From the Archives: Playwright Neil Simon Looks Back at His Career.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 05, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 030501np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Neil Simon
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:30

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Yesterday, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen honored Neil Simon with its Writers Award. Simon has made a lot of people laugh, he started his career in the early days of television writing for Sid Caeser's show, "Sgt. Bilko" and "The Gary Moore Show."

But Simon's real ambition was to write plays. He succeeded. His hits include "Come Blow Your Horn," "Barefoot in the Park," "Plaza Suite," "Prisoner of Second Avenue," "The Sunshine Boys," "The Goodbye Girl," "California Suite," "Brighton Beach Memoirs," "Biloxi Blues," and "Laughter on the 23rd Floor."

He also wrote the book for the musicals "Sweet Charity" and "Promises Promises." Simon adapted many of his plays into successful films. The popular movie and TV series "The Odd Couple" were adapted from his hit play. The movie starred Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as two divorced men sharing an apartment, having the same kinds of problems with each other that they used to have with their wives.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- SCENE FROM THE FILM "THE ODD COUPLE")

JACK LEMMON, ACTOR: Oscar, what is it? Is it the cooking or the cleaning, the crying?

WALTER MATTHAU, ACTOR: I can tell you exactly what it is. The cooking, the cleaning, the crying. It's the talking in your sleep. It's those moose calls that open your ears at two o'clock in the morning. Bwaooo! Bwaooo! I can't take it anymore, Felix. I'm cracking up. Everything you do irritates me.

And when you're not here the things I know you're going to do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. I told you 158 times I cannot stand little notes on my pillow. We're all out of corn flakes -- "F.U." -- it took me three hours to figure out that "F.U." is Felix Unger.

GROSS: I spoke with Neil Simon in 1996 after the publication of his memoir, "Rewrites." I asked him how he developed his ear for writing dialog.

NEIL SIMON, PLAYWRIGHT: I never thought about it much, but the only thing that came to me is that when I was a young boy -- five and six and seven years old -- my parents would take me to visit their relatives. And for some reason I think they thought that I was invisible because they never talked to me.

GROSS: Right, or they'd talk about you even though you could hear.

SIMON: I could hear, but they were talking family matters or gossip or whatever. And I just sat there and once in a while they'd give me a cookie or something, and I'd just listen. I wasn't terribly interested but it stuck in my head, and what I managed to learn was the way they talked. The choice of words they made. How -- what it was that they were interested in.

And years later, without knowing it, when I started to write about these people I was able to draw on my own memory from what happened in those days.

GROSS: The first sketch that you wrote that was performed in front of an audience was for the Abraham and Strauss department-store.

SIMON: Right. Yes. I was, I think, 15 years old.

GROSS: Right. And this is what, their annual employee show or something?

SIMON: Yes -- well, there was a producer we knew -- and as in the book, I tell that ultimately I worked with on the Jerry Lewis show. But this producer did what they called "industrial shows." And he found these two young kids, one eight years older than myself -- my brother -- Danny and Doc Simon as we were called then.

And we showed him some material we had written and he says, "I'd love you to write the show." Well, this was like going to Broadway even though it was in Brooklyn in a department store. But it was the thrill of my life. And that night hearing our material, which was not jokes, which was a bit of a sketch that had some character -- it was mostly department store kind of comedy.

And the audiences were easily affected by it. But that was the first step, and I think maybe the first time the bug bit me.

GROSS: Early on in your career your brother Danny was your writing partner. He's what -- about eight years older than you?

SIMON: Eight and a half years older, yes.

GROSS: Yeah. And you write in your book that he was somewhere between your brother and your father. He was your mentor as well your brother. And your father actually was in and out of the family. He left the family and came back I think about eight times.

SIMON: Exactly. Yes.

GROSS: Was it strange to have him coming and going like that not knowing exactly what his relationship to you was?

SIMON: It was awful because I felt my life was sort of on a yo-yo, to give my kind of example. My mother never knew when he was coming back. And the whole world lit up when he came back because it meant not only that we'd not have to fear for the rent because he didn't leave any money for us. We didn't have to worry about food, but I felt a solidity there with the family. And I felt happy for my mother.

