Neil Simon, Broadway Master of Comedy, Is Dead at 91
Neil
Simon, the playwright whose name was synonymous with Broadway comedy
and commercial success in the theater for decades, and who helped
redefine popular American humor with an emphasis on the frictions of
urban living and the agonizing conflicts of family intimacy, died on
Sunday in Manhattan. He was 91.
His
death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was announced by his publicist,
Bill Evans. The cause was complications of pneumonia, he said. Mr.
Simon was also reported to have had Alzheimer’s disease.
Early
in his career, Mr. Simon wrote for television greats, including Phil
Silvers and Sid Caesar. Later he wrote for the movies, too. But it was
as a playwright that he earned his lasting fame, with a long series of
expertly tooled laugh machines that kept his name on Broadway marquees
virtually nonstop throughout the late 1960s and ’70s.
Beginning
with the breakthrough hits “Barefoot in the Park” (1963) and “The Odd
Couple” (1965) and continuing with popular successes like “Plaza Suite”
(1968), “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971) and “The Sunshine Boys” (1974), Mr. Simon ruled Broadway when Broadway was still worth ruling.
From
1965 to 1980, his plays and musicals racked up more than 9,000
performances, a record not even remotely touched by any other playwright
of the era. In 1966 alone, he had four Broadway shows running
simultaneously.
He also owned a
Broadway theater for a spell in the 1960s, the Eugene O’Neill, and in
1983 had a different Broadway theater named after him, a rare accolade
for a living playwright.
Photograph by Irving Penn, Condé Nast, All Rights Reserved
For
all their popularity with audiences, Mr. Simon’s great successes in the
first years of his fame rarely earned wide critical acclaim, and
Broadway revivals of “The Odd Couple” in 2005 and “Barefoot in the Park”
in 2006 did little to change the general view that his early work was
most notable for its surefire conceits and snappy punch lines. In the
introduction to one of his play collections, Mr. Simon quoted the critic
Clive Barnes as once writing, “Neil Simon is destined to remain rich,
successful and underrated.”
But Mr. Simon gained a firmer purchase on critical respect in the 1980s with his darker-hued semi-autobiographical trilogy, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), “Biloxi Blues” (1985) and “Broadway Bound”
(1986). These comedy-dramas were admired for the way they explored the
tangle of love, anger and desperation that bound together — and drove
apart — a Jewish working-class family, as viewed from the perspective of
the youngest son, a restless wisecracker with an eye on showbiz fame.
“The writer at last begins to examine himself honestly, without compromises,” Frank Rich wrote of “Biloxi Blues”
in The New York Times, “and the result is his most persuasively serious
effort to date — not to mention his funniest play since the golden age”
of his first decade.
In 1991, Mr.
Simon won a Tony Award as well as the ultimate American playwriting
award, the Pulitzer Prize, for “Lost in Yonkers,” another
autobiographical comedy, this one about a fiercely withholding mother
and her emotionally and intellectually underdeveloped daughter. It was
also his last major success on Broadway.
Mr.
Simon and Woody Allen, who both worked in the 1950s writing for Mr.
Caesar (along with Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner, among
others), were probably equally significant in shaping the currents of
American comedy in the 1960s and ’70s, although their styles, their
favored mediums and the critical reception of their work diverged
mightily.
Mr. Simon was the populist
whose accessible, joke-packed plays about the anxieties of everyday
characters could tickle funny bones in theaters across the country as
well as in 1,200-seat Broadway houses. Mr. Allen was the darling of the
urban art-house cinema and the critical classes who created comedy from
the minutiae of his own angst.
But
together they helped make the comedy of urban neurosis — distinctly
Jewish-inflected — as American as the homespun humor of “Leave It to
Beaver.” Mr. Simon’s early plays, often centered on an antagonistic
couple of one kind or another wielding cutting one-liners in a New York
apartment, helped set the template for the explosion of sitcoms on
network television in the 1970s. (The long-running television show based
on his “Odd Couple” was one of the best, although a bum business deal
meant that Mr. Simon earned little money from it.)
