(9 of 10)
Eugene and Stanley are calming each other after a too-dose-to-home radio sketch has alienated their father. Eugene ashamedly admits he meant the parallels, adding, "There's part of my head that makes me this nice, likable, funny kid. And there's the other part, the part that writes, that's an angry, hostile, real son of a bitch." Stanley retorts, "Well, you'd better make friends with the son of a bitch because he's the one who's going to make you a big living."
Simon spends several months a year in Los Angeles, a necessity for his film career, and the rest in Manhattan, which he calls home. The ten-room Los Angeles dwelling, of white brick and wood, houses an extensive collection of modern art (including works by Modigliani and Edward Hopper) and sits above three tiers of terraces, with the obligatory swimming pool on the bottom tier, although Simon does not swim. He is a passionate tennis player, yet the house has no tennis court. "First you wind up providing the balls, then the Cokes—there's no end to it," Simon explains. "I decided to join a tennis club instead, which was, at one point, my only contact with mankind." While the house is decorated to resemble a country retreat in, say, Connecticut, Simon's seven-room Manhattan duplex is just the opposite: sleekly art deco, almost Californian, with a sun-flooded atrium at penthouse level, offering sweeping views in three directions of Park Avenue and the city skyline.
Glamorous as these homes are, they constitute considerably less than conspicuous consumption for a man of Simon's income. And he lives in them about as modestly as circumstances permit. He has a secretary-factotum on each coast and some domestic help. But he dresses simply, entertains infrequently and does not spend his life being waited on: he often answers his own telephone, greets people at the door, takes their coats and fetches their drinks. He husbands his money for his family, and has grown more cautious over the years. He invested the first $75,000 from Come Blow Your Horn in "cattle that froze to death in Montana." A far bigger error: selling the TV rights to The Odd Couple to Paramount when it made the movie, on the presumption that it would never become a series—a bad guess that Simon says may have cost him as much as $20 million. Later on he bought the Eugene O'Neill Theater on Broadway as a home for his plays. That had the unexpected result of making him the employer of his mother: she came to work on the box-office telephone ("Some mothers give you their milk, others sell tickets to Promises, Promises"). He later sold the theater—he has no ownership interest in the theater named for him, which belongs to the Nederlander chain—and now the bulk of his assets are stocks and bonds and the royalty rights to his scripts.