Neil Simon
Playwright hailed as a comic genius who beneath the dazzling one-liners of classics such as The Odd Couple explored darker themes
NEIL SIMON, who has died aged 91, was one of the world’s most successful playwrights, and ranked for many years as America’s most enduringly commercial dramatist. Reckoned by many to be America’s answer to Alan Ayckbourn – both men frequent purveyors of laughter-filled plays – Simon and Ayckbourn both played down the comparison, the salient difference being a veneer of sentimentality to Simon’s work that does not exist in Ayckbourn’s more bruising landscape.
Neither has ever had the popularity in the other country that both men enjoyed on home turf, Simon among the few dramatists to have a Broadway playhouse named after him, an accolade to which neither Tennessee Williams nor Arthur Miller can lay claim.
Simon, who won three competitive Tony Awards alongside a special Tony in 1975 for overall achievement, received the vaunted Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991 for his play Lost
in Yonkers – one of several works that led commentators to argue the case for a depth to his work at its best that lifted him well beyond the level of the polished one-liner for which the creator of The Odd Couple on stage, screen, and television was so revered.
From his Broadway debut in 1961 with Come Blow Your Horn onwards, rare was the season – for the better part of a quarter of a century, anyway – that did not snap to comic attention with one or another Simon premiere.
In addition to his plays, he wrote the book for various musicals that are considered benchmarks of their era – Sweet Charity, Little Me and Promises, Promises among them – as well as numerous films including The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Murder By Death (1976) and, in 1977, The Goodbye Girl, which brought Simon an Oscar nomination alongside a Golden Globe Award. A (less acclaimed) stage musical adaptation followed in 1993 on Broadway and, in a revised form, in 1997 in the West End. Ann Crumb and Gary Wilmot were the original UK leads, following in parts played in the movie by Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss winning an Oscar for his performance aged just 29.
The son of Irving Simon, a salesman in the Garment District of Manhattan, and his wife Mamie (née Levy), Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx on July 4 1927 into a tempestuous Jewish family. The household was marked out by his parents’ fractious relationship and his father’s long absences, but also by the defining ethnic humour that served him so well across his career.
The younger of two brothers, Simon immersed himself in the world of comedy (such as the stories of Ring Lardner and Robert Benchley, and the films of Charlie Chaplin) to which he soon become an important contributor, writing comedy sketches for radio and television scripts with his brother Danny for the likes of Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, and Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows, the last one an experience which inspired Simon’s 1993 Broadway comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor.
All the while Simon was aware on some level of the niggling voice of self-doubt that also plagued his New
York near-contemporary Woody Allen. Doing comedy, Allen remarked, meant sitting “at the children’s table”, whereas he and Simon both yearned to be taken seriously. Simon wanted to sit with the adults. On that front it is instructive that The Odd Couple was characterised by its creator back in the day as a “grim dark play about two lonely men” that none the less went on to become comic gold, spawning multiple versions. One variation rethought the famously mismatched Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar – the slob and the fusspot immortalised on screen by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon – as Olive Madison and Florence Ungar. But the 964-performance run of the original male version of the play was not repeated by this female variant, which came to the West End in 2001 with Jenny Seagrove and Paula Wilcox in the starring roles.
The play contains an abundance of Simon’s celebrated one-liners. “I get the picture,” says Felix in a testy third-act encounter between the two men. “That’s just the frame,” retorts Oscar, “the picture I haven’t even painted yet.” Elsewhere, Oscar describing Felix says: “You’re the only man in the world with clenched hair.”
It is small wonder that over time Simon was often asked by producers to tinker with other writers’ plays, a skill that earned him the nickname within the business “Doc Simon” owing to his instinct for how to land a line and kickstart an ailing script. Simon was quick to note when critical appreciation of his work lagged behind its commercial appeal. “I’ve always dreamed of winning a Tony,” he said in 1985 on picking up the award for his play Biloxi Blues. “I didn’t think I’d have to dream through 22 plays to get it.”
