“And do what?” I wanted to know.

“Nothing. Just be there. They want a Jewish writer in their home.”

“Do I get paid for this?”

“No. But you get several days off. And they have a wonderful chef.”

Gelfman was surprised when I said I wasn’t interested.

“I thought it would be right up your alley.”

“It’s not. Actually, it’s the worst offer I’ve ever received.”

“Fine,” he said, irritably. “I’ll call Dan Greenburg.”

The Caracas invitation was another story. It was not a Lake Como proposal, but it was close.

The idea was to put a group of American artists and intellectuals together with their Latin American counterparts in an attractive setting—the Hotel Avila in Caracas, Venezuela—and to see what came of it. Among those from the States were Lillian Hellman, Ada Louise Huxtable, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and, as it’s put on the television variety shows, “a host of others.” I was part of a youthful contingent that included Claude Brown, Jules Feiffer, and Jack Richardson. My play Scuba Duba was having a strong run in Manhattan, which would have accounted for my being asked along. This was heady company for me. There was a suspicion that the enterprise had been sponsored by the CIA, in an effort to smoke out Cold War chicanery. If so, little profit would have come of it. During one session, a journalist from Brazil took exception to a position the United States had taken on an issue related to Central America. When asked, sharply, by Arthur Schlesinger, what the correct stance should have been, he said: “I’m not sure.”

That was pretty much the extent of the political intrigue.

We got off the ground with what I recall as a solemn processional to a local bordello—as if we were making a scholarly investigation of the local customs and mores. One of our number, an early deconstructionist, got caught up in the sybaritic merry-making and was not seen again for the duration of the conference. Claude Brown, author of the celebrated Manchild in the Promised Land, had a reputation as a jazz musician. For the delectation of the ladies, he sat at the piano and played “Heart and Soul.” Jack Richardson thought this an odd selection, considering the setting. Brown’s performance inspired an economist in our group to sit on the lap of a resident lady, thrust his tongue down her throat, then leap off and call his wife in Manhattan to beg her forgiveness for his transgression.

I chose the most attractive of the women. It was the only time in our long friendship that I was quicker on the draw than Richardson.

For some mysterious reason, I was encouraged to participate in a panel discussion having to do with the pros and cons of modern art. The critic Harold Rosenberg, a bearded and fierce-looking man, staked out his position, then whipped his head in my direction as if challenging me to find flaws in his thesis. I muttered something to the effect that Picasso’s Blue Period was “a nice little period.” Then, falling into the spirit of it, I whipped my head around fiercely to the next participant. There seemed to be quite a bit of that going on. Later, at dinner, I was seated beside Robert Lowell. He stared blankly ahead through several courses, then suddenly, in what seemed to be the conference style, did another head-whipper and mystifyingly berated me for personally holding down the Palestinians. The outburst threw me off stride. I tend to be wary of poets generally, afraid I’m going to be quizzed on layers of meaning in The Waste Land. Still, I pulled myself together and continued to enjoy the best steak I’d ever eaten.

The panel moved on to a discussion of literature, the critic Alfred Kazin holding forth at length on the wonders to be found in the novels of Herman Melville. I had met Kazin briefly at a book party, was aware of his eminence, and was quoted in a local newspaper as having said: “You’re Alfred Kazin … and you’re just standing there, like a normal person?” After the critic’s talk had wound down, something impelled me to get to my feet and say a word on behalf of “our young writers” who had not yet become Herman Melvilles.

“Surely,” I heard myself say, as if I were Disraeli, “we did not come all this way to inform our Latin American colleagues that Moby-Dick has merit.”

The comment drew an appreciative chuckle from Elizabeth Hardwick, thus making the moment a high point of my trip. It seemed only fair that I then list the names of the writers who were being slighted, but suddenly I could not think of who they were and took my seat with a certain awkwardness. Further along, I thought of Terry Southern and Thomas Pynchon, among others, but by that time the discussion had moved on to another topic, and I could only whisper their names to a puzzled Jules Feiffer.

There was a reception for our group, given by a wealthy Venezuelan whose home was filled with major works of contemporary art and sculpture that would have been recognizable to anyone who had only the most glancing acquaintance with modern art. Priceless sculptures were placed casually about the main hall. At one point, as I relaxed, with a drink in my hand, I was told, gently, that I was leaning on a Marisol. Drums could be heard in the hills above us, along with periodic gunshots. An unforgivably beautiful hostess said that disaffected groups were a stone’s throw away.

