Danny: He Shared the Dreams

Danny Simon's ads promoting his comedy-writing course are imprinted with a testimonial: "I learned a few things on my own since, and modified some of the things he taught me, but everything, unequivocally, that I learned about comedy writing I learned from Danny Simon." That kind of thing has been said by Danny's first partner, Kid Brother Neil. But actually, the blurb is from Woody Allen, with whom Danny collaborated on NBC's The Colgate Comedy Hour for a season in the mid-'50s. These days Danny's pupils are not apprentices but paying customers for classes he conducts privately in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where he lives, and in three-day seminars at colleges around the U.S. Students spend $250 to learn from a man who has written for such TV series as Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life and for Comedian Joan Rivers' appearances on the Tonight Show, and who staged The Kraft Music Hall and The Carol Burnett Show.

By most standards, Danny Simon has more than fulfilled his boyhood dreams of show-business success. But the brother with whom he shared those dreams has attained immeasurably more. As a result, says Danny, "I have been living so long with 'Neil Simon's brother' " -- sometimes, erroneously, with "Neil Simon's younger brother" -- "that I'm thinking of changing my name." He adds, with the grin of a borsch-belt comic trying a little too hard, "That always gets a laugh." In fact, there is often a tinge of sadness in Danny's jokes about the situation. He admits, "The more famous Neil became, the more difficult it was for me."

Intensely protective of his brother during their troubled childhood, Danny wrestled emotionally with the fact of Neil's going off on his own. Says Danny: "My ex-wife said she felt I loved my brother more than I loved her." Danny wanted to direct his brother's first Broadway show, Come Blow Your Horn; after he failed to get the job, he refused to attend opening night. Danny lived the situation of one of his brother's greatest hits, The Odd Couple -- sharing an apartment with Hollywood Agent Roy Gerber, whose wife had left him -- and wrote 14 pages of a play about it before he stalled. Eventually Neil took over the concept and gave Danny one-sixth of the royalties. That concession has been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but to Danny's irritation Neil did not credit the script as "from an idea by Danny Simon." Last year Neil brought a rewritten, all-female Odd Couple to Broadway. Danny played a role in developing that idea too. But he was fired as the show's director during its tryout tour.

Yet in times of crisis, the brothers turn to each other. Danny helped Neil start dating again after the death of his wife Joan. After Neil was hospitalized in November, Danny picked him up and brought him home. Says Danny: "As the years went on, I mellowed. Today I have no antipathy toward Neil. I stopped myself from writing plays, he didn't." Danny often jokes that he has had more plays written about him than Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar -- six by his count, from Come Blow Your Horn through Broadway Bound -- and older brothers are featured in at least two of Neil's other works. By far the most tender portrait appears in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Zeljko Ivanek, who played the role, recalls learning that Danny wept on seeing the play. Asked why, Danny replied with characteristic bravado and equally characteristic regret, "Because I didn't write it."