Neil Simon

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a playwright. His elegant plots, scorching one liners, and sympathetic characters have made him one of the most successful writers in American theatrical history.

Presenter0:43

He was brought up in the Bronx during the Depression and began his career as a gag writer for radio and television. And then in nineteen sixty one he wrote Come Blow Your Horn. It was an instant success, and since then he's produced about one play a year. The titles read like a roll call of the popular and successful Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Sweet, as well as hit musicals such as Sweet Charity and They're Playing Our Song.

Presenter1:10

I believe, he said, that if I keep on working I am going to unearth some kind of secret that will make it unnecessary for me to write again. He is NEAL SIMON.

Presenter1:20

But after twenty nine plays you're still searching, are you, Nilda? The secret still eludes you.

Neil Simon1:26

Well, I don't think it's one secret any more. I think new secrets come up.

Neil Simon1:30

You do unearth some and find that there are others, so it goes on forever and you'll never really complete the cycle.

Presenter1:36

So you have to keep writing.

Neil Simon1:38

Well, not necessarily. I mean, it'll stop sometime either by

Neil Simon1:41

Um

Neil Simon1:43

by my not being able to do it anymore or or worse still losing my enthusiasm.

Presenter1:48

Of course, all your plays are are humorous, even when the subject is is deadly serious. Is that because you as a private individual always see the funny side of life, or is it simply how it comes out in the writing?

Neil Simon2:00

It's both. Uh it comes out in the writing by itself. Uh I'm not always looking for where it's going to be funny. It just seems to do that. Uh but I do have sort of an oblique

Neil Simon2:11

Look at life I see things askew

Neil Simon2:14

And the comedy comes out.

Presenter2:17

But what about you in your personal life, when you're in the middle of personal misery, which which you've had, we've all had in our lives.

Neil Simon2:23

You're allowed to do it.

Presenter2:24

Is there a kind of little voice inside your head that's seeing the funny side of it at the same time?

Neil Simon2:29

Well, it depends on the misery. I mean, some are are too deep and cutting to to

Neil Simon2:34

Need

Neil Simon2:36

or or be able to use that kind of humour.

Neil Simon2:39

Uh

Neil Simon2:40

I think when I'm funniest is when I'm in trouble.

Neil Simon2:43

Um

Neil Simon2:44

I remember a number of times I was stuck in an elevator, which I have claustrophobia, and that's the worst thing in the world for me, the worst fear. I was pretty funny in that elevator. It was a way to get over uh the horror of being in there.

Presenter2:58

When did you first realize that you could make people laugh? How early on in your life?

Neil Simon3:02

Very young, in my early teens, and the one I made laugh most was my brother.

Neil Simon3:07

and after my brother came some of my friends.

Neil Simon3:11

The humor changed over the years, but I had a very good friend who also had a good sense of humor and it made us outsiders. We would go to a dance, for example, we were like fifteen years old, and just make jokes about the whole the whole evening, commenting on that girl or that fella. The trouble with it was we never got to dance with anyone. We didn't have as good a time as the other people had while we were making ourselves laugh.

Presenter3:38

Well, now what we do on this programme is is cast you away alone on a desert island, and and we talk about the highs and the lows of your life as you go, and the music that you'd like to have with you there. So tell me about your first piece.

Neil Simon3:50

The first piece is A Fugue from Tinhorns which was.

Neil Simon3:56

the opening number in Guys and Dolls, and the first piece of music I thought was such an intricate and new sound in Broadway music, written by Frank Lesser. I know when you listen to it it just is very catchy.

Speaker 24:09

You're Paul Revere, now this is no bumsteer, It's from a handy cap, but that's real sincere. I know it's Valentine, the morning works look fine, You know the Jockeys brothers are friend of mine So make it epitaph We went to buy a half According

Neil Simon4:14

That's real sick.

Neil Simon4:16

I know it's found.

Speaker 34:19

You know the Jazzies

Neil Simon4:21

Uh

Speaker 34:21

Yeah.

Neil Simon4:22

Uh

Speaker 34:22

So make it happen.

Neil Simon4:25

Bye, yeah.

Speaker 24:28

Another question

Speaker 24:30

Epitome! I got the horse!

