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BILL EVANS

Neil Simon, His Press Agent and the Kidney They Have in Common

By JOYCE WADLER

Published: May 9, 2004

The press agent who gave Neil Simon a kidney is at first reluctant to be interviewed. Bill Evans, boyish looking at 54, is a press agent of the old school, trained in the notion that the publicist's name stays out of the paper. He is a fellow accustomed to keeping his emotions in control, who jokes that Mr. Simon is now working on a play about growing up in a reserved WASP household in Ohio. Jokes are fine. His kidney loves living on Park Avenue, Mr. Evans will write in a note a few weeks after the surgery, but it's really looking forward to Bel Air in a couple of months.

When it comes to discussing the transplant, though, the talk of the town when Mr. Evans donated a kidney to his most famous client two months ago, Mr. Evans thinks not. He is concerned about what he calls "the glop factor." A story about how heroic, how brave, how self-sacrificing? Oh, please.

Mr. Simon is at first not interested in talking about it either. But the kidney transplant he had at the Rogosin Institute in New York in March has given him his life back — and the institute has asked him to help educate the public.

So, on a recent morning, the two men sat in the office of Mr. Simon's New York apartment: Mr. Simon, 76, the five-times-married, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright; and Mr. Evans, a publicist with his own company who has represented all of Mr. Simon's Broadway shows since 1976, as well as productions like "Private Lives" and "Master Class." He was pulled to the city by theater — in particular, by those smart, witty people in Stephen Sondheim's "Company." He also related to the floundering hero in that show who has never been in a committed relationship, for Mr. Evans was also floundering.

When Mr. Evans was a raw, beginning press agent of 26, Mr. Simon's producer, Emanuel Azenberg, hired him for "California Suite." Mr. Evans and Mr. Simon met for the first time in Los Angeles. Mr. Evans, whose parents read aloud from Mr. Simon's early comedy "Barefoot in the Park" with their friends, as others might play a board game, was thrilled. He also remembered feeling instantly at ease with Mr. Simon. The two men use the same words to describe each other: "low key" and "smart." Mr. Simon was also impressed by the Colgate grad who was not at all like the crude, pushy press agents in the movies, "with the cigar and a hat flipped up."

They have worked together now for 28 years.

For this interview, Mr. Simon wears a sweater. Mr. Evans is dressed in a suit, like a kid ready for his school picture. Both men look healthy. Patients who receive kidney transplants must avoid crowds for the first two months, so Mr. Simon has been mostly at home. There's a little kvetching about that.

"I've seen every baseball game, every football game, every news show — after a while there's nothing to do," Mr. Simon says.

Also, "Now it's the Yankees that are making me sick."

Elaine Joyce, Mr. Simon's blond, trim wife, has put out a welcoming tray of cookies, but Mr. Simon is focused on his subject. Asked about kidney disease, he folds his arms protectively in front of his body and dispatches the information as if on "Meet the Press."

"I actually know very little about the whole thing," Mr. Simon says. "I was told I had to have dialysis. They put needles in you and rotate the blood in your body. No matter what they explained to me, if it's told in medical terms, I don't understand it. Whereas if I'm doing a play, I can do enormous research. Something more important, like my body, I don't know because I don't know how to deal with it."

Then, to a photographer seated at the table who is about to pick up a camera: "Can you not move around, please? It bothers me."

Ms. Joyce is the medical historian in this marriage. She says that Mr. Simon had polycystic kidney disease, which worsened dramatically in the early years of their marriage in the 1990's. By the fall of 2002, his kidneys could no longer function and he began dialysis.

For him, the procedure was difficult. He suffered severe cramps and nausea. Vomiting spells came on so quickly that he had to curtail going out. His memory deteriorated. Leaving the hospital in Los Angeles after dark, he once missed a turn and could not remember how to get home. Losing three work days a week to the treatment was, Mr. Simon says, "a terrible blow."

"There were times I was able to do some of the writing there, but your mind isn't clear enough to do what you want to do," he says.

What was he working on? "I don't remember what the play was," Mr. Simon says.

Mr. Evans steps in. " `Rose's Dilemma,' " he says, referring to a show that received poor reviews when it opened last December.

"Sometimes I work on two things, so I don't remember," Mr. Simon says. "I realize something now: I liked the play, I liked the writing, yet when we did it at the Manhattan Theater Club, which is not really where I wanted to go with it, it didn't really work. I realize now that my mind was working differently being on dialysis."

There had been a well-publicized incident during previews of the production. Mr. Simon's star, Mary Tyler Moore, was performing with an earpiece (to hear the prompter). When Mr. Simon wrote a note telling her to learn her lines or "get out of my play," and his wife delivered it half an hour before a matinee, Ms. Moore quit the show.

Talking about that now, Mr. Simon says that he "really loved" Ms. Moore and thought her work was "great." He simply wanted her to learn the lines.

"I just wrote a note," he says. "I didn't think it was a mean note, but then I wouldn't know what I was writing about then. I felt badly about that and we lost a very good actress when she left."

Does Mr. Simon remember what he wrote?

"Vaguely, vaguely. It had to do with not using those earphones with the dialogue. And then I found out later on, a lot of people have done that and I felt like a fool."