When he was gone it was the most awful time. And I thought he was never coming back. And I'm sure a lot of my personality has been formed by that relationship, and it makes me somewhat insecure at times. And its why I think I fell back on writing, possibly, as a way of being able to support and survive for myself.

GROSS: I imagine your mother, when your father was gone, ended up very busy with earning money. Earning money to take care of the family.

SIMON: Yes. She was uneducated. She did not have a job. And she would do whatever she could to provide for us. She borrowed from her family but what she eventually did, which was the hardest thing for us, was she took in two men to live in our house -- two boarders -- who took her bedroom and she slept on the sofa in the living room.

My brother and I had our own bedroom. And they were butcher's, and they paid us mostly in meat and lamb chops.

GROSS: Gee.

SIMON: And it was no fun sitting at the room -- in the kitchen eating with them.

GROSS: Why not?

SIMON: They were like strangers. They didn't talk to us. They were mostly foreigners. I don't mean mostly foreign -- they were foreign and spoke some English. But it was difficult, and it was not my father. And I felt I was living in not my house, but their house.

GROSS: You know, the stereotype of the Jewish mother of your mother's generation was of the overly possessive, overly neurotic Jewish mother, right. I imagine your mother was much too busy to fit that stereotype at all.

SIMON: No. I don't think she did fit that stereotype. She was very different. She was very loving. And very encouraging in terms of my brother and I doing the writing. My brother, foolishly I think, would read the monologues that we would write at first to my mother and she would just laugh all the way through.

And my brother said, "do you understand what they mean?" And she said, "no, I don't." And he said, "well, why are you laughing?" She says, "well, it pleases me to please you."

It was such a wonderful thing for her to do. It didn't encourage us as writers, but it encouraged us that we had a terrific mother.

GROSS: You write that your brother got you a whore shortly after your 21st birthday and that was your sexual initiation.

SIMON: Yes, it was.

GROSS: Looking back, was that a good way to become initiated?

SIMON: I don't know if it was a good way, it was the only way. I mean, if he left it to me I'd be 54 before it happened.

LAUGHTER

I'm sure glad it did happen. But it did change me. I mean, you have to get through that moment because it was the most fearful moment of my life. And I don't know why it this, looking back. I mean, you don't expect this woman to think that you should be expert at what you're doing or that this is going to be a very personal affair and that we should like each other. It's really a cash and carry business. And you just do it.

But I felt so much better having done it and that I would never have to do it that way again, which I never did.

GROSS: There's a similar but different scene in "Biloxi Blues," where the character there also has his first experience with a prostitute but that's on an army base.

SIMON: Yeah, but that -- the origin of that scene in that film was exactly what happened to me. I mean, it was with a prostitute. It was his fellow friends bringing him there, but he was -- there was a line in it that summed it up. It's because I felt the same way when it happened to me.

He said, "I'm not expecting this to be a pleasurable experience. I just want to get through it."

GROSS: You have a funny description there about how you initially lie down on the bed in a position and with an expression on your face as if you were going to be talking about the latest art film .

SIMON: I know. I was trying to be very suave. Why I was trying to impress this woman, who's going to have like seven of those affairs that night, I don't know but that's the way I was. I was very naive, and very naive for many many years to come.

GROSS: My guest is Neil Simon. Here's the scene he was referring to from "Biloxi Blues," featuring Matthew Broderick.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- SCENE FROM THE FILM "BILOXI BLUES")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: A half an hour he's been in there. If he doesn't hurry up I'm going to pass my peak.

MATTHEW BRODERICK, ACTOR: Hey, what if she's ugly? I mean, really ugly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Then you close your eyes and you think of some cheerleader.

BRODERICK: I don't want to close my eyes. That's the same as doing it to yourself.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Not if you're feeling someone underneath you or on top of you.

BRODERICK: On top of me? Who would be on top of me?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: She would. She could be anywhere -- under a table, on a chair or an ironing board.

BRODERICK: An ironing board? What kind of a girl is this? I thought we were going to a regular place.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Don't you know anything?

BRODERICK: Maybe not in actual experience. I have all the information I need.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Do you know how many positions there are?

BRODERICK: American or worldwide?

LAUGHTER

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: This guy is a riot.

