Mike Nichols and Elaine May opened for Mort Sahl at the Village Vanguard in October, 1957. Apart from their manager, Jack Rollins, whom they’d met for the first time just a week or two before, no one in New York had ever heard of them.
Nichols and May had worked out their comedy act in Chicago, playing mostly hole-in-the-wall venues as members of a local theatre group called the Compass. They performed sketches—a man on the phone with his mother, a movie star getting interviewed, a man trying to pick up his secretary in a bar. They had a script, but left room for ad-libs, and they ended the show by asking the audience to suggest an opening line, a closing line, and a style (Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Jack Kerouac), and then improvising a skit. They were an overnight hit. By the second week, they were upstaging Sahl, a man not renowned for the length of his fuse, and he began cancelling their set.
They moved uptown to a tonier joint, the Blue Angel, on East Fifty-fifth Street, where they did a midnight show. It quickly started selling out, and soon they were the talk of the town (night-life division). In those days, television variety shows scouted talent in supper clubs like the Blue Angel, and in December Nichols and May went on “The Steve Allen Show.” In January, they performed two sketches on an NBC special, where they were seen by tens of millions of viewers.
They were now nationally known and in demand. Rollins asked for big fees, and by the spring May had an apartment on Riverside Drive, and Nichols was living in a duplex on East Fifty-eighth Street and driving a Mercedes convertible. He was twenty-six. It was the first time that he had had any money. He found that he enjoyed the life style.
Nichols and May released an album, “Improvisations to Music,” in 1958. It made it onto the charts and was nominated for a Grammy. In 1960, they took their act to Broadway, where “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” ran for three hundred and eleven performances. The album of the show went to No. 10 in the Billboard rankings and won a Grammy.
Some people who saw them perform—including the critic Edmund Wilson, who went to the Broadway show four times—thought that May was the star. May is a kind of comic genius. Her father, Jack Berlin, worked in the Yiddish theatre, and she had been appearing onstage since she was a child. She was fearless—also glamorous, sexy, and terrifying to men. (She and Nichols were not lovers.) There is a story that when they were performing in Chicago she would go onstage without underwear and flash the audience.
She married when she was sixteen, had a daughter (Jeannie Berlin, who became a movie actress), split from her husband, and hitchhiked from Los Angeles to Chicago, where she hung out at the university, attending classes but never registering. That was where she met Nichols, a University of Chicago dropout who had found a home of sorts as an actor on the local drama scene.
Nichols was widely regarded as (his term) a prick. He was supercilious and had a quick tongue—“a scary person,” as one colleague put it. May was introduced to him by the Compass’s director, Paul Sills, as “the only other person at the University of Chicago who is as hostile as you.” (The Compass became Second City, the legendary feeder troupe for “Saturday Night Live”; Sills was its original director.) They quickly recognized that they were soul mates. They were sophisticated, faster with a comeback than anyone they knew, and unencumbered by conventional, or even unconventional, pieties. They saw through everything and everybody, including themselves.
More to the point, as May put it, “we found each other hilarious.” Onstage, they were complementary. “He was always directing the scene while he was doing it,” one of the Compass players remembered. “Elaine would never do that. Her bursts were spontaneous. I always felt that in their act, she was really the driving force.” Nichols did not disagree. “She was more interested in taking chances than in being a hit,” he said. “I was more interested in making the audience happy.”
What made the show so hot? Nichols and May were witty people, but they used standard comic setups (the quarrelsome couple, the all-thumbs first date), and they lampooned some pretty soft targets—the British movie “Brief Encounter,” for instance, which they set in a dentist’s office. (“There, I’ve said it. I do love you. Rinse out, please.”) Despite the reputation the act acquired, the dialogue was not remotely risqué. They were not in Lenny Bruce territory. They were barely in Mort Sahl territory.
