Neil Simon: Learning from Lemmon

Neil Simon with his Odd Couple, jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Photo by Timothy White.

Playwright Neil Simon learned something from Jack Lemmon, whose range as an actor impressed him. “He is equally as funny in one of the greatest farces ever made, Some Like It Hot, as he is moving in Days of Wine and Roses, or as touching as he is in Glengarry Glen Ross,” Simon recalled in his memoir Rewrites. “The other important quality Jack has in something an actor can neither learn, be directed to do, nor buy for all the money in the world: you can’t help but like him.

“He is also appreciative and complimentary to the written word, and if he doesn’t like it, he will play it full out anyway and let you pick up that it doesn’t work. He once said in an interview, ‘Neil writes in definite rhythms and as in music, you can’t skip any of the notes. If his prepositions and conjunctions, such as but, if, and, or and it are left out, the music is wrong.’

“When I heard this, I was taken aback for a moment. I was unaware that this was true.”

Wandering Off the Yellow Brick Road

You know, as a child I always rather despised Dorothy Gale, who flopped around through Oz weak and helpless.

I was irritated that she prevailed only by accident. But I just realized that she didn't win by accident. She won because she made friends, an angle that would never have occurred to my superhero-obsessed little mind.

My friend Brian Peterlinz replied, “There is also an age-old theme explored — finding oneself through a shared journey and adventure.”

My friend Betty Layport-Feher pointed out, “And, she made friends because she was truly interested in the well being of others." And my friend Lynne Parker remarked, “Amazing and sad how many American males are still stuck where you were as a child.”

The Hardest Day in Central Park

Playwright Neil Simon in 1969

Neil Simon’s Willy Lohman-like father had no understanding of books, plays or even fatherhood, really. He thought that the actors might have helped Neil write his first Broadway hit, Come Blow Your Horn. Irving Simon liked the father played by Lou Jacobi, telling Neil he knew so many men like that. He never recognized the character as himself.

But Irving Simon had his pride, and refused to eat in his sons’ homes, afraid he might somehow impoverish them. One day he asked Neil not to bring his beloved granddaughter Ellen along to their meeting in Central Park.

Lou Jacobi (bottom r.) played a character based on Simon's father in this comedy hit.

“I sat on the bench where we always met, and as I saw him approaching, I could see he walked gingerly, not with the usual sprightly gait I was accustomed to,” Neil recalled in his memoir Rewrites. “He looked pounds thinner and when he reached me, he sat and looked away, tears in his eyes. I sat quietly, waiting for him to gather himself. He asked how Joan and Ellen were and was I feeling well, all questions meant to delay what he really had to say. His lips were trembling as he started to speak, and the stifled sob was even more distressing than if he had just let the tears flow.

“ ‘What is it, Dad? Tell me. Are you all right?’

“Every time he tried to speak; he fumbled, he took out a handkerchief to blow his nose and hide his face when anyone passed within earshot. ‘I don’t know how to say this. I’ve never taken anything from you or Danny. You know that. Am I lying?’

“ ‘No, Dad. You never let us give you anything. What is it? Money? Just tell me. I’ll give you whatever you need.’

“He covered his eyes with his hands and this time the sobs came uncontrollably. He told me what he needed and swore it was only a loan. He would pay me back one day. ‘As God is my judge.’ I told him I would send him a check in the morning.

“I knew he was never a strong man, never a fighter, or even a self-sufficient man, despite the fact that he always worked hard. He depended on the love and sympathy of his sisters, his nieces and his nephews, who I think knew his faults but loved him. I knew and saw both sides.

“We hugged and he got up to leave; he was hardly able to look at me as he went. For a man who wouldn’t even share a Sunday breakfast with me, this had to be the hardest day of his life. I never told my mother what happened but I think somehow she knew. I grew up seeing the torment of broken families, broken lives and broken hearts. I always looked for the pain when I wrote about it. Writing about it in a play or on this page doesn’t lessen the pain, but it allows you to look at it from a distance, objectively instead of subjectively, and you begin to see a common truth that connects us all.” 

