“Dear Bob,” begins a typewritten letter from Neil Simon to Bob Hope in which Simon diplomatically and hilariously turns down Hope’s request to perform with Bing Crosby in his comedy, “The Sunshine Boys.”

“If the audience would believe that Bob and Bing could portray two old Jews, then John Wayne should have been in ‘The Boys in the Band,’” Simon wrote. Still, the playwright did leave one possibility on the table: “If in the event you wish to convert and go through what would now be a painful circumcision,” he added, “I would certainly reconsider.”

This gem of a correspondence — the year it was written not yet pinned down —  is now quite literally a national treasure. It is among 7,700 manuscripts, letters and other material that Simon’s widow, Elaine Joyce, has donated to the Library of Congress. The major acquisition was formally announced April 25 at the library, at an event with Joyce, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, stars of the Broadway revival of Simon’s “Plaza Suite.”

“Neil really is for the people,” Joyce said in a telephone interview about her husband, who died in August 2018 at age 91. “This is America’s library, and this is where he belongs. He is America’s playwright.”

Parker, who plays a trio of Simon characters alongside her husband in the three playlets of “Plaza Suite,” said that speaking Simon’s lines nightly reinforces for her the durability of his impact. “It’s so deserving,” she said of adding the playwright’s papers to the nation’s leading literary repository. “One of the other joys of doing this is so many comedy writers have come to the show, writers who work in TV and cinema, and they all say the same thing: ‘That’s why we exist: Simon is the reason we are here.’”

After one of the library’s senior music specialists, Mark Eden Horowitz, finishes the task of cataloguing the Simon trove, researchers will have available a collection detailing a remarkable theatrical portfolio. The prolific Simon is considered one of the most successful writers Broadway ever produced, with more than 30 plays and musicals to his credit — not to mention his voluminous Hollywood output — over a career spanning decades.

“Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “The Sunshine Boys” are considered American classics, and “Lost in Yonkers,” the touching 1991 family drama that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, added a prestigious dimension to his shelves of Tonys, his Kennedy Center Honors and other awards.

The bonanza the library has reaped includes multiple drafts and script rewrites of all of these, both typed and handwritten, and hundreds more. Screenplays of “The Goodbye Girl,” which won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar, and “California Suite,” which won one for Maggie Smith, are there, as well as the librettos he contributed to musicals such as “Promises, Promises,” “Little Me,” “They’re Playing Our Song” and “Sweet Charity.”

“It’s everything I hoped it would be and more,” said Horowitz, whose job title doesn’t adequately describe the depth of his expertise in theater. His book, “The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II,” will be published next month.

The letters, in particular, reveal a sentimental side that the taciturn Simon tended not to show to the public. “I have long said that you are the best living American playwright,” he declared in a handwritten missive to Pittsburgh native August Wilson, “and you probably still will be when the word ‘living’ no longer applies.”

“There are a lot of photographs. There’s correspondence,” Horowitz said. “One odd thing is the notes that we found, just on pieces of paper. One of them that I will have on display Monday is just written on a napkin. You know, things that he passed to someone, like to say, ‘Guess who’s hungry for dinner?’ The biggest surprise is the artwork, which I had no hint about. There are about 20 notepads or sketchpads full of a wide variety of paintings, drawings, cartoons, watercolors. Some of them are quite good.”

Simon die-hards and theater scholars will doubtless be intrigued not only by the drafts of rarely revived plays such as “The Good Doctor,” “Proposals” and “Jake’s Women,” but also by the breathtaking number of fragmentary and unproduced plays and film scripts.

“There’s a screenplay for ‘The Merry Widows,’ which was written for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg,” Horowitz recounted. Simon also contemplated a musical built around tunes by George and Ira Gershwin that Horowitz said had alternate proposed titles: “Embraceable You” and “A Foggy Day.”

The collection contains notebooks, too, with drafts of the opening-night letters he wrote to the people in his shows, as was the case with the original 1991 “Lost in Yonkers” cast that included Irene Worth, Kevin Spacey, Mark Blum and Mercedes Ruehl.

“And not just to the cast,” Horowitz said, “but the set designer, the lighting designer, the casting director. And the one to Mercedes Ruehl makes me cry. It’s just heart-rending.”

Laughs, though, are what he’ll always be known for. Broderick, who essentially has been a Neil Simon interpreter throughout his professional life, got an astonishing break via the playwright at the start of his career: On the same day, he was cast as both Eugene Jerome in the original Broadway production of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and in Simon’s 1983 film comedy, “Max Dugan Returns.”

“He was always pretty nice to me, but he was professional. He kept a distance,” Broderick recalled over the phone. “In rehearsals, you would see him lean over into [director] Gene Saks. I would see Neil’s head whip over to Gene. And then Gene would say, ‘Um, can you not take that pause?’ If he was happy, Neil could be extremely generous and very kind.”

And appreciative, too, of his own wit. “He enjoyed his own jokes greatly,” Broderick said, adding that his speed at creating a great comic moment was uncanny. During a short break in rehearsals for “Biloxi Blues,” the second play in the “Brighton Beach” trilogy, Broderick said that Simon dashed off one of the funniest scenes in the play, involving Eugene’s sexual initiation. “He totally did it while we stood around,” he said.

The Neil Simon collection is not the library’s largest theater-related archive by a long shot: The papers and other items in Leonard Bernstein’s bequest, for example, total about 400,000, Horowitz said. Some of Simon’s original writing had gone to Harvard University. Joyce said she was impressed with how beautifully Harvard handled that material, but she decided that much of what she had of her husband’s output and memorabilia should go to the Library of Congress.

“I didn’t want to part with his stuff. I didn’t want to let him go,” she said. “I would go to the storage bin and just cry.” During the periods of pandemic shutdown, she added, she stayed in touch with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and her staff, and then, “Finally I called and said, ‘I’m ready for the movers.’”

“I hope the American people will share in some of his creativity and benefit deeply from this in whatever way,” she continued. “And I would love for someone to come along and write like Neil.”

Horowitz estimated that it will take another six months to go through all of the documents. “There’s a script for ‘Barefoot in the Park’ that’s so fragile that I’m afraid to even touch it because the paper is so old that it sort of frazzles away,” he said.

Joyce thinks the donation signals another beginning for a playwright who always believed in new ones. And why not? He titled one of his plays, after all, “Chapter Two.”

First Published: May 2, 2022, 10:00 a.m.