10 Things We Learned From Carly Simon’s Revealing New Memoir
Carly Simon could have gotten away with just the name-dropping. In her life, she’s crossed paths with an astonishing range of famous people, from Cat Stevens and Jimi Hendrix to Benny Goodman and Albert Einstein. So it’s a pleasant surprise that in her compelling new autobiography, Boys in the Trees, she lays out her naked emotions and insecurities, and that she proves to be a supple writer with a gift for descriptions such as “Like some time-bent sailor, he did what he could to steer a course through his own sadness” (a portrait of her father). Simon’s lyrical gifts are also featured on the book’s companion album — the career-spanning compilation Songs From the Trees: A Musical Memoir Collection — previewed in the video above, a duet with her son Ben Taylor on their new collaborative song “I Can’t Thank You Enough.” Below are 10 things Boys in the Trees tells us about Simon and her encounters with boldface names.
1. Simon was a mascot of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Simon was the daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and she grew up splitting her time between a Greenwich Village townhouse and a rambling estate in Stamford, Connecticut, surrounded by celebrity guests such as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Addams. One of the family’s friends was Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers star who broke baseball’s color line: The Robinsons had stayed with Simons during the construction of their own Stamford house. Simon went to many games at Ebbets Field, sitting on the lap of shortstop Pee Wee Reese in the dugout — the team made her a special Dodgers jacket for her role as unofficial mascot. “Jackie even taught me to bat lefty, though it never took,” Simon writes. “He always had the cutest look around the side of his mouth, as if he were thinking about what he was about to say before he said it.”
2. She blew her inheritance on therapy.
The Simon household wasn’t all glamour — the house was full of secret sexual assignations, some of which the adult Carly Simon is clearly still trying to unravel. And when her father was strong-armed out of the company he founded and died young, the family money soon evaporated. After having a nervous breakdown while visiting a boyfriend in France, Simon went into psychoanalysis, going to sessions five days a week, which depleted her “small inheritance.” Simon writes of “Dr. F” telling her that she was done: “Looking back, I assume he must have caught a whiff of that pungent, sour aroma of future bounced checks, the scent of a patient on the cusp of exhausting her funds.
3. She made a transatlantic crossing with Sean Connery.
Simon’s first musical success came with the Simon Sisters, a singing duo with her older sister Lucy. Traveling home from London in 1965, they discovered they were on the same ship as Sean Connery, already famous as James Bond. Carly wrote him a cheeky letter, and the three of them ended up spending most of the trip together, dining and primly reciting poetry, not treating Connery to a “Simon Sisters Sandwich.” On the last night, however, Lucy successfully made her move with Connery — which Carly took as a sign that it was time to break up the sister act.