Mr. Simon wrote principally for New York magazine from 1968-2005, when they finally got tired of his congenital cynicism. It helps explain why I really never heard of him. I never subscribed to the magazine, and rarely picked it up in a doctor's waiting room, choosing The New Yorker, (cartoons) or Vanity Fair, or sometimes Vogue, for glossy, over-the-top photos of women I can never expect to see, over a logo that reminds me of the Sunday magazine section to The Herald Tribune, which is what the New York logo is: a leftover from the newspaper I still miss.
My all accounts, Mr. Simon was a hard man to please. There was a 'Weekend Interview, The Last Man of Letters' piece in the WSJ on November 2nd by Barton Swaim on Mr. Simon. At that point, Mr. Simon was still with us, and meets Mr. Swaim at Grand Central Terminal's Oyster Bar. What lead Mr. Swain to seek our Mr. Simon at the time is not disclosed. Mr. Simon arrives to the interview on his own, on time, and seems in complete control of all his faculties
It is fun to read Mr. Simon's recollection of being in a NYC restaurant when the the actress Sylvia Miles spotted him there and gets even with Mr. Simon, who called her a "gate-crasher," making a special trip over to his table holding a plate of steak tartare and dumping it on him and telling him that he can now call her a "plate-crasher." Mr. Simon smiles at the recollection.
Interesting to note, Ms. Miles did have a reputation as a gate-crasher. Her NYT obituary on June 12 2019 by Anita Gates makes special note of her party attendance reputation.
"She was, however, beginning to acquire a reputation for going to every party possible in whatever town she was in. She would “attend the opening of an envelope,” the comedian Wayland Flowers was said to have remarked.
In 1976, People magazine ran an article with the headline “What Would a Manhattan Party Be Without the Ubiquitous Sylvia Miles?” In 1980, Roger Ebert, the film critic of The Chicago Sun-Times, interviewed her at a publicity brunch in Los Angeles. “And if a brunch is a party, why then, of course that is Sylvia Miles in the corner,” he wrote. “She is dressed as a cross between an Indian princess, a hippie and a bag lady.”
The obituary writer gets the last word, and doesn't get food thrown at them.
Reading something from the man so short;y before the obituarists and critics take over makes the piece a bit of a treasure to read. That Mr. Simon passed away on November 24 makes the piece prescient to the tributes that followed his passing.
As we've noted in many blog postings, if someone of note passes away these days and they are over 90, Mr. McFadden has probably written their advance obit, waiting in the files for the trip upstairs to make into the paper.
Movies of all genres displeased Mr. Simon. He only favored works of a few directors, and only the good works from those directors. Mr. Simon also wrote for the National Review, and William F. Buckler Jr., the publisher, would quip that Simon "treated movies like pigeons treated statutes." To me, amazingly after using Buckley's picture in my last posting, and a decade after his passing, to read one of his quips, is one of those cosmic coincidences. God, I miss Buckley. The things he would say these days.
By all expectations, Mr. Simon probably hated Disney movies. Did he review 'Frozen?' Love to know what he thought of 'The Lady and the Tramp.' Apparently Mr. Simon's bile was never in short supply, and rivals FCC Chairman Newton Minow one-time assessment of some TV being good, but when it is bad it is a "vast wasteland." And now with a 24-hour news cycle there is certainly more barren ground filled with prickly cacti.
That Mr. Simon lived to be 94 surrounded by all things he didn't like is a testament to something. What doesn't kill you, does make you stronger. And live to be 94.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment