NEIL SIMON

The single biggest influence in my life as a writer was Neil Simon.  Trust me it was not easy having the last name Simon but I guess it was slightly easier than if my last name was Shakespeare, although Shakespeare writing “Full House” would have been kind of funny. The closest I ever came to feeling like him was when someone would say, “Neil Simon” and by instinct, I would.

Neil Simon has been so indelible in our everyday lives that like the National Anthem and The New York Yankees it feels like he has always been here as naturally as water, air, Twinkies and really stupid people in Congress.

I don’t remember my first kiss with a Neil Simon play but I’m sure there was one.  Not wanting to interrupt the flow here, I will think about that later.  I do remember seeing all of the “B” plays and sitting transfixed watching Lost in Yonkers.  I think my jaw is still glued to the floor of the Richard Rogers Theater.

I remember watching Linda Lavin in Broadway Bound and thinking/feeling: that monologue that I’m listening to is going to win the Tony and of course it did.  When you experience a theatrical moment like that you feel like you are telecommunicating directly to anyone who can vote, informing them via the telegraph key of your brain that a certain performance is, well, a no-brainer.

Being a baby-boomer the early years of Neil Simon were experienced long after the fact.  Initially being an actor I tended to focus on the on-stage performers so when I watched the repeats of Your Show of Shows or Cadence, especially when I was young,  because the stars of those shows were electric and alive, it never occurred  to me that someone else had written what was shooting out of their mouths at the speed of hilarity.  I just thought they were all naturally brilliant humans.

It was only years later, when  writing became my second wife (we are celebrating our 38th year as a professional TV/film and now play writer, which course is paper. But then again it always was and will always be) that I had to go back in time and listen to what all the masters of my beloved craft had crafted.

I went all the way back to radio and to this day I’m still astonished by the Jack Benny Show.  The razor sharp, defined characters and by association their razor sharp,  rapid-fire comedy that came exploding out their mouths was like being caught in a crossfire of jokes, that rarely missed their target.  Even when Benny screwed up, he turned the moment into a self-depreciating dig.

Radio was Hebrew University in that all of its many writing professors were mostly Jews, as were all the heads of every single Hollywood Studio.  So was/is Superman.  That’s right.  Superman came bursting out of the brains of two Jewish kids, one American, one Canadian.   Clark Kent’s biological dad even had an Israeli name: Jor-El, which in English I believe means, “father of a boy who will run around in public in Spandex.”

We Jews, whose ancestors were pyramid builders whose hourly wage was $0 and went on to become the single most loathed people on the planet.  Put it this way, in the human race we always seem to come in last.

To compensate for the centuries of abuse, my people pretty much invented American comedy.  And the scores for Broadway musicals.  And whatever is on the menu at Katz’s deli.  We Jews, do not eat ham. We just remade it in Vaudeville.

Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Jerry Lewis, The Marx Brothers, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson: All Jews. And if they weren’t Jewish their writers sure as hell were.

On a sub-conscious level, we Jews have always had our very own Scarlet Letter “A,” for anti-semitism sewn onto our garments and sadly, that is still the fashion du jour.

There is some delight knowing that the notoriously anti-Semitic Walt Disney’s studio is now run by my people, whose dazzling creativity and brilliant business acumen have taken the Burbank based company to stratospheric heights.  And they just bought Fox which was named after William Fox who was born Vilmos Fried, another Jew.  They are about to make so much money that they could easily be named Vault Disney.

The point of this little trip through Little Israel, California is to help understand Neil Simon.

When your life is so hard, so full of heartache and feelings of low self-esteem, you either commit suicide or become a comedy writer.

Comedy writing is a way to not only diffuse your extreme anxiety, at least during the keyboard hours, but it is a way to feel the presence of God by acting like one.  From the minute that your ass hits the office chair, you are totally in control of all events.  You are the All-knowing, All mighty God of your own tiny universe and that kind of self-empowerment is beyond addictive.  Comedy writing is our opioid addiction and we cannot survive without it.

You usually begin your journey as a class clown, entertaining the troops of the school room while your teacher is facing the blackboard. Your reward, besides the immediate gratification of laughter, is a visit to the Principal’s office, where I made frequent appearances.