It was known in the theater community that Mr. Simon had health problems. Still, Mr. Azenberg, the producer, was shocked when he saw him around this time. "There was an aspect of him that was nobody I knew," Mr. Azenberg says. "He was exhausted, distracted. The memory wasn't there. You felt that he's not going to make it, that he was deteriorating. He couldn't remember names, but really serious names. We would talk about who was in the cast of `The Odd Couple' — he wouldn't remember."

Mr. Simon had started thinking of transplant surgery. Doctors at the Rogosin Institute, which is affiliated with New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Medical College of Cornell University, had said his age would not be a problem. Getting a kidney from a living donor, which offers the highest success rate, was, however. Mr. Simon's younger daughter, Nancy, had offered to donate, but because she is a mother, she and her husband decided against it. Meanwhile, Mr. Simon's doctors told him he might have to increase his time on the dialysis machine. That, Mr. Simon says, would have been unbearable.

"I didn't want to live my life anymore," Mr. Simon says.

Enter Mr. Evans. He lives in New York with his longtime partner, Chuck Fischer, an artist and designer. Mr. Simon lives primarily in Los Angeles. So, much of their relationship is over the phone, but they are close. There is also the bond of doing 19 shows together, the opening nights when Mr. Evans would determine that everyone who should be there was there and tell the general manager it was time to take the curtain up. Then he would stand with Mr. Azenberg and Mr. Simon at the back of the house. Mr. Evans still remembers a night at the Ahmanson, a large theater in Los Angeles, when Barbara Barrie delivered a big line and "it smacked through that audience like a tidal wave," he says, "kind of bouncing off the walls and bouncing back." He adds, "It's amazing when somebody has the ability to communicate like that."

For Mr. Simon, those openings are "like going through the fire."

"You're always looking for someone to help the show, protect the show," he says.

It was natural, then, that Mr. Simon and Mr. Evans would discuss Mr. Simon's need for a kidney.

"We were talking about it," Mr. Simon says. "I said, `I just need to get a kidney somewhere.' Bill said, `Well, I'll give you one.' I said, `You would?' He said, `Let me think about it.' He wanted to call Chuck. And he called me the next day and said he would."

"It was like, matter of fact, calm, `I can do it,' " Mr. Simon says. "I was shocked. I thought, then, how ideal he was. There were no children, and if the match was right, and he was younger than me, he makes me younger."

Did Mr. Simon try to talk him out of it? "No, I was too needy. I was overwhelmed."

Explaining why he offered a kidney, in a discussion at which Mr. Simon is not present, Mr. Evans gets perilously close to the glop factor, which he keeps fretting about. "I don't think this should be in the paper," he says. "It's so sappy." Then the explanation: Mr. Simon is like family to him and his parents raised him to believe that if a loved one is in trouble, you show up. When Mr. Evans had some personal problems, Mr. Simon was there for him. Mr. Evans spent much of his life just sort of falling into things. This is a decision he makes. He researched it and found you can lead a perfectly normal life with one kidney.

In the discussion with Mr. Simon present, Mr. Evans's tone is more restrained.

His mother, sister, brother and partner are "completely supportive," he says. "They realized it is a family. It wasn't like this was somebody they were not very acquainted with; it's someone who has been crucial in my life."

Mr. Simon speaks: "The doctor had told me the donor gets, I don't want to use the word `thrill,' but the donor gets more out of it than you do in a way. In a sense, they're saving a life. I'm getting the life."

The surgery was done by a Rogosin Institute Transplantation Center team at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Cornell. Mr. Evans and Mr. Simon and their partners waited together in pre-op and Mr. Evans noticed that when Mr. Simon suddenly threw up, Ms. Joyce grabbed a wastebasket without batting an eye. Then Mr. Evans and Mr. Simon were taken to adjoining operating rooms.

"That was my biggest fear, that it would drop," Mr. Simon says. " `All right, we'll get another one. Chuck? Ready?' "

The surgery was performed on a Tuesday. That weekend, Mr. Evans was home with Mr. Fischer, walking the dog around the block — "the slowest walk she's ever had," Mr. Evans said. The procedure is more painful for the donor than the recipient, doctors say. But Mr. Evans, asked about that, recalls nothing memorable.

Mr. Simon and Mr. Evans intended to keep the surgery private, but word got out. So many flowers arrived at Mr. Evans's apartment that his partner had to bring them up in a luggage cart.

"Get rid of them," Mr. Evans remembers saying. "It's too much!"

The reaction from people he knows was overwhelming, Mr. Evans says later. But there is something else. He was unprepared for the intensity of his own emotions. Still, this is what he thinks it is all about: he is a gay man — if things had been different when he was a younger man, he might have adopted children; in those days, though, that wasn't done. Friends who have had children have said it changed them, and now he understands. Giving a kidney is as close as he will come to giving life.

Another discussion, this one on the phone, with Mr. Simon. In his 1996 memoir, "Rewrites," he wrote that it has always been difficult for him to call a friend and ask for a favor. If Mr. Evans had not made the offer, would he have been able to ask?

"No," Mr. Simon says.