Speaker 24:37

Uh

Speaker 24:37

Uh

Presenter4:41

Fugue for Tin Horns the opening song from the men's chorus of Guys and Dolls, and that was from the Broadway production.

Presenter4:48

One of the most striking things about your work, Neil Simon, is of course its terrific titles, Barefoot in the Park, The Goodbye Girl, Lost in Yonk,'cause The Odd Couple is is part of the English language now, isn't it? Did they take forever to think up? Did they take as long as the play does to write?

Neil Simon5:02

Not as long as the play, but I do spend a lot of time. But generally, when they come quickly, it means I know a lot about the play. When I have to stop and think of the title, it means I'm searching the play for a title.

Presenter5:15

But Barefoot in the Park, i I mean, it's a wonderful title and it came to symbolize the sixties somehow, didn't it? But it was also part of your life. Your life is in your plays, in many of them, isn't it?

Neil Simon5:21

But it

Neil Simon5:25

Mm-hmm.

Presenter5:27

Barefoot in the Park was about you and your your first mother.

Neil Simon5:29

It's my first wife.

Presenter5:30

And was she as zany and crazy as Jane Fonder was in that film?

Neil Simon5:34

Um

Neil Simon5:36

Probably not that zany, but she did things that I thought were out of the ordinary and extraordinary because she was so vital and so full of life. And at a time when it was still safe to walk in Washington Square Park, which is in the Greenwich Village part of New York City, we would walk our dog in the park at three o'clock in the morning and not think anything of it. And if it was a warm summer night, Joan would just take her shoes off and walk in the park, and I wouldn't do it. So she would call me sort of a stuffed shirt, something probably funnier than that.

Presenter6:11

What about the odd couple? Who were the inspiration for them?

Neil Simon6:14

The inspiration for the odd couple was my brother and an agent friend of his. They both had recently gotten divorced, and because they had to pay alimony to their wives, they decided to move in together to save expenses. And my brother was a fairly good cook, so when they went out on double dates, Danny would do the cooking. But when his friend, Roy, brought the girls in an hour late, or asked them to come an hour late, my brother was furious because the roast was overdone.

Neil Simon6:43

And I had visited him on one of these occasions. I was living in New York and he was in California. And I said, this is a hysterical idea for a play.

Presenter6:52

But it was Danny, you said, your your brother who in the very early days pushed you on, pushed you out, said, Neil, you can do funny, you go and do it.

Neil Simon7:00

Yes.

Presenter7:01

How did he know you could do it? Where why did he why was he so confident?

Neil Simon7:05

He just knew it. He said to me at the age of I was probably 15 or 16, he said, One day you will be one of the, or not the, best comedy writer in America. Now, that's a pretty extraordinary statement to make to a 15-year-old boy who achieved a great deal of success. I think his encouragement helped me, but

Neil Simon7:26

Um well, I'm not so sure if I would have done it on my own. I didn't know what I was headed for.

Presenter7:31

But but life was pretty hard then, wasn't it, in in your childhood. This was the Bronx through the Depression years. It was I mean, the family was pretty poor, wasn't it?

Neil Simon7:40

Yes, I wrote more about that later on in Broadway Bound. Not only were we very poor during the Depression, but my mother and father had a very up-and-down marriage. They broke up maybe six or seven times, and my father would move out. Very often my brother and I would stay there and live with my mother. Sometimes we had to take in rumors or boarders. And oftentimes we split up. At one time, my mother and I went to live with an aunt and uncle, which turned into another play, Brighton Beach Memoirs. My brother went to live with someone else. And I think humor was the best way for Danny and myself to deal with all of this. It kept us from really falling apart and going astray.

Presenter8:25

Mm.

Presenter8:26

Record number two. Tell me about that.

Neil Simon8:29

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Neil Simon8:31

I thought of Rhapsody in Blue because it reminds me so much of New York and the story of how Rhapsody in Blue first got put on, it was at the Aeolian Hall. I have no idea where that is, and it was played by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, and it sort of knocked New York on its ears. It had such a New York sound, and all of his early work did have a very New York sound.

Presenter9:53

A part of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, played by the Columbia Jazz Band conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Presenter9:59

The hero of Biloxi Blues, Eugene Jerome, is a young Jewish boy doing his army training towards the end of the Second World War. How much of your life, Neil Simon, is in that piece? That's pure you, is it?

