Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation (13 page)

Somewhere between Carly's tenth and twelfth birthday—as her father, who had never relinquished his emotional closeness to Auntie Jo, slipped into seriously ill health—Andrea hired a young Columbia University scholarship student named Ronnie Klinzing to be a companion and baseball and tennis coach for Peter. Her son was awash in a sea of women, and Andrea believed he felt at least passively neglected by his infirm father. (“I can count on one hand the number of times we did anything together,” Peter Simon, today a photographer specializing in landscapes after an eclectic photography career, recently said of him.) Ronnie Klinzing had a husky, chiseled handsomeness, reminding Carly of Rock Hudson. When Jeanie Seligmann saw Ronnie on the relatively recent occasion of Peter Simon's birthday, she was reminded of how “really very magnetically sexy he was,” a quality that must have been much more intense when he was a college student. He also had a robust voice. Sometimes he stood at the Simon piano, during the family musicales, singing Kurt Weill. Ronnie lived at the Columbia dorms and commuted to the Riverdale house on weekdays. He had his own room at the Stamford house on weekends and in the summer.

But was Ronnie's true purpose merely role modeling for Peter? One day, Carly's older sisters discovered not. Behind a dresser in a bathroom next to Ronnie's bedroom was a passageway that led to a closet in Andrea's bedroom. When Joey confronted her mother with the suspicion that Ronnie was her lover, Andrea did not deny it.

So here was Andrea Simon—whose mother had slept with her boyfriend and whose husband had fallen in love with the older woman who had been his siblings' surrogate mother—implanting in her house a lover young enough to be the beau of any of her daughters. It was at once stunning and unsurprising. “Carly was very confused and troubled by the revelation of her mother's affair with Ronnie,” remembers Jessica. “She didn't understand it.” For her part, Jessica—upon hearing the true nature of the relationship—earnestly reported to her school-principal mother, “Mrs. Simon has a…
paramour,
” to which Mrs. Hoffmann bemusedly huffed, “You're not supposed to know what a paramour
is!
” Jeanie Seligmann remembers that, at age twelve, “Carly hated Ronnie with a
passion.
” She devised a code name for him—“Hark”—after the wicked duke/henchman in James Thurber's fable
The Thirteen Clocks.
One day, the girls ceremonially recited, “Hark, Hark, the dogs do bark / The duke has found a kitten,” as Carly pulled Jeanie into Ronnie's room, closed the door, and opened his dresser drawers. She rummaged around until she found what she was looking to sabotage: Ronnie's jockstrap! She whipped it into the air. The bedroom door sprang open. Ronnie caught Carly red-handed. He made a mock-lunge for both girls but treated the incident with good humor.

Ronnie Klinzing would remain in the household for several years. In the family's complex equation of affection and need, hurt and compensation, Andrea now had, through her young lover, both a means of revenge against an emotionally unfaithful husband and a carnal reward for being the sole truly present parent. The musicales, sumptuous dinners, civil rights activism; the visits by the crazy uncles—Uncle Peter, Sam Cooke's early manager, would lead everyone in camp songs like “Down by the Riverside” and once took a whipped-cream-topped pie off the dinner table and smashed it in his face to get a laugh—all of this continued. But underneath this wholesome joie de vivre, Carly has said, the household vibrated “an atmosphere of erotica,” a “sexual haze…so thick you could cut it.”

It was another girl at Riverdale—Ellen Wise—to whom Carly drew close as third form turned to fourth form (Riverdale used the English nomenclature for junior high to high school matriculation), who most mirrored her feeling of being the neglected sibling. Small, blond Ellen, the daughter of worldly parents—a very wealthy father and a beautiful actress-turned-arts-benefactor mother—had a brother who was charismatic and manic depressive. He was the focal point of the family, leaving her emotionally marooned, just as Carly's glamorous sisters, her father's remoteness and illness, and, now, the riveting issue of Ronnie left Carly feeling sidelined. “I was aware that it felt chilly in the family for Carly—she felt neglected; I felt pain for her,” Ellen Wise Questel says. Ellen was tiny and Carly was tall, “so when we'd walk arm in arm, we looked like Mutt and Jeff, but we were very, very close—soul mates, best friends the way teenage girls need to have best friends. Those were not easy years for us.

