Playboy Interview: Neil Simon

a candid conversation about humor and success with the sunshine playwright

For almost two decades now, it's been apparent that there are actually three things in life that are inevitable: death, taxes and a new hit by Neil Simon. Since 1961, when "Come Blow Your Horn" marked the native New Yorker's play-wrighting debut, Simon has turned out 17 Broadway shows and 15 movies, the majority of which have been notable successes. After "Come Blow Your Horn," Simon quickly cemented his reputation as the nation's leading comedic playwright with "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Odd Couple," and over the years, his personal hit parade has marched on with such shows as "Plaza Suite," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "The Prisoner of Second Avenue," "The Sunshine Boys" and "Chapter Two." Simon adapts his own plays for the screen and has lately upped his output of original screenplays, his three most recent being "The Goodbye Girl," "Murder by Death" and "The Cheap Detective." By now, the former TV comedy writer--and chief financial backer of his own plays--has become a multimillionaire.

Despite his wealth, Simon leads a simple life that revolves around his typewriter--and, as his long list of credits would indicate, he is a prodigiously prolific writer. It isn't at all uncommon for more than one Simon play to be on Broadway at the same time that a Simon film is being shown around the country--and, meanwhile, a new Simon play and/or movie is in production, while still other projects are emerging from his typewriter. As we went to press, Simon was engaged in a more or less typical burst of activity: The film version of "California Suite" was being readied for release; "They're Playing Our Song" (his first original musical) was in rehearsal prior to a February opening on Broadway; and Simon was putting the finishing touches on his sequel to "The Goodbye Girl," which will again star Richard Dreyfuss and Simon's wife, actress Marsha Mason.

For all his popular acclaim, Simon has had a hard time shaking his reputation as a lightweight master of one-liners, a kind of playwright's Henny Youngman. Newsweek once noted that Simon's plays "fairly panted after laughs" and Simon himself agreed that was the case until he wrote "The Odd Couple." "Up to that point, I'd been relentless in my pursuit of laughs," he told a reporter several years ago. "But after 'The Odd Couple,' I was convinced that I could make people laugh, so I no longer felt compelled to.... I've learned to protect the serious moments of my plays."

Those moments have popped up increasingly as Simon has matured as a playwright, and he now regards his early works as "primitive." A perfectionist, he has clearly chosen a profession suitable to his nature. "Rewriting is when play-wrighting really gets to be fun," he says. "When you do your first draft, you always think a miracle is going to happen and that you'll get it all right the first time. Then, when you read it again a few months later, you see where the flow stops and you're grateful for the opportunity to do it over. And then, when the cast first reads it, it becomes very obvious what's wrong and you get still another chance to correct it."

Marvin Neil Simon has been doing it right ever since he was 15 and helped his big brother Danny write a show put on by the employees of Abraham & Straus, a Brooklyn department store. After Simon graduated from high school and served a hitch in the Army during World War Two, his brother Danny--by then, a publicity rep for Warner Bros.--got him a job in Warner's mail room. At that point, they decided to team up as comedy writers and were soon hired by CBS radio producer Goodman Ace after he read their description of a Joan Crawford movie: "She's in love with a gangster who is caught and sent to Sing Sing and given the electric chair, and she promises to wait for him." Danny and Doc--Neil's nickname ever since, as a child, he imitated the family doctor--went on to write for radio comics such as Robert Q. Lewis, Jan Murray and Phil Foster. In the early Fifties, they broke into TV and worked for Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Jerry Lester and others. After nearly a decade of writing radio and TV sketches, Simon sat down and began working on "Come Blow Your Horn"--and the rest, as they say in show-business-history circles, was boffo.

To talk with Simon, Playboy sent veteran interviewer Lawrence Linderman to meet with the 51-year-old playwright in Los Angeles. Linderman reports:

"Neil Simon's chief pleasure in life is to present himself at his typewriter every day, where, for six hours or so, he can create worlds entirely of his own choosing. Simon, slightly under six feet tall and slender, is similarly devoted to tennis, and it's no coincidence that his office--in a modest apartment building--is located a half block away from the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.

"Before we met, I'd been told that Simon is a far more serious man than many of his plays would suggest, and he is. He takes nothing for granted in life, especially his own success. He seems constantly to question his worth as a playwright, which is probably why he works so hard. His own hopelessly unrealistic vision of the perfect Neil Simon play is one in which, 'for 119 minutes the audience is hysterical with laughter, but for the last minutes they are so moved that they leave the theater in a daze.' That is not the kind of goal one expects from a craftsman of comedic fluff, which is precisely how Simon is regarded by many of his sharpest critics and some of his most devoted fans. With that in mind, when we met in his office to begin our interview, I asked Simon a question designed to get the conversation off to a rollicking start."

[Q] Playboy: There's no question that you're America's most successful contemporary playwright, yet some drama critics seem to regard you as little more than a play-writing factory that manufactures profitable--but trivial--theatrical evenings. What's your reaction to that?

[A] Simon: I think people are quick, to categorize all of my plays based on some of my plays. Critics have a hard time with me because I jump around so much in terms of my work. I don't write the same play over and over. The Sunshine Boys, for example, is a very serious play that deals with old age and its problems. On the other hand. Barefoot in the Park is a soufllé, and when one makes his fame based on a play like that, people are apt to say, "Ah, that's what he always writes." The fame and the money color a lot of this. There's something about success that makes people suspicious, that makes them think the work can't really be very good if it's that successful. But I don't think the plays could have been successful if critics dismissed them in any lump-sum sort of way--and that never happened. The good plays continue to receive good reviews, the bad ones don't. At the same time, I've tried to turn this whole thing around by flirting with danger a lot more. In other words, I've started to go into areas I ordinarily wouldn't have gone into.

[Q] Playboy: As a way of countering your critics?

[A] Simon: No, not just because of that. It's a natural outgrowth of where one has come from. I'd had a lot of success and a lot of recognition, and I thought I'd like to probe a little more deeply in my writings. I began trying things like The Gingerbread Lady--about an alcoholic former singer--for which the critics came down hard on me and said, "No, no, give us that thing you do best; make us laugh." My next play--I don't recall what it was--had them laughing again, at which point they said, "Why doesn't he dig more deeply?" I then wrote The Good Doctor, an adaptation of some Chekhov short stories. When the play was being performed in New Haven, I remember a woman coming up to me during intermission and saying, with a sour look on her face, "It's not Neil Simon." I asked her if that meant the play was good or bad, and she said, "I don't know. It's just not Neil Simon." She had come to expect something else, which is why I think that if someone else's name had been on The Good Doctor, it might have fared better. As it turned out, the play did all right. The reviews were OK, we had a fair run and it's being shown on PBS.

[Q] Playboy: We tend to think that woman in New Haven wasn't a theatergoing rarity--and that people attending your plays feel they will, indeed, be treated to an evening of fast-paced comedy. Do you resent that?

[A] Simon: Well, I'm not crazy about it, but I have to live with it: It's there and it's a matter of fact. But I think some of it has to do with whatever is the current mood of the critics. For example, Woody Allen's first few movies--Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Sleeper--were dismissed by many critics as light and trivial. When he made Annie Hall, they said, "Oh, this is wonderful, Woody is growing" Then comes Interiors and some critics say, "This is Woody's first serious work," and others say, "Well, it's not really his first serious work--all of his work has been serious." They suddenly go back and re-examine all of Woody's films through their examination of Interiors, which they're thrilled by. If my next play were to be breath-takingly beautiful and marvelous, I think critics might re-examine my other work more favorably. This doesn't pertain to all critics, of course; there are many who say I'm doing great work. But I'm somewhat affected by that kind of criticism and I can't escape it completely, even though I generally don't really listen. A number of years ago, Walter Kerr wrote that one of the reasons for my success is that I don't listen--not only to the critics but to anyone.

