One other thing about the passing of Sid Caesar. Neil Simon, as we all know, wrote on Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, plus he supplied the book for Little Me, which was Mr. Caesar's greatest Broadway triumph. So he had a lot of history with the man.
A few years ago, Simon published two books — Rewrites and The Play Goes On — which were Volume 1 and Volume 2 of his autobiography. There has been no rumbling of a Volume 3, nor has Simon had a new play produced for some time. That and a notable sparsity of public appearances and interviews has led to rumors that Mr. Simon is not in the greatest of health. He's 86, by the way.
Rewrites, which covers his earliest days as a writer, has an odd gap in it. There's almost nothing about his days in television, working for Caesar and other greats of the era. You'd think that would be one of the most colorful, fertile areas to write about…and indeed, when interviewed, Simon always had a truckload of anecdotes and stories about those days, plus he thought them interesting enough to fictionalize (somewhat) into his play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor. But in his autobiography, they pretty much get mentioned briefly in passing.
This has led some to speculate the following: That in the writing process, Simon wrote about or at least began writing about those days but soon realized that (a) that phase of his life was a book in itself and (b) that some of what he wrote, if he was being honest, might hurt Mr. Caesar. So, the theory goes, he decided to save all that for another book to be published upon Sid's passing. As I mentioned, everyone around Sid has thought for about the last fifteen years that would be occurring "any day now."
Is such a book sitting, completed or otherwise, in Neil Simon's filing cabinet? Will we see it soon? If not, does that mean he wasn't up to finishing it or he never started it? I'd sure like to see such a thing.