In addition to his 18,522 plays and his 7,001 screenplays, Neil Simon wrote two books which are essentially Volumes 1 and 2 of his autobiography. Rewrites starts with his first Broadway play Come Blow Your Horn (with a few flashbacks to what preceded it) and goes through The Sunshine Boys and the death of his first wife, Joan. The Play Goes On starts with The Good Doctor and Simon working to get over his loss. It covers his second marriage and ends with Play #30 — Proposals — and the dissolution of his third marriage.
Both books are filled with great anecdotes and insight into his process. What neither one is filled with, inexplicably, is much of anything about his days on Your Show of Shows or other TV shows starring Sid Caesar. He does write about working with Caesar on the Broadway show, Little Me…but he writes more about working on one Jerry Lewis TV special than he does about his time in the most famous Writers Room in TV history. He also quietly skips over the Play #28, Laughter on the 23rd Floor — the play he wrote about his days working in television for Mr. Caesar.
This could not have been an unintentional oversight. It's like if Neil Armstrong wrote his autobiography and left out the little matter of walking on The Moon.
Why? My guess — and this is only my guess — is that Mr. Simon had plenty to say about those years but he wanted to wait until Mr. Caesar and perhaps others were deceased and incapable of offense. Simon may even have written those chapters and decided to omit them for now and maybe expand them later into an entire book. Then again, he did not hesitate to write Laughter on the 23rd Floor which was a roman a clef of the Caesar Years and I'm not sure if that suggests my guess is wrong. Maybe you've got a guess that's better.
Somewhere, Neil Simon's files presumably exist. They would contain dozens, if not hundreds of unfinished plays and I believe there may be around a half-dozen plays that he "completed" and never surrendered to production. I put that word in quotes because Simon famously didn't consider a play as done until its formal opening and critical evaluation. He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote during rehearsals and previews, and if you pulled one of those finished, unproduced plays now from his filing cabinets and put it on stage, it would be lacking all he would have done to perfect and polish.
I wonder what's going to happen with all that leftover material now. And I wonder if in that filing cabinet somewhere, there isn't at least part of a book on how he and his brother got hired to write for Sid Caesar.
In the meantime, I was going to set up Amazon links here in case any of you wanted to order Rewrites or The Play Goes On…and you can, of course. But I see that prices on them have gone up somewhat and it would be far cheaper to order a new book called Neil Simon's Memoirs. It collects the entirety of both books plus has a new intro by Nathan Lane. If like me, you already have both books and don't want to buy this new amalgam just to read Lane's intro, you can read it online at that Amazon link. End of plug.