Read Online More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon by Stephen Davis - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Davis
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put the rhymes to a melody with the guitar chords I knew, and turned it into a song. I wrote out the melody, sitting on my bed, and I distinctly remember Carly sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, watching me intently as I sang the poem for the first time.
“So now I had this song, and instead of reciting it like the others, I got up in front of the class with my guitar and sang it. The other kids liked it and clapped, and the teacher gave me a good grade. So that’s really where the Simon Sisters started out.”
September 1956. Dick Simon rejoined his family at home in Riverdale. The Dodgers won the National League Pennant, and were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series. Publishing tycoon Marshall Field III died, and Simon and Schuster was bought back fromField’s estate by Max Schuster and other partners in a deal that did not include Dick Simon. Historians of the American publishing industry who have scrutinized this dirty deal guess that S&S executives excluded the cofounder of the firm because he was profoundly demoralized by both ill health and a much-diminished role in the company. Max Schuster’s attorney later claimed (in 1989) that Dick Simon himself chose not to buy in, and so the company’s executives went ahead without him.
Even somewhat debilitated, Dick continued to publish important and successful books, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
The
Decisive Moment
and Philippe Halsman’s
The Jump Book,
which caught celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe (and Dick Simon) in midair. But at home Dick, at the age of fifty-seven, was a semi-invalid who worried that his career was over.
“My husband was full of anxieties, all his life,” Andrea Simon said later. “He suffered a great deal from them. He worried a lot, largely about his business. It took a lot out of him.”
Frank Sinatra’s brilliant, disconsolate
Wee Small Hours
album was huge on the Simon household’s turntables. (Carly used to listen to it, lying facedown on her bed, several times in a row.) Lucy played her guitar in her bedroom along to records by their old teacher Pete Seeger, sometimes recorded by brother Peter on the family’s new wire recorder. Carly Simon’s earliest recordings date from this period. And now Carly wanted her own guitar.
Dick Simon had another heart attack in 1957, but one less serious than the first. In the evenings, he sat in his bedroom quietly smoking. Then he had a minor stroke that left him unable to sleep. At night the family could hear him moving restlessly around the house in his bathrobe, turning off lights, before closing his bedroom door. Carly kept knocking on the bedpost and praying to God that her father wouldn’t die before he learned to love her.
H IGH S CHOOL M USICAL
I n 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. The Simon family took this very hard.
Carly Simon started high school, having left Fieldston, along with her younger brother, for the more traditional Riverdale Country School. This large private academy was at the time split into separate schools for boys and girls, so Carly was thrown into an unfamiliar, mostly female milieu. There were some social tremors at first, as she found it difficult to fit in with her new classmates, was considered too tall for the “social” private dancing classes, and pointedly wasn’t invited to a couple of parties. There were murmurs of anti-Semitism, even though the Simons weren’t really Jewish. Andrea used her considerable diplomatic skills to smooth this over. Carly soon made friends and began to fit into Riverdale’s preppy, late-fifties scene, using her comedienne’s skills to make people like her—for example, by laughing so hard in the lunchroom that her mouthful of milk would spritz through her prominent teeth and spray across the room, making everyone else laugh as well.
By then, as fourteen turned to fifteen, the disparaging terms
gawky
and
awkward
and
gangly
weren’t being used to describe Carly Simon anymore.
“So now I had this song, and instead of reciting it like the others, I got up in front of the class with my guitar and sang it. The other kids liked it and clapped, and the teacher gave me a good grade. So that’s really where the Simon Sisters started out.”
September 1956. Dick Simon rejoined his family at home in Riverdale. The Dodgers won the National League Pennant, and were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series. Publishing tycoon Marshall Field III died, and Simon and Schuster was bought back fromField’s estate by Max Schuster and other partners in a deal that did not include Dick Simon. Historians of the American publishing industry who have scrutinized this dirty deal guess that S&S executives excluded the cofounder of the firm because he was profoundly demoralized by both ill health and a much-diminished role in the company. Max Schuster’s attorney later claimed (in 1989) that Dick Simon himself chose not to buy in, and so the company’s executives went ahead without him.
Even somewhat debilitated, Dick continued to publish important and successful books, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s
The
Decisive Moment
and Philippe Halsman’s
The Jump Book,
which caught celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe (and Dick Simon) in midair. But at home Dick, at the age of fifty-seven, was a semi-invalid who worried that his career was over.
“My husband was full of anxieties, all his life,” Andrea Simon said later. “He suffered a great deal from them. He worried a lot, largely about his business. It took a lot out of him.”
Frank Sinatra’s brilliant, disconsolate
Wee Small Hours
album was huge on the Simon household’s turntables. (Carly used to listen to it, lying facedown on her bed, several times in a row.) Lucy played her guitar in her bedroom along to records by their old teacher Pete Seeger, sometimes recorded by brother Peter on the family’s new wire recorder. Carly Simon’s earliest recordings date from this period. And now Carly wanted her own guitar.
Dick Simon had another heart attack in 1957, but one less serious than the first. In the evenings, he sat in his bedroom quietly smoking. Then he had a minor stroke that left him unable to sleep. At night the family could hear him moving restlessly around the house in his bathrobe, turning off lights, before closing his bedroom door. Carly kept knocking on the bedpost and praying to God that her father wouldn’t die before he learned to love her.
H IGH S CHOOL M USICAL
I n 1957 the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. The Simon family took this very hard.
Carly Simon started high school, having left Fieldston, along with her younger brother, for the more traditional Riverdale Country School. This large private academy was at the time split into separate schools for boys and girls, so Carly was thrown into an unfamiliar, mostly female milieu. There were some social tremors at first, as she found it difficult to fit in with her new classmates, was considered too tall for the “social” private dancing classes, and pointedly wasn’t invited to a couple of parties. There were murmurs of anti-Semitism, even though the Simons weren’t really Jewish. Andrea used her considerable diplomatic skills to smooth this over. Carly soon made friends and began to fit into Riverdale’s preppy, late-fifties scene, using her comedienne’s skills to make people like her—for example, by laughing so hard in the lunchroom that her mouthful of milk would spritz through her prominent teeth and spray across the room, making everyone else laugh as well.
By then, as fourteen turned to fifteen, the disparaging terms
gawky
and
awkward
and
gangly
weren’t being used to describe Carly Simon anymore.
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