“We were both a little adventurous in those years, in terms of our interest in boys—we were precocious. I remember Carly always being called sexy.” (Carly would later say, “People always said I had a kind of raw sexuality. Maybe it was my big mouth; maybe it was my long legs.”) The school had a dress-code enforcer, a Southern woman named Mrs. Rorbach who called everyone “honey chile” and stood by the school bus door and made all the girls close their eyes to see if they'd snuck on any verboten eyeliner or mascara. Mrs. Rorbach would often point to Carly's straight skirt and say, “Now,
this
is
too
tight, honey chile.” “Carly wasn't at all inhibited about her clothing,” Ellen says.

Carly was one of the first in her crowd to get birth control—to have it
offered
to her, by her mother. In 1958 and 1959, the fourth form girls at Riverdale Country Day School, who were otherwise so privileged—with their after-school trips to Bonwit's (which had a malt shop in its juniors department just for them and their fellow private-school girls); with their parents dashing out at night to benefits and Broadway openings—weren't any more liberated than the Madison High girls in Brooklyn or the Aden Bowman girls in Saskatoon. Officially, at least, “sex was an absolute taboo; it could ruin a girl's reputation. ‘Going all the way' was talked about, but nobody was very open about it and it wasn't clear who did what and who didn't,” says Ellen. Jessica recalls, “Mrs. Simon had gotten Carly a diaphragm—it was a
big
thing to have a diaphragm in high school—and Carly could give you the name of a gynecologist [who would fit a girl with a diaphragm], if you were one of the few girls in the class who were having relationships. Carly's mother was so ahead of her time: wanting to help
prevent
pregnancy, rather than ignore the risk. Mrs. Simon's progressive attitude helped Carly help the girls whose mothers were more ‘pristine' about [sex].” Andrea was, so to speak, Carly's friends' very own Margaret Sanger.

During her sophomore year, Carly acquired her first real boyfriend, a senior named Tim Ratner. Their romance bloomed during Riverdale's production of Gershwin's
Girl Crazy
(featuring “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm”), in which he was the male lead and she, a chorus soloist. “She was beautiful in her own quirky way,” Tim Ratner recalls. “And she had a great, self-deprecating sense of humor—she could make fun of herself.” Tim had been flirting with a “beautiful blond senior” in the play, he recalls, “and I was also occasionally distracted by the other pretty girl in the show.” But Carly, employing her lessons from Andrea, fastened on Tim, and Ellen recalls that “an incredible passionate young romance” ensued. “It was a romantic play, so it was an era of heady romance—of newness—for us.” The girls had moved from their Shetlands-and-Oxford-shirts to a more sophisticated look featuring dance clothes from Capezio and flats from Pappagallo. All of a sudden, awkward Carly became “Betty in
Archie and Veronica
—the
popular
girl,” Jessica laughs, adding that the next year Carly would be a cheerleader, chanting “Maroon and white! Fight! Fight!” for the football team. “Tim and Carly were a campus couple. Here was Timmy, so popular and handsome—tall, athletic, ruddy complexion, aquiline nose, great smile—and Carly, the best singer in the lower school. It was our own version of a
People
magazine story about two stars in a film who fall in love making a movie.”

Carly had just started taking guitar lessons; she and Jessica traveled to the Manhattan School of Music for them. Although Lucy, now in nursing school, had her ear tuned to the folk music that was suddenly replacing jazz as the cool music, Carly was still mostly in love with the classical music and standards that had long filled the family living room, and she regularly bought $1.50 balcony seats at Broadway theaters to hear it. Jonathan Schwartz, her big-brother figure, was now spinning standards as a disc jockey on WBAI. It was during the run of
Girl Crazy,
and the first weeks of her romance with Timmy, that Ellen saw Carly sitting on the school steps, playing and singing “When I Fall in Love” with such feeling, especially on the “It will be for-
ev
-er.” Ellen realized something that decades of being close with Carly has cemented: she was uncommonly, almost dangerously, romantic, this woman who “has read
Anna Karenina
about ten times.”

