Reliving A Poignant Past

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A tight-jawed housewife, nearing 50 and careworn, is asked by her son to tell once more of the time in her girlhood when she danced a fox-trot with George Raft. As she recounts the one public moment when she ever felt attractive, her face softens and she reveals a hidden sense of humor, of naughtiness, of delight. The son responds with glee: "There's a whole movie in this story, ma. And one day I'm going to write it." Then he asks her to dance. He holds her in his arms, standing in for the absent father who is abandoning the family. The mother recaptures the grace and ease of youth and seems, for a moment, suffused with hope in a life that has been devoted to duty. But the spell ends, and the son confesses to himself and to a raptly attentive audience on the other side of the footlights, "Dancing with my mother was very scary ... Holding her like that and seeing her smile was too intimate for me to enjoy."

Neil Simon not only wrote that scene at the heart of his new play, Broadway Bound, which opened on Broadway last week, he also lived its essence. Sometimes when his mother told the story, her partner was George Raft, sometimes it was George Burns. "I heard it twisted around so many ways," he says. "It could have been Rudolph Valentino." Nonetheless, the poignant sweetness of her recollections and the faintly acrid aftertaste of his own uneasy detachment flavored Simon's adolescence. As he rose during adulthood from deprivation to celebrity, creating hit TV shows, then dozens of gag-laden Broadway shows and jauntily comic movies, he thought from time to time of writing candidly about his mother and even about that specific situation, with its blend of childish veneration and Oedipal yearning. But such memories seemed too personal to be brought out in public, too complex, above all too risky--too distant from the machine-gun wisecracks that audiences expected of a Neil Simon play. He recalls: "I was afraid I'd kill the plays if I made them more serious."

As Simon aged (he is now 59), he increasingly felt a longing that comes to many creative people in later life: the urge for a deeper resonance between present and past, between work and an inner sense of self. And so he subtly but surely changed careers. America's master joke-meister moved away from the neatly rounded, readily palatable social comment that had made him the world's most popular living playwright. He stopped setting plays among hip and prosperous insiders like himself, dwelling in the Meccas of Manhattan or Beverly Hills. He began instead to evoke the bygone lives of the world he came from, people so conscious of their ordinariness, their smallness, their vulnerability to vast social forces that for them laughter could not be a healing touch, only a palliative relief.

First in this new voice was 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs, an ultimately comforting but nonetheless troubled vision of Simon's boyhood during the late 1930s. The show accumulated honors: the New York Drama Critics Circle prize for best play, a hit production at Britain's National Theater that transferred last week to London's West End, and a film version, also written by Simon, that opens nationwide in the U.S. on Christmas Day. Next Simon wrote 1985's Biloxi Blues, an astringent look at World War II Army recruits (including himself) whose macho bravado often obscured a lack of true moral courage. It won what he considered an "overdue" Tony for best play--it was his 21st Broadway production--and it too may become a movie.

Now Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and--for just a moment--spiritually touching. "Until I wrote it," says Simon, "I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother. I had no idea I had been so dependent on her. That is an erotic, truly intimate love scene."

Broadway Bound plainly means something very special, and not altogether comfortable, to Simon. At the opening night of the preview run in Washington, he collapsed with what appeared to be a heart attack. The seizure was later diagnosed as a gastric disturbance and a bad case of jitters. Says he: "This was the easiest play of mine to write but the most difficult to watch."

Its importance to him is clearly not a matter of money: Simon, whose net worth is estimated at a minimum of $30 million, can afford the luxury of being the majority backer of his plays, which nowadays cost around $800,000 to mount. Nor will the show's fate much affect his power: his record is so strong that his name appears above the title on many of his plays and movies, a rare honor for a playwright and an all but unprecedented one for a screenwriter who is not also a director. Virtually anything Simon writes will be produced--if he permits it. His collaborator on nine films, Producer Ray Stark, says Simon "will bring in the most wonderful material and then, two weeks later, when I ask where it is, he will reply, 'Not good enough.' He still has a wonderful humility about his work and has about 150 first acts in his trunk." Simon's motivation seems not to be glory either. He is intensely private, says one of his best friends, Broadway Bound Producer Emanuel Azenberg: "Although he is very diligent during the rehearsing and rewriting, when we open the shows to the public, his interest diminishes precipitously." Simon himself says, "I like the work, I like the opportunity for control over my life, but I don't like being Neil Simon the public figure. Now that this show is open, I plan to get away from that for a while."

