Simon Forged His Future in Dad’s Formidable Path

Perhaps no single test, not even a surprise campaign to be governor of California, surpassed the challenge that Bill Simon Jr. faced during childhood: learning to handle Dad.

His father was not just the shaper of staunch Catholic values and a tough-minded work ethic. He was a mercurial force who often terrorized the seven Simon children. His rages came on like lightning. Even his fun-loving pranks had an edge: One was “the water treatment,” a practice of waking his children on Saturday mornings by dumping buckets of water over their heads.

“He liked to create chaos -- and he did,” the 51-year-old gubernatorial candidate said of his late father, the former U.S. Treasury secretary under Richard Nixon. “We used to joke that some days he’d come home and say, ‘How come no lights are on? This place is a mausoleum!’ And the next night he’d come home and the lights would be on, and he’d say, ‘What am I doing, supporting the utility?’

Simon laughs long and loud at the memories, even rising from a chair to demonstrate the overblown way that his father dealt with an employee’s messy desk -- by sweeping every last pencil and message slip onto the floor. “One thing for sure,” remembers Simon, who is said to exhibit occasional flashes of Dad’s volatility, “you did what my father said.”

Growing up, there were moments of injustice, years of intimidation, pressures that might have bred rebellion in an eldest son. Yet “Billy,” as Simon Jr. was known to the family, excelled at meeting the lofty expectations. He is a product of the Simon name and its disparate influences: With the stabilizing presence of his mother, Carol, grew a strong sense of security and self-esteem. The camaraderie of his siblings burnished the fun-loving facets of his personality. And deep inside, always, was a serious child whose course would parallel his father’s.

The father was a sports buff; Billy played high school football and collegiate tennis and squash. The father was a bond dealer who became a millionaire by age 40; Billy spent his early adulthood in the Wall Street currency trade, and later, with brother Peter, ascended to the co-chairmanship of their father’s firm, William E. Simon & Sons. The father was a benefactor of charities; Billy continues the work. The father served government as administrator of the Federal Energy Office, in the early 1970s, and later as Treasury secretary; only months after his father’s death in June 2000, Billy announced that he would bid for elected office, vying to unseat Democratic Gov. Gray Davis despite having no previous political experience.

By all accounts, Simon took to his father’s path naturally, combining childlike enthusiasm with a stellar work ethic. He instigated food fights, antagonized his sisters -- one trick was to flip his eyelids inside out -- and on occasion joined his father in giving them the water treatment. And yet, when it was time to study, he labored long into the night.

After dinner, their father would often sit down for gin rummy or dominoes with the other siblings. They would look around and Billy would be gone, having drifted upstairs, to the third-floor attic bedroom he shared with Peter, to steep himself in history, literature and algebra.

“I never heard conversations, ‘Billy, go up and do your homework,’ ” said sister Mary Streep, who remembers him as a consistent A student in high school. “It was just within him. He automatically did it. He was totally motivated and geared up to be the best that he could be and make his parents proud.”

Simon names Albert Schweitzer first when asked about his early heroes. The others are mainly sports stars, reflecting a childhood spent mostly at the tennis courts, ball fields and swimming pools of suburban New Jersey. He kept statuettes of Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio -- he favored the Yankees -- and hung his walls with Princeton pennants. He admired Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley, tennis great Rod Laver, and a fictional literary character named Chip Hilton, an all-American kid who was a great athlete and superior student.

In recent months, Simon has had the chance to meet Bradley -- best known now as a former presidential hopeful -- and even play tennis with Laver. Aspects of Simon’s life have a fairy-tale cast to them: There’s something of Hilton in his makeup, sterling qualities that surely would make his father proud.

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Not All Perfection

However, hard realities have marred the record. Simon’s first marriage failed; he stays in touch with his grown daughter from that union mostly by telephone. Fraud charges against the family investment firm have damaged his campaign, though a $78-million verdict against the company was reversed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Last week, he levied and was forced to retract an unfounded accusation about Davis’ fund-raising.

Still, he comes across in personal meetings as likable, a conscientious family man. He and his wife, Cindy, have three children, including a son named William E. Simon III. Before the campaign cut into his time, Simon liked to surf and play basketball. He maintains friendships that date to his early teens. “He’s very comfortable and real,” said John C. Morrissey, a neighbor in Pacific Palisades who met him about 12 years ago. “As you get to know him, you understand the depth of his character, how carefully he thinks about things.”

