Patron saint of laughter
Neil Simon, who has died aged 91, was often called the world’s most popular playwright since Shakespeare. The author of The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park and Lost in Yonkers won Pulitzer and Tony prizes, and was proclaimed by Time magazine as the ‘‘patron saint of laughter’’. His shows, with an arsenal of sarcastic wit, became highly entertaining staples of high school and community theatres, and they popped up on stages as far away as Beijing and Moscow. But mostly, he dominated Broadway like no other playwright of the past half-century.
Hardly a year passed from 1961 to 1993 without a new production by
Simon, whose legacy was a colossally successful run of comedies and comic dramas on topics such as romance, adultery, divorce, sibling rivalry, cancer and the fear of ageing. Several are regarded as classics of 20th-century American theatre.
Frequently, Simon’s plays centred on white, middle-class Americans – mostly New Yorkers and mainly Jews – but the characters were universally relatable. He considered himself ‘‘an investigator’’ of the quotidian. ‘‘I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,’’ he said in 1992. ‘‘I write about the small wars that eventually become the big wars.’’
His output included dozens of plays, the scripts for five hit musicals, more than 20 screenplays and two volumes of memoirs. Many of his earliest shows were directed by Mike Nichols, who once said that much of Simon’s work will endure because of its ‘‘recognisability’’. ‘‘You’d hear an ‘aah’ from the audience, a sound of ‘My God, that’s me’,’’ Nichols once said.
In the late 1960s and again in the mid-1980s Simon had four shows on Broadway simultaneously. Because of his works’ commercial power, Simon’s stage and film projects often attracted big names, including Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Nathan Lane and Maggie Smith. He helped make a star of Matthew Broderick with Brighton Beach Memoirs
(1983), which ran for three years on Broadway.
It centred on Simon’s stage alter ego, Eugene Jerome, whose thoughts at 14 mostly run to sex and baseball. He uses wisecracks to deal with an overbearing mother, who asks him, ‘‘What would you tell your father if he came home and I was dead on the kitchen floor?’’ Eugene: ‘‘I’d say, ‘Don’t go in the kitchen, Pa.’ ’’
His crowning early comic achievement was The Odd Couple (1965), which became a hit film and TV sitcom and introduced two characters now embedded in pop culture: the sloppy, fun-loving Oscar Madison and the fussy neatnik Felix Ungar. The friends – one divorced, the other about to be – share a New York apartment and bicker like spouses.
‘‘Everything you do irritates me,’’ Oscar finally explodes. ‘‘You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. ‘We’re all out of cornflakes. F.U.’ Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!’’ Simon won Tony Awards for The Odd
Couple and Biloxi Blues (1985), the latter being part of his semi-autobiographical trilogy that included Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound (1986).
He collected the Pulitzer Prize for drama
and another Tony for Lost in Yonkers (1991), set in 1942 about multigenerational domestic conflict. It brought Simon the dramatic credibility he long sought.
At a basic level, Simon said he wrote about himself, his family and his friends. He grew up poor in Depression-era New York, a situation made desperate by a women-chasing father who abandoned the family eight times.
As an adult, Simon endured periods of depression, his first wife’s death from cancer at 41 and three turbulent later marriages, including one to actress Marsha Mason.
Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx and grew up in Manhattan, where his father worked as a salesman in the garment district. At 3, Neil earned his lifelong nickname, Doc, because he toted a toy medical kit and diagnosed everyone as sick.
With his father’s absences, his mother was forced to take in boarders and send her older son, Danny, to live with other relatives. Simon also recalled the trauma of being about
7 and seeing his father on the street with another woman. He told his mother and begged her to keep it secret, he recounted to the New York Times.
‘‘But when he came back, she insisted: ‘Go on. Tell your father what you saw.’ So I told him. And he said: ‘You didn’t see me. You’re lying. You’re making it up.’ I ended up getting it three ways. My mother betrayed me. I betrayed my father. And my father betrayed me. It was so awful it’s stayed with me my whole life.’’
Simon wrote sketches for TV stars Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar and Garry Moore, and scripts for musicals including Little Me, Sweet
Charity, and Promises, Promises. He also worked uncredited to punch up A Chorus
Line, adding one of the show’s bestremembered lines: ‘‘To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant.’’
Among his original screenplays was The
Goodbye Girl (1977), with Marsha Mason, for which Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar.
In October 1976, Simon married Mason, three months after the death of his first wife, Joan Baim. His third and fourth marriages, both to Diane Lander, also ended in divorce. In 1999, he married actress Elaine Joyce.
He died in hospital in New York from pneumonia. Survivors include Joyce, two daughters, two stepchildren and an adopted stepdaughter. –
‘‘I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world. I write about the small wars that eventually become the big wars.’’