Once Upon a Lie: Why Republicans Win

Author and cognitive scientist George Lakoff

How is the American public so easily and completely conned?

By the numbers, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff observes.

“First, stresses like fear (of terrorist attacks), worry (about finances, health care and so on) and overwork tend to activate the norepinephrine system, the system of negative emotions,” wrote Lakoff  in his 2008 book The Political Mind. “The result is a reduced capacity to notice. Second, the right conceptual framework must be in place in order to recognize apparently different events as the same kind of event."

Lakoff pointed to then-current news stories about Blackwater mercenaries mass-murdering Iraqi civilians, President Bush’s veto of the continuation of a government children’s health care program and the federal Food and Drug Administration no longer having enough funds to monitor food and drug safety.

“But they are about the same issue: the radical conservative political and economic agenda is putting public resources and government functions into private hands, while the eliminating the capacity of the government to protect and empower the public,” Lakoff noted.

We might add that the very same issue is still at work in Illinois in 2015, as a state budget crisis is manipulated to deny funding to public universities, and perhaps to eliminate them entirely.

“The public has no conceptual framework to see all these as the same and to comprehend what this means, and with the stress of fear and worry and overwork,  the public has little capacity to notice and to create the substantial neural structures needed to comprehend what is happening in hundreds of areas of life,” Lakoff wrote.

“The Democratic leaders are not, as they say, connecting the dots,” Lakoff noted.  “The facts and figures are given, but they are all about different things — violence in Iraq,, children’s health, drug tests. The old Enlightenment reason approach not only fails, it wastes effort, time and money. It does so not only because the public’s mind is mostly unconscious, metaphorical and physically affected by stress, but because its brain has been neurally shaped by past conservative framing.”

Republicans do not reason with the members of the American public. Instead, they use their overwhelming media power to repeatedly tell them simple bedtime stories — about Rescue, Redemption, strong Daddy figures, weak Mommy figures and so forth. They’re all bullshit, but so what? Familiar Republican fiction soothes the American public while insidious Republican fact gets busy stabbing them in the back.

The Good versus the 'Good'

Some people try to become good, and some people try to call what they do "good." And therein lies all the difference.

— Dan Hagen

Republicans Raise a Rough Beast

Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president, has suggested that the U.S. should murder whole families in the “War on Terror.”

When you start advocating the military execution of children, you might want to consider the possibility that you have become pure evil. By the way, that would of course be a war crime, not that any 21^st century Republican stints at those.

For 15 years, since the stolen election of 2000, I have endured sneers from people who pooh-poohed my observation that the Republican Party was aimed straight at full-blown, totalitarian fascism, complete with torture and summary execution. Funny. I no longer hear those sneers. Meanwhile, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be born…

Fate and the Self-Reliant Playwright

The young playwright Neil Simon

Neil Simon — a boy made pathologically self-reliant by his parents’ shaky-as-a-quake marriage — quoted Heraclitus to describe his journey.

“If character is fate, as the Greeks tell us, then it was my character to become a playwright, not my destiny,” Simon observed in his memoir Rewrites. “Destiny seems to be preordained by the gods. Fate comes to those who continue on the path they started on when all other possible roads were closed to them. Fate is both your liability and your hope.

“For a man who wants to be his own master, to depend on no one else, to make life conform to his own visions rather than to follow the blueprints of others, playwriting is the perfect occupation. To sit in a room alone for six or seven or ten hours, sharing the time with characters that you created, is sheer heaven. And if not heaven, it’s at least an escape from hell. After ten years of writing with my brother or with other staff writers, together in one room, screaming for my own voice to be heard, or whispering it to another writer with a voice more commanding than my own, the day I typed the title page of that first play in the unlikely environs of Coldwater Canyon I knew I had found not only the one thing I was certain would make me happy but I also knew I was about to enter the only world in which I could possibly exist.”