Neil Simon10:12

Oh yes, it is. It just came to me piece by piece. I said, What's the first thing I remember about going into the Army? and it was the train ride after the first few days at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where you were sworn in and you went you got your uniforms and they put you on a train. The war was still on. It was 1945 in August, and they had just uh dropped a bomb in Hiroshima.

Neil Simon10:34

and Nagasaki, and we were on that train uh heading to Biloxi, Mississippi, in the deep south, but and we had these fatigue uniforms on and they were filthy from this train ride, and people were cheering us all the way through because they thought we were American heroes, that we had just come back from the front because we were so grimy looking.

Presenter10:54

But at what stage did you think I can write a play, or did you always think that?

Neil Simon11:00

It was after about 10 years of writing for radio and then television when I said, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. I think I can do better. But I was very much afraid to make that first attempt because I had so many friends who wrote their first play that closed in two nights and never went back to it. I fought, fought myself night and day to make sure that this wouldn't fail.

Presenter11:22

So it was your first play was a success on board?

Neil Simon11:25

Well, I'll tell you the interesting story. I think the man who helped make it a success was Noel Coward, because the play opened to modest reviews, some good, some bad, but no one came to buy any tickets. And they put the closing notice up, and we were going to close on Saturday night. And there's a very famous agent in the States named Irving Lazar, who died recently, but he was a good friend of Noel Coward, and he took Noel Coward to see the play that night because they had seen everything else in New York. And Noel liked to see every play in New York before he went back to London. He saw the play, then went to a restaurant where a famous columnist for the newspapers came up to him at dinner and said, Well, what'd you do tonight in town, Noel? And he said, I saw the funniest play in town. Come blow your horn. The next day it was in the paper, and the day after that we had a line around the block.

Presenter12:13

Such a rocketing to success, you must have felt elated, incredible.

Neil Simon12:18

Well, the rocket really didn't come until Barefoot and

Neil Simon12:23

I still didn't feel very secure. Even when I wrote the next play, which was even a bigger hit than Baffert, which was The Odd Couple, it took me a long, long time to feel secure. I'm still not that secure, but it it was enormously exciting in those days.

Presenter12:37

Record number three.

Neil Simon12:38

I picked this song and this particular rendition because there are three of my very favourites, my loves, in this life. One is Fred Astaire, the other is London, and the other is Gershwin. And it's Fred Astaire singing A Foggy Day in London Town.

Speaker 212:58

A foggy day

Speaker 213:01

In London town had me low.

Speaker 213:09

And it had me down.

Speaker 213:13

I view the morning

Speaker 213:17

With alarm

Speaker 213:20

The British Museum had lost its charm.

Presenter13:26

Fred Astaire and A Foggy Day, written of course by The Two Gashmans.

Speaker 213:26

Freddis

Presenter13:30

Can we turn to your personal life, Neil Simon? Your wife, Joan, to whom you've been married for twenty years, died tragically when she was only thirty-nine of cancer.

Neil Simon13:40

of cancer

Speaker 213:40

Uh

Presenter13:41

That was in nineteen seventy three.

Neil Simon13:43

Yeah.

Presenter13:44

And that that laid you, as it would, pretty low for a time, didn't it?

Neil Simon13:47

Enormously. I had not known what grief was until that happened because it was so unexpected and she was such an extraordinary girl. I think one may tend to idealize the life of someone who dies young, but I never idealize her when I think about her. She just was an extraordinary woman.

Neil Simon14:07

And when she died, um I was left in charge of my two children. One was both girls, one ten, the other fourteen and a half. And that really helped me get through my own personal grief. Um I think we helped each other, so it was uh an extraordinary time in in the three of our lives. It brought us even closer than we ever were.

Presenter14:29

And then later that same year you you met and married Marcia Mason very quickly, all within space of a few weeks.

Neil Simon14:33

Yeah.

Neil Simon14:36

Yes, it was a bit of madness, I I think on my part, not because of Marcia, but to uh

Neil Simon14:43

To rush into a situation only months after this, but.

Presenter14:47

But

Presenter14:48

The marriage went wrong and part of its going wrong became the inspiration for a play, didn't it, for chapter two.