[Q] Playboy: Do you, like Allen, have an urge to write a serious drama?

[A] Simon: No, I'll never try to do what Woody attempted in Interiors, which is to write something that's totally without humor. For one thing, I couldn't do it, and I have no desire to do it. It's not that I want to make people laugh, it's just that I see humor in even the grimmest of situations. And I think it's possible to write a play so moving it can tear you apart and still have humor in it. I feel I'm always moving in and out of that type of situation. California Suite, for instance, contains four one-act plays--two farces and two very serious pieces. One of these is about this terribly witty English actress and her antique-dealer husband who've come to Hollywood for the Academy Awards, and there are a lot of early jokes about the film industry. You laugh, but suddenly it turns into this very dark play in which you discover that the husband is bisexual, which causes enormous friction in their marriage. You see that they love each other and that through love, they will muddle through, but always desperately unhappy. Despite the fact that it's laced with laughter, it's a serious piece--but the laughs throw people off. They may think, Well, it can't be very serious if I'm laughing at it.

Some critics react the same way to my work. The man from The New York Times, for one, was happy during the first act of Chapter Two, which was very, very light comedy. The second act, however, turned into the stark reality of what had happened to me: I'd survived the death of my first wife, I'd gone into a second marriage with Marsha Mason and, feeling guilt and all of the personal repercussions of it, I'd lashed out at Marsh--and I wrote about it. Certain critics said, "Don't give us that, don't suddenly change in the middle. Make it all light." Well, my life wasn't all light. I mean, the first few months of my marriage to Marsha were flushed with romance and happiness, but then one suddenly had to deal with the past. Many critics want it all one way: They want it all comedy, not something that grows more serious.

[Q] Playboy: Theater critics aside, is there any particular reason why--as indicated by your recent plays--you've pulled back from writing straight comedies?

[A] Simon: I'd say it's because there's no joy anymore in repeating myself. I don't want to write a play or a movie that's anything like another play or movie I've done before. I now have to go into new territories in order to keep myself interested in the work, which is one of the reasons I've just written my first original musical, They're Playing Our Song. I'd previously adapted three other works into musicals, and the only one I really loved was Promises, Promises, which was based on Billy Wilder's movie The Apartment. After that, I got loads of offers to do more adaptations, but there didn't seem to be any point in turning someone else's work into a musical.

[Q] Playboy: Have your instincts about your work ever steered you wrong?

[A] Simon: Oh, yes, I was all wrong about The Goodbye Girl When I wrote it, I thought it would just be a nice little picture for Marsha and me to do. In a way, The Goodbye Girl was an answer to what I felt was happening in the film industry--that there was too much movie violence for the sake of violence. I wanted to write about two people who care for each other and who can show that there's still some love left in the world. I mean, I see love around me personally, in my relationships with my wife and children, but I don't see it up there on movie screens. In any case, when I first saw The Goodbye Girl in a screening room, I really liked it, and I thought that just maybe it would make its cost back. There's no way in the world I'd have predicted it would become an enormous hit, because I was sure that very few people would be interested in a picture that told such a very small story.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think the film did so well?

[A] Simon: I feel it had to do with the purity and healthiness of the relationship between the two characters. I also saw The Goodbye Girl in a movie theater, and more and more, I see how important it is for an audience to root for your characters, to care very much about what happens to them. When people care, even the slightest joke will get a big laugh, for they'll be so caught up in what's going on. If they don't care and are not caught up, you need blockbusters every two minutes and even that won't fulfill an audience. But when I was writing The Goodbye Girl, I didn't know people would be jumping out of their seats at everything that happened to this couple. I was just writing a nice little movie that was the eventual result of another screenplay I'd written called Bogart Slept Here.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote a screenplay that wasn't produced?

[A] Simon: Not exactly. The story behind The Goodbye Girl is as complicated as La Ronde. Bogart Slept Here, which started it all, was a screenplay about success and what it does to you. I was writing from personal experiences, and not only my own; I deal with a lot of successful people and I see how it affects them. I decided to do a story about an actor who becomes an overnight success, and when I wrote it, I had Dustin Hoffman in mind, because Dustin went through that about the same time I did--in his early 30s. Dustin was then a very talented but struggling off-Broadway actor no one had ever heard of. Well, Mike Nichols tested him to star in this great movie he was about to direct, The Graduate, and there really wasn't a chance Dustin would get the part. The studio was talking about Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and every other major star, but Mike very courageously said, "No, I want this unknown." Dustin once told me about the moment he found out he had the part. He and Anne, his wife, were at home when the telephone rang, and Dustin picked it up. He was at one end of their hall, Anne was down at the other, and they could see each other. Mike Nichols was calling from the West Coast and Dustin's part of the conversation went something like this: "Yes, I see, OK. Great. Gee, that's terrific." He hangs up; he's got the picture and he looks at Anne and she knows it, too. And they also knew that their lives had changed inexorably--it was as if Dustin had been picked to go to the moon. Now, the picture could have flopped, but it didn't, and having embarked on this journey and having reached the moon--as Dustin did--their lives were inexorably changed. Which happens to many people in businesses where one can achieve fame over-night. That was the background for Bogart Slept Here, which was to be a film about a young New York actor who's married and has a couple of kids, and who gets this big part in a movie and goes out to Hollywood.

[Q] Playboy: Why wasn't it filmed?

[A] Simon: Oh, we went into production on it. Mike Nichols was the director, and it starred Robert DeNiro and Marsha, but after a week, it was clear the movie wasn't going to work out. DeNiro had finished Taxi Driver on a Friday, and when he walked in the following Monday, I'm sure he still had that character in his mind. If you've seen Taxi Driver, you know what kind of character he played--and you don't immediately shake something like that. As a result, what we had onscreen for seven days was pretty grim: It was not a comedy. Everything had to be sort of rearranged to fit DeNiro, who I think is a brilliant actor. I'm not sure whether he can play the kind of comedy I write, but none of us had much of a chance to find out. If we had been doing a play, we might have worked it out, but since we were shooting a film and it was costing $30,000 or $40,000 a day, Nichols called it off after a week. It was the smart thing to do, and I thought Mike was very brave to do it, because he was sure to get bad press about dropping a picture after having just had an unsuccessful film venture with The Fortune.

Mike dropped out, but Warner Bros. wanted to keep going, so we began talking to other directors. After another month had gone by, however, we still didn't have an actor for the DeNiro role. I'd thought of Richard Dreyfuss, but I'd been told he wasn't interested or available, neither of which was true. It turned out that he was very interested, so we had him and Marsha do a reading. By then, I'd become disenchanted with the film and somewhat fearful of the script. I felt that if it didn't' work with DeNiro, maybe there was something wrong with it. Meanwhile, I was thrilled by the chemistry between Marsha and Richard, who spark each other as actors. They both have enormous energy and an enormous zest for life, and I thought the two of them would be terrific together. My solution was to write a different picture for them, yet I wanted to keep the character of the struggling young actor. So I abandoned Bogart Slept Here and began writing The Goodbye Girl. The next-to-last scene in the movie--when Nicol Williamson comes into the dressing room and asks Richard if he'd like to go to Hollywood to be in a movie--was actually the beginning of Bogart Slept Here. I just worked backward from there because I wanted to write a romantic story showing how these two people meet. And I guess all of us were surprised by the film's success: Richard won the Academy Award, we all were nominated, and we'll be doing a sequel to The Goodbye Girl this summer. It'll be called Mister Famous, and I'm using Bogart Slept Here as the basis for the screenplay. About all that remains of that script is that Richard will be playing an actor who becomes famous overnight.