Part of the appeal was the nature of the comic pitch. Nichols and May were making fun of the kind of people who came to see them, a very marketable brand of humor. Jules Feiffer’s cartoons in the Village Voice, which started appearing in 1956, made fun of the kind of people who read the Village Voice—“Oh, my God,” Feiffer said to himself after seeing Nichols and May perform, “they’re me, but they’re better”—just as The New Yorker’s cartoons make fun of the kind of people who read (and write for) The New Yorker. It’s not that people like to laugh at themselves. They like to laugh at people who are just a little more fatuous and self-absorbed than themselves. The reaction isn’t “That’s me.” The reaction is “I know that type.”
Audiences must also have been pleased that they were getting humor with a bit of a brow. The routines made references to Béla Bartók and Bertrand Russell; this was not Bob Hope one-line-and-a-rim-shot stuff. And Nichols and May weren’t telling jokes; they were acting. This meant that the laughs they got felt like quality laughs.
One ingredient in the reception of the show may have had to do with what made people nervous around the pair back in Chicago. They channelled their hostility into their act. It was funny with a drop of acid. One of their closing numbers, besides the improv sketch, was a twenty-minute routine that began with them playing squabbling children, who become bickering parents, who, at some point, become the real Mike and the real Elaine, yelling at each other onstage. The fighting escalates until they become physically violent, and, just at the point where everyone in the theatre is feeling acutely uncomfortable watching a show that has somehow gone off the rails, Nichols shouts at May, “What are you doing?” And she says, “Pirandello”—that is, metatheatre. They bow and go off. They turned their wit on the audience.
Metatheatre—is that the person or the actor?—is an underlying theme of Mark Harris’s hugely entertaining “Mike Nichols: A Life” (Penguin Press). Who was Mike Nichols when he wasn’t playing Mike Nichols? It’s not an easy question. As Meryl Streep, who starred in three of his movies, observed, the reason he understood acting was that “he was acting all the time.”
Harris’s biography is filled with stories, and Nichols, who died in 2014, was, above all, a storyteller. As the director of some twenty films and almost thirty plays, he told stories written by other people. But he also had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of his own stories, and there are lots of stories about Nichols, some of which are collected in “Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends,” edited by Ash Carter and Sam Kashner (Henry Holt). Many of these are behind-the-scenes show-biz anecdotes—in other words, gossip. They’ve been polished smooth by circulation, and so have to be taken with a little salt, but they give genuine insights into how the Broadway and the Hollywood sausages are made. It helps that Harris himself is a talented storyteller.
Making stories was how Nichols coped with the world. The biographical question is: why was there a need to cope? The answer is not mysterious. Nichols was unusually self-aware, and he liked to talk about his life. To some extent, the Mike Nichols story is a story by Mike Nichols.
His “real” name was Igor Michael Peschkowsky, and he was born in Berlin in 1931. His father, Pavel, was a doctor. His mother, Brigitte Landauer, was from an accomplished German family. They were what T. S. Eliot called “freethinking Jews,” but in Hitler’s Germany only the Jewish part mattered, and in 1938 Pavel left to start a practice in New York City. In 1939, Igor, age seven, and his younger brother, Robert, who was three, travelled unaccompanied across the Atlantic to join him. It took six days. Their mother did not arrive for almost a year.
For little Igor, fleeing Germany was an adventure. The problems started here. Pavel had changed his name to Paul Nichols (his patronymic was Nikolayevich); his son changed his first name to Mike, because Mike Nichols sounded better than Michael (pronounced in the German style: Mick-eye-ell). He Americanized himself, but he did not fit in. At school, he was “as far outside as an outsider can get,” a classmate, Henry Zuckerman, remembered. (Henry Zuckerman became Buck Henry; he and Nichols later worked together on several movies, starting with “The Graduate.”) Part of the problem was that he was unable to grow hair on any part of his body, not even eyelashes, the result of a defective whooping-cough vaccine, and his father refused to let him wear a wig. So he was bullied.
