I subscribe to a couple of yahoo groups focused on the multiracial/multicultural experience. Every once in a while, there is a post that captures my imagination. Today, it was a headline that singer Carly Simon is the daughter of the Simon & Schuster founder Richard Simon and a black-Jewish biracial woman, Andrea Simon. Who knew? The post provides a wikipedia link with not more information than that. I did my own limited digging this morning for more details. According to the New York Times headline, on August 4, 1934, "Andrea Heinemann Bride: New York Girl [was] to Wed Richard L. Simon, Publisher." The link, for the story, on the New York Times website however, was dead. In July 1934, Time magazine reported the couple's engagement noting that the publisher was to wed "his office telephone operator." Nothing else. The story interests me because 1) who knew Carly Simon was black?; and 2) the marriage between the telephone operator and the publisher doesn't seem to have set off the same kind of scandal as the Rhinelander case, another interracial marriage only ten years prior. The Rhinelander case rocked New York's high society when the wealthy Kip Rhinelander married a black woman from Pelham, NY. When the marriage was announced, the groom's family forced him to sue for an annulment and claim that his bride had fooled him into believing that she was actually white.
I am always excited to bring people into the multiracial/muticultural fold. I am quick (probably annoyingly so) to say "biracial" when some mixed celebrity or public figure is mentioned in conversation. Welcome, Carly--if you'd like to be welcomed.
Also, I am intrigued by how easily and quickly (not even a generation later) the multiracial experience is erased. How is it that it becomes irrelevant to future generations of family? How is it that the ancestral connectedness stops (or is stopped from) being meaningful? This is in part the reason for the project, May is Mixed-Race People History Month, which I started last year. Look for it again in a couple of months with many more posts and insights into our shared multicultural and multiracial history.
Anyway, I plan to do a little more research on Carly Simon's story, but if anyone else has more information, please let me know.