Neil Simon14:55

Yes. Well, part of its going wrong was um because of my wife's death, because I think Marcia had to bear the burden of my not having really gotten rid of all the grief, so that in the first year or two I still was attached to the memory of Joan.

Presenter15:11

But does that mean that writing for you is a kind of catharsis, that you could actually get rid of of the grief and the guilt and all those feelings by writing it down and, as we were saying earlier, actually seeing the funny sign of it?

Neil Simon15:24

Yes. I'm not so sure if it's always a catharsis in other words, one doesn't just get rid of it because you write about it. I think you do get to understand the circumstances much better.

Neil Simon15:35

It's slowing down the process as if you're watching a film frame by frame and you can examine: ah, this went wrong, that went wrong.

Presenter15:43

So you exorcise something. Do do you think you you've exorcised the unhappinesses of your childhood now by writing about them, as you have done rather a lot in in in later life?

Neil Simon15:44

Oh yes.

Presenter15:55

Suddenly do you do you feel better about your childhood?

Neil Simon15:59

No, I don't feel better about my childhood. I had a difficult childhood. I feel better about my adulthood.

Neil Simon16:04

The earlier plays were almost they were very light comedies, Come Blow Your Horn and Bath in the Park, which was about Joan and myself, but in a very light way. I wasn't dealing with any kind of deep thoughts that were going on between us. But I think when I was well versed in the so-called art of playwriting, then I think I could go into the depth of what our relationships were all about, including my own childhood with my family.

Presenter16:35

Record number four.

Neil Simon16:37

Well, I picked Rex Harrison. I've grown accustomed to her face. I think.

Neil Simon16:42

that I thought it was a magical piece of writing on the part of Alan J. Lerna to take Shaw's play, Pygmalion, and put it to music.

Neil Simon16:51

and to lyricize it.

Neil Simon16:54

You say to yourself after you've read the play or seen the film with uh Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, How would he ever get to sing?

Neil Simon17:02

A romantic song, it's not in his nature, and so this song is an unromantic, extremely romantic song.

Neil Simon17:10

Uh the minute I hear

Neil Simon17:12

The part of the melody that is the inner part of him speaking out where he stops and says, I've grown accustomed to her face, that's about as much of an admission as he would make to himself that he cares for her.

Speaker 217:25

Like breathing out and breathing in.

Speaker 217:29

I'm very grateful she's a woman, and so easy to forget.

Speaker 217:34

Rather like a habit one can always break.

Speaker 217:42

I've grown accustomed to the trace.

Speaker 217:46

Something in the air.

Speaker 217:49

A custom.

Speaker 217:51

To her.

Presenter17:53

Peace.

Presenter17:55

Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins singing I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face from the original soundtrack of the film of My Fair Lady. Then there's the story, Neil Simon, of your third marriage, which reads like the the plot of a good play. It's nineteen eighty seven and you've been divorced for five years and you go into a California department store, Neiman Marcus.

Neil Simon18:15

Yeah.

Presenter18:15

And you fall in love.

Presenter18:17

Right?

Neil Simon18:17

Almost, I mean, the first recognition of I've grown accustomed to this face so soon.

Neil Simon18:25

Yes, I walked through the store actually looking for a gift for a child of a girl that I had been seeing for quite some time that

Neil Simon18:33

That that relationship didn't work out and I knew it never would.

Neil Simon18:36

And I saw this girl behind the counter and I found out later that she was an actress and just doing part-time work.

Neil Simon18:42

Um in the store.

Neil Simon18:44

Then

Neil Simon18:45

I started to to talk to her, and then there was not not much left to say. And so I turned and I left and I was heading for the garage, and I said to myself, If I go into my car now, I'll never see that girl again.

Neil Simon18:59

And with all the courage I could possibly muster, because I've never done anything like this before, and I came back and talked to her, and she said.

Neil Simon19:08

I really can't talk to you this way. I mean, if you're trying to talk to me socially, because I could lose my job for this, and I persisted.

Neil Simon19:16

and uh just trying to get her her phone number so that I could speak to her, see her again, because I looked at her her hand, I said, Could I see your hand? and she showed it to me and she said, Why? and I said, I see no wedding wedding rings there.