“When it suits them they will come,” she said (noirishly?) and with a shrug. “And they will take everything, including me.” Later in the evening, she said to me: “You’re deep, aren’t you. Perhaps too deep.” For all of that, I could not pry her away from Richardson. I imagine she felt he was just deep enough.

A poker game started up the next day beside the pool hotel. One advantage of being a poor player is that you can spot someone who is even worse at it than you are. Lillian Hellman, who was such a case, sat prominently at the head of the table, trying to fill inside straights and betting into hands that even a neophyte would recognize as unbeatable. But all the while, she took languorous puffs of a cigarette and gave off the picture of a consummate gambler, which she may have thought she was. It was a costly pose, but seemed worth it to her to be thought of as “one of the guys.”

Toward the end of our conference, she asked if I would like to spend a few weeks with her, touring the Caribbean and, I would imagine, gambling at the casinos. I thought it was brave of her to ask, and this was one of the few times in my life when I was at loose ends and didn’t have much else to do. But I turned down the offer. Though I wasn’t familiar with her plays (I was later to enjoy her books, particularly An Unfinished Woman), I was intimidated by her fame. Then, too, the prospect of strolling up to the desk of the San Juan Hilton with a woman three decades my senior was unappealing. (I don’t need to be told that the reverse situation would have been acceptable.) But finally, none of that mattered. (I’ve thought about this often.) She seemed depressed; I had a broken marriage and I was depressed enough for the two of us.

I took a stroll along the beach with the political columnist Max Lerner. He told me at length of his affair with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. (As a lover, in terms of chronology, I believe he was wedged between Eddie Fisher and Michael Wilding.) After tending to the actress in Los Angeles, during one of her illnesses, he returned to London, there to endure a lover’s agony over the romance. “I could not believe my situation,” he said to himself, as he rolled around in torment on his hotel bed. “There I was, a short, fat, aging Jewish intellectual, albeit a married one, having an affair with a woman who was—not even arguably—the most beautiful creature on the planet. What on earth was I to do?”

As we returned from our talk, we ran into Arthur Schlesinger. “You poor man,” the historian said to me, “Max has obviously been telling you his Liz Taylor story.”

Bruce Jay Friedman, the author of Stern, The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life, and the off-Broadway hit Steambath, is a novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter. He was born and lives in New York City. This is excerpted from Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman. Copyright © Bruce Jay Friedman, 2011. Reprinted by permission of Biblioasis.

Now Friedman has written Lucky Bruce, a memoir that takes readers from his Depression-era childhood in the Bronx to his time in Hollywood, with stops along the way at Elaine’s and other literati hangouts. He recalls his long friendships with Mario Puzo and Joseph Heller and recounts amusing run-ins with Norman Mailer, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, and many others, all with his famous dark humor. His passion for writing, and admiration for those who do it well, is ever present. (You can read an excerpt from Lucky Bruce here.)

Tablet Magazine’s Ellen Umansky spoke to Friedman—or BJF, as he’s known to many—about his storied career. [Running time: 21:46.]

How did Phillip Roth and Bruce Jay Friedman, who both began as comedic, self-effacing writers, end up with such completely different literary legacies? That’s the question Meg Wolitzer asked in 2006, when one of Friedman’s later books, Sexual Pensées, was published. It’s a question worth revisiting in light of Friedman’s soon-to-be-released memoir, Lucky Bruce.

Friedman, perhaps best known to the masses as the writer of Splash, the lovable 1984 film starring Darryl Hannah as a mermaid and Tom Hanks as the human in love with her, also wrote the short story upon which The Heartbreak Kid was based; another book of Friedman’s was adapted into the Steve Martin comedy The Lonely Guy; and so on. Yet despite far more commercial success and high-profile billings, Friedman remains the lesser-known writer of the two in the canon of post-war Jewish male writers in America.

Wolitzer has several theories, including Roth’s heroic sheer output as well as his political awareness, and including also the stigma that no doubt attaches to Friedman in literary circles over the perception (or reality) that he “went Hollywood.” But most persuasively of all, Wolitzer argues: “Utimately it’s the actual nature of Friedman’s fiction that has affected his standing—at least in comparison to someone like Roth’s. Over the years, Friedman has stayed “funny,” while Roth, mostly, has not.”

Read Funny Guys Finish Last, by Meg Wolitzer

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, isn’t it.”