A
line can be drawn between the taut plot threads of Mr. Simon’s early
comedies — a slob and a neatnik form an irascible all-male marriage in
“The Odd Couple,” newlyweds bicker in a new apartment in “Barefoot in
the Park,” a laid-off fellow has a meltdown in “The Prisoner of Second
Avenue” — and the “nothing”-inspired, kvetching-character-based comedy
of the seminal 1990s sitcom “Seinfeld.”
Mr.
Allen and Mr. Simon, who shared roots in the urban Jewish lower middle
classes, were also united by the classic funnyman’s ability to inspire
belly laughs by the millions in other people while managing to find the
dark clouds hovering insistently over their own fates, however
apparently successful they might seem.
Mr.
Simon once wrote of approaching Mr. Allen in a restaurant when both men
were at the height of their success to offer congratulations on Mr.
Allen’s “Manhattan.” How was he feeling? “Oh, all right,” Mr. Allen
answered. Mr. Simon wrote, “When I saw his dour expression, I saw my own
reflected agony.” This, when Mr. Simon himself had two hit shows on
Broadway, another play ready for rehearsals and two movies set for
production. (Plus an ulcer, of course.)
Agony
is at the root of comedy, and for Mr. Simon it was the agony of an
unhappy Depression-era childhood that inspired much of his finest work.
And it was the agony of living in Los Angeles that drove his
determination to break free from the grind of cranking out jokes for
Jerry Lewis on television and make his own name. As he wrote in his 1996
autobiography, “Rewrites” (the first of two volumes), the plush
comforts of Hollywood living might extend your life span, but “the catch
was when you eventually did die, it surely wouldn’t be from laughing.”
Family Tension
Born
on July 4, 1927, in the Bronx, Marvin Neil Simon was the son of a
garment industry salesman, Irving Simon, who abandoned the family more
than once during his childhood, leaving Mr. Simon’s mother, May, to take
care of Neil and his older brother, Danny. When the family was intact,
the mood was darkened by constant battles between the parents.
The
tensions of the family, which moved to Washington Heights when Mr.
Simon was 5, would find their way into many of his plays, notably the
late trilogy but also the early comedies, including his first play,
“Come Blow Your Horn” (1961), about a young man leaving home to join his
older brother, a bachelor and ladies’ man. And when the family finally
broke up for good, the young Mr. Simon went to live with cousins while
his brother was sent to live with an aunt, circumstances reflected in
“Lost in Yonkers.”
“When an audience
laughed, I felt fulfilled,” Mr. Simon wrote in “Rewrites.” “It was a
sign of approval, of being accepted. Coming as I did from a childhood
where laughter in the house meant security, but was seldom heard as
often as a door slamming every time my father took another year’s
absence from us, the laughter that came my way in the theater was
nourishment.”
Danny
Simon, older by eight years, was the signal influence on Neil’s career.
“The fact is, I probably never would have been a writer if it were not
for Danny,” Mr. Simon wrote. “Once, when I was 15 years old, he said to
me, ‘You’re going to be the funniest comedy writer in America.’ Why?
Based on what? How funny could I be at 15?”
Mr.
Simon graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and
attended New York University as an enlistee in the Army Air Forces Air
Reserve training program. He continued his studies at the University of
Denver while assigned to a base nearby. (His military experience
inspired the second play in his late trilogy, “Biloxi Blues.”)
At
the time, Danny had begun working in publicity at Warner Bros. in New
York. Neil joined him there as a clerk after his discharge from the Air
Force. Together they began writing television and radio scripts,
eventually making $1,600 a week providing gags and sketches for Mr.
Silvers, Jerry Lester, Jackie Gleason and Mr. Caesar on “Your Show of
Shows” and later “Caesar’s Hour.”
“It
was a real learning process,” Mr. Simon said of his days among the
Caesarians, a group that has become a television legend and inspired Mr.
Simon’s 1993 comedy “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” starring Nathan Lane.
“We were exhausted,” he said, adding, “On Monday, you would come in
knowing you had six new skits to do.”
