Did he ever write anything other than Biloxi Blues that appealed to heterosexual men?
I'm still a fan of Neil Simon's work, mostly, and I'm as heterosexual as the day is long. Particularly
The Odd Couple (said to have been based on Simon's observation of Mel Brooks after Brooks' early divorce),
The Sunshine Boys,
Chapter Two (revisiting Simon's pain after his first wife died and his second wife, Marsha Mason's understanding of his grieving),
The Goodbye Girl,
Brighton Beach Memoirs (based on Simon's own Depression boyhood in New York),
Biloxi Blues (his military training),
Lost in Yonkers, and
Laughter on the 23rd Floor (his comic revisiting of his years on the writing staff of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca's
Your Show of Shows).
Simon was originally the protege of a radio comedy legend---Goodman Ace (he wrote and acted in the classic semi-serial comedy
Easy Aces, plus he branched a bit to create the legendary historic drama
You Are There, though he didn't get the credit for it for years to follow), who ran a short-lived CBS workshop for comedy writing in which Simon and his older brother, Daniel, were two of his students, before they went into television writing and, in due course for Neil Simon, the stage and film. Ace helped the pair get radio writing gigs and early television work---including a show that sounded like it had a shot until some jerk at CBS monkeyed around with it, featuring another Ace protege, Robert Q. Lewis, prior to the fabled CBS talent raids that brought them about half of NBC's comedy lineup including Jack Benny in 1947-48. Ace would remember that early Lewis show this way:
I give them a good, tight, fifteen-minute comedy show and what do they do? They expand it to half an hour and bring in an orchestra and an audience. Who the hell said a comedy show had to be half an hour, Marconi? Ida Cantor? (Not long afterward, Ace revived his own
Easy Aces into a half-hour remake,
mr. ace and JANE, which could be taken as his bid to satirise and mock the half-hour format.)
By the way, Neil Simon was also one of the writers for
The Phil Silvers Show, a.k.a.
You'll Never Get Rich and
Sgt. Bilko. He also earned two Emmy nominations when he wrote for
Your Show of Shows. His older brother, Danny (he died in 2005 and would have been 100 this year) has television credits including those plus
The Colgate Comedy Hour,
The Danny Thomas Show (a.k.a.
Make Room for Daddy),
The Carol Burnett Show, and
The Facts of Life.
The Simon brothers had a harsh childhood---their parents' marriage was probably best described as tumultuous; like the two young brothers in
Lost in Yonkers, the boys were often shuttled around among other relatives when their father hit the road for long periods or when the tumult at home became too much, and kid brother Neil found refuge in the movies, where he once admitted he was often tossed out of theaters for laughing too loud at films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel & Hardy. Simon had always alluded to his own life in his post-television work, but when he did it more directly---in the so-called
Eugene trilogy (
Brighton Beach Memoirs,
Biloxi Blues,
Broadway Bound) and in
Lost in Yonkers, critics began taking him more seriously enough that he finally won the Pulitzer Prize (for
Lost in Yonkers). And if there was any single continuous theme in his work, it was the loss and the need for a kind of traditional domestic stability; a Simon play rarely if ever strove for social messaging, focusing instead on ordinary people, and he once admitted the main source of his comedy:
blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude ... do something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting. I wish I'd been that smart when I was younger.
RIP Mr. Simon.
