No Plays, No Regrets : Playwright Mayo Simon has had a hard year--his works have died off-stage, his calls aren’t being returned--but he’s philosophical

This week, you will not enter the new Center Theatre of the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Complex. There you will not witness the Southern California premiere of “Elaine’s Daughter.”

In January--after announcing an ambitious new season of plays by a new company of players, the Long Beach Repertory Theater, after mailing flyers inviting season subscriptions sales, after casting the actors, designers, director--the Long Beach Regional Arts Foundation pulled the plug. Everything--premiere, gala, season--sank, canceled for lack of finances.

And the playwright? In the wake of his non-opening, how is Mayo Simon handling disappointment? Is he in intensive therapy? Is he peering at the bottom of a long weekend’s whiskey glass?

Calmly, philosophically, with no edge of rage or suicidal depression, the playwright answered: “I’ve been reviewing the last year of my life.”

By others’ standards, it was not a very good year.

Besides the cancellation of “Elaine’s Daughter,” 1989-’90 saw Simon’s previous play, “These Men,” rejected for a Paris production because of its “vulgar language.” Now its English opening has been delayed by London’s leading fringe theater, The King’s Head, so often that, Simon said, “I’m beginning to think it will never open.” The Philadelphia Theatre Company, while negotiating with Simon a commission for a new play, went out of business. New York’s Public Theater, supposedly committed to a staged reading of Simon’s latest work, “Angel,” suddenly isn’t returning phone calls. And a Broadway option on “Elaine’s Daughter” just lapsed.

Pass the hemlock? Not for Simon.

“This has been a year in which everything has collapsed around me,” he said. “But I feel pretty good because for the first year in over 30 years of being a writer, I can now get up in the morning and write exactly what I want to.”

That’s because Simon has done the unthinkable in Hollywood: turn his back on a lucrative film and television career to write plays full time.

A year ago, Simon, and his wife, Sondra, decided to sell their 11-room French country chateau in Pacific Palisades to finance a change in career focus. They were encouraged in this decision by their children. Joel, an Internal Revenue Service accountant, and Rafael, a UC Berkeley graduate student, viewed the home as merely a financial asset. Their daughters Anne, a University of Massachusetts molecular biologist, and Francesca, a London play scout for the Mark Taper Forum, “gently pushed us in the direction of selling the house.”

“I got all that money and bought a much smaller four-room house nearby in Pacific Palisades,” Simon said. “Now I don’t have money problems and no longer have to do television and films. Selling that house at the top of the real estate market is the one thing this year that really worked out.”

But if all his play plans had materialized, Simon estimated that he would have made only $20,000--for the entire year--less than half his pay for a half-hour television pilot. This is a smart career move?

“I consider $20,000 a lot of money now,” said the 61-year-old. “When you’re young, it doesn’t matter what you write. A half-hour comedy pilot? Wonderful. Big movie? Terrific! Whether they make it or not, it’s all fun. But after a certain point, when you write a thing that’s really good and they don’t make it, you say, ‘I’ve wasted a year on this project. I don’t care what money I earned, I can’t get that year back. That year is gone.’ So $60,000 is not good money anymore. When you’re 30 it’s wonderful. When you’re 60 it’s not good money.”

His self-imposed Hollywood exile is frequently put to the test. An independent film producer recently telephoned about a movie-of-the-week treatment Simon wrote 10 years ago. “I can sell it now,” the producer said, “your concept’s hot!” Simon offered only the treatment, refusing to write the screenplay despite the offer of a high fee.

“It would take a year to write the script,” Simon said of the proposed television movie, “and then it would probably never get made. Getting well-produced in a 99-seat theater in front of an audience that appreciates what you’re written is very satisfying. When something you’ve done is successful on television, nobody but your wife knows you’ve done it.”

He proves his point by referring to a recent Gene Siskell and Roger Ebert television program. The popular movie critics were listing their choices for the 10 best films of the 1980s. “It was amazing to discover that none of the best films of the past 10 years were written,” Simon said in feigned awe. “The stories and dialogue just magically sprang from actors and directors.”

Simon remembers when he first realized the Hollywood writer’s actual status within the industry. It was 1967, during the star-studded premiere of “Marooned” at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. He had worked three well-paid years writing the space epic, his first major writing job since coming to Los Angeles in 1963.

During the 1950s in New York, as a live television writer for “Studio One” and “Playhouse 90,” executives and craftsmen had treated Simon like--well, like a playwright. So, at his first big Hollywood premiere, he anticipated similar treatment.

After taking his seat in the Egyptian, Simon opened the studio’s glossy color brochure. On the first page were listed “the creators” of “Marooned”: the producer and the director. Then Simon found page after page on the stars of “Marooned.” Then more pages on the special effects personnel. Where was the writer? Finally, at the back of the brochure, alongside the assistant director and the assistant cameraman, he found his name.

“Now, they like me,” Simon said. “The studio took out ads in the Writers Guild monthly magazine for me. But their view of how I fit in with the hierarchy was down with the assistant director. That moment made a big impression on me.”

Ironically, prior to that Hollywood opening, Simon had enjoyed his first major theatrical premiere with “Walking to Waldheim” at New York’s Lincoln Center. But at that time in his life the stage wasn’t a serious temptation.

The critics slammed the play. And he had just written an Oscar-winning documentary, “Why Man Creates.” He remembers the studios called him “a very promising up-and-coming motion picture writer.”

