Word: simonizing
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
...While Simon was recovering from his bereavement, he met Actress Marsha Mason at an audition for The Good Doctor. The mutual attraction was immediate. He married her 2˝ weeks after they met, "And that was with one postponement," he adds. Simon encountered little resistance to the abrupt romance from Joan's mother Helen Bairn or daughters Ellen, then 16, and Nancy, then 10. Nancy explains: "We responded to Marsha right away. She was warm and funny, and we needed to become a family again...