“How can you say that,” said a stray uncle, wandering by. “Which one of us knows such things. Maybe it will. Then again, maybe it won’t.” That night there was a need to get away, to sail as quickly as possible into the eye of the marriage, and off they went, south, driving in a frenzy, all that afternoon, all that night. Once, bleary-eyed, they had gone through a Southern town with two wheels up on a sidewalk. Later, moving through a misted patch of farmland, Cantrow spotted a monster turkey, his first live one, and gunned the motor, thinking it was a dreaded hawk. Only once had they stopped, for chocolate frosteds, Cantrow tipping his into her lap. With soaked shorts, she broke into laughter, then chuckled her way through five more towns. This is the kind of sense of humor she has, Cantrow thought. And I didn’t even catch that.

Curling from side to side, as though the car itself were drunk, they were somehow blessed, missing head-on collisions; at the hotel, Cantrow told the clerk, “We’re not bums,” and got a room. Upstairs, zombielike, they made a feeble pass at sex, wanting to try it married, but collapsed instead into sleep. Two hours later, hardly fresh, Cantrow awoke and stared at his bride’s slack form. So that’s what I’ve got, he thought. Maybe for forty-seven years.

Down below, at poolside, the lifeguard winked and said, “Ho, ho, ho,” a standard greeting to honeymooners. The pool water slapped Cantrow awake; so did a blond girl, sitting at the edge. She had a nice fleshiness, a good hundred thirty pounds to his bride’s hundred four. He caught her scent, too, just like honey. He had never really smelled honey, but guessed it must be in that family.

“I didn’t know they allowed big puppies in pools,” she said. And now there was her voice, crushed, feminine for a change. At a club, once, he had introduced his bride to a football-star friend of his. “She’s okay,” the friend had said privately, “but I could never live with those pipes of hers.”

Cantrow fished himself out of the water and sat by the girl’s side. She was eighteen, from Minnesota, vacationing between semesters. These were her folks, at the terrace bar, the heavyset man and the handsome woman in the white silk dress. Cantrow and the girl kidded around, wound up tickling each other. Then the shadow of the hotel seemed to fall on his back like a heavy beam. “You probably know I’m married,” he said. “Just since yesterday. Down here on my honeymoon.”

“And what else is new,” she said. Cheered on, Cantrow told her some jokes; they teased each other. But there was a whisper of difference. Before it became a roar, Cantrow suddenly panicked, took her arm and said, “Look, this is crazy, but I’ve got to see you one more time and find out something. I really have to.” Their glances met, combined, turned soft together.

“We don’t stay here,” she said. “At the Regent.”

“I’ll be there at six,” he said. “I’ll work it out. For cocktails.”

“Guess who I met at the pool,” he told his bride, later, in the room. “Crazy guy from school, Blaum, always wore a tooth around his neck, called it the Sacred Tooth of Mickasee. Didn’t care what you did to him, beat him up, anything, long as you didn’t touch his tooth. ‘Fool with my tooth and you’re in trouble,’ he’d say to you. Anyway, I told him I’d meet him later tonight for a drink. No girls, though. He’s not himself when any are around and I want to see him carry on about that tooth again.” He hurried on. “I’ll just have a quick one with him and then I’ll come back and we can really start.”

In the early evening, he dressed carefully, getting his hair just right, one loop down over the eye, with feigned carelessness, for extra appeal. At the Regent, she sat with her folks at a table, but joined him immediately at the bar. He liked the size of her in heels, the weight of her, the bounce of her hair, the honeyed look. A combo began to work in a deep beat; he gathered her in, made it once around the floor, then put his nose in her hair and said, “That did it. Over to your folks we go.”

The parents were pushed back from the table, comfortable, expectant, as though waiting for a curtain to part. Cantrow stood before them and began to speak, then said, “Hold it a second,” and unbuckled his belt for comfort. “Okay, sir,” he said, “I’ve just made one helluva mistake, about the biggest one a guy can make. But I met your daughter and I’m undoing it, no matter what it takes. You see, I got married yesterday and I’m down here on my honeymoon, but it was a bad idea from the beginning. There wasn’t a damned thing in the world between us and I just got married because it seemed like the only way out. Anyway, I met your daughter and she’s the one I want. I know it’s crazy, but I could tell in a second. You should see the difference between them. There’s no comparison. I just had to be with her a few minutes and I saw all the things I was really after. She’s easier, more feminine, just real comfortable to be with. I don’t know exactly what I expect from you. What I’d like, really, is for you to study the look in my eyes and know that I’ve never been more sincere in my life and that I’m not fooling around and that I’m the right guy for her. I’m getting out of the thing and then I’m coming after your daughter, but I just wanted to lay it out on the table and see how it struck you, whether you were with me or against me.”

