COVER STORY : Neil Simon’s Chapter Three : First there were the plays, then the movies--now, an autobiography. : The man who loves to look back fondly on his own past never lacks material.

Neil Simon flew back into town the other day from New York, leaving the premiere of one play, “London Suite,” for the West Coast premiere of another--”Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” now in previews at the Doolittle and opening Thursday. This conjunction of bi-coastal opening nights was not in itself remarkable for America’s most tireless playwright. What was different was that Simon was coming home this time not from Broadway but from Off Broadway, a small geographical anomaly that nevertheless rocked the New York theater world as a symbolic tremor. And he was returning to Los Angeles with his latest available export for what could be one of the last times.

Simon, at 67, is deep into the writing of his autobiography and says he does not expect to write any, or at least many, more plays. “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which became his 28th Broadway show when it opened there in November, 1993, is itself a piece of his autobiography--or one of the many chapters of his life he has been able to use for dramatic purposes. It’s an affectionate memoir about the roomful of all-star comedy scribes who wrote Sid Caesar’s weekly “Show of Shows” and its successor, “Caesar’s Hour,” the satirical programs that were, in effect, the original “Saturday Night Live” in the 1950s. Simon, who was 26 at the time, was one of those writers. Others were Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Lucille Kallen, Mel Tolkin and Danny Simon (Neil’s brother), maybe as close as television ever came to assembling its version of the Algonquin’s literary Round Table of the 1920s.

“We talked more about politics, literature, opera, sports, women,” Simon recalls. “And then someone had to yell--it was usually Mel Tolkin, the head writer--’We got to get off it, fellas, we’ve got to get to work.’ ”

Such a moment, in fact, occurs in “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” as do a series of volcanic eruptions in which the Caesar character, named Max Prince, punches his fist through the wall in anger over McCarthy-era network pressures, just as the muscular and volcanic Caesar was known to do.

“Sid was the most brilliant comic that I’ve ever worked for and probably have ever seen,” Simon says. “So for me it was an honor and homage to him to write the play.”

Simon is sitting for a late-afternoon interview in his simply furnished Westwood office. Perhaps one imagines the workplace of Neil Simon, one of America’s wealthiest writers, to be in a bank vault or certainly a hillside aerie with an ocean view, but his office is in an ordinary-looking second-floor apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood just south of Wilshire, about a 10-minute drive from his home in Bel-Air. There is nothing around here to remind him remotely of New York except the dark oil paintings of animals and pastoral scenes that once hung in his Manhattan apartment 35 years ago.

“I sort of like a home environment,” he says by way of explanation, but adds that he isn’t aware of the office at all once he’s lost in thought. “I never know it’s here. I came in this morning and I’d say within three minutes I was sitting and writing, because you start the process when you’re in the car. ‘OK, I’m going to work on the screenplay of “Jake’s Women” today.’ But I get lost in those hours and it’s a process I love.”

He doesn’t sit at a desk for the most part, but ranges around the apartment like a cat, camping for a period on a couch, then moving to a stuffed chair, then to another couch, all the while putting pen to paper in spiral notebooks. He still doesn’t use a computer or word processor--mainly, he says, because the enforced posture of being at a desk plays havoc with his bad back.

On the national map of popular culture, it must seem odd to some to find that Neil Simon actually lives in Los Angeles, but in truth this has been his primary residence for 20 years. He moved west after his first wife, Joan, died of cancer at the age of 39. He subsequently married actress Marsha Mason; they divorced after 10 years, then he married Diane Lander in 1987, divorced her in 1989 and remarried her in 1990.

Except for his once-regular presence at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club and his name affixed as screenwriter to the filmed adaptations of his plays, Simon is not much of a Hollywood person. He kind of hates Hollywood, he says, in the way that so many people do who make a living from the movie industry even while they deplore its methods or feel they don’t belong to it. Since moving out from New York, he has written only one play--”I Ought to Be in Pictures”--that takes his second home as a subject.

“ ‘California Suite’ takes place in California but it’s not about Californians,” he points out. “I’m still a city person. I feel somewhat stranded here very often. But it doesn’t exclude me from being able to write about New York. I think I’m able to write about people from London better than I’m able to write about Californians. Californians, somehow, the trap is, for me, you end up writing stereotypical people--you’re going to write about the people in the movie industry. The people who write about the true Los Angeleno are the people who have grown up here.