The
Simon brothers also wrote weekly revues for Camp Tamiment, the summer
resort in the Poconos. It was there that Neil Simon fell in love with
Joan Baim, a dancer and counselor. By the end of the summer, they were
married.
A Broadway Name
“Come
Blow Your Horn,” the play Mr. Simon wrote to escape the slavery of gag
writing for television comics, ran for 677 performances and gained him
connections and notice. But it was with “Barefoot in the Park,” a comedy
inspired by his and his young wife’s experiences living in a
fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, that Mr. Simon became a
Broadway name.
It was the first Broadway show directed by Mike Nichols, then best known for his comedy work with Elaine May.
Mr.
Nichols would go on to become one of Mr. Simon’s most frequent
collaborators, credited by Mr. Simon with helping to shape his early
plays through the tryouts and rehearsals. Mr. Nichols won his first Tony
Award for directing “The Odd Couple.” He also directed “Plaza Suite,”
with George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton, and “The Prisoner of Second
Avenue,” with Peter Falk and Lee Grant. Mr. Nichols died in 2014.
“Barefoot in the Park”
made a star of Robert Redford, who was cast alongside Elizabeth Ashley.
It played for close to four years and made a hot commodity of Mr. Simon
in Hollywood. His agent, Irving Lazar,
better known as Swifty, sold the movie rights for $400,000. (Mr. Lazar
asked Mr. Simon whether he’d be willing to sell the play for $300,000.
Mr. Simon jumped at the offer, and Mr. Lazar kept the rest.)
The
movie, with a screenplay by Mr. Simon, and with Mr. Redford and Jane
Fonda in the starring roles, became a hit when it was released in 1967
at Radio City Music Hall, breaking the box-office record. That record
would be smashed by the movie version of “The Odd Couple.” Both movies
were directed by Gene Saks, who would direct many of Simon’s later
plays, including the “Brighton Beach” trilogy and “Lost in Yonkers.” (Mr. Saks died in 2015.)
Mr.
Simon’s screenwriting career included dozens of titles, among them many
adaptations of his plays. In addition to “Barefoot in the Park” and
“The Odd Couple” (with the original stage star, Walter Matthau, and Jack
Lemmon replacing Art Carney), he wrote the screenplays for “The
Prisoner of Second Avenue,” with Mr. Lemmon and Anne Bancroft, and “The
Sunshine Boys,” with Mr. Matthau and George Burns, as well as “Brighton
Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers,” among others.
He
also wrote original movies, including, “The Out-of-Towners,” the period
spoof “Murder by Death,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “The Cheap Detective,”
“Max Dugan Returns,” “The Slugger’s Wife,” “Only When I Laugh,” based on
his play “The Gingerbread Lady,” and most notably “The Heartbreak Kid,”
a black comedy, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, directed by
Elaine May and starring Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd.
Richard
Dreyfuss won an Oscar for his performance in “The Goodbye Girl” as an
impish, irritating actor with whom an unemployed dancer played by Marsha
Mason moves in. The movie received a total of nine Academy Award
nominations, including one for Mr. Simon’s screenplay. (He received four
Oscar screenplay nominations in his career but never won.)
Ms.
Mason was Mr. Simon’s wife at the time. His first wife, Joan, died of
cancer in 1973. He met Ms. Mason at an audition, and they were married
four months later. He wrote about their relationship in the play
“Chapter Two,” which was made into a movie starring Ms. Mason and James
Caan.
“It’s my favorite play for many
reasons,” Mr. Simon once said of “Chapter Two.” “It was cathartic for
me. In the two years Marsha and I were married, I gave her a rough time —
still trying to hold on to my relationship with Joan. Marsha is
beautiful and talented, and I found ways to find fault with her. One
night in California, everything erupted into a terrible fight. I
realized then what I was doing. That’s how I wrote the play.”
Mr.
Simon, who lived in Manhattan, was married five times. After his
divorce from Ms. Mason, he married the actress Diane Lander in 1987.
They divorced a year later but remarried in 1990, then divorced again.
