Neil Simon

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Lore & Background

Neil Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. His parents' financial difficulties affected their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood. He often took refuge in movie theaters, where he enjoyed watching early comedians like Charlie Chaplin. After graduating from high school and serving a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio programs and popular early television shows. Among the latter were Sid Caesar's *Your Show of Shows* (where in 1950 he worked alongside other young writers including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and Selma Diamond), and *The Phil Silvers Show*, which ran from 1955 to 1959. His first produced play was *Come Blow Your Horn* (1961). It took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, *Barefoot in the Park* (1963) and *The Odd Couple* (1965). He won a Tony Award for the latter. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time. In 1983, he became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor. Overall, he garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards.

Reader's Guide

Neil Simon's significance lies in his extraordinary productivity and commercial success on Broadway. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards, along with a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006. His work ranged from farce to romantic comedy to more serious dramatic comedy. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time. In 1983, he became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor. His professional association with producer Emanuel Azenberg began with *The Sunshine Boys* and continued with *The Good Doctor*, *God's Favorite*, *Chapter Two*, *They're Playing Our Song*, *I Ought to Be in Pictures*, *Brighton Beach Memoirs*, *Biloxi Blues*, *Broadway Bound*, *Jake's Women*, *The Goodbye Girl*, and *Laughter on the 23rd Floor*, among others.

Did You Know?

• Simon's first Broadway play, *Come Blow Your Horn*, took him three years to complete and was rewritten at least twenty times from beginning to end.
• In 1966, Simon had four shows playing simultaneously on Broadway: *Sweet Charity*, *The Star-Spangled Girl*, *The Odd Couple*, and *Barefoot in the Park*, earning him royalties of $1 million a year.
• Simon served as an uncredited 'script doctor' for *A Chorus Line* (1975), helping to hone the book of the musical.
• He became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theatre named in his honor, the Neil Simon Theatre, in 1983.
• Simon's play *Laughter on the 23rd Floor* (1993) was based on his experiences writing for Sid Caesar's *Your Show of Shows*, and its 2001 TV adaptation won him two Emmy Award nominations.

A Boy Who Found Laughter in the Dark

Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York City, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie (Levy) Simon, was mostly a homemaker. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen. His childhood was marked by his parents' 'tempestuous marriage' and the financial hardship caused by the Depression. Sometimes at night he blocked out their arguments by putting a pillow over his ears. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional suffering. As a result, the family took in boarders, and Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with different relatives. Simon said: 'To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them ... She'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him.' He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer was to fulfill a need to be independent of such emotional family issues, a need he recognized when he was seven or eight: 'I'd better start taking care of myself somehow ... It made me strong as an independent person.' He was able to find refuge at the movies, in the work of stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. 'I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.' He began writing for pay while still in high school: at the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. To help develop his writing skill, he often spent three days a week at the library reading books by famous humorists such as Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and S. J. Perelman. Soon after graduating from high school, he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University. He attained the rank of corporal and was eventually sent to Colorado. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946.

The Writing Room Years

Simon quit his job as a mailroom clerk in the Warner Brothers offices in Manhattan to write radio and television scripts with his brother Danny Simon, under the tutelage of radio humorist Goodman Ace, who ran a short-lived writing workshop for CBS. Their work for the radio series *The Robert Q. Lewis Show* led to other writing jobs. Max Liebman hired the duo for the writing team of his popular television comedy series *Your Show of Shows*. The program received Emmy Award nominations for Best Variety Show in 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954, and won in 1952 and 1953. Simon later wrote scripts for *The Phil Silvers Show*, for episodes broadcast during 1958 and 1959. Simon later recalled the importance of these two writing jobs to his career: 'Between the two of them, I spent five years and learned more about what I was eventually going to do than in any other previous experience.' 'I knew when I walked into *Your Show of Shows*, that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled together.' Simon described a typical writing session: 'There were about seven writers, plus Sid, Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris ... Mel Brooks and maybe Woody Allen would write one of the other sketches ... everyone would pitch in and rewrite, so we all had a part of it ... It was probably the most enjoyable time I ever had in writing with other people.' Simon incorporated some of these experiences into his play *Laughter on the 23rd Floor* (1993). A 2001 TV adaptation of the play won him two Emmy Award nominations.

Conquering Broadway

Simon's first Broadway experience was on *Catch a Star!* (1955); he collaborated on sketches with his brother, Danny. In 1961, Simon's first Broadway play, *Come Blow Your Horn*, ran for 678 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Simon took three years to create that first play, partly because he was also working on television scripts. He rewrote it at least twenty times from beginning to end: 'It was the lack of belief in myself', he recalled. 'I said, "This isn't good enough. It's not right." ... It was the equivalent of three years of college.' *Barefoot in the Park* (1963) and *The Odd Couple* (1965), for which he won a Tony Award, brought him national celebrity, and he was considered 'the hottest new playwright on Broadway', according to Susan Koprince. During 1966, Simon had four shows playing simultaneously at Broadway theatres: *Sweet Charity*, *The Star-Spangled Girl*, *The Odd Couple*, and *Barefoot in the Park*. These earned him royalties of $1 million a year. His professional association with producer Emanuel Azenberg began with *The Sunshine Boys* and continued with *The Good Doctor*, *God's Favorite*, *Chapter Two*, *They're Playing Our Song*, *I Ought to Be in Pictures*, *Brighton Beach Memoirs*, *Biloxi Blues*, *Broadway Bound*, *Jake's Women*, *The Goodbye Girl*, and *Laughter on the 23rd Floor*, among others. Simon also adapted material originated by others, such as the musical *Little Me* (1962), based on the novel by Patrick Dennis; *Sweet Charity* (1966) from the screenplay for the film *Nights of Cabiria* (1957), written by Federico Fellini and others; and *Promises, Promises* (1968), a musical version of Billy Wilder's film *The Apartment*. By the time of *Last of the Red Hot Lovers* in 1969, Simon was reputedly earning $45,000 a week from his shows (excluding sale of rights), making him the most financially successful Broadway writer ever. Simon also served as an uncredited 'script doctor', helping to hone the books of Broadway-bound plays or musicals under development, as he did for *A Chorus Line* (1975). In 1983, he began writing the first of three autobiographical plays, *Brighton Beach Memoirs* (1983), which would be followed by *Biloxi Blues* (1985) and *Broadway Bound* (1986). He received his greatest critical acclaim for this trilogy. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his follow-up play, *Lost in Yonkers* (1991), which starred Mercedes Ruehl and was a success on Broadway.

A Career Measured in Honors

Overall, Simon garnered 17 Tony nominations and won three awards. He received a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006. He also received a Golden Globe Award and nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 1966, he had four successful productions running on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983, he became the first living playwright to have a Broadway theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honor. He died on August 26, 2018.