[Q] Playboy: Peter Falk claims that 90 percent of the actors he knows walk around saying, "Where would I be without Neil Simon?" Do you think Dreyfuss is a member of that club?

[A] Simon: No, because Richard's own work and talent have made him a star, and I think he'd have become one no matter what. But it's true that I've helped a lot of actors, because I'm very aware of the actor's needs, and I generally try to write really good parts. I also think I'm a good caster of roles for my own vehicles, and I try to discover actors, in a way, by finding them just before they make their breakthroughs. For instance, I'd seen Walter Matthau in a few small movie roles, and when I saw him as Nathan Detroit in a New York City Center production of Guys and Dolls, I thought, Hey, this guy is sensational! So I suggested him for the role of Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and--bammo!--the combination of Walter and that character made him a star.

Obviously, I can't take credit for discovering Richard Dreyfuss in any way, because he'd already done quality films such as Jaws, Duddy Kravitz and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Goodbye Girl, however, captured all the facets of his personality and allowed him to make a breakthrough and become a major star. I think he's going through some interesting changes now. Richard had wanted to win the Academy Award all his life, and now that he's won it, he's not rushing into picture after picture. He's done one film since The Goodbye Girl--The Big Fix, which I liked a lot. Richard's not planning to do another film until we shoot Mister Famous in July. He went off someplace in Connecticut to study with the Royal Shakespeare Company. All Richard wants to do is improve his craft, expand himself and learn to become a better actor.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that, as a result of appearing in The Goodbye Girl, your wife has also become a major star?

[A] Simon: To be honest--even though I sometimes use the word myself--I really don't know what a star is, and I think Marsha would tell you the same thing. Is a star someone people always line up to see? If so, then I don't think there is such a thing, because, with the possible exception of Barbra Streisand, if a picture isn't good, people just won't go to see it, no matter who's in it. In any case, I think The Goodbye Girl allowed Marsha to show another side of her talent. Up until then, about the only comedy she'd been in was Private Lives. She really never knew she could do comedy. Marsha was raised in the classics and enjoyed acting in dramas like The Crucible and Cyrano. I guess the first time she came to my anybody's attention was in Blume in Love. That was certainly the first time she came to my attention. I married her not too long afterward.

[Q] Playboy: When did you meet her?

[A] Simon: A little over five years ago, when she came to audition for The Good Doctor. I did that--an adaptation of Chekhov's stories--because I'd always written in the New York idiom, and this gave me a chance to deal differently with language. I'd still only seen Marsha in Blume in Love and I was very surprised that she wanted to be in the show. Well, she read half a page at the audition and I turned around and said, "Let's hire her." Her range was really extraordinary. She asked for a certain salary and I didn't even try to get her for less, and she wanted a six-month contract, and that was all right, too. I just wanted her in the play.

[Q] Playboy: Did anyone suspect you were giving her the role when what you really wanted to do was marry her?

[Q] Simon: Marry her? I didn't even know her. The last thing I was thinking of was getting married again. Really, she interested me purely as an actress. As a matter of fact, I didn't know if Marsha herself was married, engaged or what.

[Q] Playboy: How long did it take you to find out?

[A] Simon: I didn't see Marsha for a month after her audition--she went back to California and I continued doing rewrites for the play. Our relationship sort of started on the first day of rehearsals, when I was again awed by her capabilities. But I was also trying to deal with the play. The Good Doctor was made up, I think, of 12 scenes, and there was a lot to deal with. Yet I just kept looking over at her. At that point, I was attracted to Marsha more as a person than as a woman, but when we did start seeing each other, we got married after three weeks. If I had thought about it a lot, I probably wouldn't have done it, but I plunged into marriage because my instincts told me it was right, that Marsha was the right girl. I also thought, naïvely and not very clearly, that if it didn't work out, I'd just say goodbye. It probably wasn't very fair to either one of us, but we were both willing to take our chances and follow our instincts.

[Q] Playboy: Very soon after that, you moved from New York to Los Angeles. Was that because of your marriage?

[A] Simon: Yes, but it actually had to do with where I was in my own mind. After Marsha and I were married, we continued living in the house I'd lived in with my first wife for more than ten years. [Joan Simon died of cancer at the age of 39 in 1973.] Everything in that house on 62nd Street had been picked out by Joan, and I felt I had to move out. And then I thought it would be a good idea to get away from New York, because everything in the city--everything--reminded me of Joan. I mean, there was no way to escape those ghosts, and as it is, they stayed with me for two years, no matter where I was. But to give Marsha and myself a chance at a new life, I felt it was mandatory that we get out of New York. Our first thought was to settle in San Francisco, because Marsha had worked there and liked it, and in the few visits I'd made, I liked San Francisco, too. So we went and investigated it, and I came to the conclusion that life in San Francisco would be insane for me: I didn't know a single soul in that city, and I found I couldn't walk around town very well because the hills are so steep you need a rope and an anchor to get around. Whereas I knew everybody in Los Angeles. So we gave up the house in New York and just moved to Los Angeles with my two daughters. And, for a while, I really loved it. Marsha and I were rediscovering old friends and finding the pace of life much more leisurely than in New York, and loving the warm winter weather and playing tennis--everything was really sensational. And it isn't until now that I'm beginning to say, "Uh-oh." At this point, I've begun to find life in California a little arid for me.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Simon: In several ways--but I'm not one of those people caught up in that whole territorial-imperative thing about how New York is the best place in the world. I mean, I've heard New Yorkers put down California at the same time they're smoking 80 cigarettes a second and their blood pressure is up to 5000 over 4000. There's a lot that I like about California, but I miss the vibrations and the almost electrical input you get from New York City. Granted, I can't take that all the time, because it's too high-powered and I run down in energy, mostly because I put so much energy into my work. And I don't like getting tied up in traffic and getting tied up in all the things one gets tied up in in New York. And yet I miss it, so Marsha and I have taken an apartment in New York, and next year, after my younger daughter goes off to college, I think we'll begin dividing our time between the two places.

I've been away from New York for three years now and I've begun to feel too much out of contact with it. As a writer, I have to draw from resources I've built up within me over the years, but I know that I can't write a quintessential California play--and I can write a New York play. And I want to make sure I'm there often enough to continue to do that. I don't want to be caught between two places and become a kind of man without a country.

[Q] Playboy: Couldn't you become a Californian?

[A] Simon: It I lived here another 50 years, I don't think I'd ever be a Californian. For instance, in New York, I like to walk down the street and meet people and say, "How are you? What are you doing tomorrow night?" But you don't bump into anyone in Los Angeles. And if you do, they're people who are invariably involved in show business, and they talk about the business all the time. Another thing: In California, everybody's got these plastic smiles and they always want to make life pleasant. They've taken the conflict out of it. I think that in Southern California, people are very concerned about making their life comfortable, while back East, they're more concerned with making their life interesting. If I had to make one comparison, I'd say that when it's five below in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles, and when it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles; but there are 2,000,000 interesting people in New York--and only 78 in Los Angeles. There may be a hell of a lot more, but it's hard to find them. Everybody in Los Angeles wants to be a movie director. That's all you hear: "Well, I really want to direct."

[Q] Playboy: And we thought Hollywood was a hotbed of aspiring actors. Were we wrong?

