for a month.
CARLY AND THE VANDELLAS
Summer 1964. Carly is dancing and singing in front of the mirror on the landing of her mother’s house in Riverdale while her brother photographs her pretending to be Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas. Carly admires Martha’s glacial cool on American Bandstand and would love to be her. Carly is moving to “Dancing in the Street,” a big jam on the radio in that summer of civil rights marches and voter registration drives in the segregated American South. Progress is in the air, predicted by Bob Dylan, the protean young prophet singing “the times, they are a-changin’.” President Johnson improbably gets the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress, and Martin Luther King Jr. will shortly receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent crusade against racial discrimination in America. Motown groups—the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops—are in the vanguard of this movement. “Dancing in the Street” is the summer’s anthem, a call to arms, an invitation across the nation. The song is a bridge between peoples, defusing the tensions of a nation struggling with its past and its present.
Carly Simon digs Martha Reeves, big time. She’d even settle for being a Vandella.
When Carly’s throat healed, the sisters moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where they played several times at the Mooncusser coffeehouse. The year-old venue presented mostly Boston-based folkies (Tom Rush, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, the Charles River Valley Boys) and some New York singers affiliated with Elektra Records (Carolyn Hester, Mark Spoelstra, Judy Collins). Carly was living again with Nicky, who was driving a truck for Poole’s Fish in Menemsha. That little fishing village had a seasonal general store called Seward’s that had famously been on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. One day Carly was buying a soda at Seward’s when her path on the store’s porch was blocked by a bunch of kids whom she vaguely recognized from the Vineyard music scene. One of them, a tall boy known to her as a good guitar player, was sixteen-year-old Jamie Taylor. Carly had seen him play at the Mooncusser’s hootenanny nights. “I heard a lot about James on the Vineyard in those days,” Carly said later, “although he was referred to as Jamie Taylor.” James and his crowd were younger than Carly and Lucy, so there was no interaction between them other than sideways glances, but Carly later remembered this particular Menemsha sighting in precise detail.
In August the Simon Sisters moved to the Berkshire hills in western Massachusetts for a two-week residency at the Music Inn, a hip summer resort in the rolling hills near Lenox that featured mainstream folk acts and jazz groups. Brooklyn-born Randy Weston was the resident bop pianist. The Simon Sisters were assigned to the venue’s smaller tavern/ nightspot,
the Potting Shed, where they would play seven nights a week for a fortnight. All went well—the sultry sisters attracted a rowdy crowd of young single men nightly—until Odetta came to headline at the main room, the Music Barn.
The girls were living in the staff dormitory, sharing a row of beds with the cooks, waitresses, and cleaners. Since they didn’t start to sing until ten o’clock, they were able to hear some of the talent passing through: Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins. Carly remembers the excitement in the dorm when Odetta was due to perform:
“We were—all of us in the dorm on Friday night before her show—so nervous and excited to have her in our midst. I knew by heart every song she’d recorded. I was famous in my high school for singing like her; they even put that in my senior yearbook. There was a buzz in our dorm about almost every act coming to the Music Barn, but I especially remember the buzz about the beautiful, regal, brilliant favorite singer of mine.”
Carly and Lucy attended Odetta’s concert at eight on Saturday night. Odetta came out with her big Dreadnought guitar, accompanied by Bill Lee on upright bass. Carly went into trance from the first booming note. “I remember being visited by things other than from this world. I remember believing how—someday—I might be as self-assured, and have my voice ring out in a real concert hall. I just loved this woman on stage.” Yet reality intruded on Carly’s reverie. “It was also hard to think that we would be singing shortly after Odetta, Lucy and I, in our matching peasant blouses and with our Scottish folk songs.”
Odetta’s concert ended at 9:30, leaving just enough time for the sisters to brush their hair, change into their stage clothes, and run over to the jam-packed Potting Shed, five minutes late for their first set. They unpacked their guitars and tried to catch their breath as they heard their introduction: “Ladies and gentlemen, and now… the angelic voices of the Simon Sisters!”
The girls got onstage to a warm welcome and tore into “Winkin’.” This got major applause, as it did every night. Carly: “Then I looked at the table closest to the stage. The room was heavy and warm with summer and smoke. Single men were whistling at us from the bar in the back. I looked at the front table again… Odetta! My god! She was there. How did she get there? Why? Oh God… Oh no… Oh, I’m blacking out. Lucy! I’m not kidding, I’m…”
Carly came to after a minute. Someone was taking her pulse. Someone else was taking her picture. “But Odetta was looking down on me and fanning me with a menu. She was asking me if I was alright. I felt so embarrassed being so weak in front of her. I got up so fast, and the energy of simple embarrassment lifted me onto the stage.
In Carly’s account of the incident, the Sisters performed their eight songs and Carly sang without fear. “It was perfect. It was a night like no other. I couldn’t even talk afterward.”
Lucy has a different memory. “The only time Carly really lost it was when we were booked into the Potting Shed in Lenox. We came onstage and were preparing to sing, and we looked down and Odetta was at a front table. Carly completely froze, and then she walked off. I did the set by myself. I think Carly came back and was able to do the encore—just.”
Cuddlebug was released in September and flopped. The Simon Sisters were depicted, according to Carly, “in dreadful pink sweaters and matching pink makeup.” No one bought this passé look, or the album either. The competition (from Motown and the British Invasion bands) to get on the radio that month was murderous. “Dancing in the Street” was number one, Manfred Mann’s “Doo Wah Diddy” was number 2, and the sisters didn’t stand a chance.
