Matty Simmons, who helped launch National Lampoon magazine and was instrumental in bringing into being its most famous side project, the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.
His son Michael confirmed his death.
In his 2012 book, “Fat, Drunk and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Simmons gave a succinct version of his unusual career path: “The Diners Club begat Weight Watchers Magazine, which begat the National Lampoon, and that begat ‘Animal House.’”
Mr. Simmons was a press agent in New York, with clubs and restaurants among his clients, when, in 1949, Frank McNamara, a businessman, and Ralph E. Schneider, a lawyer, asked him if he wanted to help them bring an idea they had to fruition. They envisioned a card that people could use instead of cash to pay for restaurant meals.
Their Diners Club Card helped usher in the era of credit cards. Diners Club International calls it “the world’s first multipurpose charge card,” and Mr. Simmons was at the lunch with Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider in February 1950 when a Diners Club Card was used for the first time, at Major’s Cabin Grill in Midtown Manhattan.
Mr. Simmons rose to vice president for sales of the new company and started The Diners Club Magazine. Publishing came to interest him more than sales did, so in the late 1950s he left the company and started his own, 21st Century Communications.
Weight Watchers asked him to help turn their corporate publication into a general-interest magazine, which he did in 1968, to considerable success. His company, he said, had a half-share stake in the new magazine, and with the profits he began looking to invest in other magazine projects. The president of a magazine distribution company introduced him to three young men from the student publication The Harvard Lampoon: Henry Beard, Robert Hoffman and Douglas Kenney.
Mr. Simmons helped them put out a parody of Life magazine, then a parody of Time. Then came National Lampoon, with Mr. Simmons as chairman. As National Lampoon grew more successful, it turned into a franchise, with stage shows, comedy albums and eventually “Animal House.”
The movie, directed by John Landis (who was then largely unknown) and produced by Mr. Simmons and Ivan Reitman, involved a troublemaking fraternity, Delta Tau Chi, and its ensemble cast featured John Belushi, who had become well known from “Saturday Night Live.”
“Animal House” became a cultural touchstone of sorts.
“I must have had 1,000 people say to me, ‘That was based on my fraternity,’” Mr. Simmons told the Postmedia Network in 2013. “It wasn’t; it wasn’t really anyone’s fraternity. But it’s everyone.”
Martin Gerald Simmons was born on Oct. 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. His father, Irving, was a sign painter, and his mother, Kate (Shapiro) Simmons, was a homemaker.
He graduated from Textile High School in Manhattan in 1942 and attended the City College of New York but dropped out. He worked briefly for The New York World-Telegram and Sun before being drafted into the Army. From 1944 to 1946 he served in the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., where he produced entertainment shows.
Mr. Simmons began working as a press agent after his discharge. He acknowledged that when he first heard the pitch from Mr. McNamara and Mr. Schneider about the Diners Club charge card, he wasn’t impressed.
“I told them I thought it was the worst idea I’d ever heard,” he told Adweek in 1990. “I never charged anything. In those days, most people didn’t.”
But the men won him over, and he embarked on the path that led to the founding of National Lampoon.
The first issue of the magazine appeared in April 1970. The Lampoon, which at its peak had a circulation of more than one million, was a defining force in satire during the 1970s and ’80s, thanks to a collection of writers and editors that included P.J. O’Rourke, Bruce McCall, Tony Hendra, Sean Kelly, Anne Beatts and Michael O’Donoghue.
“It was the greatest collection of humorists, over a 20-year period, since perhaps the days of the Algonquin Round Table,” Mr. Simmons wrote in “Fat, Drunk and Stupid.”
The magazine soon branched out into stage shows like “National Lampoon’s Lemmings,” a 1973 revue that packed the Village Gate in Greenwich Village and featured Mr. Belushi and his future “S.N.L.” cast mate Chevy Chase. There was also “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” as well as several record albums. In 1979 came “Delta House,” a short-lived TV series based on “Animal House”; Mr. Simmons was an executive producer.
He was often at odds with some of the key figures on the creative side of the National Lampoon enterprise. In 1978, for instance, he dismissed Mr. Kelly as editor of the magazine.
“After ‘Animal House’ came out, Matty Simmons decided this particular goose could lay larger, better-quality gold eggs if it emulated what he saw as ‘Animal House,’ by which he meant adolescent,” Mr. Hendra complained to The New York Times in 2005.
The magazine’s popularity began to wane in the 1980s. But the franchise’s movies, with Mr. Simmons as a producer or executive producer, often did well, especially “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in 1983 and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” in 1989, both starring Chevy Chase.
Mr. Simmons sold his stake in the magazine in 1989.
His marriages to Korky Kelley in 1945 and Lee Easton in 1952 ended in divorce. His third wife, Patti Browne, died in 2017. In addition to his son Michael, who is from his second marriage, he is survived by another son, Andrew, and a daughter, Julie Simmons-Lynch, from that marriage; a daughter from his third marriage, Kate Simmons; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
Mr. Simmons wrote several other books, including “If You Don’t Buy This Book, We’ll Kill This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at National Lampoon” (1994). (The title was a reference to an especially notorious Lampoon cover.)
In “Fat, Drunk, and Stupid,” he recalled driving around Manhattan in July 1978 marveling at the long lines of people waiting to buy tickets to “Animal House.” Outside one theater he saw Walter Garibaldi, National Lampoon’s treasurer, poking at a calculator, and stopped to ask what he was doing.
“I’m just figuring out how much money we make every time somebody buys a ticket,” came the answer.
Mr. Garibaldi, he wrote, was still standing there hours later. “Animal House,” which was made on a budget of about $3 million, eventually raked in about $140 million.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
