Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (11 page)

One night Joni looked up at the stars and started reciting her poetry for D'Arcy. “It wasn't the coolest thing to do, back then and there, to be writing or reciting poetry. But Joni looked at the sky, which on the prairie is so expansive—it goes on for miles. There's a sense that you can get
out,
that you can go
anywhere.
I viewed Joni as a tortured rebel; her drinking, a reaction to the fact that she was
way
too smart for this little-mind town she was in, where they sent the message: ‘Don't dream beyond this.'”

• • •

Around Joni's junior year she bought herself a $38 baritone ukulele and a Pete Seeger songbook. In truth, though, folk music wasn't inspiring her as much as 1950s scat singing. She had discovered Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and “they were,” as she has said, “my Beatles.” (Despite the general impression that Joni moved from folk to jazz only later in her career, serious musicologists—listening to the syncopation, three-plus-three-plus-two rhythms, and sophisticated swing rhythms found in some of Joni's earliest recorded songs—believe that, in a way, she was
always
a jazz artist.) She was in love with performing, but she had what people considered a “weird” (as several called it) squeaky voice, and she played the ukulele so much at the sleepovers at Joan Smith's house that, as Marie Brewster Jensen recalls, “I wanted to say, ‘Please, Joni, take your ukulele and
go home!
” One day Frankie McKitrick came to visit her from North Battleford. The two old friends sat in the Andersons' basement recreation room, “and Joni took out the ukulele and she said, ‘You gotta see what I'm doing! I'm so excited about it!'” Frank says, “And I'm thinking, ‘Wait here,
I'm
the musician;
you're
the artist.' She started singing and playing, and I really thought she wasn't very good at it. I said, ‘Joan! Stick to the art!' But she wasn't listening. She had her own idea, and she wasn't about to let go of it.”

From that point on, Joni would begin to (to use her own words) “bring home” the musical talent and ambition that both her grandmothers had urgently passed on to her.

Born in New York City—
Current Biography
gives June 25, 1945, as her birthdate—Carly Simon received her unique first name to honor her parents' close friend Caroline “Carly” Wharton, the grand-dame-like wife of theatrical lawyer John Wharton. Carly Elizabeth Simon's family was distinctive, and not just because it was wealthy and cultured in the venerable New York tradition of first-night theatergoing, literary-lights friends, and glorious country houses. Rather, it was unusual because a thread of highly unconventional romance ran through the pasts of both of her parents and penetrated their marriage, with powerful complications. “Issues of deception and betrayal are tremendously central to the Simon family,” Carly's close friend Jake Brackman says. Carly's second husband, Jim Hart, puts it this way: “Carly grew up with no boundaries, other than the boundaries of sophistication. That's what I was there for—to give Carly the idea of boundaries.” (Boundaries were something that Hart, having trained for the Catholic priesthood, was in a very good position to impart.)

But both men's somewhat stern assessments miss something. Daring to love across lines of inappropriateness provides a vision of living by one's passions, a not-unuseful lesson in the 1950s, a decade that offered girls much more soul-flattening messages. The melodramas that Joanie Anderson watched in North Battleford movie theaters to counteract her family's and her milieu's stifling propriety, Carly Simon witnessed not on a movie screen but
within
her home. In her twenties Carly would personify a fusion of traits and inclinations—classiness
with
sexual voracity; almost soft-porn-like self-display
and
conscientious motherhood; tidy privilege
plus
ragged longing—that had previously been thought dichotomous but which, during the sparks-flying juncture of second-wave feminism with the sexual revolution, were suddenly seen as powerful, real, and
acceptable
for middle-class women. And the precedent for this all-too-human contradiction shimmered in the sad, bright air of a series of book-lined, Chopin-filled living rooms.

• • •

Carly's father, Richard Leo Simon, was the eldest of five children of prosperous German-Jewish feather-and-silk manufacturer Leo Simon and his wife, German-born Jew Anna Meier. The family was assimilated “almost to the point of being anti-Semitic; there was a lot of snobbery, and I don't think they ever set foot in a synagogue,” says Jeanie Seligmann, whose mother, Elizabeth Simon Seligmann, was Richard's younger sister. (Brothers Henry, Alfred, and George were born in between the two; Leo and Anna named all five of their children for British monarchs.) “‘Compat,'” the grandchildren's nickname for Leo Simon, since first-grandchild Joanna could not pronounce “Grampa,” “would say things to his [own] children, while they were growing up, like, ‘Don't act like a kike.'” Despite the crude jargon and a message that sounds self-loathing to today's ears, in the assimilationist era of the first two decades of the twentieth century, that sentiment was shared by other socially ambitious German Jews for whom even Reform Judaism felt too ethnic. The Ethical Culture movement, formed in 1870 as an alternative spiritual body to Reform Judaism, called for (in the name of idealistic universalism) an abandonment of all traces of Jewish ethnicity; then as now, the movement stood for progressive politics. The elder Simons joined the group, even though its intellectual tone was unmet by the somewhat rough-hewn Leo. Richard Simon attended Ethical Culture School—Carly and her sisters would later briefly attend its other campus, Fieldston—then Columbia University. Eventually growing so tall (six feet four) that he towered over every man in a room, Richard had long fingers that enhanced his gift for piano. His brothers would become experts in music—loving, respectively, opera, American musical theater, and jazz—but only Richard was capable of a serious performing career. Still, after his World War I service, he would fall into work as a piano salesman and then become a successful book publisher, relegating his daily hours at the keyboard to the realm of private solace.

