More in ‘The Heartbreak Kid’

And so finally, after four years of drift, they had found all exits barricaded and gotten married in a sudden spurt, bombing their parents with the news. A Justice had been rounded up, also uncles in the area. After the ceremony, Cantrow’s new father-in-law had taken him around and said, “It’s going to be great, ...

Cybill Shepherd and Charles Grodin
In the 1972 hit The Heartbreak Kid, screenwriter Neil Simon took the ethnic and class differences hinted at in Bruce Jay Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” and made them explicit. New Yorker Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting-goods salesman, marries Lila (Jeannie Berlin) in a ceremony where a wineglass ...

One night, in the mid-60s, my wife at the time, Ginger Friedman, turned to me and said she had read a short story in Reader’s Digest and loved it. I was suspicious. The magazine rarely printed fiction. What little they published was of a homespun variety.
“You didn’t love it,” I said, after reading the story. ...