Broadway Bound's significance for Simon is emotional. It is his most honest, unromanticized look at where he came from, a show so powerfully evocative that both he and his brother Danny have wept openly while watching it in performance. He admits, "I feel funny about being rewarded for laying out the bones of my family and myself. Even now, I suspect I would not have written it if my parents were alive." Broadway Bound is also, in his view, his best play, the one he would like to be remembered by. His family, friends and professional associates all seem to share that opinion. They expect that after decades of acclaim as a craftsman, Neil Simon may finally come to be regarded as an artist. Says John Randolph, who plays Simon's grandfather in Broadway Bound: "It was classic, that opening night in Washington. He spent all these years waiting for some critic to recognize that he is a major, important, serious playwright, which this play proves. And as soon as he had a copy of a review saying that, he was absolutely overcome."

Moments after the curtain has risen, a puckish young man called Eugene Morris Jerome bounds into his Brooklyn family home, shaking with cold, and tells his grandfather an impromptu joke about the weather: "I saw a man kissing his wife on the corner, and they got stuck to each other. Mr. Jacobs, the tailor, is blowing hot steam on them." His grandfather, as always, sees nothing funny in Eugene's whimsy. Weeks later, Eugene moves out to start a new life as a comedy writer for network radio in Manhattan. His grandfather, ever wary of affection, wonders whether he will have to endure a parting embrace. Eugene replies, "I'm going to kiss you right on the lips. They're going to have to pull us apart." This time his grandfather gets the joke.

Neil Simon is America's foremost stage comedist, the theatrical equivalent of Woody Allen in the movies. Even in his weakest plays that gift of laughter has never faltered, and it is in full flower in his trilogy. But for all its exuberant humor, Broadway Bound is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy. Its subjects include the dissolution of two marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another. Simon views the background of the play as "a war, a household war." Yet the play looks at grim events with a tempered optimism, a belief not so much in happy endings as in the renewable dignity of human beings. Simon, always generous to his characters, seeks the utmost in forgiveness for them here. He will not take sides, not even in the battle between a mother deserted by the only man she has ever loved and a father looking for the joy and tenderness that he has long been denied at home. Most of the play's key battles go unresolved: they are conflicts that must be lived with. As if in conscious rejection of the imposed neatness in his earlier plays, Simon has his surrogate Eugene Jerome say at the play's end, "Contrary to popular belief, everything in life doesn't come to a clear-cut conclusion."

In Broadway Bound, as in the other parts of the trilogy, Eugene speaks to the audience in asides. But here the voice in those asides is not the young man of the play explaining his inner thoughts; he is the older and wiser writer looking back and assessing the consequential forces in his life. Says Simon: "The audience listens attentively because it knows this character is going to become a very successful writer who will write the play the audience is seeing." This frank, almost naked address to the audience gives the play a startling immediacy, despite its nostalgic setting, and a confessional tone far less common in the theater than in the novel.

For audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish American in its rhythms, its idiom, its fabric of detail. In Simon's first two decades as a playwright, that ethnic quality frequently encumbered his attempts to evoke a more general view of the human condition. This time he fully succeeds. In a decade already much enriched by Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound is the best American play of the 1980s.

Appropriately, it benefits from an impeccable production. Gene Saks and David Mitchell, who respectively directed and designed the earlier plays of the trilogy, have renewed their contributions to the aura of heightened naturalism. Jonathan Silverman, who replaced Matthew Broderick as Eugene in Brighton Beach and Biloxi Blues and in the Brighton Beach movie, adeptly handles the dancing sequence, and he is exquisitely funny as the family listens to his and his brother's first radio sketch: he keeps covering his face, then peering out with mounting horror as he realizes that they realize that he meant it all to be about them. Chunky Jason Alexander, with his spark-plug, salesman's personality, plays a characterization of Eugene's brother Stanley that has shifted radically since Brighton Beach. That Stanley was a sweet and decent nebbish, acutely aware of his limitations. For the new Stanley, Alexander's neurotic edge and propulsive energy are just right.

