Neil Simon's Memoirs - Hardcover

Simon, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501155008 ISBN 13: 9781501155000

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

The complete memoirs of playwright Neil Simon—the author of such iconic works as Lost in Yonkers, The Odd Couple, Biloxi Blues, and The Goodbye Girl—now with a new introduction and afterword.

This omnibus edition combines Neil Simon’s two memoirs, Rewrites and The Play Goes On, into one volume that spans his extraordinary five-decade career in theater, television, and film. Rewrites takes Simon through his first love, his first play, and his first brush with failure. There is the humor of growing up in Washington Heights (the inspiration for his play Brighton Beach Memoirs) where, despite his parents’ rocky marriage and many separations, he learned to see the funny side of family drama, as when his mother screamed thinking she saw a body on the floor in their apartment—it turned out to be the clothes his father discarded in the hallway after a night of carousing. He describes his marriage to his beloved wife Joan, and writes lucidly about the pain of losing her to cancer. The Play Goes On adds to his life’s story, as he wins the Pulitzer Prize and reflects with humor and insight on his tumultuous life and meteoric career.

Now, with the whole story in one place, Neil Simon’s collected memoirs trace the history of modern entertainment over the last fifty years through the eyes of a man who started life the son of a garment salesman and became the greatest—and most successful—American playwright of all time.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Simon is the writer of more than forty Broadway plays, including Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Out-of-Towners, and Lost in Yonkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Neil Simon’s Memoirs THE HORN BLOWS

1

IN THE SPRING OF 1957, I was unhappily in California working on a television special. I was thirty years old and knew that if I didn’t start writing that first Broadway play soon, I would inevitably become a permanent part of the topography of the West Coast. The very thought of it jump-started me to my desk.

I sat at the typewriter and typed out “O N E S H O E O F F,” all in caps and putting a space after each letter and a double space after each word, trying to picture what it would look like up on a theater marquee. Four spaces down, in regular type, came “A New Comedy.” I sat back and studied it. Not a bad start for a first play. Then I suddenly wondered: when they wrote together, did George S. Kaufman type this out or did Moss Hart? No, it must have been Hart. He was the eager young writer poised behind the trusty old Royal machine while Kaufman, the seasoned old pro, would be lying across a sofa in his stockinged feet munching on his handmade fudge, bored by such prosaic labors as manual typing. Kaufman had probably put in enough time punching the keys back in the old days when he was drama critic for The New York Times. How I envied young Moss Hart being in the same room with the great Kaufman, knowing he would be guided through the pitfalls of playwriting much as any cub reporter would feel the security of marching behind Henry M. Stanley as he guided his pack-bearers across the African plain in search of the great missionary, and then, upon finding him, having the coolness and gift of a great journalist to put quite simply and memorably, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” . . . But, I had no Henry M. Stanley to teach me the impact of brevity in great moments. As a matter of fact, I had no George S. Kaufman, no fudge, no nobody. I had me. Not only had I not written a play before, I had never written anything longer than twelve pages, which was all that was required for a TV variety sketch back in the mid-1950s. Even that was a major step up from the one-liners I used to write with my brother, Danny, when we were earning our daily bagels working for stand-up comics and sit-down columnists.

Now I was faced with 120 pages to feed, complete with characters, plots, subplots, unexpected twists and turns, boffo first-act curtain lines, rip-roaring second-act curtain lines, and a third act that brought it all to a satisfying, hilarious, and totally unexpected finish, sending audiences to their feet and critics to their waiting cabs, scribbling on their notepads in the darkness, “A Comic Genius Hit New York Last Night.” . . . At least Lindbergh had the stars to guide him. I didn’t even know how to change the typewriter ribbon. Nevertheless, I pushed on.

I was about to jump four spaces down to write the simple word “by,” no caps, this to be followed by my name a little farther down the page, when it suddenly occurred to me that of the only two lines I had written so far, one of them was inordinately stupid. “A New Comedy” . . . I had seen this printed in the theater section of the Times for eons, seen it on billboards and marquees all over New York, and it never hit me until just now . . . “A New Comedy”? Was this to make it clear to the audiences they should not confuse this with “An Old Comedy”? Shouldn’t it just be “A Comedy”? And even that was a matter of opinion. A century ago, Chekhov had written “A Comedy” before such plays as The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. According to his biographers, however, neither of those plays was ever staged as a comedy during his lifetime, much to his beleaguered protests. So much for interpretation. Novels never made any such pronouncements. My copy of War and Peace never said, “A New Epic Drama by Leo Tolstoy.” Never once in any movie theater did I see the screen titles come up and read, “Some Like It Hot, A New Farce by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond.” If novelists trusted their readers to discover what their books were about and filmmakers didn’t feel it necessary to spell it out, why do playwrights or their producers hold their audiences in such low esteem? Would I be brave enough to break with tradition? Since I had not yet typed in “by” and “Neil Simon,” I didn’t feel I had enough experience.