“But I think I’ve written some of the best plays in my whole body of work out here, going from ‘California Suite’ to ‘Chapter Two,’ ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs,’ ‘Biloxi Blues,’ ‘Broadway Bound,’ ‘Lost in Yonkers’--all written out here. These are the best plays I’ve written except for ‘The Odd Couple,’ ‘Barefoot in the Park’ and a few others. I think that where a writer writes is not the problem. I mean, I could move to Canada or South America. I believe what I’ve heard many times, that you write from your first 25 years of experience in life. ‘Brighton Beach,’ my mind was back East as I was writing. Because I forget where I am when I’m writing. ‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor’ is all New York.”

It’s New York when New York was the capital of not just the theater but television as well. And for the city where television is now mostly relocated, Simon’s play about Caesar and the rest offers a view to our ancestors, most of whom, like Simon and Caesar himself, eventually joined the show business migration to California.

The 1982 film “My Favorite Year,” which starred Joe Bologna as a Caesar-like character presiding over a madhouse of writers, dealt with the same subject. Simon was not involved in the movie.

“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” drew mixed notices in New York, where rising Broadway star Nathan Lane played Max Prince. In this national tour production, arriving at the Doolittle after stops in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New Haven, Baltimore and Washington, Max is played by Howard Hesseman, formerly of television’s “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Head of the Class.”

Simon is adamant that there is nothing second-rate about the version of the play we will see here.

“It’s no different than if you go see any production on Broadway a year after it opens. You won’t see the original cast. As a matter of fact, we have four people who were in the original cast, out of nine. That’s not bad.” Actually, two are from the original cast (Lewis J. Stadlen and J.K. Simmons) and three more (Matthew Arkin, Alan Blumenfeld and Alison Martin) later appeared in the Broadway production.

Speaking about Hesseman, the playwright says, “Howard is a first-rate comedian and plays it very different than Nathan. And so if he loses any value that Nathan had, he gains something in his own personality. There’s something more poignant about Howard, who is really older than Nathan, and this play is also about the end of the road for Sid Caesar at that time. Howard brings that part of it that maybe Nathan didn’t. They’re both very funny but in different ways.”

Hesseman auditioned for Simon, producer Emanuel Azenberg and director Jerry Zaks. “Because,” says Simon, “we didn’t know if he was capable of doing something like this. It was one of the best auditions I’ve ever seen. He read it and just threw himself into the part.”

‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor” is the comedy Simon wrote after his disappointing stream-of-consciousness play about a neurotic writer, “Jake’s Women,” and the misfire of trying to make a musical out of his 1977 hit movie “The Goodbye Girl,” a show he now says should never have been done at all. (It’s coming in February to Thousand Oaks’ Probst Theatre and the Alex Theatre in Glendale.) The casualties from “The Goodbye Girl” included his longtime working relationship with director Gene Saks.

“For me to relate what the falling out was about is like me telling you why Marsha and I got divorced. It’s too personal to talk about. It has nothing to do with the quality of his work. It has to do with his life, the people in his life, the people in my life. Just to talk about Marsha for a second, we didn’t have a major fight or anything. It just seemed like the marriage ended. You just felt it was over. We had 10 wonderful years and it was time to be over. Though it was not nearly as cold as I’m making it sound now or that neat. But, in essence, if I had to describe it, that’s what it would be. And I felt the same with Gene and I.”

This rocky period followed the sweet stretch of the mid-’80s that brought forth his alliterative autobiographical trilogy (“Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound”), the plays that delivered him from critical disfavor and made it fashionable to think of him again as more than a glib entertainer. “Broadway Bound” cut closest to the bone, showing an almost tragic portrait of a young comedy writer coming of age as his family was coming apart. “ ‘Biloxi Blues’ was an idealized version of my life,” he says. “My parents weren’t that benign. They were loving, but there were great conflicts in the house, which came out more in ‘Broadway Bound’--because they had passed on and I think I allowed myself to write more truthfully about them.”

With the trilogy clearing the way, in 1992, Simon was awarded the ultimate Establishment imprimatur, the Pulitzer Prize, for “Lost in Yonkers,” his play about two motherless young brothers sent to live with an aunt and grandmother during World War II.

Did it matter to him that all those years he was producing hit comedies on Broadway he was also being pilloried by critics, his name nearly an epithet in academe and in theaters closer to the cutting edge?