[A] Simon: No, that's also true. In Los Angeles, actors want to go into movies; in New York, they want to go into theater. The difference is that you've really got to work at your craft to become a good stage actor. Of the people who recently auditioned in Los Angeles for They're Playing Our Song, I'd say half of them had never been on a stage, yet they thought they could fake it, because in television you can use cue cards and in movies you can get through a take here and there. Well, you can't fake your way through a stage performance. You know, in the last few years, I've seen a real change in movie actors. When Hollywood finally broke away from using only guys who had the leading-man looks of a Robert Taylor or a Tyrone Power, actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro came along and everyone said, "Right, it's not important to be good-looking. Audiences want to identify with real people." Television is now turning it back the other way around. The reason we're getting all of these plastic dummies--the perfect-looking guys who have their hair sprayed, the gorgeous girls who cannot act one word--is that, for the most part, TV shows are designed to play for adolescent audiences. The networks have decided that youngsters want to look at pretty people, but who knows if that's true? The networks think it is because one show like Charlie's Angels worked--and TV is an imitative medium. And now TV has begun to invade the film industry: The rock stars and actors such as John Travolta are coming out of television and going into movies.

[Q] Playboy: You don't care for Travolta?

[A] Simon: Travolta is fine. I've only seen him in Saturday Night Fever, which I loved, and he's very talented; whether or not he'll have longevity remains to be seen. But I'm not even talking about people of his caliber. I'm talking about the young actors one sees on TV shows these days. I haven't seen every show, but after watching the promos for them, there's no reason to even want to watch the shows.

[Q] Playboy: A lot of people do, however. How do you explain the changes in television since the days when you were a TV comedy writer?

[A] Simon: Well, when I worked in TV--and I'm going back at least 20 years now--for the most part, TV sets were owned by fairly affluent people in urban areas. You were dealing with a much smaller audience and a much more sophisticated audience. And so you could have programs on the air like The Ernie Kovacs Show, Your Show of Shows and Sgt. Bilko. In those days, television wasn't the money game it is today. The profits weren't that enormous and the rating games, although they went on, weren't nearly as big as they are now. A few months ago, I watched a 60 Minutes segment devoted to the TV rating game and I couldn't believe what I saw. A vice-president of one of the networks got up and said, "We're not interested in being number three. We're not interested in being number two. We're out to be number one!" And they're out to be number one at any cost. In other words, put on any shit in the world to attract the largest audience you can, because sponsors will then have to pay more to buy onto your show. Well, in order to become number one, you have to give them not quality but whatever has seemed to work in the past by trick or by accident--like Three's Company, which is just pure crap, or Charlie's Angels. Really, one can hardly call the writing on Charlie's Angels writing, or the acting, acting. It's junk, but the girls are beautiful. Who knows what will happen now that professional football teams are giving us our choice of 50 beautiful girls? Boy, this country is really into tits and ass. Is it the medium that's giving it to us, or is that what this country wants?

[Q] Playboy: Obviously, Playboy has its own opinion on the subject, but what do you think?

[A] Simon: I don't know, and I listen to the so-called experts and none of them seems to know if it's the chicken or the egg. Believe me, I'm all for beautiful girls, but I think it's terrific when they're also talented. The reason I hate television so much is because it's so untalented and tries to achieve so little. For the most part, the only thing it tries to do is make money. All entertainment forms try to make money, of course, and all of them have their high spots. The one thing I like about TV is that it deals with areas the movies are no longer interested in. At one time, movie studios would make a film of Pride and Prejudice; go find a movie company that would want to make Pride and Prejudice today. But a TV network would do it--provided it could use Farrah Fawcett as one of the major characters. I find it incredible that a girl's head of hair could make her a star.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote for most of the biggest TV comedy shows of the Fifties. Did you feel any sense of excitement about being part of what many observers have called television's golden age of comedy?

[A] Simon: It's hard to say whether the era was exciting or if the exciting thing was being in my early 20s and working for the top shows on TV. Not that all the shows were exciting to work for; writing The Red Buttons Show was no thrill, and I hated working on The Jackie Gleason Show. Gleason had very little respect for his writers, or at least that was the case during the short time I was there. Sid Caesar, however, knew that his success depended on his writers, and he got the best in the business. Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Gary Belkin, Mel Tolkin, Joe Stein, Michael Stewart--Sid put together an incredible group of writers and he paid us the highest salaries in TV. Working on Your Show of Shows was a terrific learning experience for me. Max Liebman, who produced it for two years, wasn't a writer, but he was a great editor. We worked in front of a live audience and, unlike TV today, we couldn't cut, edit or put in the laughs. If we didn't get them from our audience, we died that night.

[Q] Playboy: You were earning $1600 a week as a comedy writer when you began phasing yourself out of television. Weren't you worried about turning your back on that kind of money?

[A] Simon: Yes, but I could see the end of the road. I thought, This is what I will be doing for the rest of my life: I will just be writing television shows.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a frustrated playwright?

[A] Simon: No, I was afraid to be a playwright. I didn't think I had the talent to be one. I was an avid theatergoer and, after watching plays by writers like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, I'd say to myself, "That's big league, I can't do that. I can just write sketches for Your Show of Shows." My fear was that I'd stay in one place for the rest of my life, and I felt a need to grow. I wanted to go on and at least write movies, but my agent at the William Morris office told me it would be difficult to get me a movie job, because all I had were TV credits. And certainly, nobody says, "Hey, kid, we'd like you to write a play." You've got to do that on your own, so I made up my mind to do it.

I think I was 29 years old at that point, and I went out to California to work on a Jerry Lewis TV special. I'd written one before with Mel Tolkin, but when this one came around, Mel was busy on something else and Jerry asked me to do it myself. It was a huge challenge for me, so I went out to California, rented a house for two months and in the first week, I wrote two sketches and showed them to Jerry. "They're perfect," he said, "and that's all you have to do. I've got three songs and a couple of interviews, which you don't have to write. I needed two big sketches and now I have them." I said, "But I've rented a house for seven more weeks. What do I do?" And Jerry said, "Do whatever you want to do."

So I used the time to start writing Come Blow Your Horn, but not really with the intention of having it appear on Broadway--that would've been too frightening. I started it as an exercise, just to see if I could write 120 pages. Having read a lot of books on playwriting, I knew that you should write about what you know. I figured, OK, I know my family, so I'll do something about how my older brother Danny and I left home and took our first apartment, and what it was like in those days. I then sat down and began writing the play--and it took me only three years to finish it.

[Q] Playboy: A case of writer's block?

[Q] Simon: No, it was a case of not knowing the first thing about how to write a play. There were very few blind alleys I missed. For example, I'd make an outline of the play and I'd find that the play wouldn't conform to the outline because the characters wanted to go where they wanted to go, and I didn't know how to catch up to them. I also didn't know how to get my characters on or off the stage--they would just leave. There was a lot to learn, and I had to keep doing it over and over, which is why the process took three years. Really, it was a horrible experience: I rewrote Come Blow Your Horn 20 times, and I mean 20 times from beginning to end. I'd say that in the first ten versions of the play, there probably wasn't one sentence that was used in Come Blow Your Horn. In the mean-time, I had to support my family, and during those years, I literally had no time for myself, my wife or my children: During the day, I worked on The Garry Moore Show, writing sketches for Carol Burnett, and at nights and on weekends, I worked on Come Blow Your Horn. When I finally finished it, I was sure I'd never have the energy to spend another three years writing a play. But Come Blow Your Horn was semisuccessful: It ran two years without ever filling a house, and the royalties I received, although not nearly what I was making as a TV writer, were enough to subsidize me for another year to get my next project going. That's when I started Barefoot in the Park, which turned out to be a big smash hit, and I was OK from then on in.

[Q] Playboy: Was Barefoot in the Park a lot easier for you to write?