The father yawned, drummed his fingers on the table and said, “Not if they stripped me naked and dragged me four times around the world. Over the desert, through the jungle, under the seven seas.”

“Okay,” said Cantrow. “Long as we’re clear. But you don’t know me, sir. You don’t know what I can do. I’m coming after her anyway. Once I make up my mind on something, that’s it.

“First thing I’ve got to do is get out of it,” he said, with a bow to the parents. “You take it easy, honey,” he said, pecking her on the cheek.

“But I listen to my father,” she said, as he walked to the door.

“Another thing about you that turns me on.”

Pale and angular, Cantrow’s bride slapped on pancake before a mirror. “Hold it, hold it,” he said, tearing into the room. “Whoa. We’re not going out tonight. Any night, for that matter, unless we meet some day later on as platonic friends, and I’m not even really sure of that. There was no Blaum and no tooth. That is, there is a Blaum and the tooth part was no lie either, but I didn’t just meet him. It’s a new girl I ran into at the pool. I don’t see any point in describing what went on, because that would be just like waving a red flag in your face. What’s important is us and how flat it’s always been when you take away those first few weeks, just one, if you really want to be strict about it. Look, I’m pulling out. I admit, I shouldn’t have gone this far, but I didn’t see it clearly until just before at the pool. There’s a whole other way. With us, it would be one long downhill ride. Get yourself someone else. I admit, I’ll be a little shaky on that issue if I stop and think about it, but I can stand it. Meanwhile, I’m on my way.”

“And I’m supposed to just listen to that.”

“Oh, we can kick it around if you like,” said Cantrow, packing, “but how’d you like to lift this hotel on your back and move it across the street. That’s roughly what you’d be up against trying to talk me out of this thing I’ve got in my head. Look, here’s three hundred dollars for openers. I’m throwing in the car and just holler if you think that’s not generous. The funny thing is, as we’re making this break, I’m starting to like you more already.

“Maybe,” he said, slamming shut his suitcase, “years later, when the sting is out of it for both of us, we really can meet for dinner.”

That night, Cantrow flew north and woke up Wenger, his attorney-cousin, at midnight. “Cantrow with an emergency,” he said. “Remember that marriage I told you about? I’ve got to get out of it now. We were just hitched for the shortest time you can imagine and then the whole thing blew up. Anyway, I’m actually out of it already since there isn’t anything—tornadoes, nuclear war, you name it—that could get me back in. So you just take care of the legal part. I’ve got five grand from the service and believe me it wasn’t easy to save. Cut down on everything, meals included, to get it together. Anyway, use the whole bundle if you need to and keep the change. Just get me out.”

“If we weren’t cousins, you wouldn’t call me at this hour.”

“I’ll stick around one week, in case there are papers. Then I’m getting into something else.”

“Hi, Mom,” said Cantrow at his folks’ apartment. “The entire marriage is down the drain, but don’t worry, I’m in good health and got out clean.”

“I saw the whole thing coming,” said Cantrow’s mother. “If you’d asked me, I could have recited the entire story before it happened. Okay, how about a trip to Europe, all expenses for a month. To clear your head.”

“No, Mom, I’m bunking in here for a week, then I’ve got to go out to the Midwest on something.”

“I knew it,” she said. “Another little winner. One wasn’t enough for my son. I can tell you the end of this story, too, if you want to sit and listen.”

With great crankiness, Wenger gave the go-ahead and Cantrow took a plane west, then tracked the girl down to a small teachers’ college of Episcopal persuasion. Off-campus she lived with her folks and came home for meals. His first night in town, Cantrow announced his presence to her mother at the door. “Hi, you probably remember me from the resort hotel. I don’t expect you to let me see your daughter right off, but I thought I’d let you know I’m here and that wasn’t a wild story I’d made up when I saw you at the bar.”

“My daughter’s preparing for bed,” said the mother, easing the door shut. “She studies very hard and needs her sleep.”

Later that night, Cantrow asked around and smoked out his one rival, a fair-skinned fellow of strange, shifting sexuality. Sliding in beside him at a bleakly lit campus hangout, Cantrow ordered the local special, beer and braunschweiger sandwiches, and said, “Hi, I’ve just gotten down here and what I’m after is Sue Ellen Parker. Now look, we can do this like gentlemen, you just tapering off with another date or two to save face, or else we can go to muscle. You look pretty well set up, but the point is, if we fight, it doesn’t matter how it goes. If you take me boxing, I’ll bring in karate and if you know that I’ll go to guns.”

“Would you really do all those things,” said the fellow with a wet stare, kaleidoscopically shifting sexes before Cantrow’s very eyes.

The road partially clear, Cantrow called the girl herself. “I’d be teasing if I pretended not to be flattered, but it’s just so completely out of the question,” she said. “I mean with Mother and Dad. And me, sort of.” Undismayed, driven, Cantrow hung on, peppered her with calls, nourished himself on her great phone voice. One night that honeyed blond fragrance seemed to trickle through the wire. She said she would sneak out and meet him on the corner. Cantrow hired a car, scooped her up and off they drove in silence to a wooded place she knew. Thin, towering Minnesota trees, crowded together, stripped and haunted. “I won’t sleep with you tonight,” she said, as they left the car, “but let’s take off our clothes and run through there, as far as we can go.”

“Suits me,” said Cantrow, knowing instantly he’d been right about her.

And so they began. All the things he had missed. Nude walks and swims. Hours of savoring honeyed flesh. Sudden love, almost anywhere, under stairwells, beneath a tree. Giving everything. Wonder of wonders. Getting back. “I knew I wasn’t crazy,” he told her one night, bewitched, at some lake’s edge. “It must have been a hell of a jolt to all concerned, but I knew I was on the right track.”

A month later she phoned, out of breath. “Dad’s calling a truce. From now on, it’s the front door for us, darling.” Legitimate now, Cantrow arrived that night in a suit and tie. “I never thought I’d see the day I’d be doing this,” said her father, “But let’s have us a handshake. You Eastern fellows sure are determined. Well, more power to you, son.”

Later that night, passion undiminished, they made love in the parlor. The next night in her very room. Pacing himself, Cantrow waited another week, then told her, “Look, I haven’t been fooling around.”

“I know, darling, I feel the same way. I’ve already said something and the folks’ answer is, of course, anything we want.”

With blurred speed, the wedding plans were made. Cantrow’s folks declined, but Wenger, the lawyer, came west with the final papers. Soon Cantrow, who had always dreamed of tails, stood erect in them and watched strange blond people with great Scandinavian profiles mill around him at the church. Mr. Parker came over, cuffed him in friendliness and said, “Now this is one for the books, isn’t it. The first time you came up to us and now here we are. I think it’s great though, kind of thing you see in the movies.” He disappeared in a swirl of guests. Mrs. Parker took his place. Solid, tanned gold, an easeful ripened version of her daughter. She took his arm and said, “I want you to know how warming I find all of this. And I have a confession to make. Even at the hotel I just knew. There was something so profound about the cast of your neck and shoulders.”

“And how about how I feel,” said Cantrow. “I get sick when I think of how I could have let the whole thing slide and muffed the chance of a lifetime. Sue Ellen. Being here in Minnesota. The things that have happened. Mr. Parker. You. Even the way you just said that. That it was all so warming. And what was that word you used about my neck and shoulders. You know once in a while I’d check myself in mirrors and there really was something about them, although I guess I’d be the last one to say it about myself. But what was that you called them? Profound.

“Oh, Jesus, look,” he said covering her hand. “I wonder if we could just talk for a second, I’ll talk and you don’t say a word till I’m finished.”

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 gets crushed and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” segues into “Hava Nagila.” Lila has a Noo Yawk accent, dark hair, and a certain voluptuousness; the critic Pauline Kael described her as “a middle-class Jewish peasant, her ripe lusciousness a cartoon of sensuality.” (That Berlin is the daughter of the film’s director, Elaine May, suggests the caricature was affectionate.) Down in Miami on his honeymoon, Lenny meets Kelly, a fair-haired, blue-eyed dream girl (played with haughty refinement by Cybill Shepherd), who appears before him on a beach in a halo of sunlight. Lenny soon disposes of his bride and shows up, post-divorce, at Kelly’s Minnesota college; she’s surrounded by hulking football players who fit into Friedman’s genus of “strange blond people with great Scandinavian profiles.” Her dad (a Brylcreemed Eddie Albert) calls Lenny a “New York wiseguy” and tries to buy him off, but soon caves in and lets him marry her. In a church.