While Richard was growing up in his parents' proper West Eighty-sixth Street home, a frequent visitor was a German-speaking Swiss-born professional nurse named Jeannette “Jo” Hutmacher, who was Richard's mother's close friend and a helper with the children. Even before he was twenty, Richard, who had his pick of girls in his circle, grew infatuated with this uneducated woman eighteen years his senior. Ultimately, the two embarked upon a love affair and Richard Simon's first sexual experience. When Richard was in his late twenties, his mother died, and Jo immediately moved into the Simon house to care for the youngest children. Richard had long since moved out, and had formed with motor-trade magazine editor Max Schuster their eponymous publishing company. They'd started with crossword puzzles and hadn't yet made the great leap to literature and major nonfiction. It wasn't exactly as if the young man was in love with his own mother-substitute, but, even by liberal standards, Richard's ongoing involvement with Jo yielded an eyebrow-raising pairing. He even proposed marriage to her. But the older, service-class immigrant understood what her young lover was too privileged, and too romantic, to grasp. “Jo knew their marriage would be unacceptable,” Jeanie Seligmann says. “She was eighteen years older and of ‘inferior' social class; she didn't even have a high school education. She said, ‘I won't marry you because it won't be good for you—I'll hold you back.' Uncle Dickie was heartbroken; Jo made him very, very happy.”

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the young woman who would be Carly's mother, Andrea Louise Heinemann, was growing up alongside her brothers, Fred (“Dutch”) and Peter. Their German-born father had abandoned the family, and their Spanish-born Catholic mother, Asunción María Del Río Heinemann, was raising them on her own in a state of near-poverty but with an aura of glamour and culture. María, whom everyone called Chibie (pronounced Shee-bee), was one of those magical creatures of an earlier, self-made America. Exotic, intentionally cloaked in mystery, Chibie told people that she had been Thomas Mann's secretary (and maybe more than that…) and hinted that she'd had affairs with Fiorello La Guardia and perhaps even with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Bravado and illusion were her arts; “When I die,” she frequently warned her wider family, “you will know
nothing.
” She was definitely a boundary crosser. One day Andrea came home from school to find her mother in bed with one of her own boyfriends. Still, Chibie was a person of substance—intellectual, multilingual, literary; a perfect speller, always giving her grandchildren and nieces books of poetry—and despite that powerful breach of trust, mother and daughter were very close.

Chibie called herself “Moorish” and said she had African blood. (The Moors, from northwest Africa, invaded Spain in 711 and didn't leave until 1492.) Those who knew Carly's uncles, Peter Dean and Dutch Heinemann, say they possessed African features; in her youth, curly-haired Andrea was likened to Lena Horne. Carly enthusiastically believes Chibie's assertion about her lineage.

In 1934, Andrea, a switchboard operator at the now-thriving Simon & Schuster, caught her boss's eye. “Hello, little woman,” Simon said one morning, tipping his hat. She responded, flirtatiously, “Hello, big man.” Carly later wrote an evocative song about her parents' courtship, back when Manhattan was “carriage rides and matinees.”

Andrea was quite beautiful—with high cheekbones and a delicately sculpted nose, she resembled Katharine Hepburn—and she was tactile and captivating, touching people's hands, calling them “darlingest.” Simon proposed when he learned that his competition was circus impresario John North Ringling. (Carly would similarly use Mick Jagger to hasten her marriage to James Taylor.) She and Richard Simon married in 1935. The groom had immediate regrets. From his European honeymoon, he wrote to Jo Hutmacher, “I've made a terrible mistake.” But when the new husband visited his first love after he returned to New York, Jo, on moral grounds, refused a rekindling of their physical relationship; she would stay in Richard's life in the sidelined way to which she was accustomed. Richard's feelings for Jo were left to be expressed in nonsexual but powerful imprints: when his and Andrea's first child turned out to be a girl, she was named Joanna—the final two syllables for Richard's mother, Anna, and the first syllable in honor of Jo. “I must say, Andrea was a good sport to go along with that,” Jeanie Seligmann says. After Joanna (nicknamed Joey) came Lucy, Carly, and the sole boy, Richard Peter, always called Peter. During these years Simon & Schuster would invest in Pocket Books and pioneer the mass-market paperback, publishing Dorothy Parker, Agatha Christie, Emily Brontë, and Thornton Wilder in inexpensive form, as well as hardcover literature and nonfiction.