John Randolph perfectly balances ferocity and fragility as the stubborn old socialist grandfather. Phyllis Newman must be likable, and is, as an aunt who was and is now guiltlessly rich. Philip Sterling has exactly the lost aura of a husband in search of something he cannot define and only recently realized he wanted.

The play's most rewarding role is not Eugene, as in the earlier plays of the trilogy, but his mother. Linda Lavin (of TV's Alice) gives a stunning performance. After a first act in which she seems to be a short-tempered drudge, this long-suffering mother gradually transmutes shrewishness and emotional blackmail into fidelity and a kind of noble forbearance. That transformation is the basic movement of the play. There is not a moment of sentiment or self-indulgence in Lavin's evocation, nor in the woman she is playing.

The Jerome brothers are screaming at each other about how to write a radio skit. Eugene, the younger, keeps tossing out what he thinks are funny situations. Stanley insists on order and method. The keys to comedy, he says, are "conflict" and "wanting," and every detail must make sense. Eugene demands, "It's just a comedy sketch. Does it have to be so logical?" Stanley, the self-appointed teacher, replies, "It's not funny if it's not believable."

Marvin Neil Simon was born July 4, 1927. He grew up not in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, but in Washington Heights at the northern end of Manhattan. The family never had much money, he says. "There were definite class distinctions depending on where you lived. People next to the park who got a breeze in summer were considered wealthy. All of our rooms faced walls or the backs of houses." Simon's father Irving, like the father in the trilogy, worked in the garment industry. Recalls Simon: "Like Willy Loman, he learned to ingratiate himself with his customers. He wasn't a particularly bright man and had only a grade-school education. I remember him as being a great laugher, a great audience."

The most conspicuous thing about Simon's father was his absence: his marriage was stormy, and he was often away for protracted periods, leaving his wife Mamie and the boys, Neil and Danny, who was eight years older, to fend for themselves. Says Simon: "Each time he came back I thought, 'At last, we're together.' But it kept on like a yo-yo." Mamie Simon was resourceful: she worked at Gimbel's department store; she ran poker games in the house and took a cut of each pot. At the hardest times Neil and his mother were taken in by kindly relatives, a situation Simon reversed in Brighton Beach, where he portrayed his family as the host rather than the guest. On other occasions Mamie took in boarders: her son particularly remembers two butchers who paid part of their rent in meat.

Throughout Neil's childhood and adolescence, the strongest male influence in his life was his older brother Danny. From the start, Danny believed in his kid brother's limitless potential. According to Simon, Danny endowed him with the nickname "Doc"--an appellation for which there have been more interpretations than the Rosetta Stone--at age two. Neil was playing with a toy stethoscope, and Danny burst out, "This kid is gonna be a doctor." As Neil grew up, Danny enthusiastically envisioned him as America's greatest baseball player and, later, the world's foremost comic genius. He backed up this boosterism with hard work: Danny dragged Neil into writing. Both brothers say that without Danny's coaching, the shy and initially indolent Neil would never have developed the craft.

The older-brother figures who appear repeatedly in his plays, although viewed affectionately, tend to be coarse and loud and pushy. They usually have a gift for success but often lack brains or scope or sensitivity. Above all, they try to remake their younger brothers in their own image. Simon readily admits ambivalence toward these characters--and the brother on whom they are based. "My complicated relationship with Danny stems from the fact that when I was growing up, I saw him as my father. It wasn't until much later that I saw him as a brother. He'd tell me when to go to bed, how to behave, give me all the rules of life. He wanted the best for me, and I simply would not be who I am today without him."