In The New York Times, Vincent Canby called The Heartbreak Kid “a first-class American comedy, as startling in its way as was The Graduate.” He also noted that it “begins as a rather familiar New York Jewish comedy,” which tells you something about Hollywood movies of that era. It was a time when Woody Allen’s filmmaking career was taking off (thanks mostly to Canby, Allen’s most prominent cheerleader), Simon’s plays (such as The Odd Couple) were being made into hit movies, and obviously ethnic actors like Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, and George Segal were getting cast in lead roles in M*A*S*H, Midnight Cowboy, and The Owl and the Pussycat.

In Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s remake of The Heartbreak Kid, opening Friday, the only Jewish thing about Cantrow—now a San Franciscan named Eddie—is the person playing him: Ben Stiller, whom the critic David Denby once called “the latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on the make.” The Farrelly brothers—known for There’s Something About Mary (which also starred Stiller) and other comedies combining outrageous vulgarity with winning sentimentality—upend the original’s assimilationist theme, making Lila

Ben Stiller and Malin Ackerman

(Malin Ackerman), Eddie’s bride, the seemingly perfect blond goddess. On his honeymoon in Mexico the dream girl Eddie meets is Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), a witty, down-to-earth brunette from Mississippi. Yet there’s nothing “Southern” about her; as Eddie points out, she doesn’t even have an accent. The Farrellys are notorious for exploiting and then subverting all kinds of stereotypes—fat people, disabled people, the mentally ill, the Amish—and here the targets are gays, Mexicans, and accented Southerners. (Eddie refers to Miranda’s extended family as “good rednecks, like Jimmy Carter.”) But they leave the Jews alone. While the plot takes Eddie into completely new places (including a bizarre illegal-immigrant third-act interlude), the new ending—a dark punch line—is actually truer to the spirit of Friedman’s story.

The first movie was a sharp-edged satire in which Cantrow had to face the melancholy consequences of attaining his shiksa trophy; the new one is a raunchy romp that mocks the fantasy of true love even as it hinges on it. Once you’ve added a sex-crazed bride and a poisonous jellyfish whose sting requires urine as an antidote, who needs subtext?

“You didn’t love it,” I said, after reading the story. “The author hasn’t played fair with the reader. He’s tacked on an ending that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t grow indigenously from the materials he’s presented.”

“I don’t care,” she said, crisply summing up the marriage. “I loved it anyway.”

“Try to stay awake,” I said. It was late at night in Great Neck, Long Island. “I’ll show you a story that will prove my point.”

She agreed. I generally have a few half-formed notions floating around in my head, ready to be topped off at some future point. I went to work on one of them in the attic, a large, comfortable space with a cot, an oaken desk, and a picture window that looked out on the backyards of a cluster of psychiatrists who had been drawn to the neighborhood. I found it perfect for taking naps—and occasionally doing some work.

Jeannie Berlin and Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, 1972

I had come up with a number of stories in this makeshift “office,” although I don’t recall spinning them off quite so easily, and certainly not in the two hours it took me that night to complete this story. “Change of Plan” deals with a young Jewish man named Leonard Cantrow who gets married, drives to Miami with his bride, and on the second day of his honeymoon sees and falls in love with a blonde, shiksa goddess. Rather than let this remain a fantasy (as the author did in real life) Cantrow declares that his marriage is over, and pursues (successfully) his golden-haired princess to freezing Minnesota.

When I got back to the bedroom, my wife was asleep. Rather than wake her, I put the story in an envelope, and mailed it the next morning to my agent, the soon-to-become iconic Candida Donadio. (Her clients at the time included the relatively unknown Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Mario Puzo, and Peter Mathiessen.) We’d had some victories before, among them a good many stories and the novels Stern and A Mother’s Kisses. Donadio sent the new piece to Esquire, which bought it immediately. The fiction editor—Robert Brown, by nature a timid man—told me later that he had stormed into the office of the editor in chief, Harold Hayes, flung the story down on his desk, and said, “If you don’t buy this story, I quit.”

“Change of Plan” was published in 1966 without a word changed. Generally, when a story appears, the author might hear from a nephew in Fort Lauderdale, who says he enjoyed it—and it quietly disappears. With great luck, it might turn up in a collection of the author’s stories or, in some cases, an anthology of related pieces. Once in a while, there is a happier scenario. It doesn’t mean the story is better or worse than others—only that it’s hit a nerve. Such was the case with “Change of Plan.” I can’t say that I was immediately “deluged” with film offers, but there were three or four within days of publication, which was deluge enough for me.