As a personality, Simon is tough to fit in a box. “I don’t think he has any one speed,” Morrissey said. “He’s a very thoughtful guy when it’s time to be thoughtful, and he’s fun and frivolous when it’s time to be fun and frivolous.”

Simon, perhaps befitting the role of underdog, seems much more open, easier to know, than the more imperious Davis. In background, they are remarkably similar -- products of large, devout Catholic families, country club wealth and rigorous private schools. They even hail from the same region of the Northeast -- in Simon’s case suburban Spring Lake, N.J., where he was born in 1951 to young parents who had not yet found their fortune.

His father was a pre-law student at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., about to graduate $5,000 in debt and unable to afford law school. His mother, a former model, was a stay-at-home mom who would be pregnant again in months. With the elder Simon taking a temporary job in advertising, the family scraped by on $35 a week and moved, during Billy’s second year, into a basement apartment in one of the poorest tracts in Orange, N.J.

Before long, however, Simon Sr. got into bond trading and, by the time Billy was 4, they had moved again, into a three-bedroom home in Florham Park, near Madison. They borrowed $2,000 for the down payment and took a mortgage of $18,000--the last William Simon Sr. would ever need.

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Formative Years

Florham Park was the raucous stage for nearly all of Billy Simon’s formative years. The home boiled with the hubbub of seven children and their friends and all of the slapstick and tantrums of their father’s forceful personality. “There was always something going on at our house,” said sister Leigh Porges, seven years younger than Billy. The children played hide-and-seek and kick the can. As they got older, they gravitated toward touch football and tennis at courts across the street.

Their mother served dinner at 6 every night. The two boys regarded their attic room as a clubhouse and kept the girls out. On Saturdays in the fall, the family made the hour drive to Princeton to tailgate at football games.

Duty and devotion were two themes driven home nonstop. All the kids had chores. Billy shined his father’s shoes. He and Peter were altar boys. They attended private Catholic school in the early grades and were channeled -- there was no other choice -- to their father’s alma mater: Newark Academy, a strict all-boys prep school (later co-ed) that sent a disproportionate share of young scholars to the Ivy League.

“They worked us like crazy,” said Jay Hagenbuch, a Newark classmate of Simon who remains a close friend and runs an investment firm in San Francisco. Even at 14, a skinny kid who would never top 5-foot-10, Simon was clearly the type you’d want to buy shares in, Hagenbuch said. “He had an awareness and a drive you could see. At the same time, he was a very modest, sometimes quiet guy ... [with] a warm and self-deprecating sense of humor.”

Peter Simon, trailing his brother by two years, remembered “Billy carrying around more books than I could ever carry.” The single expectation of both parents was that you’d try your best -- and Billy, being the oldest, shouldered more of that pressure than anyone. “He was a model at whatever he did,” Peter said. “He was very determined, very bright, very considerate of others, very athletically inclined. ... Billy was always controlled. He rarely overreacted to things -- rarely.”

His father’s example was often the way not to behave. He could demean and humiliate. Billy still remembers a day in his early teens when friend John Faraci was visiting. For whatever reason, William Simon flew into a rage and ordered both boys to their rooms.

“I’ve gotten sent to my room before,” recalled a laughing Faraci, now a top executive at International Paper and still a close friend of Simon. “But that was the first time somebody else’s parents sent me to my room.”

“Horrible” is how sister Mary Streep remembers some of their father’s tongue lashings. “It wore on you,” she said. “We all seemed able to cope with it because we all had each other to talk to.” And they learned, sometimes the hard way, to curb their own unruly impulses.

Billy’s great love was tennis. “He played tennis every single day, all day,” Streep said. So it was a bitter lesson when his racket was confiscated for a month after he threw it one day in anger. He begged to have it back, Streep remembered, but their parents “were very, very strict. [Billy] was in a lot of pain. It was probably the greatest lesson he learned in his life.”

Family dynamics were complex. Carol was “gentle, dignified, like a Princess Grace,” said Streep. She tolerated a family of pranksters. “We’d have food fights in the country club on Mother’s Day,” Streep said. “For about seven years in a row, she got really mad at somebody. Billy was one who would start throwing peas.”

Between the pranks and the outbursts, the noisy family dinners and silent nights of study, one theme that emerged was a sense of life’s adventure. Nothing about the Simons was passive. They shared a zest for life that instilled in Simon, the future gubernatorial candidate, a feeling that anything was possible, anything could be tried.

