California Simonized

When he left New York last January to establish himself in Hollywood, Neil Simon, Broadway's best comic playwright, seemed destined to dissolve into orange juice. The master of the sharp New York-Jewish one-liner, the one man who has been able to keep Broadway alive and kicky for 15 years --with Sunshine Boys, Plaza Suite, The Odd Couple and The Prisoner of Second Avenue--could not possibly survive in all that gossamer. He was too deep into Broadway to travel well. His brains would scramble in the sun. The sands of Malibu would jam his typewriter if tennis elbow did not strike him limp first. Simon told a reporter eight years ago that he "would rot" if he ever left New York. "I have to stay here; I'm a fish and I was born in a dirty pond and that's how I breathe in that pond." But the pond began to dry up. Simon's wife Joan died of cancer in 1973. Last year, in New Haven, Simon abruptly decided that he had to move. "I suddenly realized after all these years I was beginning to recognize the audiences in the theater. They were almost familiar faces. The New York winter was getting me down. My old place housed too many ghosts."

In the brief period since he set himself up in a Bel Air mansion, Simon, now 48, has not only survived but scored mightily. His new movie, Murder by Death, starring Truman Capote, Sir Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, Peter Sellers and David Niven, will open later this month, and by all advance reports it is one of Simon's best pictures. His new play, California Suite, a sort of Plaza Suite West, starring George Grizzard and Tammy Grimes, played to cheering houses in Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theater for six weeks. The show was such a hit that it has already more than repaid its backers (about $200,000) and this week will open in the black on Broadway.

Something Borrowed. Even Simon is amazed by the success of his play. "I was nervous," he told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos last week, "especially seeing all those very Waspy types from Pasadena troop into the theater. I wondered whether someone who's so New York in his humor would be funny to them." They laughed because portions of California Suite, a series of four one-acters, play skillfully on Simon's view of the absurdity of the New York v. Hollywood chauvinism. "This place," snorts a New York woman as she arrives in Beverly Hills, "smells like an overripe cantaloupe." At another point her ex-husband declares: "New York isn't Mecca just because it smells that way."

What pleases the Western audiences, apart from the crisp gags, is the smug conviction that California has captured the great Neil Simon and thus is one up on New York. But it is not quite that simple. Simon has not succumbed to California; he has just borrowed it. He asks: "How can I be a turncoat when everything about me--all the baggage I've accumulated since my birth--is pure New York?" In Manhattan, Simon lived in a comfortable East Side townhouse. Now he has a massive electronic gate blocking the entrance to the ten-room house, gardens and pool that he shares with his second wife, Actress Marsha Mason, and his two daughters, Ellen, 19, and Nancy, 13. He gets his New York Times every Sunday to keep in touch --but the Times is not the New York he misses. "There's no ambience in Los Angeles," he complains, "and no sidewalks. No place to walk to, no strolling or window-shopping. I love sunshine, but there have been times when I've looked up into another one of those endless cloudless days and told God, 'O.K., enough already. Can't you arrange for a drizzle?' "

His prayer unanswered, Simon last week packed a bag and lit out for the New York opening of California Suite. Said he: "To tell the truth, I'm really looking forward to it. I need a fix." To tell the truth, so does Broadway.

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