His prolific output prompted the eminent New York Times drama critic Walter Kerr to write in 1966, on the occasion of the Broadway debut of Simon’s The Star-spangled Girl, that the author “didn’t have an idea for a new play this year but he wrote it anyway”. (The 1971 film version was compared by another critic in the same newspaper to “a chop suey dinner”.) Simon later referred to Kerr’s jibe as “the best bad review I ever received” and went on to argue the authorial case for having “a burning passion to write a particular story”.
His so-called “Eugene Trilogy” of the mid-1980s – the three largely autobiographical plays with Biloxi Blues at the centre and on
either side Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound – showed an ability to colour the humour with bleaker topics like antisemitism and family fissures that ran painfully deep.
An early vehicle for a young Matthew Broderick, who won a Tony for his performance as the Simon alter ego, Eugene,
Brighton Beach Memoirs crossed the Atlantic in a 1986 National Theatre staging directed by Michael Rudman and starring Steven Mackintosh as Eugene, alongside Frances de la Tour. The production managed a commercial transfer over the river to the Aldwych, next door to the Strand Theatre (now the Novello) where Simon’s later, darker Lost in Yonkers ran in a 1993 production headlining Maureen Lipman and Rosemary Harris.
For a long time, Simon’s hit rate was unassailable. Among his other successes were
Plaza Suite and its companion piece of sorts California Suite, the 1978 film of which won Maggie Smith her second Oscar; Barefoot in the Park, an early stage vehicle for a 27-year-old by the name of Robert Redford; and Chapter Two and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, two plays that folded death and depression into the comic equation. Prisoner has had several starry London revivals, first with Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason in 1999 and then with Jeff Goldblum and Mercedes Ruehl in 2010.
The Sunshine Boys had a strong track record on stage and screen, winning a Supporting Actor Oscar for the venerable George Burns and pairing Richard Griffiths and Danny Devito in a West End revival in 2012.
“When an audience laughed, I felt fulfilled,” Simon once wrote, so it surely came as a shock – not to mention a sign of a shift in the theatrical ecosystem – when he went offbroadway for the first time in 1995 with his play London Suite (the Plaza Suite model of multiple playlets making up a play displaced to a London setting) and then again with Rose’s Dilemma, starring John Cullum, in 2003.
A planned repertory run on Broadway in 2009 of revivals of Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound was aborted because of poor ticket sales, despite fine reviews for the former; the latter was cancelled prior to the first preview. That was in stark contrast to both plays’ lengthy original Broadway runs: 1,299 and 756 performances, respectively. That was the Simon norm, much to the delight of stalwart collaborators like the directors Mike Nichols and Gene Saks and the producer Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg.
Simon’s last original play to premiere on Broadway, 45 Seconds From Broadway, set in a coffee shop modelled on the theatre district’s beloved, now-defunct, Edison Café, closed after 73 performances in 2002.
Undaunted until derailed in recent years by illness, Simon told the Telegraph in 2010: “I’m still at it all the time”, even if the tendency on both sides of the Atlantic of late has been to throw his musicals into the spotlight – Sweet Charity always seems in the process of getting a major revival somewhere – rather more than his plays.
Simon’s work was catnip for actors, many of whom walked away with trophies: the original Broadway production of Lost in Yonkers garnered four Tonys, three for its stars – Mercedes Ruehl, Irene Worth, and Kevin Spacey – and the other for Best Play. Gemma Craven won a 1980 Olivier Award for Actress in a Musical for the West End premiere of They’re Playing Our Song, Simon’s collaboration with the composer Marvin Hamlisch that later had a 2008 London revival.
Married five times, including twice to the same woman (Diane Lander), Simon married his frequent leading lady, Marsha Mason, in 1973 after the death of his first wife, Joan, from cancer (which inspired his 1977 play Chapter Two). He was married for the last time, in 1999, to Elaine Joyce, who survives him with two daughters from his first marriage and Diane Lander’s daughter, whom he adopted.
“It’s great to be a playwright but oh the pain,” read the headline to a New York Times interview with Simon in 2000 on the occasion of the Broadway opening of his play The Dinner Party, which ran almost a year.
In 1997, turning 70, he wrote: “I’d settle for getting out of the bed in the morning and to hell with the play.” His comic genius, virtually unparalleled on Broadway, came at a cost, laughter the balm against the abrasions of life.