Paul Simon: The Life

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CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE

The Boxer

PART TWO

The Sound of Silence

PART THREE

Bridge Over Troubled Water

PART FOUR

Still Crazy After All These Years

PART FIVE

Graceland

PART SIX

Questions for the Angels

Epilogue

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photo Credits

PROLOGUE

Ever since his debut on Saturday Night Live in 1975, Paul Simon looked forward to walking the narrow hallway to the stage at NBC Studios in Midtown Manhattan. Whether alone, or with Art Garfunkel, or with the high-stepping, show-stopping South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he enjoyed the well-wishes of the cast and crew as he made the walk—their smiles, shouts of encouragement, and even pats on the back.

This time—the night of September 29, 2001—it was different.

As soon as Simon stepped into the hallway, he saw a row of New York City firefighters and police officers, their heads bowed, still mourning the deaths of more than four hundred of their comrades in the World Trade Center terrorist assault eighteen days before. It made Simon wonder whether this tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks—some nine thousand killed or wounded—wasn’t premature. Many in the SNL cast of comedians asked themselves the same question. Would people really be ready for jokes?

Simon had already joined nearly two dozen musicians—including Bruce Springsteen and U2—in performing on a September 21 telethon that was broadcast around the world and raised more than $200 million for families of the victims. In one of the show’s emotional highlights, he sang his most famous composition, the gospel-edged Bridge Over Troubled Water. But that night wasn’t quite the same. The telethon was designed as a worldwide expression of solidarity and support. Artists performed on candlelit stages with no studio audiences, giving the event an intimacy that was somber and inspiring.

For SNL, Lorne Michaels, the creator of the culture-defining series, wanted to aim directly and unmistakably at the residents of New York City—opening with Mayor Rudy Giuliani standing with some thirty fire and police personnel who had just come off duty at ground zero, the dust of the site still visible on their uniforms. The plan was for the mayor to say a few words about the glory and resilience of New York and then have Simon sing a song, which would serve as a crucial step in Michaels’s goal of lifting the city’s spirits.

Michaels believed Simon was the perfect choice—the only choice. He was one of the all-time great American songwriters, inducted into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (twice) and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the only artist to receive Album of the Year Grammy Awards for records made in three separate decades. His tunes had been recorded by a treasure chest of vocalists, from Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles.

Simon was also a New Yorker whose career reflected the triumphs and struggles of the city itself. He had come out of the borough of Queens with his schoolboy chum Art Garfunkel to enjoy superstar status around the world, and then exhibited the guts to walk away from the duo at the height of its popularity in 1970 to follow his own musical dreams. The first solo decade proved to be an even more creative period for him than the 1960s, thanks to his wider musical range, and the 1980s were equally commanding, including his masterpiece, Graceland. At the same time, Simon had felt the sting of defeat. He’d never been forgiven by a lot of Simon and Garfunkel fans for breaking up the partnership. He had also gone through two divorces and had failed in his ventures into movies (One-Trick Pony) and Broadway (The Capeman).

To Michaels, Simon had one other vital link to this special evening: he had been in the city on 9/11, and he knew the fear that gripped it. On that morning, he had walked two of his children—Adrian, eight, and Lulu, six—to school, about fifteen minutes along Central Park West. It was a lovely day with just a trace of prefall chill in the air. By the time he returned to his apartment just after nine o’clock, his wife, Edie Brickell, was at the door with the news that an American Airlines plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

As Simon stared at the television screen, his first thought was that it was a tragic accident—only to watch in horror as a second plane, this one from United Airlines, smashed into the South Tower. There was now no question that the city was under attack. In panic, he raced back to the school to bring home Adrian, Lulu, and the children of some of his friends. To keep the kids calm, Paul and Edie turned off the television so they could play without hearing the frightful details of what was happening downtown, just a few subway stops away.

President George W. Bush soon confirmed the attack, and city officials closed the bridges and tunnels leading into and out of the city. Within minutes, a plane attacked the western façade of the Pentagon, and yet another crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. By the end of the day, there was a strange smell in the air in New York—not a normal smoke smell but all the chemicals from the crashes. It was like we were all trapped, all helpless, Simon said. You wanted to help, but what could you do? Days later, he got his answer with requests to perform on the two broadcasts.

Even with his concern about the timing of Saturday Night Live, there was no way Simon would turn down Michaels, who was one of his closest friends and whose judgment he trusted implicitly. Plus, Simon had been around the SNL set so much that he was like an honorary member of the cast. Still, it was daunting. As soon as he stepped into the hallway, he began to worry about maintaining his composure. Simon had sung at funerals and memorial services for friends and musicians, and he knew how difficult it was to look at grieving faces.

Giuliani, as solemn as the fire department and law enforcement officers at his side, opened the show with a statement about the city’s resolve: Our hearts are broken, but they are beating, and they are beating stronger than ever. New Yorkers are unified. We will not yield to terrorism. We will not let our decisions be made out of fear. We choose to live our lives in freedom.

As he finished, the TV audience heard a few gentle guitar notes, and the camera slowly panned from the mayor to Simon. Dressed in black and wearing an FDNY cap, Simon stood in front of a huge American flag as he began singing the song Michaels had chosen for him: not Bridge Over Troubled Water but The Boxer, a story of Simon’s own struggle and resilience, complete with New York City references.

Though recorded more than thirty years earlier when Simon was just twenty-seven, The Boxer was a song of remarkable craft and depth, its early verses written in the first person, but its final verse shifting dramatically to the third person to add a compelling ring of universality. That final verse:

In the clearing stands a boxer

And a fighter by his trade

And he carries the reminders

Of every glove that laid him down

And cut him till he cried out

In his anger and his shame

I am leaving, I am leaving

But the fighter still remains

Lie-la-lie . . .

The audience remained silent during the first two choruses, giving the moment an added poignancy. As Simon ended that final verse, however, scattered members of the audience whispered the Lie-la-lie chorus with him, adding to the emotion in the studio. Fifteen years later, Lorne Michaels called Simon’s performance the most moving musical moment in the history of Saturday Night Live.

I was so proud of Paul and the show and the city, he said, acknowledging his own tears that night. The strength he showed with that song—standing in front of those firefighters and law enforcement officers and knowing what they had gone through, what the city had gone through—was just incredible. Even after all this time, I think he’s the only one who could have done it. He is as much a symbol of the show and of New York as there is.

It was a defining moment for Simon because it underscored what had long been one of his quintessential qualities as a songwriter. Like The Boxer, so many of his songs moved past any inherent darkness to express consolation, optimism, and even faith. In a rock ’n’ roll world forged by rebellion, his music—from America and Mrs. Robinson to American Tune and The Boy in the Bubble—was founded on empathy.

Despite melancholy and self-doubt at points in his personal life, he avoided despair or hostility in his songs. If all I have to say is how disappointed I am about whatever there is in life, then I don’t see what the contribution is, Simon said. "There’s already plenty of that out there. I really don’t believe philosophically that’s my job. But I’m not lying when I go the other way. Love is amazing, and like I say on the You’re the One album, it’s something you want so desperately that it can make you laugh out loud when you get it. It’s like medicine for us."

Indeed, Simon’s first great song was born during a period of trauma when he was in need of comfort himself. After years of toiling at the lower levels of the music business trying to write teen pop hits largely by copying what was on the radio, he felt in the fall of 1963 that he was at a dead end. Inspired by the emergence of the folk movement in New York’s Greenwich Village, he vowed to reach inside to find out if he truly had anything of his own to say in a song. If he was going to be a failure as a songwriter, he told himself, he was going to be a proud failure.

As he often did, Simon took his acoustic guitar into the family bathroom, where the tile made the sound all the more alluring, and he turned off the lights so that he could relax and feel totally at one with the music. Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen, songwriting has always been a great place of security and comfort, he said. Songwriting never turned around and stabbed me in the back. I remember times when I was really sad, and I’d sit and play an E chord for a half hour. I wasn’t writing a song. I was just comforting myself with this instrument I loved.

Night after night in November, he sat in the bathroom with his guitar, alone with his music and his future. Then his world changed with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Simon, who’d just turned twenty-two, was on his lunch break from his job at a publishing company in Manhattan when he heard the news. His mother, Belle, remembered that he spent hours despondent in his bedroom.

Not long after the tragedy, Simon returned to the bathroom, switched off the lights per his custom, and started softly fingerpicking on the guitar. It was around then that he hit some warmly evocative notes that he played over and over again. Slowly, he began reflecting on thoughts that had been nagging at him for months: the way people ignored the words of those, from musicians to religious leaders, who preached against injustice and excess materialism.