Both parents were having affairs, meanwhile, and they fought at home in front of the children, to whom they seem not to have paid much attention. In 1944, Paul died of leukemia. When the war in Europe ended, Brigitte’s sister was able to get out of Germany and join them, but within weeks of her arrival she was hit by a bus on Central Park West and killed.
The family was forced to get by on an uncertain income. Brigitte was anxious and demanding, and a rift developed between her and Mike, who was now a teen-ager. (The nagging-mother routine was inspired by a phone call from Brigitte.) She did allow him to be fitted for a hairpiece and false eyebrows, and, for the rest of his life, he had to make himself up every morning, as though he were going on a set.
Nichols later said that he never had a friend until he went to the University of Chicago. He entered in the fall of 1949, when he was seventeen. Nichols was well read, but academically indifferent, professionally undirected, and highly defended. He had nothing to back up his sense of superiority, which is not a good place to be.
This was the prick Elaine May met. To be accepted by someone equally quick, smart, and capable of cruelty seems to have changed Nichols’s life. The relationship validated him. Plus, he had found something he was good at: improvised comedy. When he was snotty onstage, people didn’t shun him. They laughed.
Success did not turn Nichols suddenly into a nice person. As Harris shows us, there was always a “scary” side to his work self. As a director, he sometimes abused the crew, picked on actors he took a dislike to, and fired people on a dime. He had a “no assholes” rule at work, but he knew that he was sometimes the asshole, and he regretted it.
Still, he was not usually an asshole, because he realized he did not need to be. He had an intuitive grasp of the micro-sociology of personal interactions, as a director ought to have. He picked up the cues almost before they had been delivered. Most people aren’t that fast. “His behavior, his manner are silky soft,” Richard Burton said of him. “He appears to defer to you, then in the end he gets exactly what he wants.”
A personality emerged that many people, including, and especially, rich and famous people, found adorable. Nichols lunched with Jackie Kennedy and dined with the William Paleys. Richard Avedon, Leonard Bernstein, Tom Stoppard, and William Styron were intimate friends. He went out with Mia Farrow and Gloria Steinem; in 1988, after several unsuccessful unions, he married Diane Sawyer. He worked with some of the biggest stars of his day, from Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Hanks, and most of them seem to have loved the experience.
In 1962, more or less out of the blue, Nichols was offered the job of directing a new play by a writer just starting out in theatre. The play was “Barefoot in the Park,” and the writer was Neil Simon. “This was the job I had been preparing for without knowing it,” Nichols told Harris. It wasn’t just that he felt naturally good at it. “If you’re missing your father, as I had all through my adolescence,” he said, “there’s something about playing the role of a father that’s very reassuring. I had found a process that allowed me to be my father and the group’s father.”
Elizabeth Ashley, who had just won a Tony, was attached to the production, and opposite her Nichols cast Robert Redford, then a little-known actor whose real interest was painting. The play, which opened on Broadway in October, 1963, was a box-office and critical sensation. Reviewers thought that Nichols had done something new. He won a Tony for Best Direction, and the play ran for almost four years. The next Simon play he directed, “The Odd Couple,” opened in March, 1965, and ran for close to two years. Nichols won another Tony. (He went on to win eight, the last in 2012, for “Death of a Salesman,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.) Then he moved to film. And the winning streak continued.
When Nichols got into the movie business, Hollywood was in crisis mode. Leisure dollars are finite, and the movies’ share was shrinking. In 1950, 12.3 per cent of Americans’ recreational budget was spent on movie tickets; in 1965, it was 3.3 per cent. Hollywood was not keeping up with the rest of the culture. There were a lot of reasons for this, but by 1965 two had become obvious. One was that the movie audience was becoming younger and more male. You were not going to reach them with Julie Andrews musicals.
