(7 of 10)
Simon met the great love of his life, Joan Baim, at a Poconos resort called Tamiment in June 1953. He was a writer on the entertainment staff, making $20 a week. She was a dancer working as a counselor in the children's camp. Three months later they were married. Says Simon: "I knew immediately she was the girl for me. She was very beautiful, very athletic, very warm. She had very definite ideas, she was very vehement in her own scenario, but she was very supportive. She stopped working—which I think she probably regretted later—and gave herself over to the children and the relationship. I got very spoiled."
With encouragement from Joan, Simon in his spare time wrote Come Blow Your Horn, about two young brothers moving away from home and trying to leave the family waxed-fruit business for something more artistic. It took 1,200 pages of drafts—some the product of Simon's compulsive perfectionism, some ordered up by a succession of about a dozen potential producers—to get it staged. Says Simon: "If we had closed, I would have folded my tent and gone out to Los Angeles to write My Three Sons for twelve years." Instead, success followed success: Barefoot in the Park (1963), an evocation of newlywed days; The Odd Couple (1965), based on an experience of Danny's; Sweet Charity (1966), a Bob Fosse musical now enjoying a Broadway revival; Plaza Suite (1968), a trio of bittersweet one acts set in the same hotel room; Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969), a hilarious yet pathetic picture of a man attempting infidelities during a mid-life-crisis.
Simon had attained fame and wealth, and, to observers, his marriage seemed idyllic. But when he was 40 and in a brief mid-life crisis of his own, he thought of divorce. "I felt my mortality and told Joan over lunch that I wanted to leave and start all over again. We'd married young, I explained, and I needed to experience life. She smiled benignly and said, 'That's O.K.' After five seconds I told her, 'Never mind.' I had asked for her permission to get out, and she had given it. I no longer felt she was controlling me."
When Joan was struck by cancer at 38, Simon says, "the doctor told me how long she had to live, and I decided we wouldn't tell her. But she knew. And only once did she ever show that she was scared." Simon's way of handling the strain was to throw himself into writing about the randomness and futility of life in The Good Doctor (1973), an attempt at dramatizing Chekhov-like stories, and God's Favorite (1974), a deliberately vulgar retelling of the Book of Job. Both were among the few misfires in his career, artistically and commercially. After Joan's death he went into therapy for two years. He resisted the process at first because, like Tennessee Williams, he feared his neuroses were the source of his talent. "I didn't have to worry. I remained as neurotic as ever but got a clearer perspective." He found the process so helpful that he still sees counselors from time to time, one on each coast. "That's the height of luxury," he says. "Matching analysts."