Neil Simon19:29

And she says, Well, I don't see any on yours either.

Neil Simon19:31

And uh and she didn't recognize me at first. She no, she didn't know who I was. She thought I was a professor from UCLA. She thought I probably taught English letters, something like that. Not with my New York accent, though it wouldn't. But um

Speaker 219:34

No, she didn't.

Neil Simon19:44

Anyway, the conversation continued, and she did agree to give me her phone number, and I spoke to her the next day whereupon she told me she got fired.

Neil Simon19:52

for talking to me.

Neil Simon19:54

And I felt terribly guilty and I was going to call the store and she says, No, it's all right, I didn't really want to stay there'cause I'm I'm starting to do some more work in in pictures and television and and mostly in commercials.

Presenter20:05

And at what point did she discover that she was talking to or being asked out by America's greatest living playwright?

Neil Simon20:12

Well, toward towards the end of the conversation, she said, You look familiar to me. She says, Do I know you?

Neil Simon20:18

She says, What's your name? and I said, Neil Simon says, Oh my gosh, I've done your works in class.

Presenter20:25

So you married a year later, but a year later you divorced.

Neil Simon20:29

Yes. Um but I couldn't get my mind off of Diane nor the baby, whose name is Bryn.

Neil Simon20:37

And so then we did marry eventually. You remarried. Remarried.

Presenter20:39

He remarried.

Neil Simon20:41

And I adopted Bryn, who's now my daughter.

Presenter20:44

Record number five.

Neil Simon20:46

What a wonderful world.

Neil Simon20:49

I had heard the song a number of years ago.

Neil Simon20:52

And it didn't hit home until I saw Good Morning Vietnam with Robin Williams. The screenplay itself was very much the way the structure of the music was, in that it played against what was going on in the screen. In other words, when the havoc and the horror of what was going on in Vietnam, they would play some lovely melody.

Speaker 221:18

The Colors of the Rainbow.

Speaker 221:22

So pretty in the sky.

Speaker 221:25

Marp also on the faces.

Speaker 221:28

Of people going by.

Speaker 221:31

I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do?

Speaker 221:39

They really say I love you.

Speaker 221:45

I

Presenter21:45

What a wonderful world, Louis Armstrong. What you haven't enjoyed, Neil Simon, is the same kind of success in the UK as you have in the US. You've had your successes, but by no means the number you've had on Broadway. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, is it frustrating to you that you haven't quite managed to cross the Atlantic in that?

Neil Simon22:04

Not really. It may have been in the beginning, but in the beginning I had a few plays that did that were successes. Baffle in the Park was fairly successful. The Odd Couple was enormously successful. But the musicals seem to have been more successful. They're playing our song, Promises, Promises, Sweet Charity, were all big hits in London. The plays weren't. I think one of the reasons may be I mean there may be some other more obvious reason, but I can't think of it is that I write in a sort of New York idiomatic way. But I think there is a a great distance

Neil Simon22:43

In the humour.

Neil Simon22:46

I mean, distance isn't the right word. It just doesn't get translated as well. We laugh at different things, I think.

Presenter22:52

I suppose people would point to Woody Allen though and say that his sharp New York Jewish wit travels across the Atlantic. So why doesn't yours?

Neil Simon22:57

Trap

Neil Simon23:00

He probably took a better boat than me. I don't know. I have no idea. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I mean, the reverse has happened somewhat to Alan Ayckburn, who comes to America. And I think people really appreciate his plays, but they are rarely big hits in America. They were in the beginning, just as mine were in the beginning. But the problem for both of us is that we write so many that they all can't be successes.

Presenter23:26

But what British critics seem to say is that they like your work obviously when it when it's more serious, it seems to me. They like Lost in Yonkers and Broadway Band, they got good reviews, but they still say things like you're too influenced by the conventions of Broadway, that you like to send people home with

Neil Simon23:32

Yeah.

Presenter23:43

The dramatic equivalent, one of them said, of a warming cup of cocoa. You're kind of soft-centered. You gift-wrap.

Neil Simon23:47

Topic.

Neil Simon23:50

That may be true. I'm not so sure. It's hard to get away from.