GROSS: We'll hear more from Neil Simon after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: Back to our 1996 interview with Neil Simon, recorded after the publication of his memoir "Rewrites." About his career writing for TV, movies and Broadway.

You say that you have always followed the advice of Max Gordon who said, "think of characters not stories or plots." Why is that good advice?

SIMON: Because that's what a play is about. There are very few plays that are about a plot. Movies are made about plots. Television shows are about plots. If you go to a movie studio today and bring a script and they start to read it, and they'll say, "oh, I see this is character driven isn't it?" Which is a negative to them.

I grew up reading many many books. I got pulled into the stories by the characters, as I did with the early films that I saw. The characters that Humphrey Bogart played or even a Leslie Howard or any of the great actors. That's what I was attracted to.

GROSS: What was Broadway like when you first got there?

SIMON: It was great. There were, I would say, a minimum of 20 plays on Broadway. I think today you'd be lucky to find five plays on Broadway. When I say minimum, I think maybe there'd be 30. And if you would count the amount of plays that were there during the entire season, the plays that failed and moved on or had run its run from the year before -- so there could be 40 plays on Broadway.

Actors were always acting. Once a play closed they auditioned for another play. And so it was not a place that I felt I was not going to be able to break into. There was a long road to do it because I had to write a play and get it passed the producers.

I showed the first play, "Come Blow Your Horn," too many producers -- about 10 or 12 of the best of them. David Merrick and Garson Kanin and some of the best-known people in the theater. They gave me wonderful tips about writing the plays. But they didn't want to put on "Come Blow Your Horn," they didn't think it was experienced enough.

And so the only way I could save it was by going to summer stock, to the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. We put it on there. It was sort of a success, but it wasn't there all the way through. And so the producers there said if I took six months and re-wrote it and they liked the rewrite they would put it on Broadway.

By it was a glorious time on Broadway then, and I'm sorry to see it not the same way. It's still a very lucrative place. It's a very successful place now. There many more musicals and there probably always will be. But it doesn't stop me because I've written a new play for next year and I'll go back to Broadway with it.

GROSS: What's changed? What was once there that you miss now?

SIMON: The accessibility of seeing the best actors in the business. There was Henry Fonda and any other number of wonderful actors who would come from Hollywood each year to do it. When the difference in salaries didn't seem to mean anything. But now when an actor in one television series could make enough in that one series, if it ran three years -- five years or eight years -- to last him his life and never had to work again.

We've lost all of those actors -- lost them from the theater. Very hard to get somebody who would come back and do a play. You do occasionally, but it's few and far between. So I kind of write ensemble plays now where I don't need stars for the most part. Once in a while I do get them, like I had Alan Alda, let's say, for "Jake's Women."

But the minute Alan left, we couldn't find a suitable replacement or someone with a name as big as Alan. And so the play had to close. I liked it when I do something like "Barefoot in the Park" when -- I'm sorry, not "Barefoot," but -- well, that could be an ensemble too because Robert Redford was unknown at the time.

But I'm talking about "Brighton Beach Memoirs" when I had all these young boys on the stage and young girls. And out of it came Matthew Broderick and a few other characters who did go on to better things, or more lucrative things. But it has changed.

GROSS: Let me ask you about creating two of your most famous characters, Felix and Oscar, the odd couple.

SIMON: Yes.

GROSS: How did you come up with those characters?

SIMON: Well, I just watched it in real life. It was my brother Danny and a friend of his named Roy Gerber. Both of whom moved in together in the same apartment because they recently were divorced, and they wanted to cut down their expenses so they could help pay their alimony.

And in their social life, rather than going out on a double date somewhere and spending a lot of money on the dinner, my brother Danny decided to cook. And Roy was kind of a, you know, things came and go very easily for him. So he would just say to the girls, "come up for dinner, you know, 6:30, 7:00, 7:30 whenever you're ready."

Well, to Danny that was anathema. He cooked the pot roast that night. He wanted them there at 7:30. And I watched this one night. I came up to Danny's apartment and Roy's apartment, I saw this taking place as they were getting prepared for this dinner. I was going to leave before the dinner happened. And it was hilarious to me.

And I said, "Danny, this is a great movie. A great play something. You must write it," because Danny was a writer too. But he never wrote by himself, and he started to write the play but he took three months or so to write 10 pages. And finally called me and he said, "I can't do it." He says, "I'm not a writer and I'm certainly not a playwright." He is a writer of course, but he was not a playwright. And he didn't know how to construct it.