As he sat alone, these words eventually burst forth: Hello darkness, my old friend.

For the next five-plus decades, Simon wrote with such ambition and craft that it looked easy from a distance. He’d deliver a prized album, tour, and then largely disappear for the three or four years it took to write and record another collection. Through it all, he rarely shared his personal story in interviews or engaged in the tabloid-ish episodes that contribute to many artists’ personas, which rival their music in the public eye. Yet Simon, too, had to deal with the struggles and challenges of a life in the pop world. He wasn’t a born songwriter. He spent six years writing one mediocre song after another until, through a series of pinpointable events, he finally became the artist who wrote The Sound of Silence. This evolution makes Simon an ideal case study of pop music excellence and longevity—how true artistry is achieved and how you then need to protect it against distractions such as fame, wealth, drugs, marriage, divorce, ego, rejection, changes in public taste, and fear of failure. Simon wasn’t immune to any of them.

PART ONE

The Boxer

CHAPTER ONE

The first sound Paul Simon fell in love with was the crack of a baseball against a Louisville Slugger, preferably one swung by a member of his beloved New York Yankees. He could even tell you the moment: the summer of 1948 when, at age six, he sat down with his father to listen to his first baseball game on the radio. Lou Simon was a professional musician, and he was out a lot, especially in the evenings, so Paul loved any chance to spend time listening to the radio with him, regardless of the program.

But this time was special. Paul immediately got caught up in the excitement of the announcer’s voice (most notably, the ebullient Mel Allen) and the cheers of the Yankee Stadium crowd. He later became enthralled by the team’s illustrious history of legendary players and more World Series championships by far than any other franchise. His allegiance was so strong that when his grandfather Samuel Schulman took him to see the rival Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, Paul wore his Lone Ranger mask as a disguise—on the outside chance that if he ran into anyone he knew, he didn’t want them to think he was a Dodgers fan. The games had such a powerful effect on Paul’s mood that his mother had to listen in to the afternoon broadcasts to keep track of the score. If the Yankees lost, she knew there was no point in defrosting a steak, because Paul would be so upset he wouldn’t eat.

One thing Paul loved as much as the games themselves was the Topps baseball cards that came five to a package, along with a stick of bubble gum. Each card featured a color photo of a major leaguer on one side and the player’s game statistics and personal data on the other. Where most youngsters cared only about the batting or pitching stats, Paul focused on another piece of information: the player’s height. He knew by junior high school that his dream of playing for the Yankees was threatened by an issue that would haunt him for years: his size. Thumbing through the cards, he hoped to find players close to his own height to give him hope that he might indeed be able to play pro ball—if he just got a big growth spurt. Paul was around five feet tall at the time, and the shortest players he could find were Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto and Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Bobby Shantz, both five foot six.

Paul was still so short his senior year at Forest Hills High School that the baseball coach, Chester (Chet) Gusick, wouldn’t let him try out for the team until some of the other kids told him that Paul was a terrific player. Given a turn during batting practice, Paul made the team by hitting a home run. Despite his size, he batted over .300 and showed enough speed on the basepaths to be put in the leadoff spot in the batting order. He was even named to the league all-star team.

His greatest moment on the field came on May 13, 1958, with the Forest Hills Rangers trailing Bayside High by a run in the seventh inning. Paul was on third base when he noticed that the opposing pitcher was taking his full windup rather than pitching from the stretch. In that instant, he knew he had a chance to pull off one of baseball’s rarest and most exciting plays: stealing home. After getting the go-ahead from the coach, he took off as soon as the pitcher began his windup, and he slid across home plate just before the catcher applied the tag. Two innings later Paul contributed a bunt single to a four-run rally, which gave the Rangers a 7–3 win. But it was the steal that Paul would always remember. The headline in the Long Island Press said it all: Simon Steals Home. Sixty years on, a reproduction of the article is still displayed on a wall in Paul’s Manhattan office.

As it turned out, that steal was Paul’s last hurrah in baseball. When he tried out for the team at Queens College the following year, he knew after a few days of practice that there was no way he could compete against college pitchers, many of whom stood over six feet and threw with blazing speed. The coach didn’t say anything, but I realized I was done, Simon said. The moment wasn’t as devastating as it might have been, because Paul, by then, was consumed by a new sound: rock ’n’ roll.