Neil, a quick learner who finished high school at 16, became a scholar of comedy, poring over books by humorists. Says he: "It was like going to art school. I'd use how Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner did it as a model." By the end of his teens, he and Danny had landed an audition with Radio Personality Goodman Ace at CBS. Says Simon: "Our assignment was to write a sketch about an usherette at Loew's Pitkin Theater reviewing a movie. We came up with 'Joan Crawford's boyfriend is sent to the electric chair--and she promises to wait for him.' He hired us on the spot." The Simon brothers went on as a team to write for Comics Victor Borge, Buddy Hackett, Jan Murray and Phil Foster. Their first job in television, in 1948, was The Phil Silvers Arrow Show and next came Beat the Clock. In 1953 they joined the smash Your Show of Shows, where they created a renowned sketch about a cuckoo clock gone haywire, with Imogene Coca as a clockworks figure ladling water nonstop onto Sid Caesar, who never responds.

In the early days, Danny Simon was not only the dominant brother but sometimes seemed the more gifted one. Neil was so shy that he hardly spoke up and was often assumed to be a tagalong, his brother's way of picking up a second salary. Director Bob Fosse (Cabaret, Sweet Charity), one of Simon's longtime friends, recalls that Neil talked so little in those days that "it was always questionable what he did." The Simon team broke up by 1956 in large part, Neil says, because "I needed my own voice." Danny headed to Hollywood to become a TV director, and both undertook to write plays. Danny's Trouble-in-Law got produced first, in 1959 on the prestigious U.S. Steel Hour, but to pallid reviews. Neil's Come Blow Your Horn opened in 1961 and ran 84 weeks on Broadway. Says Neil: "There was a certain rivalry between us. It took him a long time to say 'That's the greatest play I ever saw.' The sibling rivalry stopped when my mother died in 1977--there was no one to compete for. Since then, we have become really good friends."

Eugene, a young man facing his dream opportunity, a chance to write a sketch for CBS radio that must be ready by morning, is explaining why he doesn 't want to stay home and work. He has met a girl, "and you only get one chance in your life of meeting a perfect girl." His brother Stanley, whose interest in women is considerably less spiritual, asks, "You know how many perfect girls there are in Hollywood?" Then he demands, "Are you willing to risk everything for a girl you might not even be interested in by next week?" The starry-eyed Eugene replies, "I'll be interested in her for the rest of my life."

Simon met the great love of his life, Joan Baim, at a Poconos resort called Tamiment in June 1953. He was a writer on the entertainment staff, making $20 a week. She was a dancer working as a counselor in the children's camp. Three months later they were married. Says Simon: "I knew immediately she was the girl for me. She was very beautiful, very athletic, very warm. She had very definite ideas, she was very vehement in her own scenario, but she was very supportive. She stopped working--which I think she probably regretted later--and gave herself over to the children and the relationship. I got very spoiled."

With encouragement from Joan, Simon in his spare time wrote Come Blow Your Horn, about two young brothers moving away from home and trying to leave the family waxed-fruit business for something more artistic. It took 1,200 pages of drafts--some the product of Simon's compulsive perfectionism, some ordered up by a succession of about a dozen potential producers--to get it staged. Says Simon: "If we had closed, I would have folded my tent and gone out to Los Angeles to write My Three Sons for twelve years." Instead, success followed success: Barefoot in the Park (1963), an evocation of newlywed days; The Odd Couple (1965), based on an experience of Danny's; Sweet Charity (1966), a Bob Fosse musical now enjoying a Broadway revival; Plaza Suite (1968), a trio of bittersweet one acts set in the same hotel room; Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), a hilarious yet pathetic picture of a man attempting infidelities during a mid-life-crisis.

Simon had attained fame and wealth, and, to observers, his marriage seemed idyllic. But when he was 40 and in a brief mid-life crisis of his own, he thought of divorce. "I felt my mortality and told Joan over lunch that I wanted to leave and start all over again. We'd married young, I explained, and I needed to experience life. She smiled benignly and said, 'That's O.K.' After five seconds I told her, 'Never mind.' I had asked for her permission to get out, and she had given it. I no longer felt she was controlling me."