Carly and Tim's spring and summer romance was full of music, “mainly American standards, which we were getting to love, through the show,” Tim says. “Carly had a wonderful, true alto, even though she'd never taken a singing lesson. She just had natural pipes.” They'd stay up long into the night, call Jonathan Schwartz at the station, and request dedications for each other. Then, wrapped in each other's arms, they'd listen as Jonathan's smooth voice announced the dedication and segued into the lush, thoughtful music. They improvised duets of “Blue Skies”; they harmonized over Andre Previn, Eydie Gorme, and Frank Sinatra records. Tim says: “I remember being with her at two in the morning, listening to ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning' for the first time.”

Visiting Carly often at the Stamford house over the summer of 1959, Tim saw the complexity of her home life—the “highly matriarchal atmosphere, the strong older sisters, a mother both very organized and also cut off and not available, a father growing progressively less functional.” Ronnie's relationship with Andrea was never explicit, “but any observer could tell what it was. There was sadness for Carly. A few years later I'd hear the Beatles' ‘She's Leaving Home' and think it captured the sadness I felt in Carly.”

Tim went off to Dartmouth in the fall of 1959. Carly began to play the guitar in earnest, finding her voice in the folk music whose popularity had, in a year's time, swept like a brushfire from college to high school. Now the sounds of “John Henry” were more likely to be heard from guitar-strumming Carly than “When I Fall in Love.” Carly and Ellen and Jessica got deeper into a bohemian look: black turtlenecks and bottle-green skirts. They subwayed down to the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street. Carly loved Odetta. She was the most privileged of white girls, but she wanted to sing like the Alabama-born, L.A.-raised Negro opera-singer-turned-folksinger who had wowed Pete Seeger and inspired the unknown Bob Dylan. (A few years later, Carly and Lucy were playing a coffeehouse. When Carly saw Odetta in the audience, she was so intimidated, she walked off the stage and fainted.)

• • •

In Stamford at the beginning of the summer after Carly's fifth form year, Richard Simon was being nursed by Jo Hutmacher while Ronnie Klinzing remained with Andrea. During this time, an MIT boy, Paul Sapounakis, who'd had one of the now-common unrequited crushes on Lucy Simon, suggested to his friend Nick Delbanco, who had just finished his freshman year at Harvard, that the two visit the Simon house—“and you,” Paul said, “can date the younger sister.” Delbanco had grown up in a Westchester County suburb of New York after a childhood in London; his parents were Jews who'd fled Germany for London on the eve of the Holocaust. Their name, Italian for “moneylender,” literally described what the family had been until they'd left Italy for Germany in 1630. Nick's father was a businessman-painter; the household retained a cultured, somber European feeling—heavy woods, sacher tortes, a stunning art collection—and the shortish, intense-featured Nick conveyed an old world gravitas. He had an almost theatrically formal voice; he was dashing. A lover of James Joyce and Malcolm Lowry (the “proud modernists,” as he puts it), he was writing serious fiction and, even as an undergraduate, was thought of within Harvard's English department as a likely candidate for renown.

Nick Delbanco entered the Simon house with Paul Sapounakis and took in the scene: the “stony-faced” infirm Richard Simon, sitting (as Nick would later put it, in an essay in his
Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France,
in which he pseudonymed Carly as “Dianne”) “in an armchair…wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, hands folded in his lap.” The evening family recital, around the grand piano, was about to begin. Like other family visitors, Nick watched, that night and subsequent nights, the performing Simon girls “offe[r] show tunes, operetta, opera, folksongs, torch songs, the blues. The three girls took turns…joined in duets and trios; their brother photographed them all. Then a guest would play Chopin or Lizst and [Carly] would return to my side,” eliciting praise. “She was perfect, better than ever, the best. Play ‘John Henry' again, I would ask her, or ‘Danny Boy.'” She obliged, in her “deep, strong, throaty voice” with “erotic abandon.”

Carly unfurled her ample insecurities at Nick—“She had the remnants of a stammer and a forthright anxiety,” he would later write. “She said that her family left her feeling insecure, unloved, and that her comic antics were a ploy to gain attention…. She had clamored for applause…to make her father smile at her.” Her father's infirmity felt like a “reproach to her.”