July 31, 1960—In a way, the third, fatal heart attack of Richard Simon came as a mercy. Suffering from heart disease, depression and delirium for the last several years, the co-founder of Simon & Schuster had found himself sidelined not just in the firm that had published Albert Einstein, Pearl Buck, Will and Ariel Durant, and Sloan Wilson, but also in his own household, where his wife was conducting an affair with a man 20 years her junior who’d been hired as a companion for her pre-adolescent son.
Simon’s decline fascinates me, not merely because it powerfully influenced one of my favorite singers, his daughter Carly Simon, but because it foreshadowed the takeover dramas that his firm (under new management) and the entire publishing industry would experience a couple of decades later amid the mergers-and-acquisitions frenzy. In addition, the Simon psychosexual drama would also provide material for a sometime guest in his household, Irwin Shaw, who drew on it for his novel Lucy Crown.
(This whole story has also been set out, in nonfiction form, in several accounts: Marie Brenner’s August 1995 Vanity Fair account of Carly’s relationship with her mother; Timothy White biography of the singer’s former husband, James Taylor; and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation.)
Even many people who never picked up a book by Richard Simon’s firm—or solved a crossword puzzle, a hobby given greater prominence when S&S published the first best-selling crossword-puzzle book in 1924—know the publisher, at least obliquely, through songs by Carly, the youngest and most famous of his three musically inclined daughters. (The other two were Joanna, an opera singer, and Lucy, composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden.)
“Hello, Big Man” took its title from the response of her mother Andrea, a telephone operator at S&S, when she first heard her future husband’s opening greeting: “Hello, little woman.”
But the relationship between Richard and Andrea had declined sharply by the time of his death two decades later, as chronicled in Carly’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” released in 1971.
In this first major hit of Carly’s career, friend and lyricist Jacob Brackman helped her depict, in a simple but stark opening, the atmosphere of alienation, emotional unavailability, and death-in-life that prevailed in her Riverdale (N.Y.) home as an adolescent—a household that sounds like an upper-middle-class Ethan Frome:
“My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.”
The emotionally broken and defeated man of these lyrics was a different person in the early 1940s. A later S&S editor, Michael Korda, recalled that in his prime, Richard Simon displayed an instinct for marketing that complemented friend and bookish partner M. Lincoln Schuster. (Schuster is the bespectacled one in the accompanying image.) Several of Richard’s brainstorms—feeding the cravings of newspaper cross-puzzle fans with a full-length book (with a pencil attached so they could start working on it immediately), igniting the contract-bridge craze by publishing Charles Goren, and encouraging amateur photography with his own book on the subject—made his firm a growing force in commercial publishing by the early 1940s.
It all started to come apart in 1944, when Simon, Schuster and their hard-driving partner, Leon Shimkin, sold the firm to retail giant Marshall Field. Following the sale, the trio stayed on under long-time management contracts.
But Simon’s initial opposition to the buyout left him marginalized in the new order at his old firm. The new owners’ attempt to placate him with an imprint of his own, New Ventures Books, did little to mitigate his restlessness and frustration.
By 1953, Simon’s growing infirmity provided an opening for Andrea Simon to take a belated form of revenge for the unusual situation he foisted on her at the start of their marriage. Beginning with their honeymoon, Andrea had watched in dismay as Richard, nettled by not having consummated the relationship, a) daily cabled his family’s longtime surrogate mother, “Auntie Jo” Hutmacher, on the progress of the relationship; b) installed “Auntie Jo” and Andrea’s mother in a rented apartment together, for no apparent reason of compatibility; and c) named his and Andrea’s first child Joanna—an amalgam of “Auntie Jo” and his own mother, Anna. At some point in all of this, Andrea figured out the truth: “Auntie Jo” had been the teenage Richard’s first lover, and two decades later she was still a part of his life.
With Richard increasingly sullen, remote and frail, Andrea could claim, relatively plausibly, that six-year-0ld son Peter needed a playmate. At some point, however, Columbia University student Ronnie Klinzing became Andrea’s, too. When Joanna discovered a passageway between Andrea’s room and Ronnie’s, her mother did not deny the obvious implications.
This bizarre psychosexual drama affected Carly more than her socially assured sister. She was already suffering from one emotional deficit: lanky and gawky at the time, Carly did not fare well at all in any competition with Joanna and Lucy for the affection of her father, who pretty much ignored her. Her realization of her mother’s affair, however, pushed her into a web of phobias (including stammering, agoraphobia and stage fright) that would plague her into early adulthood, and even beyond.
