More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon Read Online Free PDF Page A

avant-garde, inspiring opera based on American blues and spirituals.
    Gershwin thanked his friends for the praise and then asked a favor. Here are the lyrics for “Summertime.” Would Andrea mind singing them, with Dick playing piano? This way, Gershwin could hear the song for the first time with fresh ears. This was daunting, but Andrea said she’d give it a try. Dick ran through the piano arrangement once, and then Andrea began to sing.
    It didn’t work. “Summertime” has melodic curves that soar over operatic octaves, and Andrea wasn’t much of a sight reader. Then she went off-key, and Dick banged the keyboard. “No darling,” he scolded her, peevish. “Not like
that
. Like…
this
.” He played the passage again, but Andrea couldn’t get it right. It was the first time that Dick had ever expressed disappointment in her. She felt humiliated,but Gershwin consoled her, and told them he hadn’t realized that “Summertime” might be the most difficult thing to sing he had ever written.
    Two years later, in 1937, Gershwin died of a heart attack in Hollywood, not even forty years old. Dick and Andrea were as shocked as everyone at the loss of an indispensable American musical genius. An inscribed photograph of Gershwin reposed in a silver frame was in every Simon family living room in which Carly grew up.
    Andrea Simon’s first child, born in 1937, was named Joanna by her father, after his two mothers, Anna and Auntie Jo. (This name wasn’t Andrea’s first choice.) “Joey” was the first grandchild in the family, and was much doted on and fussed over until 1940, when a second daughter, Lucy, was born. World War II began for America in late 1941, and a third daughter, Carly Elizabeth Simon, was born toward its conclusion. Carly was named after Carly Wharton, the wife of one of Dick’s colleagues. During the war years, Andrea left the children with nannies while serving five days a week as a uniformed driver for senior military officers in New York. She later said that her preoccupied husband never learned of this job, and would have disapproved. She would arrive home before he did, change from uniform to house dress, and tell Dick the children had run her ragged all day.
    In 1944, Dick and Max sold Simon and Schuster to the mercantile tycoon Marshall Field III, who owned the
Chicago Sun-Times,
with the proviso that both men stay on to run the successful company. This sale made Dick Simon a millionaire, and the family’s situation now changed with this new wealth. First Dick bought an entire apartment building, at 130 West Eleventh Street, where he installed his growing family and those of his brothers and sister, now Mrs. Seligman. Andrea’s two brothers, Peter and Fred, also had flats, and both Chebe and Auntie Jo lived there, as did other Simon friends and retainers. Then Dick bought a large sporting estate in rural Stamford, Connecticut, about an hour’s drive north. The sixty-four-acre propertyfeatured a colonnaded mansion on Newfield Avenue, conveniently near the Merritt Parkway; a large swimming pool and a tennis court; mature orchards and playing fields where the dogs could run; a gentleman’s barn and cottages that Dick rented to favored S&S authors in the summertime. Andrea remade the Stamford estate into a home/ resort/ summer camp, with comfortable guest accommodation, and for the next fifteen years the Stamford house was a playground where Dick and Andrea’s children gamboled in the idyllic landscape and where Dick entertained celebrity authors such as Albert Einstein and Pearl Buck, star-quality professional athletes (Jackie Robinson; tennis hero Don Budge), famous academics (historian Louis Untermeyer was thought to be adequate in left field in family softball games), and musical friends from Broadway and the arts. A weekend invitation to the Simons’ house in Connecticut was a coveted prize in the New York of the late forties and early fifties. Andrea and a staff of cooks, nannies,