Mr. Simon married the actress Elaine Joyce in 1999. She survives him,
along with his daughters Ellen Simon and Nancy Simon from his first
marriage and his daughter Bryn Lander Simon from his marriage to Ms.
Lander. He is also survived by three grandchildren and one
great-grandson. Danny Simon died in 2005.
Mr.
Simon wrote the book for three successful Broadway musicals in the
1960s. “Little Me” (1962), with music by Cy Coleman and lyrics by
Carolyn Leigh, was directed by Cy Feuer and Bob Fosse, choreographed by
Mr. Fosse and featured Mr. Simon’s old boss Sid Caesar playing the
multiple loves of an adventuress named Belle Poitrine. “Sweet Charity”
(1966) reunited Mr. Simon with Mr. Fosse for a musical based on
Federico Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” with music by Mr. Coleman and
lyrics by Dorothy Fields. “Promises, Promises,” based on the movie “The
Apartment,” featured music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David.
“Promises, Promises” was Mr. Simon’s biggest musical success, running 1,281 performances. It was revived on Broadway in 2010.
Mr.
Simon returned to musicals in 1981 with “They’re Playing Our Song,”
featuring music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. His
last musical book was for an unsuccessful stage adaptation of “The
Goodbye Girl” in 1993.
In his most
productive period, Mr. Simon wrote plays at the rate of almost one a
year and produced almost 30 over his career. Many of the later works,
from the 1990s and beyond, were tepidly received and had brief Broadway
runs. “Proposals” (1997), a quasi-Chekhovian comedy, and “45 Seconds
From Broadway” (2001), his last new play on Broadway, a tribute to a
fabled Rialto coffee shop, were quick flops. But “The Dinner Party”
(2000) ran for almost a year.
Mr. Simon made headlines in 2003 when Mary Tyler Moore abruptly left
his play “Rose’s Dilemma” (2003) at Manhattan Theater Club. That turned
out to be his last produced play. He also made news with the
announcement of a kidney transplant in 2004. The donor was Mr. Evans, his longtime press agent and friend.
Fighting for Respect
Most
recently, in the fall of 2009, Mr. Simon expressed surprise and dismay
at the quick closing of a much-anticipated Broadway revival of his
“Brighton Beach Memoirs.” It was intended to run in repertory with
“Broadway Bound” but closed in a week when it received mixed reviews.
“I’m dumbfounded,” he said. “After all these years, I still don’t get
how Broadway works or what to make of our culture.”
It
was a poignant comment from the man who more or less defined Broadway
achievement for a couple of decades. But while quick flops were
relatively rare in his career, Mr. Simon always fought to gain critical
respect. Although he was nominated for 17 Tony Awards, he won just
three: for author of “The Odd Couple,” and twice for best play, for
“Biloxi Blues” and “Lost in Yonkers.”
“I
know how the public sees me, because people are always coming up to me
and saying, ‘Thanks for the good times,’” Mr. Simon told The Times in
1991. “But all the success has demeaned me in a way. Critically, the
thinking seems to be that if you write too many hits, they can’t be that
good.”
Looking
back, Mr. Simon wrote with a still starry-eyed joy of his decision to
embark on a playwriting career: “For a man who wants to be his own
master, to depend on no one else, to make life conform to his own
visions rather than to follow the blueprints of others, playwriting is
the perfect occupation. To sit in a room alone for six or seven or 10
hours, sharing the time with characters that you created, is sheer
heaven.
“And if not heaven,” that master craftsman of the well-timed joke added, “it’s at least an escape from hell.”
Correction:
An
earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the play “That
Championship Season.” It won the Tony Award for best play in 1973 — not
in 1965, when Mr. Simon was named best author for “The Odd Couple.”
Correction:
An
earlier version of this obituary contained an incomplete credit for the
original Broadway production of the musical “Little Me,” for which Mr.
Simon wrote the book. It was directed by Cy Feuer and Bob Fosse, not
just by Mr. Fosse.
Mervyn Rothstein contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on ,
on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Neil Simon,
Theater Titan Who Paved Way for Surge In TV Sitcoms, Dies at 91. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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