West, North & South of Broadway

When Playwright Neil Simon first married, he and his wife Joan moved into an apartment in a brownstone on East Tenth Street in Manhattan. It was four flights up, plus the additional steps of the front stoop. When deliverymen arrived with the furniture, they collapsed on it and sat there for a quarter of an hour with their mouths open and only the whites of their eyes showing.

One piece of furniture was a large single bed. In the Simons' bedroom, it reached from wall to wall. To get to the closet, they had to walk over the bed. It might have seemed more sensible to sleep in the living room, but there was a skylight there with a considerable hole in it, and, in winter, snow frequently came pouring through.

All this sounds more like the start of a successful theatrical comedy than a successful marriage, but it turned out to be both. The marriage has been running ten good years. Neil Simon's comedy, called Barefoot in the Park, may run that long too; it is the first and only smash of the present Broadway season and is already sold out through February. With Elizabeth Ashley as his spritely wife and Robert Redford as a rough facsimile of himself, the play precisely duplicates the events, rents and blizzards of the Simons' golden past, with deliverymen reeling into view like sherpas out of shape, and the young couple fighting the plausible battles of youth:

He: Let's discuss it.

She: Not with you in the room.

Seven Caesars. To be sure, the real situation has been embellished. A mysterious, never-seen downstairs neighbor puts nine empty cans of tuna into the hall each morning. Who could be living there? Perhaps "a big cat with a can opener." But most of Neil Simon's funny lines pass the true test of comedy: out of context, they mean nothing; they rise from the fabric of incident.

At 36, Simon has become Broadway's leading comedy writer. His Come Blow Your Horn opened on Broadway in 1961, ran for 85 weeks, and has now been metamorphosed into a Frank Sinatra movie. Last year, commissioned by Producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin to turn Patrick Dennis' Little Me into a musical, Simon got a brainflash, wrote all seven of the major male roles for Sid Caesar, creating one of the season's better box-office draws.

Knit Fireworks. In his private person, Simon is shy, quiet and inconspicuous. But Walter Mitty would be jealous. He is the man who listens unnoticed as the professional party clowns laugh it up, then--in a momentary gap in the uproar--drops a quiet line that tops them all. "Doc" Simon, as he has been called since he used to compete with physicians in their attempts to diagnose family sicknesses, has been writing jokes since he was in his teens. His father was a dress salesman, and the Simons lived in an apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Doc and his older brother Danny were a professional writing team for more than ten years, servicing miscellaneous nightclub and television comics from Phil Silvers to Jackie Gleason.

Eventually they made enough money to move away from home, precipitating the family fireworks that exploded on Broadway and the screen as Come Blow Your Horn. "Of the two of us, Doc was always the shy one," remembers Danny. "But the lines were always there whenever we went into a room to write, although everybody always suspected that I was bringing him along for charity. I used to have to swear that Doc was funny."

At Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, Neil and Danny Simon wrote a revue each week for two seasons, and for the first time reveled in the feel of live audiences. Danny soon took off for Hollywood. But Doc stayed behind, bitten by those immediate theatrical laughs. Too security-minded to abandon TV, he went on writing for it--some 40 episodes of Sergeant Bilko, a year and a half with Garry Moore. But he used his nights and weekends to write Come Blow Your Horn. Then, with $250,000 rolling in from Hollywood for the movie rights to Blow Your Horn, Simon set himself up in a 57th Street office and began working a 71-hour day. He still does, commuting from his new and airy high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West, where deliverymen arrive pink-cheeked and puffless and are let in by two little girls.

Simon's ambitions remain modest. "He tries to focus only on the smaller problems of the people he knows," says his brother. "That's why people love the people in his plays. They are always done with love and sympathy. Doc never gets mad at anything."

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