“Yes, it hurts, but not for very long, because sometimes you see the truth in it. I know when I haven’t done really well. That doesn’t bother me. It’s when I do really well and there are a couple critics who will just cut you down because your kind of theater is not what they want to see.”

Simon’s most recent play, “London Suite,” the evening of four one-act comedies directed by Daniel Sullivan that opened Off Broadway (at the 499-seat Union Square Theater), got mixed reviews, but apparently this is not one of those times Simon is willing to admit the critics might be right. “The audiences before the critics came were incredible,” he says. “So some of the reviews threw me a little.”

He chooses to quote the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who wrote, deferentially, that Simon finds himself now “in a no-win situation” in which he is expected to top himself each time out. “I agree with him,” Simon says. “I think that’s how they judge the plays from now on.”

He believes he should be allowed to write “a divertissement ,” as he calls “London Suite,” without it being compared to his most ambitious work. In any case, many critics found the four playlets only intermittently funny by whatever measure.

But the reviews were an anti-climax to the storm of comment and analysis that greeted his announcement that he was turning his back on Broadway, where no contemporary playwright has had more success and where a theater is even named after him.

To this Simon shakes his head, insisting that he is surprised at the reaction. “Why me? Why not Woody Allen, Elaine May, David Mamet?” he says, naming playwrights who have been on Broadway in the past and recently defected together with an evening of one-acts. “Why not Edward Albee, who won the Pulitzer Off Broadway recently? Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, all the great American playwrights. So I go, and they make a to-do as if this is going to start a whole new trend. Well, a whole new trend with whom?”

This will strike some as disingenuous, since it is safe to say that Simon attracts a different audience than Edward Albee or Sam Shepard. A few years ago, playwright Lanford Wilson, himself no slouch in the category of hits and honors, suggested sarcastically that Broadway be renamed “Simon.” “That would be a start,” Wilson said, reflecting the disenchantment of so many writers with the artistic collapse of the Great White Way. “That’s the only thing that succeeds there.”

Referring to producers and other Broadway citizens who have sounded alarms, Simon goes on to say, “They all started to say, ‘Well, Neil Simon’s going Off Broadway, this means the theater is in trouble.’ Well, the economics of doing a play is in trouble. A million-six, a million-seven it costs now.”

By comparison, “London Suite” was mounted for less than $500,000.

“I know that I’m an important name on Broadway, but I think if there was an item in the paper that said, ‘Neil Simon Retires, Not to Write Any More Plays,’ it would be about two lines. ‘Neil Simon Going Off Broadway’ gets major stories in the New York Times because they paranoiacally think it’s going to impact the Broadway theater. I don’t think so. If there’s a terrific play on Broadway, people will go. Whether the producers will make their money back is another question.”

The only really successful American play in the last five years on Broadway was Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Sisters Rosenzwieg.” The fact that “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” had a difficult run on Broadway was probably a factor in Simon’s fleeing downtown for the first time. “If we had done ‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor’ Off Broadway,” he concedes, “we’d have made a lot more money than we didn’t make on Broadway. If we’d have had the same number of people coming to an Off Broadway theater to see that play, we’d have come out fine. As it is, we’ll pay off on this tour.”

Why is it unexpected to hear Neil Simon referring to Sam Shepard as a great American playwright and pronouncing Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” “a brilliant piece of work”? Would you expect him to call “Stomp,” the wordless percussion and dance piece, “one of the most explosive things in the world”? He does.

Probably it is because of his commercial attainments and the sense that Shepard, Kushner, Mamet and August Wilson (pick almost any American playwright under 60) live on different planets, where Neil Simon would not be able to breathe.

And yet this is evidently not quite the case, or he would like you to believe this is not quite the case. He is quick to praise these and other younger writers. Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” at the Westwood Playhouse? “A brilliant play,” he says.

Still, there’s no denying that the standards and practices of comedy have changed considerably since Simon made audiences roar at “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” and “Plaza Suite.” And where are the names of Simon’s heirs in the theater?

It would seem he might want to talk a little about this, but when the subject is raised he pushes it aside. He will only say, “Comedy has become a lot easier because of the language that’s allowed. And everything is so political today.”

Not to mention mean. “People like mean comedy for the same reasons they like gossip.”

He watches hardly any situation comedies on television. “Because they’re all the same,” he says. “If my wife is watching ‘Seinfeld’ I’ll watch it. Otherwise I’ll look for a movie and always for a basketball game. And thank God, baseball is back. I’m a sports nut.”