Neil Simon23:56

Writing for Broadway when that was my goal since I was a young man. And

Presenter24:01

Has it spoiled you then, I suppose, they're saying.

Neil Simon24:03

I I think so, but then they can't make up their minds on Broadway either, because the the reviews of my plays are split right down the middle. If the play is very funny, the ones who aren't serious are not happy. If the play is serious, the ones who say give us laughs aren't happy.

Neil Simon24:18

So

Presenter24:19

But what I think what the British critics are saying is that they accuse you of not being.

Presenter24:23

true to your your subject, true you're not really showing the pain, the real angst at the centre of the story that you're telling because you're going to make it soft centered and leave the audience feeling warm and happy.

Neil Simon24:40

I don't think I do all the time. I think that probably is true, what you're saying. But I think certainly in Lost and Yonkers, I never thought there was a happy ending to that. And I went as far as I possibly could with that. And the same thing for Broadway Bound. There was no happy ending to that.

Neil Simon24:57

What I try to do is write a hopeful ending. And I think people misconstrue the word happy ending, even if you take something like Barefoot in the Park, when the the married couple after one week fall back in each other's arms and everything is fine and it's fade out, but twelve years down the line they could be divorced. So I don't believe in endings. I believe there's the end to that piece of work, but not to their lives.

Presenter25:24

More music.

Neil Simon25:25

More music. Um Mozart's Eine Kleinen Nachtmusik. Well, again, I love Mozart and there there is so much to pick from that I could have picked anything. Uh this is as great as any because I don't think he's written anything that was less than great.

Presenter26:45

Part of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, play by the Berlin Philharmonica, conducted by Herbert von Karian. How much do you have to like the characters you're writing about?

Neil Simon26:56

Well, to answer that, I have to go back to Tyron Guthrie, who was a great director in England, then came to America. And I read this piece where he was talking to Sir Laurence Olivier when or Lord Laurence Olivier, when Olivier was doing a part in a play, and he came to Guthrie and he said, I can't do this part. I just hate this man. And he said, Oh, dear boy, you must love him. You must learn to love him. And so I usually like to make the villain in the piece.

Neil Simon27:26

The person himself. In other words, well, to put it on its most trivial form, perhaps Felix's problem in the odd couple is his own problem. The world isn't doing it to him. Society isn't doing it to him. He's doing it to himself. He just refuses to be able to have a good time in life, to be as.

Neil Simon27:46

Well, as loose as someone like Oscar. I mean, if you then change that into a deeper, more serious play, in my case, let's say the

Neil Simon27:55

Lost in Yonkers when this young girl Bella, who is a in a sense a retarded young girl, is dealing with her grandmother who is

Neil Simon28:04

The fiercest, most author thor author I can't say words sometimes. I'm sorry, you say it for me.

Presenter28:07

I can't say

Presenter28:10

Or solitarians.

Neil Simon28:11

authoritarian. See, we don't in America don't use words like that. She is so strong in her attitudes, but when you find out what her background is and learn that she has the inability

Neil Simon28:24

to be able to show sentiment or love

Neil Simon28:28

We all sort of recognize this in somebody else in our life, if not ourselves. And so.

Neil Simon28:34

We don't necessarily root for her, but we understand her, and I think that's very important.

Presenter28:38

But is the bottom line that you've got to have a good story first? You've got to have narrative drive? Or can the characters be good enough to carry any story?

Neil Simon28:47

Well, the first producer I ever met who gave me the most worthwhile piece of advice was it starts with the characters. If you don't have characters, you're building a play on sand and it'll i inevitably sink. He says you get the characters and the characters dictate what the story is because as the Greek saying is character is fate.

Neil Simon29:06

And so you know that these characters are heading in a direction that they can't change, and the idea is to put enough blocks in front of them to make them at least try to change, which is what we all go through in our daily lives.

Presenter29:20

Play code number seven.

Neil Simon29:22

One fine day, the aria from Madame Butterfly I love Puccini. I don't listen to a lot of opera, but every once in a while something comes along because uh that stays with you forever, and you need the the great, great opera singers uh to bring it home to you.

Speaker 230:20

Live beyond loss here.

Neil Simon30:21

Uh

Presenter30:39

The Aria One Fine Day from Act Two of Puccini's Madam Butterfly, sung there by Mirella Franey, with the Vienna Philharmonic, again conducted by Herbert von Carrian.