The atmosphere of the house, permeated by Andrea's eroticism and Richard's close-mouthed acquiescence, also, in a way, contributed to Carly’s future career. Now, you might argue that she came by her artistic inclinations through heredity (brother of a jazz drummer, Richard had reluctantly, at his father’s urging, put aside his dream of a career as concert pianist), or even by environment (the Simon girls sang “A Real Nice Clambake” for its lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, a house guest). But I think it’s more plausible that the pressure of her own circumstances did so.
As Carly's stammering worsened, Andrea advised her on a remedy: “Sing it.” Her daughter did so. The future Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee took the first halting steps toward fame as one of the great “confessional” singer-songwriters of the 1970s as an attempt to ferret out truth and her own self-esteem in a family environment that denied her both.
That career has also been the real foundation for whatever affluence she has had in adulthood. Simon & Schuster long ago left behind the world of its co-founder, and Carly, because of her father’s agreement to sell it, has not benefited from its earnings since then.
The company would, in any case, be a vastly different place from the one Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster built in the 1920s with only $8,000 of relatives’ money. Its culture had changed for good in the 1980s, when it took over my old company, Prentice-Hall. Simon & Schuster's corporate parents over the years (including Gulf + Western and Viacom) have exerted pressure on the firm to produce profits. Not only has that resulted in shifts toward blockbuster titles rather than blacklists and toward marketing rather than editorial sides of the business, but it has also placed additional stress on the publishing arm's subsidiaries. Prentice-Hall, for instance, went from a paternalistic orientation to one increasingly swept up by the nostrums of the day (e.g., "synergy") during my years there. I imagine it has only worsened in the two decades since.
Simon’s decline fascinates me, not merely because it powerfully influenced one of my favorite singers, his daughter Carly Simon, but because it foreshadowed the takeover dramas that his firm (under new management) and the entire publishing industry would experience a couple of decades later amid the mergers-and-acquisitions frenzy. In addition, the Simon psychosexual drama would also provide material for a sometime guest in his household, Irwin Shaw, who drew on it for his novel Lucy Crown.
(This whole story has also been set out, in nonfiction form, in several accounts: Marie Brenner’s August 1995 Vanity Fair account of Carly’s relationship with her mother; Timothy White biography of the singer’s former husband, James Taylor; and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation.)
Even many people who never picked up a book by Richard Simon’s firm—or solved a crossword puzzle, a hobby given greater prominence when S&S published the first best-selling crossword-puzzle book in 1924—know the publisher, at least obliquely, through songs by Carly, the youngest and most famous of his three musically inclined daughters. (The other two were Joanna, an opera singer, and Lucy, composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden.)
“Hello, Big Man” took its title from the response of her mother Andrea, a telephone operator at S&S, when she first heard her future husband’s opening greeting: “Hello, little woman.”
But the relationship between Richard and Andrea had declined sharply by the time of his death two decades later, as chronicled in Carly’s “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” released in 1971.
In this first major hit of Carly’s career, friend and lyricist Jacob Brackman helped her depict, in a simple but stark opening, the atmosphere of alienation, emotional unavailability, and death-in-life that prevailed in her Riverdale (N.Y.) home as an adolescent—a household that sounds like an upper-middle-class Ethan Frome:
“My father sits at night with no lights on
His cigarette glows in the dark.
The living room is still;
I walk by, no remark.”
The emotionally broken and defeated man of these lyrics was a different person in the early 1940s. A later S&S editor, Michael Korda, recalled that in his prime, Richard Simon displayed an instinct for marketing that complemented friend and bookish partner M. Lincoln Schuster. (Schuster is the bespectacled one in the accompanying image.) Several of Richard’s brainstorms—feeding the cravings of newspaper cross-puzzle fans with a full-length book (with a pencil attached so they could start working on it immediately), igniting the contract-bridge craze by publishing Charles Goren, and encouraging amateur photography with his own book on the subject—made his firm a growing force in commercial publishing by the early 1940s.
It all started to come apart in 1944, when Simon, Schuster and their hard-driving partner, Leon Shimkin, sold the firm to retail giant Marshall Field. Following the sale, the trio stayed on under long-time management contracts.
