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Odd Man Out

He may have been our most successful playwright, but he was also our neediest. When he moved on to darker, riskier subjects, Simon kept one eye on his audience, as if scared of losing the crowd for even a second. As Broadway Bound and his memoirs suggest, he wanted the approval of his parents and their friends—non-theatergoers with no time for fancy-pants Expressionism, convinced that the only measure of worth was mass acclaim. It’s a revealing moment in the film The Goodbye Girl when an artsy director pumps his mother for a verdict on his (risible) production and then, in spite of her waffling, runs through the theater hollering, “My mother loved it!” In Simon’s universe, there’s nothing more pathetic than a mama’s boy who’s willfully blind to his mother’s disapproval.

Simon certainly wasn’t. Brighton Beach Memoirs depicts an overbearing, relentlessly critical mother who monitors every move in her house. Simon’s young alter ego, Eugene, yields to her dominance as if it’s a Jewish boy’s lot in life: There’s barely a hint in his wry but sunny nature that the hypercritical atmosphere has damaged him. It wasn’t until Lost in Yonkers that Simon could have a character raise a peep of protest against a matriarch from hell, and then he had to put it oh-so-tentatively in the mouth of her daughter, the backward child-woman Bella.

But symptoms of Simon’s smothered, resentful psyche are all over his plays, not just in the fussy, anal-retentive characters, but in the fussy, anal-retentive writing. He’s famous for holding actors to the letter of the text, and those with their own distinctive rhythms sometimes didn’t survive rehearsals. A young Robert De Niro, fresh off Taxi Driver, was cast in a film called Bogart Slept Here, which shut down when De Niro was fired for being a mite internal. Harvey Keitel was dumped from the film of The Sunshine Boys and replaced with the more Jewish-inflected Richard Benjamin. Christopher Walken’s drill sergeant in the film of Biloxi Blues is a rare instance of an actor’s meeting Simon’s specifications and yet making the role his own. A trained stage actor, Walken keeps to the meter, but he’s Walken—he elongates words, steals beats from the end of one line and adds them to the next, and injects creepy little laughs at his own sadistic turns of phrase. The aforementioned Bella was Simon’s most compelling character (especially as played by Mercedes Ruehl in the stage and screen versions of Lost in Yonkers) precisely because her rhythms are all messed up, because there’s a disconnect between her thoughts and words that’s unprecedented in Simon’s work.

The playwright’s two volumes of memoir suggest, for all their self-attention, an unexamined life. They dwell on his rise to fame, his hits and flops, his courtships of various mates, his real-estate purchases. He’s very moving when he talks about his first wife, Joan, who died of cancer at a young age, but he rarely demonstrates much empathy, and he never gives you a sense that he can see himself through others’ eyes. It’s hard to reconcile the sinned-against narrator of those books with the tales of backstage tyranny like the one that sent poor Mary Tyler Moore sobbing from the theater. Did this playwright ever notice other people long enough to be able to forget himself and inhabit someone else?

That said, his obsessive work ethic didn’t go to waste: Some of Simon’s plays are genuinely boffo. One reason The Odd Couple is his most enduring work (it turned into stale sushi only when it was miscast with two Felixes, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick) is that Felix—the needy, anal-retentive whiner who’s far more comfortable with women than men—is seen through the eyes of Oscar Madison, one of the only anal-expulsive characters in Simon’s repertoire. Oscar makes glorious messes—he’d give Simon’s mother a stroke. Parts of Plaza Suite, set in a hotel that for Simon’s tribe was the ultimate in luxe, are a howl. In William Goldman’s The Season, the author tells of Simon removing laughs from the script because they were killing the pace: “It got so insane. There was a moment … where George [C. Scott] said something to Maureen [Stapleton], gestured, turned and walked to the door, and they laughed. We cut the line out altogether; he just gestured, walked to the door. They wouldn’t stop laughing. Finally we had him go straight to the door, and they laughed at that.”

Although most of Simon’s movies are stagebound and claustrophobic, his screenplay for The Heartbreak Kid is stunningly good: It’s his only work in which the main character’s obsession with a shiksa goddess has a subtext of Jewish self-loathing, and director Elaine May’s off-the-beat timing gives the lines some air. The bitchery of Simon’s Sunshine Boys is more than for laughs—it suggests a poignant longing for a dying showbiz (and cultural) past. Simon’s underrated Rumors proved he could pull off the mechanics of farce—no mean feat. And Lost in Yonkers, though sometimes ungainly, deserved many of its accolades. Too bad that isn’t the play they’ve chosen to revive: Brighton Beach Memoirs is a piece of shopworn, unfocused realism that would have seemed old-fashioned in the forties. (That said, the cast of the new production is tremendous.)

Neil Simon embodies a different age, when you tried out a play at the Shubert in New Haven, in Boston, in Philly, in Wilmington, and fiddled and handed the actors new lines as they were going onstage and tossed out whole acts if you needed to. I remember seeing the radiant young Marsha Mason in The Good Doctor at the Schubert, right around the time that she and Simon got hitched: It wasn’t much of a play, but there was a live-wire feel to seeing it in process. Even one of Simon’s biggest duds, God’s Favorite, was fun in New Haven with a solemn Simon visible in back. The most entertaining stories in his memoirs are the ones in which he’s working on those plays out of town, stressed but in his element, measuring laughs and watching his audience watch his work.

But there’s a price to pay for watching an audience so attentively, for striving to find a too-harmonious balance between bathos and clownishness, for flattering and spoon-feeding instead of leading people somewhere they haven’t been. When that audience moves on (or dies out), the works don’t evolve. They remain a product of their era and place—forever of their time instead of perpetually new.