[A] Simon: There were fewer blind alleys for me, but only just fewer. For example, would you believe that in the original draft, Barefoot in the Park was set in a chalet in Switzerland? How does a play set in a Swiss chalet eventually wind up taking place in a little apartment off Third Avenue in Manhattan? Simple: I still had a lot to learn. After many abortive attempts, I realized I had to take my Barefoot characters out of that exotic setting and stick closely to the truth, which was the reality of what happened to Joan and me in our first year of marriage. Writing the next play, The Odd Couple, wasn't easy, either. In fact, although they come easier now, they're still never easy. And I still don't always know if what I'm writing is good, but at least I can pretty much tell what's bad. One of the tests is to put something away for a while and then go back and read it. If I can read something I've written five months later and still like it, fine. On the other hand, I might just end up saying, "My instincts were right--this is crap."

[Q] Playboy: How many times have you actually jettisoned a work in progress?

[A] Simon: I've got the beginnings of at least 30 plays in my drawer, and they range from five pages up to an entire movie that I wrote for Marsha and Burt Reynolds. We read it, everyone thought it was wonderful, Columbia offered me a fortune for it--and I said no, I didn't like it. And it's back in the drawer and will stay there.

[Q] Playboy: In the past few years, you've become as prolific a screenwriter as you are a playwright. Do you enjoy writing for the movies as much as you do writing for the stage?

[A] Simon: No, playwriting is still the most important aspect of my life, because when I'm writing a play, what I visualize is exactly what the audience sees. Unless you direct a film, it's really out of your hands--I'm talking about the interpretation of the material now, not the words. With somebody else, another writer can be brought in, but they're not going to do that to me. Anyway, in a play, if there are two actors onstage and one is saying something and the other is doing something, the audience always sees both. In a film, the director will be cutting from one actor to the other. By now, I've found that it's really a waste of time for me to indicate the cuts in a movie. For instance, if a set hasn't been built the way I visualized it, the director might not be able to shoot a scene from a particular angle; or if there's a shot that I want to emphasize, I can note, for example, that after one particular line of dialog we should cut to the closet, where, let's say, someone is hiding. But in the editing room, they may cut to that closet an extra time or one less time than I want, which is why I always have to keep my fingers crossed.

On the stage, however, nothing stops the flow of a scene except the end of it, and nothing stops the natural rhythm of one's writing. In a movie, the constant cuts and different camera angles change the rhythm of one's writing. The reason I work best with Herb Ross directing my films is that he understands the rhythm of my writing and tries very hard to keep it. Even so, whatever I see on the screen is always a surprise to me. In order to achieve in films what I can achieve on the stage, I'd not only have to spend every day on the set, I'd also have to spend every day in the cutting room. That's why Woody Allen writes, directs and usually acts in his own films--because he truly wants to control his material. He once asked me to direct the stage version of Play It Again, Sam, and I'm sure I would've screwed it up for him, because I'd have made him change it due to my own point of view. I don't think I'd ever be good for someone else's work.

[Q] PLayboy: Do you have any desire to direct your own work?

[A] Simon: No, I'd much rather have that done by someone who's willing to spend all his time on direction. I learned early on that I could never direct what I write. When The Odd Couple went into rehearsals, we spent the first day reading the script, and the first act was terrific, the second act was even better--and the third act was a shambles. Mike Nichols was the director and I asked him, "What do we do now?" Mike said, "I rehearse the first and second acts and you go home and rewrite the third act."

It had taken me about seven months to write The Odd Couple, which meant I'd spent about two months writing the third act. Well, I went home and rewrote the third act in a week--and when I brought it in, it was worse than the first version. Now I was really in trouble, because I was running out of ideas. We stayed with the early version of the third act throughout rehearsals and the out-of-town tryout, and all during that period, I did rewrite after rewrite, until I finally got what I wanted. What would I have done if I also had had to direct the play? There's no way I could've had the energy and talent to do both things well. I feel the same way about directing a movie: I have no desire to do it. If I stopped writing plays, then I might be tempted to direct the films I write, but I really don't get enough kicks just writing screenplays.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned that your screenplays are never tampered with, yet we've heard scores of horror stories about what can happen to a script from the moment a writer finishes it to the time the film appears--and that's happened to the work of even the most respected Hollywood screenwriters. How have you been able to avoid that trap?

[A] Simon: Whatever power I have that way has been given to me because I'm a name playwright who's also been able to write some successful movies. But just being a name playwright doesn't do the trick for you, although, God knows, there aren't many name playwrights around. You have to be able to make the transition, for there are some brilliant playwrights who haven't been able to write commercially viable movies. And I suppose there are some brilliant playwrights who aren't interested in writing movies. It's certainly true that for a long time, my only interest was a case of take the money and run. I considered myself a playwright, and I wanted to stay in New York and around the theater, so I used to just send my scripts to the West Coast, fly out for a couple of meetings and then return to New York. I really did not want to get involved in motion pictures. And I think not having a hand in the making of the pictures hurt them in a lot of areas.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Simon: Casting, for one. In the theater, any director worth his salt is going to consult the author and ask, "Is this who you had in mind?" Again, it goes back to the theater's being a playwright's medium, with the director there to interpret your play. In the movies, I'd say that 95 percent of the time it's a director's concept; and even when he's given a script, he makes it his concept. But because of my unique position, I don't really live in that world, or at least I haven't for the last six or seven years. But earlier on, I was a victim of that principle. For example, I never wanted Walter Matthau to appear in all three parts of Plaza Suite, a movie that I don't think works at all. I wanted Walter just to be in the last part--as the bride's father, who tries to break down the bathroom door to get his daughter to go to her wedding. Paramount told me Walter wouldn't do the film unless he got all three parts. My vote was to skip it and get three other people. I thought an audience would get tired of the same actor and that only by having three different actors would we be able to maintain people's interest. Well, I lost that argument completely, and, as it turned out, I think I was right: Walter was really only good as the father of the bride. He was not good in the two other pieces. There were also some faults of my own in that picture: There was no reason to shoot it all in the same suite. I could have opened the picture up for Walter by using much more of New York and the Plaza hotel.

[Q] Playboy: Have you often been on the losing end of such casting decisions?

[A] Simon: Well, it's hard to generalize or put a number on it. I've done three pictures with Jack Lemmon; I thought he and Walter were terrific in The Odd Couple and that Jack was perfect for The Out-of-Towners. But The Prisoner of Second Avenue needed someone more ethnically right and much more urban. Jack, to me, does not portray a typical New Yorker. I wanted Peter Falk, but the studio told me, "Look, Peter's not a name--and Jack is a big name." Big names prove nothing in the wrong picture: The Prisoner of Second Avenue never really grossed any money, so we'd have done just as well with Peter. One of the reasons I often don't like doing movies has to do with the compromises you sometimes have to make. For example, I couldn't use Diane Keaton in The Heartbreak Kid, and if it had been a play, I think I would've won that fight.

[Q] Playboy: Did you want her for the Cybill Shepherd role?

[A] Simon: No, I wanted her for the Jeannie Berlin part. Jeannie is Elaine May's daughter, and Elaine, who was directing the movie, insisted on using Jeannie. By then, I could make a choice, and it was to either take Diane Keaton and lose Elaine May or keep Elaine with Jeannie Berlin. Jeannie turned out to be quite good in the picture and she won an Academy Award nomination, but I'd never doubted her acting ability. My quarrel was that she's obviously not as attractive as Cybill Shepherd. Diane Keaton is very attractive. And my point was that the movie wasn't about a guy who leaves an unattractive girl for a beautiful girl like Cybill Shepherd--that's too easy. The movie was about the kind of man who'd find flaws in whatever woman he was married to, no matter how good-looking she was.

[Q] Playboy: Did you discuss that with Elaine May?