When Joan was struck by cancer at 38, Simon says, "the doctor told me how long she had to live, and I decided we wouldn't tell her. But she knew. And only once did she ever show that she was scared." Simon's way of handling the strain was to throw himself into writing about the randomness and futility of life in The Good Doctor (1973), an attempt at dramatizing Chekhov-like stories, and God's Favorite (1974), a deliberately vulgar retelling of the Book of Job. Both were among the few misfires in his career, artistically and commercially. After Joan's death he went into therapy for two years. He resisted the process at first because, like Tennessee Williams, he feared his neuroses were the source of his talent. "I didn't have to worry. I remained as neurotic as ever but got a clearer perspective." He found the process so helpful that he still sees counselors from time to time, one on each coast. "That's the height of luxury," he says. "Matching analysts."

While Simon was recovering from his bereavement, he met Actress Marsha Mason at an audition for The Good Doctor. The mutual attraction was immediate. He married her 2 1/2 weeks after they met, "And that was with one postponement," he adds. Simon encountered little resistance to the abrupt romance from Joan's mother Helen Bairn or daughters Ellen, then 16, and Nancy, then 10. Nancy explains: "We responded to Marsha right away. She was warm and funny, and we needed to become a family again."

Simon bared his rage and guilt at Joan's death and recounted his quick marriage to Mason in Chapter Two (1977). That put him back on stride, and every stage work since--from the musical They 're Playing Our Song (1979) to the trilogy--has clicked. Meanwhile, the new marriage thrived for about eight years, then ended in divorce in 1982. Although Simon wrote five films for her to star in (notably 1977's The Goodbye Girl), part of the problem was career conflict. There were other tensions, about which they are enigmatic. "Marsha was starting to find new ways to express herself in her life and her work," Simon says. Mason remains attentive and admiring. Says she: "Neil is totally honest. He doesn't edit much, which can be a problem for someone living with him, but I'd rather have that than someone who doesn't communicate at all. We've come to a relationship that is very comfortable for all of us, and I have all their pictures on my wall."

Simon hopes to marry again. "An opening night is a lot less fun if you are there with a date, a friend, instead of someone you are deeply involved with," he says. He has had two such relationships recently with women who have young children, and says he has a potential wife in mind, although he does not discuss the matter further. Daughter Nancy, 23, believes being unmarried has made Simon more conscious of his age. Certainly he has gone through a moody period of late, one that has made him willing to talk about his worries and insecurity in conversation and not just through his work--a pursuit that was always his "refuge" but is now satisfying him less. He says, "I wasn't feeling happy during Broadway Bound. Eugene and Stanley are shown when life is just beginning. I can't get back to that place. I would never think of giving up my career, but it's just not the same as when I began to achieve what I wanted." He concedes that his "gloom" has been triggered in part by health problems (emergency prostate surgery in November, a pending adrenal operation sometime during the next few weeks). He talks of taking a protracted sabbatical, although friends note that his temperament is mercurial and predict that such impulses will pass. His most reliable comforts, he says, are his children. Nancy, an aspiring director, staged a production last summer of Biloxi Blues in Fish Creek, Wis., which Simon came to see. Ellen, 29, a choreographer and aspiring screenwriter, lives in Toronto with her husband and Simon's only grandchild, Andrew, who turns six this week. When she completed her first script last fall, she sent it to her father--and to Mason--for comment.

Eugene and Stanley are calming each other after a too-dose-to-home radio sketch has alienated their father. Eugene ashamedly admits he meant the parallels, adding, "There's part of my head that makes me this nice, likable, funny kid. And there's the other part, the part that writes, that's an angry, hostile, real son of a bitch." Stanley retorts, "Well, you'd better make friends with the son of a bitch because he's the one who's going to make you a big living."

Simon spends several months a year in Los Angeles, a necessity for his film career, and the rest in Manhattan, which he calls home. The ten-room Los Angeles dwelling, of white brick and wood, houses an extensive collection of modern art (including works by Modigliani and Edward Hopper) and sits above three tiers of terraces, with the obligatory swimming pool on the bottom tier, although Simon does not swim. He is a passionate tennis player, yet the house has no tennis court. "First you wind up providing the balls, then the Cokes--there's no end to it," Simon explains. "I decided to join a tennis club instead, which was, at one point, my only contact with mankind." While the house is decorated to resemble a country retreat in, say, Connecticut, Simon's seven-room Manhattan duplex is just the opposite: sleekly art deco, almost Californian, with a sun-flooded atrium at penthouse level, offering sweeping views in three directions of Park Avenue and the city skyline.