The other problem, not unrelated, was the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry had adopted in 1930 as a system of self-regulation. Although it had been revised incrementally over the years, it was still about ten years behind educated taste. Foreign imports—Bergman, Fellini, the French New Wave directors, whose work was not subject to Production Code review—had at least the reputation of being racier and more explicit. Imports were a very small percentage of the American box office, but they were making Hollywood movies look dumb by comparison.
Nichols’s entry was perfectly timed. His first picture, the movie adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” poked a big hole in the already crumbling dike of the Code. His second, “The Graduate,” hit the demographic bull’s-eye.
Albee’s play features two middle-aged semi-alcoholics, George and Martha (he is an associate professor of history; she is the daughter of the college’s president), who pretend to have a son, and who invite a much younger couple over for drinks and serious head games. Why would a major studio, Warner Bros., choose to have this dark “psychological” melodrama directed by a man who had made his name with Neil Simon comedies, and had never stood behind a movie camera? (Indeed, Nichols had no idea how cameras worked—not even that you could use a long lens to shoot closeups from a distance.)
His hiring was the result of Nichols’s ability to establish friendships with people who were generally suspicious of offers of friendship—that is, celebrities. When he and May were on Broadway, Richard Burton and Julie Andrews were starring in “Camelot” in the adjoining theatre, and after his show Nichols, who knew Andrews through her husband, walked down the alley to hang out in Burton’s dressing room. Burton was more than a leading man. He was well read, like Nichols, and he knew theatre. They became friends.
Soon afterward, Burton went to Rome to shoot “Cleopatra,” and he and Taylor began their scandalous affair. They were trailed by paparazzi, and when Burton had to be away on another picture he asked Nichols to fly over and take care of Taylor. Nichols arrived and arranged a day trip to a place where she wouldn’t be recognized, and they, too, became close.
“Cleopatra” was one of the more spectacular flops in movie history, mostly because of extravagant production costs. Twentieth Century Fox actually sued Burton and Taylor for fifty million dollars for conduct detrimental to the picture. But “Cleopatra” had made them tabloid superstars, the Brangelina of their day. Although they were clearly a high-risk package, they were potentially box-office gold. Studios just had to be willing to roll the dice.
Harris says that Albee did not like the idea of Nichols directing the adaptation. “My play is not a farce,” he complained. But, in exchange for a lot of money for the rights, Albee had given up casting and director approval. He wanted Bette Davis for the female lead; so did Jack Warner, and so did Bette Davis, for whom the part might practically have been written. Albee thought that Taylor was too young—she was thirty-three, and Martha is in her fifties—but she was the actress the producer wanted. She took the part after Burton (they were now married) told her she must, to keep anyone else from taking it. She had never seen, or even read, the play.
Taylor told the producer that the director she wanted was Nichols, who had lobbied her for the job, and, after the Hollywood veteran Fred Zinnemann turned it down, Nichols was hired. When Burton heard the news, he signed on. Whatever else Nichols brought to the project, from the studio’s point of view, he drastically reduced the risk factor.
Nichols said that he never again felt as confident directing a movie. He believed that he understood the play. When Buck Henry asked him what “Virginia Woolf” was about, he said, “It’s about a man and a woman named George and Martha who invite a young couple over for drinks after a faculty party. They drink and talk and argue for ten to twelve hours, until you get to know them.” For a play that offers numerous invitations to allegorize—George and Martha and their imaginary child? Who might they be? Virginia Woolf . . . because she was possibly infertile? Because she was possibly a lesbian?—this was a radical simplification.
But it was Nichols’s philosophy of acting. What reviewers had responded to in “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” was the use of the fourth wall, the imaginary barrier between the actors and the audience. The old style of Broadway comedy had the actors playing to the house, trying for laughs. Working with May had convinced Nichols that actors should not think that what they’re saying is funny. “We’re doing ‘King Lear,’ ” he used to say in rehearsals for “Barefoot in the Park.”