No one likes a disrupter, but when you are funny, it’s hard even for a principal, who in my case was Mr Ratner (who looked like the offspring of a rodent and a ferret) to inflict much punishment.  No matter how hard Mr. Rather wanted to lecture me, he could not help but be charmed by light-hearted, clownish ways. A slap on the wrist with a whoopee cushion was pretty much the worst blow I ever got.

From that point on, knowing that poking light-hearted fun at others and yourself, became my way of survival.  I was always “on” and during my down time, I obsessively came up with the next bit.

I read constantly while I soaked in the rhythmic cadence of comedians especially on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was the only place on TV to see Jewish performers.  Joe McCarthy made it clear that Jews were commies, which is why you never saw a Jewish family on any sitcom.  Between never seeing your own on your favorite programs and being exiled during Christmas,  reminded you what an outsider you were.

And so guys like Larry Gilbert, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil and Danny Simon, put words in the mouths of clowns in order to become as subversive as possible, knowing full well, that outside the walls of a studio or a writer’s room, there was nothing out there for but rejection and hostility.

Neil was the quiet writer in the room at first.   After learning his craft in the comedy trenches of TV (I have been there and it ain’t pretty. Getting your joke heard in that environment is like being the last passenger on an evacuating chopper out of Vietnam.  You fall and crash to the earth far more times than you score and as you more often than  not plummet to your certain death, you are reminded that that at any given moment, right to the end, you are replaceable..

So it is not surprising that Neil Simon sought the isolation of the playwriting room.  It is deliriously secluded and the only voice that you hear is your own.  The problem is the only voice that you hear is your own.  And the voices of all the characters who come springing from your bottomless imagination.

I’m sure that is why Neil was married five times.  What lives in the writer’s room stays in the writer’s head and after a five or six-hour marathon writing session, the re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere is nearly impossible.  Real people are simply not as wonderful as the made up ones whose company you obsess over.

Once the floodgates bang open and as your writing deepens and matures, it becomes an even purer form of oxygen.  It’s like you take the storms our your soul and turn them into brainstorms which in turn, if you are lucky, produce some life-saving work.  

From Barefoot in the Park through Lost In Yonkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Neil Simon made us laugh by showing us his still-healing scars.  Having been abandoned by his father and eventually having to live with relatives, he knew what it was like not to be wanted, which for a Jew, came rather naturally.

When bad things happen to us, it feels like justification rather than punishment.  Since we are as a people long been ostracized and blamed for all of societies ills, we freely accept the condemnation.

We who grew up around concentration camp tattoos on the arms of survivors did not benefit from being around them because they never ever spoke about their past.  Either shame or pain muted them and as a result, things were just not discussed.  Growing up like that, often being called a “kike” in my Italian-Irish Catholic neighborhood and to this day seeing nazi flags being waved patriotically on the streets of America, remind us constantly the next pogrom is inches away.

And so we writers, we beaten yet stubborn souls, make up ideal worlds where everyone is witty and funny, where parents embrace you like gold and women are responsive, available and simply dazzled by you.

When you write those dreaded words, “End of Play” or “End of Film” the instant reward of exhilaration lasts about five minutes.  It’s like watching the New Year’s Eve ball drop.  The minute the year lights up, you take a breath, maybe kiss somebody and then sit, like Ben and Elaine at the back of the bus in “The Graduate” and stare into the future and suddenly realize that you can neither envision or even feel it.

The thought that your last script is such a triumphant accomplishment and its dizzying rewards will a lifetime cool off like hot soup, and if that soup happens to be Alphabet, you find yourself waiting for the letters to form words and then sentences which will guide you to your next idea.

The word sentence is ideal in that when you first begin to write a new script, it feels like a prison sentence.  You are uncomfortable.  Trapped. Gloomy. Once again we’re a foreigner in a strange land which simply does not want us.

But then you begin to open the faucets of charm and let the water flow until it feels warm and inviting and before you know it, it is not quite cold, not quite hot.  It just feels poridge perfect.   

Movies and plays are living monuments to the men and women who created them.  Theaters of any kind remain sacred shrines which we trek to, congregate in order to be reminded of how equally human we all are.  

And all it takes to feel that is the power of one special, unique voice who understands pain as intimately as he or she understands laugher.

Like my forever hero, Neil Simon