There are a number of autographed baseballs in his office. One carries the signature “Steve Carlton.” Another is signed by the entire Dodger team.

On the wall near his desk there is a small framed Mailgram informing him that he has won the Pulitzer Prize and nearby a framed letter on White House stationery congratulating him on the Pulitzer, signed by President Bush.

Among the framed posters of his plays and movies in the office is a prominent one for the 1993 movie of “Lost in Yonkers.” This one is signed by the film’s producer, Ray Stark. “Without you I’d be lost,” Stark has scribbled in felt-tip pen.

Which is ironic considering that ‘Lost in Yonkers’ took in only $9.3 million in domestic box office after costing Columbia more than $30 million to make it.

While it’s true Simon has written his share of smash movies, his most recent films have not brought glorious returns. (Remember “The Marrying Man”?) He is currently at work adapting “Jake’s Women” for television, and a new adaptation of “The Sunshine Boys,” starring Peter Falk and Woody Allen as an aging comedy team, will be seen on CBS at the end of May. But he says he has had it with Hollywood and its system of art by committee.

“I used to pay a lot of attention to the movies. I don’t pay attention to them anymore--in terms of my own work. It’s too much work. To do a movie, you have to talk to the head of the studio, the head of the studio’s first man or woman, then all the other executives, then those meetings about demographics. Then you go into preview theaters where people write (evaluation) cards. I mean, when we preview a play we would never think of putting a weapon like cards in the hands of the audience. It’s like saying, ‘Tell me what you don’t like about this.’ And you get such varied answers that anybody who pays attention to them is nuts.

“Everything is done by committee, which is the very opposite of the theater, which is basically two people, the playwright and the director. A play is what I want to say in the theater and the director is going to help me say it, and we make almost all the decisions.”

‘L aughter on the 23rd Floor” will be the 12th Neil Simon play or musical to be staged at the Doolittle or the Ahmanson, going back to “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” in 1972. For a while, Simon made a habit of launching his new plays here, but he stopped after “Biloxi Blues” in 1984. “It became too long a tryout,” he explains. “We rehearsed it here, then played seven weeks at the Ahmanson and six or seven weeks in San Francisco. That’s 14 weeks that the actors have been in front of big audiences, so by the time they get to New York, they’re tired of it already.”

Besides the TV projects, Simon says he has completed the first draft of a new play and is up to age 46 in his autobiography. “I’ve got 21 more years to write about,” he says with resignation. “It seemed that more things happened in these last 21 years. Disappointments-- betrayals is a strong word--in business. Celebrations of all sorts, of grandchildren, a new marriage. Everything changes. The people who I’ve known who’ve died--Bob Fosse, Paddy Chayefsky, people I was so close to.”

Simon quotes a line from “London Suite” in which an actress, meeting her former husband whom she hasn’t seen in 16 years, says, “Half the people we grew up with in the business are all gone.”

“I think that’s happened with anybody my age in the business,” he says, “whether it’s from AIDS or just from age, they’re gone, and a large part of my life is gone with them. So I don’t have those people to cling to anymore, to spend time with. So I have not cultivated tons of new relationships with people because you’ve got to be in some kind of situation that creates a close relationship. It happens either in a marriage or working, I think, basically.”

As it happens, Caesar and most of the gang Simon reassembles in “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” are still with us. The playwright even called on some of them for research assistance.

“I called up Larry Gelbart and Mel Tolkin and people and said, ‘Tell me what the room was like, did we have the food on the left side or was it on the right side?’ So basically it’s what it looked like.”

Still, at least one New York critic was hard on the set, complaining it didn’t look right. “But on opening night, after the performance,” Simon says proudly, “Sid walked out on stage and said, ‘This is the room.’ So critics, some critics, view a thing through their own eyes, what they want to see, as opposed to what I thought was the truth.”

But, speaking of truth, it turns out that the writers room was not really on the 23rd floor of the building in question on 57th Street. “I called Sid and asked him what floor it was on, and he said he remembered it was on the 11th or the 12th. But I didn’t think I could call it ‘Laughter on the 12th Floor.’ That didn’t sound right to me. The rhythm was off. So I added 11 and 12 and got 23. I don’t know why. My mind just did that. Sometimes you have to change the facts a little.”*