And he said, "you take the play and you do it." And so I made a financial arrangement with him because it was his basic -- it wasn't his idea to do it as a play, but it was his life. So I was taking a part of it.

When I wrote the play, in the beginning, I thought I was writing a very dark comedy. I didn't think it was going to be as funny as it was dark because here was a man who has broken up with his wife that he loved dearly, and he had to leave his two children at home. And he was almost suicidal.

Whereas Roy was another kind of character who was -- I mean, the character that Roy was based on -- the Oscar character -- was a man who really couldn't keep his life going together. Didn't know how to take care of his children's goldfish when they left.

And so I thought I was writing, as I said, this grim comedy until I gave it to Bob Fosse, a good friend of mine who lived in the same building, to read. And he says, "this is the funniest play I've ever read." And I said, "you don't find it dark?" And he said, "no, not at all."

So the author is not always sure about what impression he's going to leave when he writes this thing.

GROSS: Now how did you feel about "The Odd Couple" when it became a TV series? Where instead of like a constructed play every week there was another -- another little adventure or mishap to write about?

SIMON: Well, I have to preface that by telling you the story, which you may have read in the book, that I had a business agent who thought he was doing me a favor by getting a deal made with Paramount Pictures. Whereby they would buy this little company from me for $125,000, which seemed like an enormous amount of money, in which they got all of the TV and television rights to "The Odd Couple."

So I never saw a penny of any of "The Odd Couple" television series, so I could not watch -- I didn't watch that for two years because when I saw that it was a hit I saw that's my money going down their drain.

GROSS: Right.

SIMON: And I also lost all of the stage rights of "Barefoot in the Park." Never made a money -- a penny on that play from the day it opened. And so -- so I looked at that as a very bad experience. And it was hard for me to watch the show until I finally did see it about two years after it was running, and I saw how good it was. It was really good. Didn't do me any good, but it was OK for them.

GROSS: Oh boy, what heartburn it must cause to feel that you almost don't want to see the success of your own work because you're not getting anything out of it.

SIMON: I know, it was hard. But maybe just pushed me on to do other things, and I said I've got to get on with this. I'm not going to sit and just gripe about it for the rest of my life. And I just went on to write other plays.

GROSS: My guest is Neil Simon. More after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: Back to our 1996 interview with Neil Simon, recorded after the publication of his memoir "Rewrites."

You write a little bit in your book about being in analysis. And you say that your first year of analysis was in a sense an attempt to introduce you to yourself. The two sides of you, one the writer and the other the person who doesn't write. Are these two sides of you at odds?

SIMON: Well, they have been for years. They weren't always at odds they were just different people. They were not the person that I was with my family, with my friends. The writer is a very solitary person who is, I guess in the worst sense, willing to pick the bones of somebody else's character and put it up there on the stage; even though I don't think I've ever hurt anybody by doing it because no one ever came up to me and said, "how dare you put this up there on the stage."

As a matter of fact, when I put my father up on the stage in "Come Blow Your Horn," he came to see it and I was very fearful of what he was going to say. And I said, "what did you think, dad?" And he says, "oh, I know men just like that."

He never saw himself in it at all, which is what most people do. Sometimes people come up to me and they say, "that was me you were writing about wasn't it?" And it wasn't at all anything that I was writing about.

So about the two Neil Simon's, yes. The writer was persistent. He just always wanted to write. The other person wanted to have more fun, more leisure time, more time with his family. And so they were at odds.

But I find, as time goes on, right about now -- maybe as we're talking -- that the two characters are becoming more wed to each other. I don't see the disparity in the two personalities anymore. It sounds like I'm a little psychotic but I'm not really.

GROSS: Well, maybe that's because the two have lived together for so long they've become more acclimated to each other.

SIMON: I know. I'm my own odd couple.

GROSS: That's a nice way of looking at it. Did analysis help?

SIMON: Well, analysis I think helps in the long run. I never went for like long long periods at a time. I would go from time to time when there was great trouble in my life -- when my first wife died, when I had other personal problems.

