Neil Simon's Storied Career

Another Honor For One Of America's Most Prolific Playwrights

(CBS)  He made the covers of Time and Newsweek. His life was perfect until his wife Joan, with whom he had two daughters, died in 1973 from cancer. They had been married for 19 years.

"It was the hardest thing I think in my life," he said.

Simon's solution was to throw himself into his work, which was good news for actors like Richard Dreyfuss.

"He knew that I could do things that I didn't know I could do," Dreyfuss said. "It was the greatest writer in America listening to what I specifically do and it's the most important moment I've ever had."

The moment was "The Goodbye Girl." Dreyfus won an Academy Award playing a struggling actor forced into sharing a tiny apartment with Marsha Mason.

Mason was not just any actress; she was Neil Simon's second wife. He was also married to actress Diane Lander and now, for the past seven years, to another actress, Elaine Joyce. He says he fell for her on their first date.

"She opened up the door, and I go, 'Yep, that's it,'" he said.

"Well, it was it and luckily it was mutual ... well, it's good," Joyce said.

At 79, Simon is still writing and is in good health after a 2004 kidney transplant. Simon has had a lot of good days in his life. This month's Mark Twain Prize is just the latest in a series of awards. He received Kennedy Center Honors, the Comedy Award, three Tonys, a slew of Academy Award and Emmy Nominations, and the Pulitzer Prize for "Lost in Yonkers," one of his more serious plays about a family dominated by a dictatorial grandmother.

What resonates in all of Simon's work, serious or comic, is its universality:

"Many times I would go to the theatre and stand in the back and people would come up and they say, 'How do you know my father?' 'How do you know my cousin?'" he said. "I seem to have touched that aspect of their lives that's familiar with them as familiar with me ... making a connection with millions of people is pretty good."