Simon was not a child prodigy who astounded the rest of the family by playing sonatas on the piano at age three or writing dazzling poetry in his grade-school notebooks, his lifelong pal Bobby Susser pointed out. Paul had little interest in pop music as a child—certainly not the bland mainstream hits that were on the radio in the early 1950s. Even when his father tried to stir an interest in music with piano lessons, Paul resisted.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1954 that Paul, quite by accident, discovered his calling. As he did each game day, Paul sat down to listen to the Yankees on WINS. But on this day, the radio was tuned to another station: one playing the mainstream pop that bored him. As he reached to change the station, the DJ’s remark caught his ear. He said something like, ‘This record is becoming a hit around the country, but I think it’s the worst record I’ve ever heard,’ Paul said a half century later. Now, that was interesting—the worst record he’d ever heard. I had never heard anyone say that on the radio. Sure enough, DJs were always praising records; there was no point in saying they didn’t like the next record because it might encourage listeners to tune out. Curious, Paul kept listening and soon heard a doo-wop expression of romantic infatuation by the Crows, a black rhythm-and-blues group from Harlem. Called Gee, the record felt fresh and alive. The song’s giddy lyrics (supposedly written in ten minutes) were catchy, and the group’s lead singer, Daniel (Sonny) Norton, moved up and down the notes with acrobatic ease.

Ohh-ohh-ohh, gee-ee, Simon recalled, singing one of the tune’s opening lines. The record sounded so young, and it had a good beat, and the lyrics were simple. I even liked the name of the group: the Crows. Immediately, I felt, ‘That’s my music.’ It’s not those big ballads you heard on the radio back then: things like ‘See the pyramids, along the Nile,’ and all that.

Wanting more of this new sound, Paul turned the dial endlessly in the coming weeks, hoping to find a station that played it regularly. As it turned out, he didn’t need to turn the dial at all. Alan Freed, a disc jockey who had popularized rock ’n’ roll in Cleveland earlier in the 1950s, moved his show to WINS, the Yankees station, in September 1954. Paul began looking forward to Freed’s show with the same passion as the ball games. When he would say again and again over the years that he knew he wanted to be in music by the time he was thirteen, Paul was speaking about the lure of Gee and a handful of other extraordinary R&B songs he heard that year, including the Moonglows’ Sincerely and the Penguins’ Earth Angel.

He got so caught up in the sounds that he asked his father to buy him a Stadium acoustic guitar for his thirteenth birthday that October and teach him some chords. Lou, who played upright bass, didn’t care for this primitive doo-wop sound, but he was pleased his son was finally interested in some kind of music; it’d be a good hobby, ideally leading him to something more sophisticated, such as jazz or Broadway show tunes.

It wasn’t long before Paul wanted more. To capture the harmonies of the records, he needed another singer. He didn’t need to look far. Thanks to one of life’s wondrous twists of fate, Paul’s parents had moved into a home just two blocks from a family named Garfunkel.

Paul Fredric Simon was born on October 13, 1941, at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, but the Garden State ties were short-lived. Before his second birthday, he was calling New York home—which is where fate comes in. Belle’s brother’s wife, Goldie, died on May 23, 1943, and Belle’s brother Lee Schulman, a graphic artist who lived in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, asked her to stay with him for a while to help care for his young son, Jerry. Belle’s family was tight knit, and she didn’t hesitate, even though it meant that she and Paul would have to leave Lou behind temporarily in Newark, where he played bass on a music show that aired weekday mornings on radio station WAAT.

The move not only introduced the Simons to Kew Gardens Hills, which would be Paul’s home for the next two decades, but it also led him to his future singing partner. Lee Schulman lived on Seventy-Second Avenue, almost directly across the street from Jack and Rose Garfunkel, whose second son, Arthur, was born on November 5, 1941. Despite the proximity, there is no evidence that the children actually met until grammar school.

Kew Gardens Hills—adjacent to prestigious Forest Hills, home for years of the US Open tennis championship—was in the 1940s a picturesque middle-class neighborhood. To young couples, the rows of mostly attached or semiattached houses represented a coveted piece of the American dream. Yet there were moments of anxiety for Paul, including living in a house where a mother had just died and not having his father around except for occasional weekends. Looking back years later, Paul wondered if his long history of violent dreams wasn’t triggered by living in his uncle’s home. The dreams, which would become more frequent over the years, could be very gory and upsetting. Without ever finding a reason for them, he simply learned to accept them.

After a year or so of separation, Lou rejoined the family when he got a job playing bass on radio station WOR in New York. He and Belle rented an attached house at 141-04 Seventy-First Street, close enough to the Schulmans for Belle to walk over there to watch Jerry until Lee got home from work. It was happy times again, Paul said. Dad was back.

When the Simons’ second son, Edward, was born on December 14, 1945, Lou and Belle needed a larger place, and they bought their first home: an attached residence at 137-62 Seventieth Road. By this time, Belle no longer needed to help her brother because Lee had remarried. To make the Simon family reunion even more joyous at the time of Eddie’s birth, the nation was still caught up in celebrating the end of World War II.

In a photo of Paul standing in the driveway of the family’s two-story house—the same driveway where as a youngster Paul and his dad often played catch—the Simon house looks identical to the one next to it. If the camera had provided a wider view, we would see that every other house up and down the long block looked the same. This cookie-cutter approach caused Lou endless frustration. My father used to drive into the wrong driveway all the time, Paul said. The story is special to Paul because it’s one of the few times he heard his mother or father complain about anything. Paul’s acquaintances from those days agree: this was a loving family.

Paul was such a good, happy baby, said Beverly Wax, whose husband, Harold, played accordion at the Newark radio station with Lou, and who first saw Paul when he was just a week old. He fit in perfectly with his mom and dad, who were the nicest people you could find. Paul and Eddie enjoyed each other’s company so much that they eventually gave up their separate bedrooms to share what was Paul’s upstairs room. It was a bonding that continued into adulthood, when Eddie would eventually comanage his brother. We all know people whose lives have been very much molded by trauma, but that wasn’t our case, Eddie said. If you were ever in trouble, my mom and dad would help you. They made it so you were not fearful. In his career, Paul’s never been afraid to move on.

Fittingly, Paul’s parents met through music. While on a weekend getaway in the Berkshires with girlfriends in 1937, Belle Schulman met Lou, who was playing in a band. They began a courtship that led to their marriage on September 15 of the following year in Newark. Both were native-born Americans, children of immigrants who had come to the United States separately between 1882 and 1909. Paul’s father’s family came from small towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in territory that is now part of Ukraine, while Paul’s mother’s family came from small towns—shtetlach in Yiddish—in Lithuania, which was then a province of Imperial Russia.

Paul’s paternal grandfather was born Pinkas Seeman, but he changed his first name to Paul before arriving in the United States in 1909, and he adopted the last name Simon before Paul’s father was born in 1916. Seeman/Simon was a successful tailor until he lost his business in the Great Depression, and subsequently opened a small deli in Newark. Belle’s father, Samuel Schulman, was for years a commissioned salesman at Phillips Clothing Company, a retail store in Manhattan. His future wife, Ettie Marcus, worked across the street in a clothing accessories store. They were married in 1902, and Paul’s mother was born in 1909, the last of two sons and two daughters in the family.

While Paul’s grandparents immigrated to the United States primarily in search of a better life, they were fortunate to leave Eastern Europe before anti-Semitism led to the butchery of the Holocaust. George Schulman, Paul’s cousin, traced his family roots to Lithuania, where he said bullet holes in a churchyard wall in the town of Trishik were still visible. In the early summer of 1941, Nazi SS troops rounded up seventy to eighty Jews, almost certainly including some of Paul’s relatives, and opened fire. Soon the Nazis moved through other cities, including Kalvarija and Vilkaviskis, where more relatives lived. Jewish men were typically rounded up and shot, and women and children were murdered within weeks.

In the safety of America, Lou, under the stage name Lee Simms, led his own dance band every Thursday afternoon for nearly twenty-five years at the landmark Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan’s theater district. He also did periodic dates with Lester Lanin, the society bandleader whose elegant dance music was featured at hundreds of parties for some of the world’s wealthiest and most celebrated people, from actress Grace Kelly’s engagement to Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956 to the sixtieth birthday of Queen Elizabeth II in 1986. On top of it all, Lou also played several seasons in the house orchestra for CBS-TV shows hosted by personalities such as Jackie Gleason, Arthur Godfrey, and Garry Moore. Paul and the rest of the family would watch the programs at home, hoping to get a glimpse of Dad.