But Simon’s initial opposition to the buyout left him marginalized in the new order at his old firm. The new owners’ attempt to placate him with an imprint of his own, New Ventures Books, did little to mitigate his restlessness and frustration.
By 1953, Simon’s growing infirmity provided an opening for Andrea Simon to take a belated form of revenge for the unusual situation he foisted on her at the start of their marriage. Beginning with their honeymoon, Andrea had watched in dismay as Richard, nettled by not having consummated the relationship, a) daily cabled his family’s longtime surrogate mother, “Auntie Jo” Hutmacher, on the progress of the relationship; b) installed “Auntie Jo” and Andrea’s mother in a rented apartment together, for no apparent reason of compatibility; and c) named his and Andrea’s first child Joanna—an amalgam of “Auntie Jo” and his own mother, Anna. At some point in all of this, Andrea figured out the truth: “Auntie Jo” had been the teenage Richard’s first lover, and two decades later she was still a part of his life.
With Richard increasingly sullen, remote and frail, Andrea could claim, relatively plausibly, that six-year-0ld son Peter needed a playmate. At some point, however, Columbia University student Ronnie Klinzing became Andrea’s, too. When Joanna discovered a passageway between Andrea’s room and Ronnie’s, her mother did not deny the obvious implications.
This bizarre psychosexual drama affected Carly more than her socially assured sister. She was already suffering from one emotional deficit: lanky and gawky at the time, Carly did not fare well at all in any competition with Joanna and Lucy for the affection of her father, who pretty much ignored her. Her realization of her mother’s affair, however, pushed her into a web of phobias (including stammering, agoraphobia and stage fright) that would plague her into early adulthood, and even beyond.
The atmosphere of the house, permeated by Andrea's eroticism and Richard's close-mouthed acquiescence, also, in a way, contributed to Carly’s future career. Now, you might argue that she came by her artistic inclinations through heredity (brother of a jazz drummer, Richard had reluctantly, at his father’s urging, put aside his dream of a career as concert pianist), or even by environment (the Simon girls sang “A Real Nice Clambake” for its lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, a house guest). But I think it’s more plausible that the pressure of her own circumstances did so.
As Carly's stammering worsened, Andrea advised her on a remedy: “Sing it.” Her daughter did so. The future Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee took the first halting steps toward fame as one of the great “confessional” singer-songwriters of the 1970s as an attempt to ferret out truth and her own self-esteem in a family environment that denied her both.
That career has also been the real foundation for whatever affluence she has had in adulthood. Simon & Schuster long ago left behind the world of its co-founder, and Carly, because of her father’s agreement to sell it, has not benefited from its earnings since then.
The company would, in any case, be a vastly different place from the one Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster built in the 1920s with only $8,000 of relatives’ money. Its culture had changed for good in the 1980s, when it took over my old company, Prentice-Hall. Simon & Schuster's corporate parents over the years (including Gulf + Western and Viacom) have exerted pressure on the firm to produce profits. Not only has that resulted in shifts toward blockbuster titles rather than blacklists and toward marketing rather than editorial sides of the business, but it has also placed additional stress on the publishing arm's subsidiaries. Prentice-Hall, for instance, went from a paternalistic orientation to one increasingly swept up by the nostrums of the day (e.g., "synergy") during my years there. I imagine it has only worsened in the two decades since.
You included a lot of information that helps to flesh out the story of the Simon family; details not found in Ms. Simon's new book, "Boys in the Trees". I also appreciate your expertise and knowledge of the publishing industry. My early career was spent in magazine publishing and there have been many changes in that beleaguered field as well.
ReplyDeleteI've bookmarked your blog and will return. Thanks.
Not quite accurate. Jeannette Hutmacher ("Auntie Jo") came on the scene in 1926, after Anna Maier Simon, Richard's mother and Carly's grandmother, died. Thus Richard was a grown man of 27, and already a business tycoon. Ms. Hutmacher was a nanny for the younger Simon siblings; Richard was the oldest.
ReplyDeleteCarly's wonderful book, "Boys in the Trees," pays very little attention to Jeannette Hutmacher, and none at all to her paternal grandparents, who aren't even mentioned, even though Leopold Simon, Carly's paternal grandfather, lived until 1959 or so. ON the other hand, her maternal grandmother, Alma (or Elma) Maria Heinemann, is given lots of ink along with her musical uncles, Frederick Jr. ("Dutch") and Peter, who later became a talent agent and musical artist in his own right.