Presenter30:49

So, Neil Simon, we prepare to cast you adrift and and leave you to your fate on this desert island.

Neil Simon30:54

Yeah.

Presenter30:55

How uh how practical are you? Will you be able to look after yourself?

Neil Simon30:59

Not at all. Not in the least. I would last maybe the better part of an afternoon.

Presenter31:01

Maybe.

Presenter31:04

What about psychologically, though? Um you know, will you survive, do you think, on a desert island, or would you go into terminal decline without people?

Neil Simon31:14

Oh yes, I would, after a while. It's why uh Los Angeles seems like uh like the the desert island that I was cast away on, and I have to go back to New York quite often to to see people. Uh I try to find people uh on the street just to walk by them, and there's almo almost nowhere to go in Los Angeles to find people. You

Neil Simon31:34

You generally have better conversations at a red light when your two cars stop and

Neil Simon31:39

No, I would need some people on a desert island, just to complain to.

Presenter31:42

But but people apart, um I wonder what you would miss most.

Neil Simon31:47

What I would miss most, life.

Neil Simon31:50

Everything about life. I mean, if you just look at my work, then you know that I'm writing about people in conflict. And I just love that.

Neil Simon31:58

that whole idea because they have a way of working things out.

Speaker 332:02

Last record.

Neil Simon32:04

The last record, um, Peggy Lee singing Is That All There Is? Um

Neil Simon32:11

I'm not quite sure why I picked this one.

Neil Simon32:14

Except that it surprised me when I heard it, and especially when I heard who the writers were. I think their names are Lieber and Stoller, who back in the sixties, I guess, wrote Elvis Presley kinds of songs. But when I heard it I thought it was very Brechtian, very extremely pessimistic.

Neil Simon32:31

idea for a a pop song. Is that all there is? No matter what she finds in life, it's not good enough. She thought there would be much more to it, which at times I think we all think about.

Neil Simon32:43

And in our disappointment.

Speaker 232:45

Is that all there is?

Speaker 232:49

If that's other is my friend, Then let's keep dancing

Speaker 232:58

Let's break out the booze and have a ball.

Presenter33:08

Uh

Speaker 233:08

Yeah.

Presenter33:08

That's all.

Presenter33:12

Peggy Lee singing the Lieber and Stoller song Is That All There Is? Pretty pessimistic ending.

Neil Simon33:18

Very, very. That's why I like it.

Presenter33:21

There's a depressive in there trying to get out, is there?

Neil Simon33:24

Well, I like it aired, yes.

Presenter33:27

Now, if you could only take one of your records.

Neil Simon33:31

Well, I'll surprise myself, I guess. I would take um Fred Astare singing A Foggy Day.

Presenter33:37

And thoughts of London town.

Neil Simon33:39

Mm-hmm.

Presenter33:40

And then you have to choose a book. The Bible and Shakespeare are waiting for you on the beach. What one book would you like us to place on top of those?

Neil Simon33:48

Because I said I'm not very pragmatic or very practical about things, I would need something that would.

Neil Simon33:56

not make me happier there, but would help get me off the island. So I would need a book called Uh How to Build a Boat. But since I don't think I could build the boat, I think m my

Neil Simon34:08

Preference would be How to Swim Great Distances, except since I can't do that either, I would need a book called How to Swim, because I can't swim at all.

Presenter34:15

You can't swim, not as fast.

Neil Simon34:16

Not another stroke.

Presenter34:19

And what about your luxury? Something

Presenter34:22

Totally impractical. It can't be of any practical use whatsoever.

Neil Simon34:25

Well, uh I was going to pick uh an ice pick to help open the coconuts, but I can't use that. I I say now. So I think I would pick um

Neil Simon34:35

A musical instrument that I could learn, because I can't play anything, and I'd probably pick the harmonica, a large one, and that I could play any number of kinds of music.

Neil Simon34:47

So one that has a little h that little handle on the end of it that quivers and and gives you variations.

Presenter34:55

Neil Simon, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Neil Simon34:59

Thank you. I had a wonderful time.

Neil Simon35:01

And do send help, please.

Speaker 335:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.