That résumé, however, made Lou’s musical world seem more glamorous than it was. Aside from the freelance dates at CBS, he spent most of his time in music performing at social gatherings, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. The jobs didn’t pay all that much, and they were irregular, forcing Lou to spend almost as many hours lining up gigs as playing them. The stress may have contributed to his lifelong health problems, including numerous heart attacks.

One of Paul’s favorite childhood memories was accompanying his father to the radio station when he was around four and watching a live broadcast. As the musicians played, they read the notes from sheet music on a stand and then tossed away the top page to see the next one. Paul thought one of the musicians had thrown the paper by mistake, so he raced over, picked up the sheet music, and placed it back on the stand, causing everyone in the room to break out in laughter—a moment so embarrassing that Paul recalled his discomfort decades later.

While Paul didn’t respond to the piano lessons, Eddie enjoyed playing classical piano, especially when his father accompanied him on bass. What impressed Eddie was how his dad, even in the informality of their home, took the music seriously. There was nothing casual about his playing: he played in perfect tune, from the start of the duet to the end, and Eddie thinks Paul picked up on that dedication. Music was something to be treated with respect. Bobby Susser, his friend, also believes Paul embraced Lou’s dedication. Lou always wanted to be a notch or two above the rest no matter what he was doing, and he wanted the same for Paul. With regard to music, there was no such thing as mastering it. The goal was always to get better—never settle.

The Simon home on Seventieth Road was in such a new development that construction of the local elementary school, PS 164, wasn’t finished until Paul was ready for the third grade. That meant he attended kindergarten at PS 117 in the fall of 1946. That school was in Jamaica, Queens, just two miles away across the Grand Central Parkway, but any separation from his mother was difficult. When the bus pulled up for the first day of school, Paul refused to get on unless Belle came with him. She gamely climbed aboard for the short ride along Main Street.

Things went fine that day, and Paul stepped on the bus by himself the following morning. In the coming months, he adjusted well to school, and he received high praise from his teachers during his three years there—though one of them would later describe him as especially sensitive, noting that he tended to cry easily. Belle, too, remembered Paul’s sensitivity when he befriended a neighborhood boy with Down syndrome and accompanying speech problems. On his way home from grade school, Paul would often stop by the boy’s house and play catch with him. It got to where the boy would start shouting, Paul! Paul! whenever he saw Paul coming down the street. That was, Belle said, the first word the youngster learned.

Simon also had a tremendous imagination, said Beverly Wax, the family friend from the New Jersey days. He was always making up games or stories. Even when he was little, I thought that he might become a writer. He was always observing things and then describing them in an original, thoughtful way. Even when he was ten or eleven, he spoke like an adult.

Helene Schwartz Kenvin, who also attended PS 117 and PS 164, recalls Paul being well liked. She and Paulie, as she called him, were class president and vice president, respectively, for several semesters. She also believes Paul benefited from the high academic standards of his grade school, which required students to complete a three-year study program of the nation’s historical documents, including the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Patrick Henry’s speech to the House of Burgesses—papers crammed with complex legal and philosophical language. Kenvin said, Can you imagine nine-year-old children reciting ‘on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent . . . on a land rent with civil feuds’—from Daniel Webster’s reply to Senator Robert Y. Hayne—and understanding what they were saying? We all became exceptionally literate, and I think that it shows in the poetry of Paulie’s lyrics.

Despite getting high marks, Paul’s teachers sometimes mentioned to his mother that he could do even better if he paid attention rather than stare out the classroom window and daydream. But Belle, herself a popular elementary schoolteacher for years, defended her son. I think she understood that the ones who are looking out the window are sometimes your best students, not the ones who always raise their hand and want attention, Paul said. I always thought that was embarrassing. I wanted attention, too, but I didn’t want to be seen as wanting it. I wanted it to come naturally, by doing something that warranted it, rather than me manipulating people to look at me. Onstage years later, Paul tended to follow that same guideline. He wasn’t interested in being a showman; all he cared about was playing the music.

