The Play Goes On: A Memoir

Neil Simon's memoirs, notes below. There is a fantastic story about his mother on pages 202-203.

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21: The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park, both true comedies, were successes in both mediums [theater and film].

38: I was playing tennis at a club when I received a phone call from agent Irving "Swifty" Lazar in Los Angeles. Lazar could trace you down if you were in a dungeon in Patagonia. Lazar had initially sold my first three plays, Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, all to Paramount Pictures. Irving now had another offer from Paramount to buy The Sunshine Boys as a vehicle for, and I gulped at this one, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. I grew up listening to both of them on the radio and had seen all their Road pictures as well as Hope's other wonderful comedies. But I told a stunned Irving Lazar that I was regretfully turning it down. The essence of my p lay was that these two aging ex-vaudevillians were Jewish, cranky and tired... not that religion was important to the characters, but their culture and background was.

70: The first preview of The Odd Couple in Delaware drew notices that were anything but exuberant. We had a third act that didn't work at all. Seven weeks and fifty pages of rewrites later, we had a smash.

87: Roy Gerber [was] the original model for Oscar in The Odd Couple.

171: I always knew you could trace my life through my plays (not all, but many) and in the above paragraph there are listed three common themes that show up in various forms throughout my career: the abandoned child, a father with a failing heart (my father died of one) and a mother dying of cancer, which of course was Joan. Always abandonment in one form or another. It shows up in Chapter Two, in Jack's Women, in Broadway Bound. Even in Proposals the father dies of a heart attack and both he and his daughter feel abandoned by the mother who left them. And in the comedy The Odd Couple, the wives of both Oscar and Felix have left them. Oscar copes but Felix is almost suicidal. Abandonment, of course, doesn't always mean someone actually leaving you. They can be there with you, but not be there for you. My mother's inability to deal with my childhood illnesses made me feel just as alone as if she were the one who packed up and left instead of my father, who did it time and time again.

191: I found The Odd Couple, drafts one through twelve. I didn't remember doing it over so many times. I was about to close the file when I noticed that in a faded manila envelope, unmarked, was another script. I took it out and read the title: Brighton Beach Memoirs. I had written it nine years before and had never even looked at it since then.

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20: Jack Lemmon was the only actor ever who said yes to doing a film of mine after I gave him a mere five-sentence description of the story.

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227: Comedy is not always profound, but laughter often makes it feel as if it is.