NEIL SIMON
1927-2018 Witty, prolific playwright gained laughs, awards over career lasting decades.
Neil Simon, the quick-witted writer for stage, film, television and radio, died Sunday at New York Presbyterian Hospital. The cause of death was complications from pneumonia, the Associated Press confirmed. He was 91.
Simon is the only playwright ever to have four plays running on Broadway simultaneously: “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “Sweet Charity” and “The Star-Spangled Girl” all played in the 196667 season. He earned more combined Tony and Oscar award nominations than any other writer, at 17 Tony nods and four Oscar nods. He also was the only playwright to have a Broadway theater named after him while he was still alive. “One usually has to die before a theater is named for him,” he wrote in “Rewrites,” his first memoir, from 1996. “I had the good fortune to have the Nederlanders, who owned it, call it the Neil Simon, prehumously.”
Simon’s canon of plays, which include “Promis-
es, Promises,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” didn’t change theater as an art form. In content he affirmed middle-class values; in form, he adhered to the constraints of boulevard comedy, even as he occasionally took on darker themes such as mental illness, as in the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning “Lost in Yonkers.”
“Being onstage with a comedic line by Neil Simon was like holding dynamite,” said actress Evalyn Baron who was nominated for a Barrymore Award for her role in Neil Simon’s “Hotel Suite” at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. “The minute you shared it, the audience would explode with laughter.
“Offstage, Mr. Simon was warm, sweet, and generous,” added Baron, who now lives in San Francisco.
If Simon wasn’t a trailblazer he was nonetheless a titan, his hopeful portraits of American families and relationships earning the sort of broad appeal few if any contemporary playwrights can claim today. It’s no coincidence that Simon’s theatrical heyday was when theatergoing was considered a crucial part of bourgeois East Coast life.
His willingness to work within convention made him a natural fit for Hollywood, where he adapted many of his plays. There he also found success with original screenplays, especially “The Out-of-Towners” and “The Goodbye Girl,” the latter starring his second wife, Marsha Mason.
“The theater has lost one of its most important authors,” said Bay Area theater producer Carole Shorenstein Hays, owner of the Curran Theatre. “The Curran stands taller for having presented so many of his timely and touching works.”
Simon was born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, to Irving Simon, a salesman, and Mamie Simon, née Levy. The Depression strained his parents’ marriage — Simon estimates they separated and got together at least eight times — and young Neil often sought refuge at the movies and in the books of humor writers.
After a brief stint in the Army Air Force Reserve, Simon and his brother Danny set out to write scripts for radio. A gig writing for “The Robert Q. Lewis Show” led to an opportunity to write for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” where Simon collaborated in the writer’s room with Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, among others, and eventually went on to work in television.
It was while at “Your Show of Shows” that he decided to take up playwriting.
“There were two other
writers on ‘Your Show of Shows’ with the same idea,” Simon told The Chronicle in a 2007 interview. “The first one wrote a play ... and his play ran one night . ... Then the other one had a play the next year, and that was one night also. So I said, ‘What am I doing?’ I was writing ‘Come Blow Your Horn.’ We got the play on — it ran a year and a half. I left ‘Your Show of Shows,’ and I went on to write plays.”
And it turned out it was the stage where he said he always felt most at home.
“For a man who wants to be his own master,” he wrote in “Rewrites,” “to depend on no one else, to make life conform to his own vision rather than follow the blueprints of others, playwriting is the perfect occupation. To sit in a room alone for six or seven or 10 hours, sharing the time with characters that you created, is sheer heaven. And if it’s not heaven, it’s at least escape from hell.”
Simon had four wives, all of them performers: Joan Baim, Mason, Diane Lander and most recently Elaine Joyce, whom he married in 1999 and who survives him. He is also survived by daughters Nancy and Ellen from his first marriage and by an adopted daughter, Bryn, Lander’s daughter from another relationship.
Chronicle Arts and Entertainment Editor Leba Hertz contributed to this report.