Whatever his manner in the classroom, Paul was placed into a special progress program at Parsons Junior High that enabled him to go through the school in two years rather than the normal three. If Paul needed any further assurance about his own intelligence, the word passed down in his family was that Lou, during high school, registered the highest IQ score in the state of New Jersey. I went to two Ivy League universities, and I’ve often said I never met any group of people as smart as the kids I knew when I was a child, said Kenvin, who would later teach advanced criminal-constitutional law and litigation at Rutgers Law School in Camden and handled several celebrated constitutional-law trial cases as an attorney.

The Simons belonged to a synagogue, but their lives didn’t revolve around religion, and the boys received different signals from their parents. Although Lou wasn’t religious, Belle came from a religious background, and she’d go to the synagogue by herself during the high holidays. They eventually agreed for Paul and Eddie to have their bar mitzvahs and then be free to decide their own religious paths. Paul didn’t embrace organized religion, but he developed a deep spirituality that was reflected in many of his songs, including occasional Christian imagery.

I’m not religious, but I believe in God—at least I’m getting there—and I believe in spiritual powers, Paul said. I believe that the nonscientific and the nonrational world exists, and it’s powerful and valid. The thing I’m comfortable with is that if there is a God, and He created this planet and everything on it, I’ve got to say an incredible ‘Thank you so much—great job. I’m really grateful to be here in this marvelous setting.’ If it turns out there’s no God, I still feel the same way. I’m really grateful to be here. What a beautiful planet.

Paul remembers first seeing Garfunkel in 1951 at an assembly at PS 164 when they were both in fourth grade. Artie, as Paul grew to call him, sang Too Young, a ballad that had been a hit for Nat King Cole, and Paul was struck by two things: the loveliness of Art’s voice and the strong impression he had on the girls.

Their actual friendship, however, didn’t begin until the closing weeks of sixth grade when they both performed in the school’s production of Alice in Wonderland. Oddly, Paul was cast in the main singing role, the White Rabbit, while Art, with that spectacular voice, played the nonsinging Cheshire Cat. During the weeks of rehearsal, they enjoyed each other’s company. They were both clever and shared a sense of humor that was a touch irreverent. They both loved Mad magazine, a new, wildly satirical look at popular culture. They also both liked baseball. There was no sense of competition over who was the better singer. In fact, it’d be a year before they even got the idea of singing together. While at PS 164, Simon’s world revolved almost exclusively around baseball.

Eager to do more than listen to games and daydream about playing in the majors, Paul, at the age of ten, began searching neighborhood playgrounds for pickup games. Hearing that a bunch of kids would gather almost daily during the summer to play softball at PS 165, he rode his Schwinn bicycle a mile or so to the paved school yard, where he first met Bobby Susser.

Paul was the new kid, and some show-offs wanted to test him, Susser recalled. We were all wearing jeans, and Paul was wearing short pants, and someone said, ‘Oh, so Mommy made you wear short pants today.’ Paul got off his bike, just as cool as could be, and said back to this guy, ‘No, my mom didn’t force me to wear these pants. I chose to wear them. It’s a hot day, you’ll notice, and these pants are a lot more comfortable than your jeans. You ought to try it sometime.’ Susser thought, Wow, this is a smart kid. No one is going to push him around. From that moment, Bobby wanted to be on Paul’s side.

Susser, too, would become a songwriter, specializing in children’s songs. His albums have sold more than five million copies. He was also such a good pitcher that he was named the most valuable player in the New York City Baseball Federation League in 1957. One of the highlights of Bobby’s all-star season was striking out Joe Torre, the future Hall of Fame catcher and Yankees manager, twice in one game. It was all the sweeter because Torre and some of the other rival players—who’d laughed before the game when they saw how short Bobby was—walked over to Susser after the game and shook his hand.

Paul and Bobby would play pickup games two or three times a week at the school yard and invariably cap the afternoon by going to the Honeycomb luncheonette for tuna sandwiches or egg creams. They later had a bittersweet moment when their team went to the regional finals in the five-foot-and-under softball league, but Paul was disqualified on the day of the championship game. The opposing team’s coach complained to a league official that Paul was too tall—and, indeed, he had grown to five foot one.