Glamorous as these homes are, they constitute considerably less than conspicuous consumption for a man of Simon's income. And he lives in them about as modestly as circumstances permit. He has a secretary-factotum on each coast and some domestic help. But he dresses simply, entertains infrequently and does not spend his life being waited on: he often answers his own telephone, greets people at the door, takes their coats and fetches their drinks. He husbands his money for his family, and has grown more cautious over the years. He invested the first $75,000 from Come Blow Your Horn in "cattle that froze to death in Montana." A far bigger error: selling the TV rights to The Odd Couple to Paramount when it made the movie, on the presumption that it would never become a series--a bad guess that Simon says may have cost him as much as $20 million. Later on he bought the Eugene O'Neill Theater on Broadway as a home for his plays. That had the unexpected result of making him the employer of his mother: she came to work on the box-office telephone ("Some mothers give you their milk, others sell tickets to Promises, Promises"). He later sold the theater--he has no ownership interest in the theater named for him, which belongs to the Nederlander chain--and now the bulk of his assets are stocks and bonds and the royalty rights to his scripts.

Simon on first meeting seems more like an accountant than a comic wit. Although he can be a deft public performer, the private man is a thoughtful, earnest conversationalist, never a raconteur using companions as an audience. He realizes he is considered aloof even by those who know him best, and admits, "I'm always having to tell myself, 'Get back into the conversation.'" When he does get off a good line, it is a throwaway, almost sotto voce, and rarely with a stranger. Director Mike Nichols, who staged four of Simon's plays, recalls attending one in which he had not been involved. Simon greeted him wearing a handsome coat. Says Nichols: "It was an off night. The play had problems, real problems. After the performance, Neil took my arm, walked me down the alley, and said, 'Mike, so you really like my coat?'" Lavin recalls Simon's coming to rehearsal with a bad cold and remarking that even the clothes in his closet were sneezing. When one of Simon's daughters told Silverman, who plays Eugene Jerome, that he resembled pictures of Simon at the same age, the playwright turned and said, "The only piece of advice I have for you is 'Hold onto your hair.' "

Writing is the one constant in Simon's life. Says Trilogy Director Gene Saks, one of Simon's valued friends: "He never stops writing because of any personal problem; it is his great release, and he never has writer's block." Daughter Ellen says her "earliest recollection was of sneaking past the door when he was writing. I always felt that I didn't have his full attention. He seemed to be distant, in his own world." For Simon, the early stages of writing a play are a kind of Freudian trek through the subconscious: "There's no blueprint per se. You just go through the tunnels of your mind, and you come out someplace." It takes him about four months to create a play from nothing but considerably longer to refine it. Sometimes he is simply trying to make the play funnier--or intentionally less funny. He prides himself on the ability to pace his jokes to the needs of the plot and theme.

Perhaps the most dramatic instance of rewriting in Simon's entire career is the scene of mother and son dancing in Broadway Bound. There was no hint of it in the original version. Instead there was a scene between Eugene and his girlfriend Josie, a character intended to represent Simon's first wife. Early in rehearsals it became apparent the scene was not working. "I realized it was in the wrong play," says Simon. "Some other time I will write about Joan. She needs a whole play to herself. Right then I had the idea of a scene between Eugene and his mother. I liked the idea of him reaching into his family's past to find out where he came from." The crucial scene of the best play of Simon's career took three days to write. But Producer Azenberg knew things would be all right as soon as Simon passed him a scrawled note, now framed in Azenberg's office. In its unassuming way the note summed up Neil Simon, the resilient man, the sober craftsman and the confident artist. It read, "Don't worry. I know how to fix it."

With reporting by Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York, Elaine Dutka/Los Angeles