But screenwriters were second-class citizens, mechanics for hire. His work on Judy Garland’s last movie, “I Could Wake Up Singing,” became “a ghastly nightmare”: his secret rewritings of a writer were being secretly rewritten by yet a third writer.

“There was a kind of madness to the whole thing,” he said. “When you finish, all you can be proud of is the fact that you’re still alive, not that it made a magnificent picture or somehow you had a personal success.”

And Simon said he has watched it get worse, not better. For the Writers Guild, Simon recently sat on a panel arbitrating screenplay credit for a film. There were 21 scripts by eight writers--for the same movie. This horrifies Simon, who apprenticed under the late Robert Penn Warren, the American poet laureate, at the University of Minnesota and who brings an almost religious devotion to his work. Writing, for Simon, is a literary act of faith, a profound gesture toward “communication and insight.”

So in the 1970s, seeking artistic satisfaction, Simon began to use Hollywood as the financial backer of his plays. He would average a year and a half creating “The Man From Atlantis” for NBC or writing a film such as “Future World.” Then for the next year and a half he would live off the industry profits while writing a play.

But it was always difficult to make the transition between screen and stage, sometimes requiring two or three months before he could think in the opposite genre’s terms. “For a film, your point of view is extremely flexible,” he said. “The audience wants everything shown. But on a stage, you tend not to show what you’re talking about. A theater audience is much readier to go with its imagination than a film audience. The stage is filled with what you imagine.”

In the beginning, Simon was not seriously bothered by such conflicts. Between film and television assignments, Simon wrote plays. “L.A. Under Siege” was produced by the Mark Taper Forum in 1970. Three one-acts titled “Double Murder and Suicide” were written in the mid-1970s but not done until 1982 by the Los Angeles Actors Theatre.

But “These Men” in 1980 made Simon reassess his double creative life. The play examined how the feminist revolution changed women’s sexual lives. Before its off-Broadway production, producer Fred Coe took Simon out to a business lunch and asked him, “How would you like your characters costumed?”

Simon was stunned.

“I was coming from Hollywood where they’re not interested in the writer’s views on costumes,” Simon said, “or on anything else. I didn’t know what to say. Then he said, ‘Well, Pappy, you’re the boss.’ This was not said ironically. He was dead serious. They were there to please me. I had been a writer for 20 years in television and film; never once had a producer turned to see what I thought of an actor. It was a very heady experience.”

Then when Simon studied the contract for “These Men,” he realized that, unlike screenplay contracts, he was the author. No one could touch his play without his permission. In Hollywood, every contract made the buyer the author, while writers became paid employees.

“I can’t tell you how many times every author has been called on the phone by his agent to say, ‘Well, kid, here’s the story: the company thinks you’re kind of tired so they’re hired these other writers.’ They don’t even call you themselves. In Hollywood, every writer knows he’s there to be replaced by somebody else.”

Although “These Men” was savaged by the New York critics, a revised version at London’s Bush Theater in 1981 became a sensational hit. In 1985, the Los Angeles Theater Center premiered “A Rich Full Life,” his contemporary sequel to “A Doll’s House.”

Simon continued his difficult transitions between mediums. He forged a collaborative relationship with director Jules Aaron, who guided “Elaine’s Daughter” into the 1987 Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American plays. There Simon began thinking the unthinkable: entirely severing his Hollywood involvements.

His first day at Louisville, Artistic Director Jon Jory called everyone involved with the festival to a meeting. Jory announced that he wanted to introduce the stars of the Festival. Simon looked around, thinking, “Oh, have the stars arrived?” Then Jory began introducing the writers.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Simon said. “I wanted to run up and hug and kiss him.”

“Elaine’s Daughter” became the hit of the festival. The New York Times called it “the brightest play of the weekend, a sharp-sighted little comedy about a generational conflict between opposites.”

But the next year was spent writing a movie of the week for Columbia, “Victory at Pearl,” about construction workers rescuing sailors during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Simon felt it was perhaps the finest screenplay he had ever written. It was never made.

“If I can’t get this one made,” he thought, “What am I doing here?”

When Gary Marsh, one of the Columbia executives working on “Victory at Pearl,” called to ask him to write another original film script, Simon made his decision. “I can’t do it,” he told the producer, “I’m going to just write plays.”

“As disappointing as it was to me,” said Marsh, now vice president of original programming for the Disney Channel, “I respected his decision to control his own creative destiny. Simon’s writing really cut to the essence of what the human spirit is really about. He’s at the point we all want to be someday, to have enough money to do what he wants. That I respect.”

“It was the first guy in the business I said ‘no’ to,” Simon said. “Suddenly we had no income. I had to sell the house.”

Any regrets?

“I made $284 for 13 performances in a theater that seated 174 people,” Simon said of his Louisville festival experience. “And it was the best five weeks I ever had. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was my play--the way I’d written it--beautifully done up on the stage for a great audience, with 30 critics from all over the country saying ‘this is terrific.’ I wouldn’t give that up for anything.”

But, seriously, after the non-opening of a play he spent over two years researching and writing, isn’t there some depression? Some impulse to call his Hollywood connections and make a deal?

“Ten years ago I would have been devastated by this,” Simon said of the Long Beach reversal. “But I’ve had so many of these things happen to me that it doesn’t make any difference now. These disappointments don’t keep me from enjoying my life as a playwright. At Louisville, everybody said ‘Elaine’s Daughter’ will go to Broadway. It didn’t--maybe it never will. I mean, it didn’t even go to Long Beach!”