[A] Simon: Yes, and Elaine was quite willing to deal with Jeannie as an unattractive girl; she did not attempt to make her beautiful. She also knew how talented Jeannie is, and she is a talented girl, but so is Diane Keaton. Diane Keaton gave a reading that was to die! I mean, it was a knockout! And I said to everyone around, "There is no contest. This girl is spectacular!" And this was before Diane Keaton had made her breakthrough. She was sensational--and she didn't get the part.

[Q] Playboy: If you felt so strongly about it, why didn't you replace Elaine May?

[A] Simon: Well, despite losing out on the Jeannie Berlin question, I knew that Elaine was so gifted that she'd bring things to The Heartbreak Kid that a lot of other people wouldn't. She also, as it turned out, put in things I didn't have in the script. She turned The Heartbreak Kid into a Jewish versus WASP story, which I hadn't written. I never wrote in a Jewish wedding with guests dancing all around and the groom stepping on a glass. I had a very neutral wedding, because I didn't want to play on that. Elaine got around the clause in my contract that says my words can't be changed by simply shooting a different kind of wedding. These kinds of things finally stopped happening--and my attitude toward movies changed--when I met up with Ray Stark, who's the best film producer I've ever worked with.

[Q] Playboy: What makes him the best?

[A] Simon: He's smart, he's tasteful and he knows when to turn the reins over to you. I trust Ray's sense of what's right for a film much more than I trust what any studio tells me, especially his ideas on casting. The first film we worked on together was The Sunshine Boys. I wanted to do it with the original Broadway cast--Jack Albertson and Sam Levene--and Ray bought the film rights to the play on that basis. I was not going to sell out, and I'd already had the chance to do so: At one point, Bob Hope offered me $1,000,000 for the property for himself and Bing Crosby to do. I thought it was absolutely wrong for those two to portray a pair of aging, Jewish vaude-villians from New York. I was being very idealistic, and I felt that if Jack Albertson and Sam Levene could be wonderful onstage, there was no reason they couldn't be just as good in a movie. Ray slowly started me thinking beyond that, and I finally wound up agreeing with him: There's no way Jack Albertson and Sam Levene would've been able to attract a nationwide movie audience, and because of that, we'd have had to make the film very cheaply. As it is, even with a star of Walter Matthau's caliber and with George Burns winning an Oscar, The Sunshine Boys--the best film translation of any of my plays to date--grossed only around $10,000,000. So I think Ray was right about that. But until we decided to go with Walter and George, well, it was a long process.

[Q] Playboy: Were they your first choices after Albertson and Levene?

[A] Simon: No, they weren't. Ray's first idea was to use Jack Benny and Red Skelton, and I thought they'd be great for it. In movies, if there's some doubt as to who should get a part in an important film, even the biggest stars will test for it. For example, when Gone with the Wind was made, actresses like Paulette Goddard and Susan Hayward did screen tests. For The Sunshine Boys, every middle-aged and older comic in the business, no matter how big, was quite willing to test for it. Well, Red Skelton and Jack Benny did a screen test, and they were magnificent. Jack's only problem was that he lacked a little bit of energy; he was starting to show the effects of his illness, which was just beginning. But he was as sweet as could be and terribly funny. Red Skelton was brilliant, but Red had problems, although I'm not quite sure what they were. He's a very strange man. He wanted infinitely more money than they were willing to pay at the time, and he later accused us of having bad taste and publicly said he'd never do a film in which he would call his friend a bastard. I thought it was pretty silly, but, at any rate, it just never worked out with him.

We started to look for someone else to work with Jack Benny and we decided on Walter Matthau, because the role called for a great deal of energy that a man of 80 probably couldn't give us. We hired Walter to do the film with Jack, and then Jack became very ill and died. When we got over that, Herb Ross, the director, and I thought of George Burns--and the studio was against it. George had been known only as Gracie Allen's straight man, and the studio didn't think he was an actor. They were suggesting all kinds of actors, including Laurence Olivier. Really crazy. Herb and I had George come over and read and after he did a couple of pages, we knew the man was just perfect. And it's incredible to see what's happened to his career since then. Ray Stark felt the same way about George that we did, and I really think he's got almost mystical powers that enable him to get the best possible casts for his films. For California Suite, he's assembled a cast of Jane Fonda, Alan Alda, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Maggie Smith and Michael Caine. Generally, you can get only two or three actors of that caliber in a movie, and that's because compromises are made to keep the cost of a movie down. Well, California Suite is an expensive movie, but I feel the only way it will work is by having people of that quality.

[Q] Playboy: You recently stated that California Suite is your most optimistic work since Barefoot in the Park. In what sense did you mean that?

[A] Simon: I think I meant I'm not writing about as many neurotic people as I have been. I'm trying to write about people who have not necessarily an optimistic view of life but certainly a hopeful one. I must tell you that I truly hate talking about the work; it takes away all of the instincts. And I'm not very good at dissecting my plays or my psyche.

[Q] Playboy: Bear with us, if you will, though. Your comments about California Suite seem similar to remarks you made about Barefoot in the Park--and it seems to us that when your life is happy and carefree, so is your work. Would you agree?

[A] Simon: Yes, but it changes, and I really never know where the work is coming from. For instance, when I wrote The Odd Couple, I thought I was writing a black comedy. That really sounds ridiculous now, but when I was working on it, I was thinking about divorce and about two men who are basically unhappy. I suppose you could practically trace my life through my plays, because they always come out of what I'm thinking about and what I am as a person. I may have started Come Blow Your Horn when I was 30, but it was about myself at the age of 21. Barney Cashman in Last of the Red Hot Lovers is a little bit of the way I was feeling when I wrote that play, because I was then in my early 40s and here was this whole sexual revolution going on, and a lot of it had skipped by me.

[Q] Playboy: Are you tied that closely to most of your characters?

[A] Simon: Oh, they're not all me--and yet they are. Evy Meara, the alcoholic, sexually provocative night-club singer in The Gingerbread Lady is obviously not me, yet when I write her, I have to say, "OK, I'm Evy Meara. How do I feel about this moment? How do I react as Evy Meara--and not as Neil Simon?" Well, I have to draw on my observations of people I know who are like Evy Meara, and those observations then get funneled through my own thought process, which means that she's got to pick up a little bit of me. I've also seen that, in a way, my characters reappear: Mel and Edna in The Prisoner of Second Avenue are, in some respects, those kids from Barefoot in the Park 20 years later. But they'd changed, because I was very down on New York at that point, which is about when the taxi drivers started putting up those barriers between themselves and their passengers. It seemed to me symptomatic of what was going on in all our cities: People were so alienated and so fearful that they were separating themselves from contact. And not without cause, for a lot of cabdrivers were getting mugged and killed, and it was pretty unsafe to walk the streets. I decided to make a statement about those urban ills and to do it in the form I write best: a comedy. That's the way for me to get a point across to people. Playwrights like Edward Albee and Arthur Miller have another way of doing it.

[Q] Playboy: Does it seem to you that comedy is usually regarded as less of an artistic accomplishment than drama?

[A] Simon: Yes, and I have a very profound answer for that: Bullshit. There is nothing very uplifting about bad comedy, but the same is true of bad drama. I just think it's pointless to denigrate comedy, but it probably happens because there's so much bad comedy around today, particularly on television. I mean, if you watch TV comedies and equate those with all comedy, then it's all crap, true. But if you look at comedic plays like Born Yesterday or Mr. Roberts--which encompasses both comedy and drama, the kind of thing I like to write--they are the equals of almost any of our good plays. I also think that if a comedy is about something worth while and pertinent to our lives, then it's as important as any drama could be.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Woody Allen's recent comments about Interiors, when he said that writing comedy is eating at the kids' table, while writing serious drama is eating at the grownups' table?