Paul enjoyed competition so much that he and Eddie designed a series of games to play at home, especially on rainy days or when their parents were away. Though four years younger, Eddie was a scrappy kid who exhibited much of the raw skills and drive of his brother. As the contests grew in number and complexity, Paul and Eddie began calling them their personal Olympics. They ranged from bedroom basketball, where they’d turn a pair of socks into a tight round ball, to a version of baseball in which they’d swing a tennis racket at one of the fuzzy dice that teens in those days liked to hang from car rearview mirrors. Years later, Bobby Susser saw Paul approach music the same way he approached the games. Whatever it was, Paul would outwork you, outthink you, and outpractice you, he said. He had this passion to be the best at whatever he was doing.

Paul and Art were attending Parsons Junior High School when Paul heard Gee on the radio. Doo-wop, with its mostly sweet, wistful harmonies, is a long way from the rawness and ache of the blues or the bravado and fury of hip-hop, but it was a central step in the evolution of black pop in America and one of the kick starts of rock ’n’ roll. Though the records usually had musical accompaniment, it was really the vocals that mattered, making the music tailor-made for the streets of New York. Soon doo-wop groups sprang up on street corners—mostly in black neighborhoods, but also in Italian and Jewish ones—where they would try to re-create the vocals from the records.

Though they didn’t sing on street corners, Paul and Art did get together regularly to sing into magnetic wire recorders, the primitive devices that stored sounds on thin steel wires—the forerunner to the much more efficient magnetic tape recorders that became popular in the 1950s. The teens would listen to their vocals on the recorder to measure how well their voices blended. They soon felt good enough about their music to take it public by singing Sh-Boom, an R&B hit popularized by the Chords and the Crew-Cuts, at an assembly in 1954. The response was encouraging, and they began working even harder on their harmony. As Paul got more comfortable on the guitar, he and Art raised their ambitions again by trying to write their own songs—almost always patterned after something they had heard on the radio, which is how most young songwriters begin. After school each day, Paul couldn’t wait to get home to listen to the radio, and he was rewarded during the fall term with several marvelous tunes, including the Spaniels’ Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite, the Drifters’ Honey Love, the Charms’ Hearts of Stone, and the Clovers’ Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash. Still, Paul couldn’t convince his father that the music had any merit. When he played Earth Angel for Lou, his father deemed it awful, Simon said much later, and it hurt.

A year later, Paul and Art wrote a doo-wop song, The Girl for Me, that they felt was as good as most things they heard on the radio. They even sang the engaging song at a talent show at Forest Hills High School. Lou boosted their confidence when he registered it with the Library of Congress. They were encouraged, too, by Charlie Merenstein, the father of one of Paul’s baseball chums and, more importantly, the head of Apollo Records, an indie label with an emphasis on doo-wop, gospel, and jazz. Merenstein was so impressed by Paul’s ability to spot hits that he frequently played records for him just to get his opinion. He urged Paul and Art to take their songs to some of the record companies in Manhattan. We didn’t go to any of the big places; they wouldn’t have let us in, Simon said. We just looked up the addresses of these little companies in the phone book, and we’d knock on the doors. Sometimes someone would listen to our song. Mostly they were too busy.

The pair spent the rest of 1955 trying to write another tune as promising as The Girl for Me. When Paul brought new tunes to his dad, Lou was always honest. He saw no value in false praise, even if it sometimes upset Paul. That was the only time Paul was obstinate, Belle said. My husband would say to him, ‘What are you doing there? You can’t put five notes into that sequence; there’s only four to that phrase, Paul.’ And Paul replied, ‘It’s my phrase, Dad. I’m gonna put as many in as I want.’ His dad would reply, ‘No, Paul, you’re driving me crazy. You can’t do that and call it music.’

Some observers over the years have suggested that these early confrontations are what caused Paul to devote himself to music with such intensity—yet another example of a young musician obsessed with winning his father’s approval. But Paul’s story doesn’t fit the stereotype. Bobby Susser believes that Paul’s relationship with Lou was, indeed, a defining thread in Paul’s life, but it was more complex than simply wanting to win his dad’s approval. Susser spent a lot of time with Lou because he had communication problems with his own father and found in Lou the love and counsel he wanted so badly.

Paul always wanted his father’s approval, but that wasn’t what drove his writing, Bobby said. He had this unending passion for the music. I think he realized that Lou’s early criticisms were right—that the songs weren’t very good, and Lou was trying to help him, and that honesty stuck with Paul. When he was working with people years later, he felt it was always important to be honest. Unquestionably, Lou’s comments toughened Paul. "My father