A tight-jawed housewife, nearing 50 and careworn, is asked by her son to tell once more of the time in her girlhood when she danced a fox-trot with George Raft. As she recounts the one public moment when she ever felt attractive, her face softens and she reveals a hidden sense of humor, of naughtiness, of delight. The son responds with glee: "There's a whole movie in this story, ma. And one day I'm going to write it." Then he asks her to dance. He holds her in his arms, standing in for the absent father who is abandoning the family. The mother recaptures the grace and ease of youth and seems, for a moment, suffused with hope in a life that has been devoted to duty. But the spell ends, and the son confesses to himself and to a raptly attentive audience on the other side of the footlights, "Dancing with my mother was very scary ... Holding her like that and seeing her smile was too intimate for me to enjoy."
Neil Simon not only wrote that scene at the heart of his new play, Broadway Bound, which opened on Broadway last week, he also lived its essence. Sometimes when his mother told the story, her partner was George Raft, sometimes it was George Burns. "I heard it twisted around so many ways," he says. "It could have been Rudolph Valentino." Nonetheless, the poignant sweetness of her recollections and the faintly acrid aftertaste of his own uneasy detachment flavored Simon's adolescence. As he rose during adulthood from deprivation to celebrity, creating hit TV shows, then dozens of gag-laden Broadway shows and jauntily comic movies, he thought from time to time of writing candidly about his mother and even about that specific situation, with its blend of childish veneration and Oedipal yearning. But such memories seemed too personal to be brought out in public, too complex, above all too risky—too distant from the machine-gun wisecracks that audiences expected of a Neil Simon play. He recalls: "I was afraid I'd kill the plays if I made them more serious."
As Simon aged (he is now 59), he increasingly felt a longing that comes to many creative people in later life: the urge for a deeper resonance between present and past, between work and an inner sense of self. And so he subtly but surely changed careers. America's master joke-meister moved away from the neatly rounded, readily palatable social comment that had made him the world's most popular living playwright. He stopped setting plays among hip and prosperous insiders like himself, dwelling in the Meccas of Manhattan or Beverly Hills. He began instead to evoke the bygone lives of the world he came from, people so conscious of their ordinariness, their smallness, their vulnerability to vast social forces that for them laughter could not be a healing touch, only a palliative relief.