[A] Simon: I found it very strange. I grant you that if comedy is trivial, then it's not very important, but quite a few of America's finest dramatists have attempted comedy and have fallen flat on their faces. Others use comedy in almost all of their plays. Tennessee Williams, for example, is one of the funniest writers in America, and almost all of his major plays contain a great many laughs. A Streetcar Named Desire is really funny--and it's also one of the most powerful plays in American theater. I just think that anything devoid of humor is empty.

[Q] Playboy: How would you define your style of humor?

[A] Simon: The humor itself is often self-deprecating and usually sees life from the grimmest point of view. Much of that, I think, can be traced to my childhood. I grew up in a family that split up dozens of times. My father would leave home, be gone for a few months and then come back, and I felt that our life was like a yo-yo: We'd be spinning along pretty good, and then--zap!--the string would break and he was gone. At those times, we never knew where our next meal or dollar was coming from, and my mother occasionally had to take in boarders. We once had two butchers living with us, and they paid most of their rent in lamb chops and liver. In retrospect, I think that's funny, but it wasn't funny when we were living through it. The relationship between my parents was stormy and awful, and at night I'd try to block out the reality of it by putting a pillow over my head and not listening to their arguments. During the day, when I wasn't in school, I'd always dash off to the movies. I went to see everything--Bogart, Gary Cooper, all of the Chaplin films. The comedies were my greatest release, and I remember always having the ability to make my friends laugh. My older brother Danny always encouraged me to be funny and whenever I said something even remotely witty, he'd say, "That's fantastic." Danny, who always wanted to be a writer, was funny in a different sort of way. He was like a Mel Brooks: He could tell an incredible joke and do dialects. Danny is still a brilliant editor in terms of comedy writing, and he generally needs to work with somebody. I think that's why he encouraged me so, and we wound up writing together for many years.

[Q] Playboy: When did you discover that you were funny enough to make a career in comedy?

[A] Simon: I knew I was funny all through my teens, and I was much more outgoing then than I am now. By the time I got to be 20, whenever my friends and I got together, I would be the group's focal point in terms of humor. They would always say, "Did you hear what Doc said?" Doc was my nickname. I was constantly on, constantly performing. Then I got married and began working on TV with a pretty heavyweight group of comedy writers, and even though it was hard to be funny in an outspoken way with guys like Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart around, I was able to do it. And I was still a funny, amusing person at parties. But then I began writing the plays and the plays became hits--and I went right into a cave. The success changed me. I mean, I can still be witty in certain groups, but I no longer have any desire to be the performer, the clown.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Simon: Well, it's like a spotlight's on me anyway, and I want to say, "Shut it off, I'd like to be in the dark for a while. Do you mind? When I write the next play, you can put it back on." Somewhere along the line, things shifted for me in terms of being funny. It's a reluctance, I think, to want to give out that part of me. It's like I want to hold it back, but I'm not sure why. It may be because getting laughs, in a way, is a bid for attention, a need to be loved, to be patted on the head and told you're a good boy. When people laugh at the humor you present, they sort of affectionately embrace you, and I feel I get so much of that in the theater there's no need for me to go around asking for it. I don't feel I need that pat on the head all the time. I also have a thing about not playing up my success too much, and that probably comes from some very primitive instincts. I've just read Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, and he offers some interesting insights into the Jewish character. For example, because Jews were persecuted and kicked out of country after country, they couldn't get involved with owning land or big houses; they had to put their money into things they could carry. So they carried around gold pieces and jewelry, and you had to keep quiet about it, because if someone found out what you were carrying, it would be stolen. I wouldn't say that is necessarily the reason I shy away from publicity about making lots of money, but it might be.

[Q] Playboy:We won't shy away from that: Reportedly, you're worth $32,000,000. How much time do you spend managing that kind of money?

[A] Simon: First of all, I can assure you that there's no $32,000,000. And I spend almost none of my time or energy on money, because I'm not interested in making more money. I just want to write my plays: I don't want to get involved in investments. I didn't feel like that when I first started making money from my plays. I made a couple of the kind of dumb deals one often makes early in one's career. In his book Act One, Moss Hart wrote that you might as well forget about any money you'll make from your early plays, because you're going to blow it, and in my case, he was right. I put all the money I made from Come Blow Your Horn into cattle--and the cattle froze to death in Montana. I did that on the advice of my first business manager, so I got another business manager, because it didn't seem like a very good idea to work all those years on a play and not have a penny left from it. The new man was very good at what he did, but he was much too ambitious for me. I bought one theater and he wanted me to buy more. He wanted me to go into all sorts of investments, and I found that we were having constant meetings and constant fights about money. I finally left him.

By then, I'd made a very dumb capital-gains deal with Paramount. I sold all of the stage rights to Barefoot in the Park, which means that whenever Barefoot in the Park plays anywhere in the world, I don't get any royalties--they go to Paramount Pictures. In that deal, I also sold the television rights to The Odd Couple for 15 years or so. I've never made one penny from the Odd Couple television series, which I watch all the time. I think Tony Randall and Jack Klugman are perfect in it, and I even forget that they're playing characters I created. The show is rerun twice a night in Los Angeles, and those reruns will go on forever. Anyway, my instructions to the business manager I have now are very simple: I don't want him to try to make money for me. And so my business manager never tells me about a new supermarket that's about to open in Atlanta.

[Q] Playboy: Your plays are better investments than supermarkets. Your detractors believe the reason they are is that you consciously design them to appeal to a middle-class mentality. Do you?

[A] Simon: No, because if I did, The Gingerbread Lady would've been a big success, and the same thing would've been true of God's Favorite and The Good Doctor. If I could have said, "Well, I'll give them what they like," I would have done it.

[Q] Playboy: But isn't it true that the three plays you've just mentioned are departures from your usual works?

[A] Simon: In a certain sense, yes, they are, which is why I knew there would be more resistance to them. And, yes, I know I'm very facile and adept at light comedy, but that's still no guarantee that every light comedy I write will be a hit, or even that I think it will be a hit. And that goes back to my first major hit: When I was working on Barefoot in the Park, I quit in the middle of it because I didn't think anyone would be interested in a story about a young couple who've been married a week. A producer I know told me I should at least finish it, and I did, but you'd be surprised at the number of producers who turned the play down. And I certainly didn't think I was appealing to the so-called middle class when I wrote The Sunshine Boys, because I knew that a play dealing with two older men didn't figure to attract huge audiences--and it didn't. The Sunshine Boys, ran for a year and a half, and I'm prouder of that play than of almost any of them, except, perhaps, for Chapter Two, which I think was really good work. So I'm not out there all the time saying, "Gee, I know how to write a hit." I really don't write for audiences or critics. I know this is a cliché, but you end up basically doing the work for yourself. I like to think I'd buy a ticket to the plays I've written and that I'd go see them and enjoy them. And then there are some things I've written that I would not go and buy a ticket for.

[Q] Playboy: Would you care to go into more detail?