But after a while I started to go because it was a way of learning about myself and about learning about other people, because the conversations were not only about this Neil Simon character, it was about how they are affected by other people in the world. And once you get into that subject you start to talk about the other people in the world.

And you realize that you do not live alone in this world. So it was very educational for me, and I graduated. Got a diploma. It was very nice.

GROSS: Was it helpful for you as a writer to introspect out loud like that?

SIMON: I think so. The one thing it helped me to do was open myself up to a complete stranger, because I went to different analysts during my life. And I never had any trouble doing it. I know people who would say, "oh, I would never tell that to my analyst." And I say, "what are you going for?"

I was never afraid that they were going to betray my privacy or that they were going to dig too deep. I was sometimes afraid that I was going to go some place that was so dark and deep in myself that it might throw me. But it never did. I never found that place that was so awful. I just realized that I was human and I was subject to human experiences and troubles and travails and a lot of happiness.

If anything, the analyst may have taught me to try and enjoy my life so much. One of them said, "Neil, you don't enjoy your successes long enough." And I said, "well, how -- you mean the play?" And she says, "yes. I mean, you go around for about three or four days and say this is great, and then you just go back to work and you forget about it."

And I said, "well, you have to tell me how long I'm supposed to enjoy myself." It's work to me, and I enjoy the work so I'm enjoying the work more than I am the success.

GROSS: You also have claustrophobia, right?

SIMON: I did, yes. Strangely, it just went away. I don't know. I couldn't get on planes. I couldn't get on elevators.

GROSS: Didn't you live in an apartment building? Didn't you live in an apartment -- like a high-rise?

SIMON: In New York?

GROSS: Yeah.

SIMON: Yes, but not while I had claustrophobia.

GROSS: Otherwise you'd be taking the stairs a lot.

SIMON: Yes, when I was growing up in New York we lived on the third-floor so I walked up there. When I did live in a building that had an elevator -- if it had an elevator man then I was all right. Once the push buttons came in I was getting kind of scared.

But it just disappeared one day. I couldn't get on a plane without a drink or something like that, or a pill. That went away as well. I sometimes can get it. I don't like driving in a car that's a two-door car and I have to sit in the back. And that -- it all has to do with control. It means I am at the whim of the person driving the car. If I say stop the car, I want to get out and he says no; I'm stuck back there.

So I need control over my life, which is why I think -- one of the reasons I became a writer. Because while I'm in that room nobody can say no, that's not good. You can't do that.

GROSS: You have a theory, that you write about in the book, that your mind doesn't know when you're writing that it's only fiction. Your mind thinks you're actually living through whatever you're putting on paper.

SIMON: Yes.

GROSS: What has led you to this conclusion?

SIMON: Because my body goes through the pain that I am going through in the writing. I feel -- I feel the tenseness if I'm writing a scene, let's say, a husband and wife who are having a fractious marriage. Things are going wrong. There's a big argument. There's a confrontation.

I feel the intensity in my body. And I don't think I am acting that out, I truly feel it. I'm exhausted when I go home. Whereas if I write something that's a funnier scene, a lighter scene, a more loving romantic scene; I don't feel that same tension. I feel a lightness about me.

So I don't think that the mind differentiates about what's going on in real life or what's going on in the fiction you're writing.

GROSS: So fiction really does take its toll on you physically.

SIMON: It does, but its been very rewarding for me. I don't think I would like to have been anything else in life but a writer. But I also don't think I could have been anything else.

GROSS: Did you ever try?

SIMON: Well no, I was too busy writing.

GROSS: Right. Well Neil Simon, thank you so much for talking with us.

SIMON: It was a pleasure.

GROSS: Neil Simon recorded in 1996. Yesterday, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival honored him with their Writers Award.

I'm Terry Gross.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
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TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Neil Simon
High: Playwright Neil Simon. He's about to receive the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival Writers Award in Aspen. This is the Festival's ah annual event. Simon's plays and movies include "Barefoot in the Park," "The Odd Couple," "The Goodbye Girl," "The Out-of-Towners," and "The Sunshine Boys." He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play "Lost in Yonkers." Terry talked with him after his 1996 memoir "Rewrites" was published.
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; Profiles; Lifestyle; Culture; Neil Simon

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Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Neil Simon
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.