I plunged back into intensive work and finished typing in “by” and “Neil Simon.” I sat back and studied my work so far. It was good but something was missing. It did not occur to me to type in the lower right-hand corner of the page “1st Draft, Oct. 15, 1957.” I never assumed there would be a second draft or, God forbid, a third draft. Wasn’t writing a hundred and twenty pages accomplishment enough? Surely I would change a few words here and there, possibly cut a few lines or add some last-moment inspirations of wit, but new drafts? It was unimaginable. Did Shakespeare do rewrites? How? He obviously wrote in longhand on cheap parchment with a scratchy quill. His plays ran four hours and he wrote thirty-seven of them, not to mention the sonnets, letters to actors and producers, love notes to Anne Hathaway, and excuses for delayed payments to roof thatchers and the local dung heating suppliers. The quills needed for this enormous output alone must have taxed the poultry growers of the region to their capacity. The acting roles in each of the plays numbered in the thirties, which meant at least that number of additional scripts, not to mention those for stage managers and understudies. Even if he had friends and apprentices quill-copy each play to make up the additional scripts, it must have meant thousands upon thousands of naked fowl running around central England. The time, the labor, the costs, and the wear and tear of stress on Bill Shakespeare would certainly inhibit and prohibit the luxury of rewrites. He was certainly in the top three of the world’s greatest geniuses and if he had to do without rewrites, why should I worry about them? But I did. I typed in “1st Draft, Oct. 15, 1957,” took it out of the typewriter, put it on my desk face down, inserted the next blank piece of paper in the machine, and said to myself, “Now . . . how do you begin a play?”

All I had was the subject. Not a story, not a plot, not a theme, just a subject. Actually, the subject was my third priority. Number two on my list was a desire to write for Broadway. Number one—and this was my dominating motivation, far and above all the others—was a desperate and abiding need to get out of television. In the mid-1950s, when some great electronic genius picked up the coaxial cable that would interconnect all television stations from coast to coast, plugged it into a wall socket, and saw that it worked, my days in New York were numbered. Television, like the film industry some forty years prior, was going west with all the young men. California had the largest studio space, the sun for shooting outdoor scenes, and the smog for shooting London scenes. It all seemed to make sense. Not to me, and certainly not to my wife, Joan. We loved New York. Life without New York was inconceivable. I grew up on the streets of Washington Heights in upper Manhattan; Joan was raised a horse’s canter away from Prospect Park in Brooklyn and about a home run’s length away from Ebbets Field. I was a Giants fan; she, of course, was a Dodgers fanatic. We were the Montagues and Capulets of baseball, who found true love despite this insurmountable barrier. When the Polo Grounds was finally toppled into dust and Ebbets Field was dismantled brick by brick, downing a vial of poison each was not totally out of the question. Moving from New York to California was. If possible, Joan was even more adamant than I was. To her, New York was the center of the universe. It was the ballet, the theater, the museums, The New York Times, the Seventy-second Street Marina, steamed clams in Montauk, fall drives through Vermont, the U.S. Open in Forest Hills, sailing in Long Island Sound, old bookstores, Greenwich Village pubs where you could see Franz Kline paintings and Maxwell Bodenheim poems tacked to the walls in lieu of their paying their bar bills. And yes, even walking barefoot in Washington Square Park with a feisty dog named Chips, on a cool October night, sitting on a park bench till three o’clock in the morning facing the great Arch and the elegant brownstones and mews where Henry James’s heroines once looked longingly through a candlelit window for a lover who never returned. Leave all this for what? Houses built on stilts in a place where Lorenz Hart said the nights were cold and damp and the ladies were mostly tramps? “We’re just not going to California for the rest of our lives,” Joan said in that tone that never beat around the bush, and would certainly never beat around a giant redwood.

There was, unfortunately, little to keep me in New York. All the television shows I had worked for in the past—Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers in Sgt. Bilko, The Red Buttons Show, and many more—were either defunct or had moved to California. Worse still, my friends, the writers, had all gone where the work was. I couldn’t believe that the brightest and wittiest of them all, the staff of the Caesar show—Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, and Sid Caesar himself—were now living in the place we had been satirizing for so many years. The L.A. networks pounced on them all with golden offers, as well they should. But it was still beyond my understanding how you could look out a window, see a palm tree in the sun, and think funny. If that were possible, surely there would be great Hawaiian comedy writers by now. I was one of the few who remained in New York, devoid of work and three-fourths of my closest friends. Even my older brother, Danny—my mentor, my spokesman, the Kaufman to my Hart—moved west to a place called the Valley. From his letters and picture postcards, the Valley looked like America’s Shangri-la, a place where your life span could increase by a hundred and fifty years. The catch was that when you eventually did die, it surely wouldn’t be from laughing.

