Paul Simon admits his short 5-foot-three height eclipsed his success

Paul Simon is so obsessed with his height that he believes there is a ‘prejudice against small men’, a new book claims.

The Graceland singer, who is 5ft 3in tall, claimed that society discriminated against him his whole life because of his diminutive size.

Simon’s shortness eclipsed his success and he was constantly intimidated by taller men, the first biography of Simon done with his cooperation says.

It was especially bad for Simon because he was ultra-competitive and an alpha-male – but he was too short to dominate anyone.

Simon was so sensitive about his height that he was still hurt 60 years after his Bridge Over Troubled Water co-singer Art Garfunkel, who was six inches taller at 5ft 9in, told him: ‘I’ll always be taller than you’.

Simon’s obsession with his height is detailed in Paul Simon: The Life, by Robert Hilburn, which is out on May 8 and published by Simon & Schuster. 

While Simon is far from the only successful male celebrity who is short, his feelings of persecution about it seem to run deep.

Prince was 5ft 3in tall, the same height as Simon, and wore stack heels on stage to make himself look taller.

Bruno Mars is just 5ft 5in but that has not held back his career while Tom Cruise is 5ft 7in and he has enjoyed a lifetime of success in Hollywood.

Also among famous short men is 5ft 6in-tall Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos, whose show desk has been modified to disguise his short legs between taller anchors Robin Roberts, 5ft 10in, and Michael Strahan, who is 6ft 5in. 

In his new book, Hilburn writes that Simon had been sensitive about his short stature all the way back to the beginning of his partnership with Garfunkel in the late 1950s.

The book quotes Simon as saying: ‘I remember during a photo session Artie (Garfunkel) said: ‘No matter what happens, I’ll always be taller than you. Did that hurt? I guess it hurt enough for me to remember 60 years later’.’

According to Simon, people thought Garfunkel was the one who wrote the songs, not him, because he ‘looks like he writes the songs’.

Simon said: ‘It came up all the time. There is a prejudice against small men and that has been a problem at times because I happen to be a sort of alpha male-ish type guy. It becomes a competitive thing.

‘There’s this attitude that ‘I’m taller, so I could beat you up, or I should be in charge’.

Eventually, when he was in his 40s, Simon said to himself: ‘Listen man, if you’re going to make a big issue out of what you don’t have, you’re taking your actual gifts for granted….that’s the hand I’ve been dealt with. That’s the way I’m going to play it’.

Elsewhere in the book Simon talks about how his height was bound up in his long running mental health issues.

In 1981 he went to see Los Angeles psychiatrist Rod Gorney and told him he was so unhappy he couldn’t write songs anymore.

Hilburn quotes an interview with Simon from 1984 in which he says that from the outside people could not understand why he was depressed, but inside he was looking at the ‘thin slice of the pie that has got the bad news in it’.

What he meant by bad news: ‘being short’, his voice and his relationships.

Simon said that his issues left him ‘unable to absorb the bounty that was in my life’ and he used to joke that he would happily pay $5 million to look like his hero Elvis Presley, who was 6ft 2in tall.

Simon, 76, grew up in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York, and dreamed about playing for the New York Yankees.

But his dream died because of something that Hiburn says would ‘haunt him for years: his size’. 

By 1960 Simon started fretting about his thinning hair as well because all his role models like The Beatles and Mick Jagger were, as he put it ‘skinny and tall, and they had a lot of hair’.

Simon said: ‘That’s what rock’n’roll was, and it was a really big thing with me.

‘I once had this conversation with John Lennon, and he really wanted to know how I knew enough to keep my own publishing rather than give half of it away like the Beatles did. I told him I grew up around the music business….then I asked him: ‘Who ever told you how to comb your hair like that?”

Much of ‘The Life’ is taken up with the love-hate – mostly hate – relationship between Simon and Garfunkel.

Simon first saw Garfunkel in 1951 at an assembly in their school when they were in the fourth grade.