Jo Hutmacher became “Auntie Jo” to the Simon children, and Auntie Jo and Andrea's mother, Chibie, became roommates. They lived for many years in an apartment owned by the Simons—the wise, simple Swiss nurse who'd turned down marriage to Richard Simon and the divalike intellectual whose daughter was making a glamorous life with him. This female Odd Couple had a fine old time watching
The Honeymooners
in their bathrobes at night. Richard Simon visited Jo often; she was his confidante. Most families don't start with such melodrama: rivals living as roommates, de-eroticized ex-lovers close at hand, wives so ripe for anger. It was within this nest of potentially explosive emotions—all wrapped up in taste, wealth, intelligence, and enterprise—that Carly Simon was nurtured.

Andrea's detractors (and there were several in the Simon family) looked askance at what they considered her slipshod attention to maternal detail. She was often mysteriously dashing off somewhere (without telling her husband, she drove an emergency ambulance during World War II), forgetting to wash her daughters' hair and sew errant buttons on their coats. But Joey, Lucy, and Carly today believe that Andrea was a good mother; latter-day defenders of Andrea Simon contend that her new husband's immediate outreach to Jo had placed her at a disadvantage right from the start, justifying whatever private-space-carving was necessary to keep her in emotional fighting form to manage, with aplomb, the increasingly large family. Jim Hart, who became close with Andrea through marriage to Carly (Andrea never bypassed the chance to charm a handsome man), says, “Andi tried hard to remake what was unacceptable”—the fact that her husband retained affection for another woman—“by suppressing it, and in whatever way she could. Otherwise, she couldn't have proceeded to become this incredibly positive force in her children's lives.” Radio personality Jonathan Schwartz, who as a teenager spent a great deal of time with the Simons, describes in his memoir,
All in Good Time,
Andrea moving with “joy and energy” about the kitchen in the weekend house in Stamford, Connecticut (a magical estate of nineteen rooms on sixty-four acres, with gardens, pool, and tennis court; frequent guests included Jackie and Rachel Robinson, Random House editor Bennett Cerf, and Benny Goodman). Andrea was “a mother-director-chef: a hummingbird, tasting, sipping, laughing with delight,” Schwartz recalled. “In her hair a hibiscus,…her blouse often a white ruffled peasant garment. She marveled at what the children said, her deep voice rising in appreciation. She was easy to thrill. Children in wet bathing suits did it. A thunderstorm did it. Strawberries, tomatoes, apples…did it.”

But underneath Andrea's joie de vivre lay a steely discipline, the same steely discipline shared by Carole's and Joni's mothers. Like theatrical, emotional Genie Klein—who grilled her mentally disabled son about abuse he may have suffered at Willowbrook, who intimidated the members of her daughter's first singing group, and who seemed to have wanted to have been the star that Carole became—and like proper, proud Myrtle Anderson, who vacuumed her garage daily and who, in the mid-1990s, called her middle-aged daughter's sharing of a hotel room with her boyfriend “disgrace[ful]”—Andrea Heinemann Simon was the dominating linchpin of the family. “She was a fireball—controlling, very bright, very organized,” says Tim Ratner, who became Carly's first boyfriend when she was fifteen.

For Carly's first six years, home was two fused apartments comprising the top floor of a gray six-story doorman building at 133 West Eleventh Street. Only twelve families shared it, including Elizabeth Simon Seligmann, her physician husband, Arthur, and their daughters, Mary and Jeanie. The building was a block away from the private school, City & Country, that the Seligmann girls and Simon girls attended. (Pete Seeger guest-taught in Carly's kindergarten class, leading the children in the rousing folk songs that, since he was blacklisted, he could perform only
off
stage.) The five girls were always in each other's bedrooms: cutting out paper dolls; bunched around Elizabeth as she read them
Mary Poppins
; being led by Andrea in rounds of charades; trading library books—Carly loved spunky Francie Nolan of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
—while eating the chocolate and vanilla ice cream cups, with pictures of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on the inside lids, they'd buy at nearby Rosie's. There were so many girls in this Simon generation that upon the birth of a sixth to another brother, Alfred Simon quipped, referring to the ladies' luncheon spot, “Congratulations on the latest daughter—what a boon for Schrafft's.”

“Because the men were always off working by day and sound asleep at night, it was a very girl-oriented household—especially in the summer, at Carly's parents' weekend house in Stamford,” says Jeanie Seligmann, “where one of those closets contained a stash of Andrea's discarded evening gowns, mantillas, and high heels that we played dress-up in. All our mothers and aunts were around. It was a household
so
full of strong women, so nurturing and earth-motherly that, come to think of it, it's a wonder none of us turned out to be lesbians.” But there was one sadistic woman in the household, Carly's Scottish nanny, Nancy Anderson, who, in an effort to get her to stay put after lights out, “put stuffed animals under my bed and said they'd come out and bite me if I tried to get out of bed,” Carly recalls. Still, as was typical of prosperous Jewish-lite families of the time (on both coasts), someone was always at the living room piano, and Carly would go off to bed singing the love ballads of Richard Rodgers (also a favorite of Carole's) and family friend Arthur Schwartz, father of Jonathan.