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

housekeepers, gardeners, and chauffeurs pulled all this together, whatever was needed. “Publishing is very social,” she later recalled. “My husband, as they used to say, was a guest in his own house.” Dick’s intensely competitive card games, fueled with tobacco and gin and tonics, went late into the summer nights while the children slept upstairs. This was mostly bridge, and a variation of bridge called Fornication (also known as Oh Hell!), because the winner usually ended up screwing his opponents. Bandleader Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, was a regular at Dick’s card table during those years.
    “Our family had a house in Stamford,” Carly said much later. “The house had a large barn, a play barn with a stage, and we used to put on plays, most often musical productions. We rehearsed, had my mother’s old ball gowns and mantillas for costumes, lots and lots of hair and makeup. That’s really the way we got into music, my sisters and I. We put on ballets, all kinds of plays. And my older sister [Joey] wanted to be an actress, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be that, or a ballet dancer, or an opera singer. So one night atdinner, some famous writer asked Joey, who was maybe 12, which she wanted to be—actress, dancer, opera star—and she earnestly asked back, ‘Which one has more maids?’
    “This brought the house down. Someone told Joey that opera singers had the most maids. Joey began to study opera.”
    Carly Simon’s earliest memories are of these two family homes, the cozy brick building, smelling of home cooking, in the West Village; and the imposing but relaxed country house in Stamford. Unlike her two older sisters, Carly was an insecure baby, who then became a crying toddler who could find consolation only in the arms of the family’s housekeeper, Allie Brennan, who would rock crying Carly to bed when the child woke up, frightened by her troubled dreams.

B EHIND C LOSED D OORS

    G reenwich Village in the late 1940s: cobblestone streets, old redbrick buildings, leafy streets in September. The Richard Simons have the first television in the communal apartment building. The black-and-white screen is the size of a toaster. The kids watch
Howdy Doody
in the evenings. The adults watch Dodger games from Brooklyn and Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Carly follows her sisters to the City and Country School, a progressive private school favored by the neighborhood’s well-off bohemians and socialists. Carly is a head taller than the tallest boy, and this makes her self-conscious and nervous. In kindergarten her music teacher is Pete Seeger, who is earning a modest living teaching kids after being blacklisted from show business for his erstwhile membership in the American Communist Party. “He taught us all the old Lefty songs,” Carly recalls. “‘This Land Is Your Land.’ Woody Guthrie’s songs. ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ He played his guitar or his banjo, and we kids were just enthralled.”
    It was a relief to her when her brother was born, because she wasno longer the youngest in the family. Now the spotlight was directed elsewhere, yet Carly remained an awkward shadow of her two older sisters. She took ballet lessons when she was four, from Lucy’s teacher, but it didn’t work. “Actually, they kicked me out, because I stuck my tongue out to the side of my mouth, quite innocently and quirkily, while learning first, second, third, and especially fourth positions.” She entered the musical life of the family when she sang in Uncle Henry’s choir in their building at 133 West Eleventh Street. Henry Simon was the musical editor of Simon and Schuster and an authority on the history of the Metropolitan Opera. He took it upon himself to organize the Simon family into singing weekly rehearsals of classical pieces on Sunday afternoons. (The building’s Italian super was the lead tenor.) But Carly couldn’t keep a straight face during the rehearsals. She was