Neil Simon - Early Years

Early Years

Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie Simon, was mostly a homemaker. Simon had one older brother by eight years, Danny. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the period of the Great Depression, graduating from from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen, where he was nicknamed “Doc” and described as extremely shy in the school yearbook.

Simon’s childhood was difficult and mostly unhappy due to his parents “tempestuous marriage,” and ongoing financial hardship caused by the Depression. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional hardship. As a result, Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with relatives, or else their parents took in boarders for some income. Simon recalls this period:

The horror of those years was that I didn’t come from one broken home but five. It got so bad at one point that we took in a couple of butchers who paid their rent in lamb chops.

During an interview with writer Lawrence Grobel, Simon stated: "To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between the two of them.... She’d hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him." Simon points out that one of the reasons he became a writer was his need to be independent of such family concerns when growing up:

It’s partly why I became a writer, because I learned to fend for myself very early. . . . I began to think early on, at the age of seven or eight, that I’d better start taking care of myself somehow, emotionally.... It made me strong as an independent person.

In order to escape difficulties at home he often took refuge in movie theaters, where he especially enjoyed comedies with silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. Simon recalls: “I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.”

I think part of what made me a comedy writer is the blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude.... do something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting.

Simon attributes these childhood movies for inspiring him to some day write comedy: "I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." In referring to Chaplin’s influence, Simon noted that it was his "appreciation of Chaplin's ability to make people laugh that was the only thing that I saw in the future for myself as a connection with people. I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor."

At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. During these high-school years, he also enjoyed reading humor by Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and S. J. Perelman. Simon recalls: "I read humorists... I read all the adventure stories... I was at the library three days a week as a kid. I read everything, I think, except the classics—which I’m going to get to one day."

Soon after graduating high school he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University, eventually being sent to Colorado as a corporal. It was during those years in the Reserve that Simon began writing, starting as a sports editor. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946.