They attended the same high school and began to play music together. Their first single was an R&B number titled, ‘Sh-Boom’ in 1954. 

And even before they turned 18, the boys were being played on national radio. In 1957, however, they suffered a split that ’caused a wound so deep in Art it would never heal fully’.

Sid Prosen, the owner of the record label called Big which signed them, asked Simon if he could record some songs on his own and ‘caught up in the excitement of the moment’, Simon agreed.

Hilburn writes that their ‘massive mistake’ was not telling Garfunkel who knew he had a great voice but was ‘dependent on Paul for songs, which meant Paul had all the power’.

Garfunkel ‘always felt in danger of being tossed aside’, the book says. Simon’s song flopped as did their next collaborative project and the pair went their separate ways for five years. 

They would go through the same cycle for the next 50 years; reconciliation and fighting before breaking up once more. 

The biggest blow up came in 1993. Simon and Garfunkel had reunited for a series of shows in New York called Event of a Lifetime that sold out so fast they added 14 more nights to the ten-night run.

But the old tensions came back straight away, and Joseph Rascoff, Simon’s business manager, had to physically get between their dressing rooms to stop anything from happening.

He said: ‘I genuinely believed that if there had been a knife on the table, one of them would have used it’.

At one point Garfunkel accused Simon of getting a journalist to write a negative review of one of the sets.

On another night, while playing their hit ‘The Boxer’, Garfunkel suddenly stopped singing, which Simon thought was a mistake. 

But after the show Garfunkel told him: ‘I didn’t forget. I just wanted you to see what it feels like to be made a fool of’.

The two men went at each other and, recounting the episode, Rascoff said: ‘They never came to blows but there was shoving, and I had to step between them’.

Simon described the incident as ‘ugly – the most vicious fight, verbally at least, I’d had in my life’.

Simon divided opinion among those who met him and a veteran from the British club scene in the 1960s called him ‘shy, arrogant, self-assured, ruthlessly determined’.

Other said that he was so obsessed with music that human relationships came second.

Joan Bata, a friend of his first girlfriend Kathy Chitty, said: ‘He wasn’t deliberately being hurtful. It was just that his mind was totally occupied with something else.’

The most striking breakup was with his first wife Peggy which is described with brutal starkness in the book.

In 1974 the couple were due to go to their home in New Hope, Connecticut, but Simon was listening to his competition in that years’ Grammy Awards, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions.

Peggy called him to join her but he was too caught up in the music so she called him again and he became angry, thinking to himself: ‘Can’t I even listen to music any more?’

As the book puts it: ‘When Peggy called out a third time, the marriage was over’. 

Simon simply walked out of their townhouse and moved into the Stanhope Hotel around the corner until their divorce was finalized.

In the book, Simon said: ‘Ultimately I wasn’t ready for marriage. The marriage didn’t solve the loneliness. I knew right away I had made a mistake. 

‘I didn’t know how to be a good companion. I wasn’t a very mature person. I didn’t understand you had to work at problems. I wanted the marriage to solve my problems.’

‘The Life’ says that Simon did not get on with some celebrities, including John Lennon when they were supposed to be working on a covers album in 1974.

Lennon was constantly drunk and when Simon started to play acoustic guitar on ‘Rock Island Line’ before Lennon wanted he repeatedly told him to stop.

Then Lennon started to reach over and mute Simon’s guitar strings with his hand. A frustrated Simon told him: ‘John, I play guitar too.’

May Pang, who was staying with Lennon at the time, said that Lennon was annoyed by Simon because ‘unlike almost everybody else who entered John’s orbit (Simon) had a powerful sense of himself and could actually refuse to be treated badly’.

In 2002 Simon was in Washington to receive a Kennedy Center Honor to receive an award for his lifetime of achievement to American culture through the performing arts.

As he sat next to Elizabeth Taylor they watched as Alicia Keys butchered Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Taylor leaned over to Simon and said: ‘Tell me, Paul, does it upset you when somebody f**** up one of your songs?’