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His book Neil Simon Rewrites—A Memoir is a delightful trip down memory lane when the writer was in his prime. True, we run into a plethora of Hollywood celebrities and even authors like John Steinbeck`A0but we also know how the man sweated and toiled for his success and the bearing it had on his family, especially his wife Joan. Now touching 80 and living a very private life in San Francisco, his book ends with the death of his wife Joan (he does not mention his marriage to actress Marsha Mason), but what a wealth of material he churns out—his dedication to his craft, his witty observations of folks he encountered and his turn of phrase which makes Neil Simon Rewrites as gripping as it is incisive and revealing.
I never knew he wrote Come Blow Your Horn though I enjoyed the film, which`A0probably first brought the "bum" word out of the closet. Simon didn’t like the film, said it was too Hollywoodish. The play must have been better but it was inspired by the goings-on in his family. Still, his dad Irving Simon did not see the similarity, though he loved it. "Wait till you see the father, he’s hilarious," was how he described the Lee J. Cobb character in the film. Frank Sinatra played the philandering son. He speaks fondly of his dad, who was later separated from his mum, but whom he was always close to. When his dad`A0came back from work, he would tell Neil to take the gum he brought for him from his coat pocket. It was a feeling`A0of intimacy he developed for the old man.`A0 So when the old man loved his play and thought "the father was the best one," Simon thought "I had finally crawled out of`A0my father’s coat pocket and into his heart." So succinctly expressed. He has a way with words. He took a long, long time to write Barefoot in the Park but after that the plays seemed to flow. They were The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity, Plaza Suite, The Out-of-Towners, The Sunshine Boys, the works. And wasn’t The Front Page particularly memorable because it was about journalism?`A0 At one stage he had written 29 plays in 34 years. Something phenomenal. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were his favourite actors. More so Lemmon. He said he had "one of the widest ranges of any actor I can think of. He is equally funny in one of the greatest farces ever made Some Like`A0it Hot as he is moving in Days of Wine and Roses or as touching as he is in Glengary Glen Ross. Lemmon was also a director’s dream, he said. Simon thought that a playwright had an advantage over a scriptwriter. "An audience`A0will tell you immediately what’s wrong, and you can go home and fix it. With a screenwriter, once they’ve shot your scene, it’s history—or blasphemy." But he adds a rider to it. Here it goes: "The catch is, you not only must be willing to rewrite, but you must be able to rewrite." Not for nothing is his book entitled Neil Simon Rewrites. He had made a fine art out of rewriting. And speaking of rewrites, he recounts how he and film-maker Mike Nichols worked on a rewrite of`A0Prisoner of Second Avenue up to nearly 2 am in the hotel lobby before retiring to their respective rooms. "Let’s face it, the man was terrific in hotel lobbies," he says of`A0Nichols whose most memorable`A0film for me at least is The Graduate. Simon also loved working with music choreographer Bob Fosse with whom he worked in Sweet Charity, an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria in which Shirley MacLaine plays the hooker Charity of the title. Fosse’s wife Gwen Verden was equally talented. "Gwen’s`A0and Bob’s minds and feet worked as one, and as he was showing her a new move or a step, she already knew it before he finished`85 Gwen was a dream to watch and a joy to work with," he said of his experience with that couple. He also said Bob wanted darer endings and they came in Cabaret, Lenny and All That Jazz which was also`A0autobiographical. In the course of his illustrious career, he came across a number of celebrities, one of whom was Italian neo-realism director Vittorio de Sica`A0with whom he made After the Fox. Then there was George C. Scott, a rather temperamental Hollywood icon. Then there was`A0Steinbeck, Princess Margaret and many, many more. His early years, too, are graphically recounted like his writing partnership with his brother Danny as was his initiation into sex, courtesy big brother again. "We were in the pre-AIDS world where all you had to worry about was your conscience and your discretion," he says later on. Shades of David`A0Frost who said`A0"we lived in the golden age of sex, after the pill and before AIDS," in an interview with Norman Mailer.`A0 `A0 Simon took time out, too, to enjoy his life. Had an excellent holiday in a remote corner of Spain, played tennis with the likes of John Newcombe and toured a good deal with his wife, Joan, and two daughters, Ellen and Nancy. But Joan was the focal point and for that reason the novel ended with her death. He called her the Girl from the Black Mountain and they met at`A0a holiday camp. In fact the structure of his book is like "pulp fiction," going back and forth in time and space, and he isn’t afraid to being self-critical as when he quotes New York Times critic Walter Kerr on his Star-Spangled Girl.`A0 "Neil Simon didn’t have any idea for a play this year but he wrote it anyway," he said. Though he did turn out plays as though on an assembly line, he did not like to be told so`A0and even had a spat with his then manager, Saint Subber. "What am I, a writing machine? Is my life all about turning out plays for you?" he admonished him. He then goes on to explain, "Ends of friendships don’t just happen. The estrangement has to be fed and nurtured by large doses of insensitivity." Of success he says, "The truth is, unfortunately, that success breeds jealousy and jealousy breeds contempt." And with success comes its related problems, like having to see a psychiatrist. "If life was so absolutely perfect for me, why did I have to find myself in need of an analyst. One obvious answer would be because`A0life is`A0so absolutely perfect for me,"`A0is`A0his candid, cute and`A0accurate way of putting it.
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Neil