The one I found most appealing came from Max Rosenberg, a producer of horror films and Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party. His plan was to do a three-segment film, combining my piece with one by the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien and another by Pinter. Very good company indeed, for the snobbish likes of me. I wrote a screenplay for my story. For the part of Cantrow, the producer had in mind Elliott Gould, who was married to Barbra Streisand at the time. The Rosenberg film was never made, there being a traditional resistance in Hollywood to “anthology films.” Neil Simon and Palomar Pictures (and the director Elaine May) came into the picture then. By then Simon had written a dizzying string of Broadway successes, including Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. To do the screenplay, Simon went off to Majorca, which is where all screenwriters should be fortunate enough to do their film work. Some years later, Edgar Scherick, who produced the movie, told me that Simon had phoned him and said: “I can’t write this. The main character does not have a single redeeming quality.”

“Did he return the money?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then you had nothing to worry about.”

The film was released in 1972 and starred Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as the rejected bride, and Eddie Albert as Shepherd’s father—a memorable performance for which he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was the first story of mine to be adapted. My feeling about having work adapted, generally, is that once the check is cashed it’s best to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Richard Pryor told me that a writer once complained to him that his novel had been mangled on the screen. Pryor listened patiently, then asked, “Did you get paid?”

But there is no other way to put this—I absolutely loved The Heartbreak Kid. It’s as if I’d sketched out a floor plan and May and Simon had used it to construct a dream house. My story had a different ending. The “hero” becomes enraptured by his new bride’s mother. There is a hint that he will run off with her. In the film version, Grodin, having secured his blonde goddess, sits beside some children at a wedding reception and wonders what he’s accomplished—and what he’s going to do next. I liked my ending and I liked Simon’s. There are others that might have worked as well.

The reception of the film was enthusiastic and became even more so as the years rolled along. Though never a monster at the box office, The Heartbreak Kid settled in comfortably as a “cult classic.” Pauline Kael adored it. Neil Simon considered it his favorite among his movies. Several women’s groups demurred (my first and inevitable “demurred”), feeling that the main character was a bit swinish and his wife treated shabbily. My response to such criticism is to brandish the word “satire”—and to walk away quickly.

After the film’s release, I met Simon for the first time and asked him how he could have gotten into the mind of the main character.

“I pretended I was you.”

“But you’ve just met me.”

“Didn’t matter. I’d read your books. And for God’s sakes, couldn’t you have made the story a bit longer?” (and, by implication, made his job easier).

I could have written more, of course, but it was stuffy in the attic and I was racing to go downstairs before my wife fell asleep.

Despite his quibble about the story’s length, Simon was more than kind to me in the future. A decade later, he turned my book The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life into the Steve Martin film The Lonely Guy. (Alert: self-serving anecdote coming up.)

At a speaking engagement in East Hampton, an audience member asked Simon why, in the way of other playwrights, he hadn’t done more adaptations.

“I only adapt Friedman,” he said.

I’d sold the rights for a modest sum—“found money,” I felt—and cheerfully went about my business. But one morning I received in the mail an envelope from Bristol/Myers Squibb. Probably a toothpaste sample, I thought, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Then I realized that I really enjoy trying out new toothpastes, not to mention that I was a bit down at the heels at the moment. I retrieved the envelope. Inside was a royalty check for $25,000 (the company had been an unlikely backer of the film), a princely sum at the time and hardly a disgraceful one now.

Simon thought, at one point, that the movie would be a good basis for a Broadway musical. I’m told that he auditioned several composers (one of them, Edward Kleban, the poor man who wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the score for Chorus Line) none of whom quite worked out. Among the rejected ones was Dorothy Fields, who had written 400 songs, among them one of my favorites, “The Way You Look Tonight.” Fields sought me out and insisted on my giving her a second opinion. I agreed to meet her at a steakhouse called Nickels on the Upper East Side. She was a large, 60ish woman with an operatic style, who appeared not to be as robust as she might have been some years before. We took a corner banquette in the crowded restaurant. Before I could take a sip of my drink, she burst into “Lila’s Lament”—a song she had composed for the rejected wife. With a packed restaurant of stunned diners looking on, she sang full-throatedly, looking directly at me, and making a variety of faces to match the sentiments of the lyrics. Since I’d never been sung at publicly, and at such great volume, I wasn’t quite sure of how to react and tried a variety of expressions, mostly soulful, in response to hers. I understood why it hadn’t worked out for Simon, but I did feel awful for Fields, who died soon afterward.

