![]() ![]() ![]() She took the news calmly and casually, and by the end of the dinner, he had recommitted to their marriage. Simon described one dinner in which he attempted to ask for his freedom, simply because it was the sexually freewheeling 1970s. Yet, by his account, she could not have been a better spouse for dealing with her husband’s burgeoning celebrity. Their marital ups and downs no doubt fuelled much of the volatile dialogue in his plays (he described one fight as ending with him being assaulted with a veal chop). She probably would have been his only wife had she not died of cancer in 1973, after 20 years of marriage. The central turning point in Simon’s life, both personal and artistic, was the death of his first wife, Joan Baim. What holds up best from those early years are his adaptations of other author’s works, usually for musicals, such as the Patrick Dennis satire of the cult of celebrtiy in Little Me (1962), his transformation of the Federico Fellini film Nights of Cabiria into the musical Sweet Charity (1966) and his conversion of Billy Wilder’s cynical screenplay The Apartment into the bright but still edgy musical Promises Promises (1968). “Neil Simon didn’t have an idea for a play this year,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Times, “but he wrote it anyway.” In the 1966-67 season, Simon had four shows running simultaneously – Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Sweet Charity and The Star-Spangled Girl – though the last one showed his touch was not always golden. Then there were the steps backward he learned not to take. But plays such as The Gingerbread Lady, written in 1970 but revised, were harbingers of better works that he would write later. That his plays were both accessible and easy to produce meant that they penetrated to the most humble reaches of the theatre world, including student and amateur productions.ĭuring Simon’s long peak, which ran roughly from 1965 to 1985, there were flops. The expression “Africa hot”, for instance, used to define the steamiest weather, came from a commentary on Mississippi heat in Biloxi Blues (1984). Often, Simon’s plays contained lines that took on lives of their own. In Rose and Walsh (2003, later retitled Rose’s Dilemma), he went further afield, in a play partly inspired by late-in-life Lillian Hellman wrestling with the ghost of her longtime lover Dashiell Hammett. Most of the jokes in A Chorus Line (1975), which portrays struggling dancers, were written by Simon without credit. Photograph: Freed from the confines of himself, Simon developed a versatility and openness that allowed him to keenly dramatise lives that were far away from his own. Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in the film of Barefoot in the Park, 1967. Underneath the jokes, that’s the Simon trademark: workaday people who come out of his native New York City woodwork with anonymous acts of kindness. The suicidal Felix checks into a seedy hotel to jump out of the window, but the window is stuck, his back is injured as a result, and, in a brief but memorable minute, he is the object of concerned, motherly warmth from an elderly cleaning lady he has never previously met. His best moments have layer upon layer of the sweet and sour, as in the opening moments of his 1968 film version, which stars Jack Lemmon as Felix and Walter Matthau as Oscar, of his 1965 play The Odd Couple. Simon’s common touch was coupled with a fantastical inner life, as dramatised in Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983) and a keen observational sense that gave his work a realistic honesty: finding the humour of human existence also meant highlighting the underlying tragedy. This quality brought him decades of success in the theatre industry, time that he needed to develop from a writer whose characters were interesting only for the jokes they spewed to the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Lost in Yonkers (1991). ![]() Even his autobiographical Brighton Beach trilogy, an enshrinement of his urban Jewish heritage, never needs his audiences to have shared it or anything like it. ![]()
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