In early September the Simon Sisters were appearing at one of the coffeehouses on Yonge Street in Toronto. They were staying at the same semi-besieged hotel as the Beatles, who were playing for the first time in Canada. One of the Beatles’ entourage offered them tickets to the September 7 concert at Maple Leaf Gardens, the city’s hockey arena. The girls, at their first ever rock concert, were shocked at the lack of decorum.
Carly: “I think it was Dusty Springfield who opened for them. Everyone was being extremely rude and standing on their chairs and screaming. ‘WE WANT THE BEATLES!’ Well, great ladies of the theatre that we were, my sister and I looked annoyingly on those people. It only later I realized that the whole point of the concert is the electrical charge, and not to make contact with that is absurd.”
Then the sisters’ career stalled. There was talk of teaming up with the three talented Chapin brothers—Harry, Tom, and Steve (sons of a Big Band drummer)—to form a pop group like the New Christy Minstrels or the Serendipity Singers, to be called Brothers and Sisters, but nothing came of it. This was in the middle of the presidential election, Johnson versus Goldwater, which featured TV ads of mushroom clouds and the first American “advisers” in Vietnam.
Carly and the rest of her family voted for Lyndon Johnson.
Then Carly broke up with Nicky.
Carly [speaking in a 1972 interview]: “My first boyfriend, whom I was with for six years and I was very in love with, was a little bit threatened by my going into the music business. I remember him saying to me that when I was on stage and he was looking at me, he hated the fact that everyone else was also looking at me. I also think he was worried that I would meet somebody else out on the road, or I would be glamorized, or caught up in the whole glamorousness of the business, and that I wouldn’t be satisfied by a simple life anymore. In fact, that’s why we finally broke up.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve always had these men that I allowed to tyrannize me, or scare me out of a professional life. ‘Now Carly, you know that isn’t going to make you happy. It’ll ruin you.’ That kind of thing…. We finally broke up because I went into analysis and I realized that I wasn’t satisfied by being tyrannized. It’s not fair to say that he tyrannized me, but I realized that my will was being thwarted by giving in to him, all the time.”
Nicholas Delbanco’s first novel, The Martlet’s Tale, was published two years later, to enthusiastic reviews. The author’s photograph was taken by Peter Simon, and the novel was dedicated to his sister, Carly.
SWINGING LONDON
Summer 1965. The Rolling Stones’ pop art masterpiece “Satisfaction” (whose main riff is an inversion of “Dancing in the Street”) is the number one song in America. The Simon Sisters have some possible gigs in England, so Carly leaves for London to follow a charming British shoe salesman with whom she’s been infatuated in New York. Things don’t work out with the shoe guy, so instead she falls, quite madly, in love with the Simon Sisters’ potential English booking agent, the notorious London rake Willie Donaldson.
Willie was thirty but looked forty with his thinning hair and baggy suits. He was a popular, semisuccessful figure in London’s entertainment world, centered in Soho. He’d gone to a good public school, then to Cambridge, and then gravitated to the theater; he’d been one of the producers of the brilliant review Beyond the Fringe, which had launched the careers of Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett in London’s West End before migrating to a long run in New York. Willie had also been involved in bringing Bob Dylan to England for the first time, in 1964 (and can be seen in the background of the documentary Don’t Look Back, which documented Dylan’s 1965 UK tour). Willie was tall, blond, charming, and utterly hilarious. Long divorced, he was well-bred, but raffish and louche, unburdened by any great reputation for financial probity, and when he met Carly he was about to be dumped by his girlfriend, the actress Sarah Miles, who specialized in slatternly roles in noir British films such as The Servant. But Willie Donaldson’s most recent productions had flopped in London, and when Carly came into his life he was on something of a downward spiral. Anyone who knew Willie would have told Carly to stay away, far away, but she fell for him.
She first contacted him at his office at the Players and Writers Agency. Her diary noted that on July 14 she visited him at Sarah Miles’s apartment on Hasker Street. Carly herself was living in a small flat on Wilton Street for ten shillings a week, rolling
her drying hair over beer cans so it would be straight like the actress Julie Christie’s. She was attracted to Willie immediately, as he had many of the physical attributes of her father, including the thinning hair and slightly stooped bearing. Having broken up with Nicky and lost interest in the shoe salesman, as she noted on July 20, “I feel very close to Willie, even if he does call me ‘Simon’s Sister.’”
Carly was flattered that Willie seemed interested in her. He was the funniest man she’d ever met. “We were instantly attracted to one another’s wit, Willie’s being far more everything than mine, but me being a great audience for him.” Her diary for July 26 mentioned that Sarah Miles had kicked him out of her house and that he had moved into 6 Wilton Street, across from where Carly was staying. Diary entry from the end of July: “Willie has the body of an old man. What is it that I want? Oh Carly—watch out!”
By early August, Carly and Willie Donaldson were glued to each other. On the night of August 3 they roamed the streets of Mayfair and Soho in an all-night walk as Willie showed Carly around. With the summer sun rising over leafy St. James Park, Willie confessed to Carly that something in him was very damaged, but he felt that her love was helping him recover. Carly loved this. Nick had always been her protector, but now she felt she could heal Willie’s psychic wounds with her love, and this meant a lot to her. Willie was big on nicknames. He started calling Carly his “little frog footman,” for reasons she never quite understood. Then he asked her point-blank, half in jest, if she would marry him, and Carly immediately said yes, she would.
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Page 9