Thinking back, I suppose those days were heady ones for me, though they didn’t seem so at the time. I thought this was the way things were supposed to be. After struggling for a decade, I’d published two successful novels. My short stories were being snapped up as fast as I could write them—or so it seemed—and the first two plays I tried (Scuba Duba and Steambath) were hits, a term that my British friends find offensive. In the great tradition, I was “flown out to the Coast” to write the Lenny Bruce story. When I backed away, I was offered a substantial sum to “stay interested” for another month—money that I earned, incidentally, by reading truckloads of Bruce correspondence and depositions. Soon afterward, I was “flown out” once again to write the screenplay version of the play Owl and the Pussycat, which eventually starred Barbra Streisand and George Segal. The most notable part of that experience was having the actress Natalie Wood assigned to me as a secretary. I didn’t think I needed a secretary, but Ray Stark, the producer, insisted that I have one and sent over the star of Splendor in the Grass. She was good at the job, although, perhaps understandably, I tensed up a bit during our sessions. (It’s my understanding that her psychiatrist recommended she take a job away from acting to help her with her depression.)

My feelings about Hollywood have always been ambivalent. Generationally, as a novelist, my heroes were the usual suspects: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. Scribner’s—not Warner Brothers—was the temple, and the editor Maxwell Perkins was the High Priest. Screenwriting, at the time, was considered sort of down market. There were women in Greenwich Village—trust me on this—who wouldn’t consider you as a lover if you worked on films, or if you “sold out” and “allowed” your novel to be bought by the movies (which is what we called them until “film” took over.) After I’d written Stir Crazy, which was released to much success in 1980, the starry-eyed young attorney who handled the contract told me that I was “the hottest writer in Hollywood.” The thought so horrified me that I disappeared for a year and wrote a novel, Tokyo Woes—a “purifying” effort that doubled back on me when the rights were sold to a film producer.

Having said all this (a favorite term used by producers who are preparing to give an inch—and no more) the film world has always treated me generously. My efforts were professional, but I always felt, often correctly, that I was being rewritten as I wrote. Others, as usually happens, were called in—sometimes by the dozen—to “improve” my work. And improve it they occasionally did. Mario Puzo was paid a million dollars for the screenplay of The Cotton Club—and there is not a single line of his dialogue in the film. It’s the nature of the beast, and on occasion it can be a handsome beast indeed. But it requires that the writer be a team player, and in that sense I never entirely measured up. It’s fun to see your name on the Big Screen. But I’ve never felt that pride of authorship that comes along with the publication of a novel, or short story, or, for the most part, a play. There are so many hands, many of them gifted, that touch the great machine that becomes a movie—even an awful one. And no one needs me to point out that it’s the director who “writes” the movie—although honorable men (and alright, women) have come to blows on this point.

My involvement in The Heartbreak Kid was the most pleasurable of my Hollywood adventures. I enjoyed the subsequent success of Stir Crazy and Splash—both written directly for the screen—and how could I not? But to the extent that I have a sensibility, it was the Neil Simon adaptation that picked up on it. And apart from the two hours in the attic, all I had do was sit back and enjoy the ride. No meetings, no huge sheaves of the dreaded “notes” that eventually drove me away from what is now called The Industry. All I had to do was show up at a theatre and enjoy the movie. It was certainly far better than anything I could have achieved on my own.

Ben Stiller and Malin Akerman in The Heartbreak Kid, 2007

The Heartbreak Kid has been remade, this time by the Farrelly Brothers, starring Ben Stiller, and will be released this Friday. I haven’t seen the script or the film, although I’m told by an agent that it is “vulgar and hilarious.” (The very words used to describe the plays of Aristophanes, incidentally.) Once again, there is very little for me to do except to watch the movie, take full credit for anything that‘s exceptional, and to deny involvement with any parts that aren’t.

There are some who feel more possessive about The Heartbreak Kid than I do. Why do it again? Why fool around with a classic comedy? For one thing—small matter—I don’t control the rights. And even if I did, my allegiance is always to the original story. There have been more than a hundred productions of my play Steambath. I’ve never felt it would be useful to run around the country and try to oversee the all-lesbian or all-black approaches to the play. Didn’t my grandmother have a Yiddish expression for my feelings? Luzhem spielen—“Let them play”?

Nothing much more of any note came out of that momentarily magical attic. We sold the house soon afterward. But though the story “Change of Plan” flourished, the marriage, alas, did not. A divorce followed a few years later—not, I would hope, as a by-product of the story. I’m told that a psychiatrist moved in at one point and may be sitting in the attic now, hard at work on a screenplay.