His father’s example came across not only in his own formidable achievements, but in the sheer energy he created. “Dad had his eyes on the horizon: ‘That’s where we’re going--follow me,’ ” said Simon, who now tries to emulate that characteristic. Inspirational quotations from the likes of Andrew Carnegie, or from particularly trenchant works of literature, formed a ceaseless refrain. The message was invariably one of perseverance, generosity or other noble values.

From “Scaramouche,” the famous French Revolution tale of revenge, came a line that Simon especially likes to recall: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

“[If] I’d lost a game, or something bad would happen ... he’d go off with this line,” Simon said. “There was an irreverence about our household ... a sense that the world was mad, don’t take yourself too seriously. He had these themes. ‘Beau Geste’ was a favorite -- like the French foreign legion. He had this sense ... there was nothing he couldn’t do if he put his mind to it.”

That attitude encouraged young Simon to broaden himself. Normally, during the summers, he worked odd jobs -- cutting lawns, tending a soda fountain, changing hospital sheets and beginning a lifelong involvement in charity work. At 18, a student at Williams College in Massachusetts with hopes of medical school, he was offered the chance to volunteer at a hospital in remote Tanzania. His parents said great, go do it, and he spent most of a summer there.

Simon recalls taking a 24-hour bus trip into nowhere. A nurse met him at the end of the one-street town and led him directly to surgery. “This doctor with a mask on looks up at me and he says, ‘Bill, look at this’ and he reached into this lady’s abdomen and takes out her uterus like this -- “ Simon lifted a hand above his eyes. “And there’s like these fibroids hanging down ... and I took one look and I faint. The next thing I know I’m looking up at the doctor. Turned out there was a miscommunication. What the doctor thought he was getting was a senior intern, somebody who’d been all the way through medical school. I’d just finished my freshman year in college.”

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Change of Direction

The Tanzania trip may have been an omen. He struggled in math and science. Though he made the dean’s list at Williams, his transcripts are marred by C grades in chemistry, physics, calculus and cellular metabolism, and even a D in principles of genetics. Eventually, Simon changed his emphasis to German and Russian history.

By the time he was in college, his father’s fortune was made, and he was constructing a mansion on 64 acres in New Vernon, N.J. His appointment as federal energy czar in 1973, during Simon’s senior year, moved the family into the political spotlight.

Simon recalls returning from the practice courts one day and being confronted by his college roommates. Armed with the Wall Street Journal, they shocked him with the raw numbers -- how much his father had earned the previous year, and how those millions broke down per diem. It was worth a big laugh, Simon said.

“For all we knew, growing up, Dad was a banker,” he remembered. No one, it seemed, not even their mother, knew just how much wealth was accumulating until the article came out. Simon called his father to congratulate him. “All he said was, ‘Shhhhh! I’m in big trouble with your mother.’ ”

As he grew, Simon’s effort to be his own man developed in ways both comic and serious. During a trip to the Middle East, the family visited the Saudi Arabian oil minister. William Simon admonished his children not to compliment any of the Saudi’s possessions, Streep said, because “in their culture, when you compliment something, they feel obliged to give it to you. So we walk in ... and what’s the first thing Billy says? ‘We love your camels.’ Billy looks at me and winks when he said it. It was so funny -- oh, God.

“My father looked at Billy like, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ ”

The oil minister nearly shipped one of the animals to Washington, D.C., Streep remembered. “It took [William Simon] a couple days,” she said, “to convince him we could not accept a camel.”

A far longer period of time would be necessary to bring about meaningful equality between father and son, according to Streep. Simon, armed with a law degree and Wall Street background, joined his father’s investment firm in 1988 and “was certainly intimidated, I’m sure, many times in those beginning years,” Streep said.

He was ridden by his father. His judgment was questioned. He endured all the blistering he could take, until one day, in the worst sort of mood, he called his wife to vent about it.

“Cindy said, ‘Are you a man, or are you still a little boy?’ ” Streep said, relating the story. “And that did it. He went back and told his dad how he felt, and he didn’t want to be talked to that way any more.”

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Series Begins on Bill Simon Jr.’s Life

This week, The Times begins a series on the life of Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon Jr.

Today: Simon’s upbringing.

Next: Simon’s tenure as a federal prosecutor, his charitable activities and how he came to be the Republican nominee for governor.

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Last week, The Times published a parallel series of articles on the life of Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. State elections will be held Nov. 5. The complete series of candidate profiles is available on the Web at www.latimes.com/profiles.