[A] Simon: Well, I wish I could bury The Slar-Spangled Girl somewhere. When that play appeared, it was, Whoops, what happened to him? Walter Kerr gave the best explanation. He said, "Neil Simon ... hasn't had an idea for a play this season, but he's gone ahead and written one anyway." God's Favorite was another one that didn't really work. It's the play I'm least objective about, because it was written under the most grueling circumstances: It was an attempt to release or exorcise some of the anguish I was going through following the death of my wife. I was not able to rationalize why somebody like Joan could die of cancer at the age of 39. I was very angry, and writing that play was a kind of cathartic experience for me. But I knew it was not going to be enormously satisfying to the public or the critics to see Joe Benjamin suffering with boils and blisters. It was depressing, yet it was something I wanted to do at that point in my life. I was in the middle of the ocean, looking for a log to hang on to, and God's Favorite was the log that I grabbed. I would much rather have had a steamer come along, but that's what got me through that period, and I still think that what I tried to do was worth the effort. But I'm willing to accept the failure that came along with it. The Star-Spangled Girl, however, was a much greater failure, because I was not clinging to any rafts. I was very clear in my mind about what I was doing: I set out to write a play about young people in the atmosphere of Berkeley, and it just was lousy.

[Q] Playboy: Saint-Subber, who produced a number of your plays on Broadway, has said that when you finish writing a play, you're close to both a mental and a physical breakdown and that you're almost dangerous to be around. Was he overstating the case?

[A] Simon: Well, to a degree, that's fairly accurate, but I don't think I should be put away or locked up. I could be invited to dinner and not make a fool of myself at all. To me, writing a play is analogous to a marathon runner crossing the finish line, collapsing and then gasping for breath. I don't know the depths of my exhaustion, but an enormous amount is always taken out of me, and when I finish a play, I generally have gone into, if not a state of depression, then a state of exhaustion. And then I have to go in front of that firing squad on opening night. It's torture, but I don't panic. I deal with it very calmly, but inside, little termites are eating away at my system. For the opening night of Come Blow Your Horn, I had to run backstage and get a shot of brandy during both intermissions, and I thought I'd never be able to live through it. The same thing happened with Little Me, but then it started to get easier as the plays got better.

[Q] Playboy: There have been years when you've had three or four plays running at the same time on Broadway. Are you ever surprised by the impact you've personally had on the American theater scene?

[A] Simon: Well, when I keep reading that I'm America's most successful playwright, yes, that surprises me. It amazes me. But I don't hold on to that for very long, because I quite often still think of myself as that little boy growing up in the Bronx. I don't walk around thinking, Hey, look who I am. More often, I'm thinking, Will this next play be good enough? It wavers. Sometimes I'm walking on top of the world, knowing I've done really good work today. At other times, I walk around muttering, "Shit, I bungled it." But I don't denigrate myself too much. I know that I've been an influence on the theater, because I hear it from people who come up to me wherever I am, mostly young actors. I've rarely met a young actor or actress who hasn't been in Barefoot in the Park someplace. There are scenes in that play that are often used for auditions and are used in acting schools to teach comedy. So I know I've had an influence, but you're never really satisfied. You want everything you do to be terrific.

[Q] Playboy: You've been writing one play a year for some time now, and you've recently begun to write one play and one screenplay a year. Is there any reason you've stepped up your production?

[A] Simon: It's some kind of applied pressure I put on myself, because I say that I'm a working playwright and that's my job. What would I do if I didn't write plays and films? More important than that, these are my productive years. If I found something I wanted to do even more, then I'd do it. But I haven't. I've found the best form of expression for me, the healthiest outlet for all of my neuroses and frustrations, and it's also the best way for me to share my joys. And I'm able to do it now and do it well. It would seem unreasonable to me for Jimmy Connors, for example, to say, "Well, I had a terrific year, I'm going to take the next two years off." I'd say, "Putz, you blew years 26 and 27, and you might come back at 28 and still be terrific, but those were years when you should have been playing." That's how I approach my work. I'm not the kind of person who thinks, Well, I made a lot of money during the last several years, so I don't have to do this anymore. I don't write plays to make money. I write plays because I enjoy writing them, and these are my productive years.

[Q] Playboy: Do you worry about not having too many productive years left?

[A] Simon: Sure I do. I feel it, and it doesn't apply only to the work; I also feel it as a person. I've gone through two major changes in the last ten years in terms of age. Turning 40 didn't bother me, but when I was 41, I really went bananas. I was ready to give up my marriage and I wanted to turn back the clock to 32 and begin my life all over again. I got over that very quickly--and then, all of a sudden, I turned 50. I thought, Hey, this is OK. I'm beginning to mellow and to let go of all those hang-ups I had, and to feel I don't have to prove myself anymore, I can just enjoy my life. And then I turned 51 on July fourth, and I'm beginning to feel the same sort of depression I felt when I was 41. I'm not acting the way I did then, because I know I can't turn the clock back to 32. The 5()s are tough, because you really feel that time is running out. It's not that you're racing toward old age and death, it's that you're running out of productive years. When you turn 40, you say goodbye to youth, but you also see that you have 20 years to go before you're 60. Well, now I have only nine years before I'm 60, and I don't know how much longer I can be productive. What really frightens me is that I won't want to write anymore, that I will lose the desire to do it. What also scares me sometimes is seeing a 70-year-old man turning around to look at a really attractive 21-year-old girl, and I say to myself, Oh, no, don't tell me you still have it when you're 7(1. I don't want to be horny when I'm 70, because it'll be so hard to fulfill. I mean, trying to pick up some girl when you're 70 is difficult.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't that sound like a very healthy appetite to want to hold on to?

[A] Simon: Yes, and I think it's healthy to want to hold on to life at all. The saddest thing I ever heard was Samuel Beckett's phrase "It takes such a long time to die." I mean, talk about morbid. Oh, well, he has his point of view, I have mine. And it doesn't really change from day to day: I always look forward to the beginning of a new project. It's like a rebirth. I just hope that when I'm past 60, I can still come up with a really fine play every few years. I don't know how valid this is, but I recently read a review of Tennessee Williams' newest play, Vieiux Carré, which opened in London to reviews that hailed it as one of the best pieces of work he's done since he first started writing his great plays. I was jubilant about that, not only for Tennessee Williams but for myself. I thought that if that guy can come up with it again at 66, then it's possible for me to do it, too.

[Q] Playboy: Meanwhile, all that's a long way off for you. Do you have anything else planned in the interim?

[A] Simon: Well, I still see myself writing a play and a movie each year for at least five or six more years; but if my urge to do it starts to diminish, what I'd love to have, with Marsha, is a little theater somewhere that fostered writing and acting and where we could put on our own experimental plays. I would teach, write and direct plays, Marsha could act and direct plays--it could be the ideal thing for me. I don't want to do it right now, but I think it couldd be the most practical way for me to pull back from the pressures of the commercial world and still be actively involved in the theater. Failing that, of course, I might be able to make the pro-tennis circuit. That would make me very happy. But I use one of those Prince rackets with an oversized face. Do you think they'll keep me out because of that?

[Q] Playboy: We don't think so. You could always leave them laughing.

"I see humor inon even the grimmest of situations. And I think it's possible to write a play so moving it can tear you apart and still have humor in it."

"I was all wrong about 'The Goodbye Girl.' When I wrote it, I thought it would just be a nice little picture for Marsha and me to do."

"There's a lot that I like about California, but I miss the vibrations and the almost electrical input you get from New York City."

"Really, one can hardly call the writing on 'Charlie's Angels' writing, or the acting, acting. It's junk, but the girls are beautiful."

"Would you believe that in the original draft, 'Barefoot in the Park' was set in a chalet in Switzerland? I still had a lot to learn."

"I never wanted Walter Matthau to appear in all three parts of'Plaza Suite,' a movie that I don't think works at all."

"For 'Sunshine Boys,' Herb Ross and I thought of George Burns--and the studio was against it. The studio didn't think he was an actor."

"Getting laughs, in a way, is a bid for attention, a need to be loved, to be patted on the head and told you're a good boy."

"I don't to ant to be horny when I'm 70, because it'll be so hard to fulfill. I mean, trying to pick up some girl when you're is difficult."