Money never mattered much to Joan. She could and did live contentedly in our first apartment, a one-room, five-story walk-up in the Village. It had a small dressing room which she converted to an even smaller bedroom. It had a low doorway and I couldn’t see how she could get a bed in. It would, I thought, have to be born in there. Never underestimate the wiles and ingenuity of a newlywed decorating her first apartment. I came home that first night we moved in, having put in a full day on the Caesar show, and found the bed in the room. “How?” I asked, expecting some reasonable answer. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I just did it.” With the bed now in the room, reaching and touching all of the four walls, I stood amazed. Perhaps she had rented the apartment next door, broken down the adjoining wall, shoved the bed in, quickly replastered the wall, and broken the lease on the adjoining apartment—all in one afternoon. She was capable of things like that.

One could open the window by standing on the bed, but opening the small closet on the opposite wall was another matter. What we did was walk across the bed, pull the closet door open about three inches, a major feat in itself, then you would squeeze your arm through, reach in, feel around, and whatever you pulled out was what you wore that day. No one noticed, because people in the Village dressed strangely anyway. When I came home at night the bed was neatly made. A shoehorn was her only possibility. The apartment was on Tenth Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place, three blocks from New York University. Walking our dog past NYU at night was the closest I came to a college education.

The kitchen was comprised of a “sinkette,” and an antique two-burner stove which was powerful enough to warm water but not actually boil it. The apartment’s main attraction was a red brick fireplace that could fill the room with smoke in three minutes flat. Some of this, fortunately, could escape through the large hole in the glass skylight fourteen feet above. Unfortunately, this also permitted rain, sleet, and snow to fall gently and otherwise on the sofa, the only good piece of furniture we had. This meant that Joan redecorated the room every time the weather changed. It had the advantage of making it seem as though we lived in a six-room apartment. As for amenities, there was a vertical bathroom. No tub, just a shower big enough for you to make a phone call but not large enough for you to bend over and wash the lower half of your body. This may have been the reason Joan liked to walk barefoot in the park so much.

We moved there on the day we were married, September 30, 1953, after a rather austere ceremony that took place in the Criminal Courts Building in lower Manhattan. We were married by a judge whose new false teeth had not yet properly settled in his mouth, so that when he tried to pronounce our names, we sounded vaguely Armenian. In attendance were Joan’s mother and father, a sweet, happily married couple, and my mother and father, who were separated and did not speak to each other. At least not in the first person, anyway. At the end of the ceremony, the best my father could manage to my mother was “Congratulations to her.” My mother nodded back, looking in the opposite direction. From moments like this, the seeds of comedy are born. Joan was gloriously happy up in our tree house on Tenth Street. I was gloriously happy with Joan, although not quite as stoic. I would announce with a touch of sarcasm as we squirmed into our miniature bed, “We’ll be sleeping from left to right tonight.”

On April 25, 1957, Ellen Marie Simon was born. She was six and a half pounds and Joan was in labor for eighteen hours. By the time Ellen entered the world at 7:28 that morning, the long struggle of labor and birth had taken its toll on the baby. Her head was as pointy as a dart. With the twisted mind of a comedy writer, I looked at her in panic, thinking, will she sleep in a crib, or do we just throw her into a dartboard at night? It was with great trepidation that I asked the obstetrician, “That er . . . pointy head . . . that does go away, doesn’t it?” He assured me that by nightfall her head would settle nicely.

The jobs were getting scarcer in New York, our savings were dwindling, and with Ellen now in our lives, we had no choice but to move to a larger, but more expensive apartment. Larger was no problem because every apartment in New York was larger. We moved down a few hundred feet on Tenth Street to a more prosaic and adult building. This one had an elevator, ten floors, a doorman, two bedrooms with reachable closets, a stove that made hot food, a full bathroom with a tub, and a living room that was protected from the elements, which meant that our furniture placement could remain stable. A week after we had moved in, we realized we had suddenly grown up. Our bohemian life, such as it was, was behind us. We missed the hole in our skylight, the light snowfalls in the living room, and the bedroomless bedroom where we were forced to sleep tightly in each other’s arms, knowing that being an inch apart was not only physically impossible, but was also gloriously wonderful. The compensation was that now we had Ellen. Within a month it was clear she was going to be as beautiful as her mother, especially now that her head no longer looked like a sharpened pencil.

Suddenly, a call came from my agents at the William Morris office. Would I like to work for Jerry Lewis again? I had previously written one television special for him with Mel Tolkin, who was formerly the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501155008
• ISBN 13: 9781501155000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672