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him. Away from the cocoon of Ebbets Field, Dick would often shrink into himself again. Carly would soon turn for solace to her funny uncles, her mother’s brothers, especially irrepressible Peter Dean, who began to take on a more fatherly role for Andrea’s youngest children, Carly and Peter.
    “My father could be very difficult,” Carly said later. “He could be very proper and aristocratic, and then he would burp at the table. He definitely felt that he was terribly, terribly special, and that his children were terribly, terribly special too. He had that complete disregard of reality that all true narcissists have. And this, combined with his strengths, is what made him such a powerful influence on me. He was a very dynamic man, especially when he was younger. People who knew him really loved him, and loved to talk about him. Every day of my life, I still wish I’d known him better.”

I DYLLS OF S TAMFORD

    T he Simon estate in Stamford, set in the lush Connecticut countryside, was a childhood paradise for Carly and her siblings, especially during the summertime. “We were the children of the orchard,” she recalled, years later. “There was one summer when I spent the whole time up in the fruit trees in our orchard, near the play barn, beyond the huge copper beech. The apple trees were Cortland and McIntosh varieties. There were also two large cherry trees whose bark was rougher on my skin than the apple trees, and so much harder to climb. But, once scaled, the cherry prizes were more thrilling than even the tartest Mac.
    “Part of the fun was to savor a sweet, dark purple cherry and then aim the pit at a target below, most often my little brother, Peter, but either of my sisters would do as well. We lived in those trees: me and Joey and Lucy, and Jeanie and Mary Seligman, my cousins. Peter couldn’t climb yet, so he ran around below us in his blue corduroy shorts, calling to us to drop him a cherry, please, or just singing or babbling to himself, the only little boy of our tribe.”
    In those days, the early fifties, Andrea Simon would organize theme summers for the children. One year would be cooking, with a live-in chef. Another would be sewing, with a seamstress. Another would be painting, with an artist in residence. Andrea herself served as a singing teacher. A typical Simon dinner often ended with musical rounds—“Row, row, row your boat,” etc.—with family and guests trying to complete the round without goofing up.
    “That summer I lived in the trees,” Carly recalls, “was the summer of Helen Gaspard. She took care of Peter and was also our in-house playwright and director of the productions we put on for guests in our barn. We learned the lines for
Little Women
sitting in the trees, calling down cues to each other and filling ourselves with fruit. Jeanie and I always had the lesser parts, but we were still young enough to believe Joey when she assured us that even though we only had a line or two, they were pivotal lines, and without them there would be no plot. In the play
The Monkey’s Paw,
I merely had to knock on the door. And this was OK because I stuttered… could hardly speak. And it was humiliating for me, when people supplied the word I was blocked on, or finished my sentences for me. I didn’t even have names for those fears.
    “Joey bossed me around a lot. Her technique was to get her way by flattering me. She would always lead me to believe that I was the true star of the show. During the curtain calls, the audience—who were obviously in on the little joke—applauded as if I were Katharine Hepburn. So I definitely grew up with a… distorted view of fame.”
    Carly: “Looking back, I think my childhood was somewhat Chekhovian.” This refers to the heartbreaking family dramas of the Russian author Anton Chekhov. “I’ve seen myself described as the outsider in my family, the black sheep, the ugly duckling. I remember that our extended family played a kind of reverse