So in a play like Albee’s, when the characters are in a room—George and Martha’s living room, for example, where the entire play is set—the actors don’t need to declaim. They just need to talk the way people in a room talk to one another. If the play has been written properly, the drama will take care of itself. Nichols was famous for the direction, after listening to a speech, “That was wonderful. Now do it as you.”
Another thing Nichols believed in was “business.” Don’t just talk; do something. In everyday life, people talk when they are eating dinner, or folding clothes, or getting dressed for work. Nichols liked to find things for his actors to do. The first act of “The Odd Couple” is a poker game, not an exciting thing to watch from fifty feet away. Nichols made up all kinds of activity to give the scene life. Frank Rich called it “the funniest staging of anything I’ve ever seen in the theatre.” In the opening scene in Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” Taylor delivers her lines while eating a chicken leg, and Burton delivers his while sitting at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle. Because that’s what people do.
Later, Nichols signed on to direct extravaganzas like “Catch-22” and the television adaptation of “Angels in America.” But his best work was people-in-a-room scenes, such as the kitchen scenes with Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher in “Silkwood.” The ending of that movie is a mess, and it doesn’t really work as a “60 Minutes”-style exposé of the nuclear-power industry, which Nichols was probably not much interested in anyway. But the kitchen scenes are unforgettable.
Some of the language in Albee’s play—“screw,” “monkey nipples,” “hump the hostess,” and so on—was Code-averse. Luckily for Warner Bros., Jack Valenti had just become the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and he was determined to replace the Code. So when the Production Code Administration voted to deny approval to “Virginia Woolf,” the M.P.A.A. overruled it.
Another minefield that filmmakers had to negotiate was the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. The bishops were not going to like “hump the hostess.” Nichols arranged for his friend Jackie Kennedy to be invited to the screening. When the movie ended, she was to lean over to the officials vetting the picture and whisper, “What a beautiful movie. Jack would have loved it.” Apparently, she did this, and it worked. “Virginia Woolf” managed to be both risqué and blessed by the Church. Within two years, the Production Code was replaced by the ratings system.
“Virginia Woolf” received Academy Award nominations in every category for which it was eligible, thirteen in all, one of only two movies to have swept the nominations. Taylor won for Best Actress, and Sandy Dennis for Supporting Actress. Nichols lost Best Director to Zinnemann, who won for “A Man for All Seasons”—Old Hollywood. But New Hollywood was just around the corner.
“The Graduate” is based on a novel by Charles Webb, published in 1963, about a college graduate, named Benjamin, who returns to his parents’ home in Southern California, inexplicably loses his motivation, and gets seduced into a loveless affair by the wife of his father’s law partner. Nichols thought that the story was trite. “Kid, older lady, that’s how everyone got started,” as he put it. But he wanted to direct the picture.
One of the things that made “The Graduate” not just a hit movie but a phenomenon was the decision to cast Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin. Redford had wanted the part, but Nichols knew he was wrong for it. “When was the last time you struck out with a girl?” he asked him. Redford said, “What do you mean?” Nichols said, “Exactly.”
Hoffman was then barely making a living doing Off Broadway theatre. Nichols had auditioned him for a musical called “The Apple Tree,” and he stuck in Nichols’s mind. So Hoffman was flown out for a screen test. People who watched Hoffman’s test were unimpressed. Then they watched it on film. Nichols later said that Elizabeth Taylor was the only other actor he worked with who could do what Hoffman did. He called it that “deal where you do nothing and it turns out you were doing everything. That’s what a great movie actor does. They don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know how they do it.” The camera transformed Hoffman into a star.
Nichols was listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s album “Sounds of Silence” while he was shooting “The Graduate,” and the duo reluctantly agreed to record some new songs for the movie. In the end, though, Nichols chose mostly songs from the album, which may have been the key to reaching the young male audience. I remember going to the movie with a friend. We were both fifteen. As soon as “The Sounds of Silence” started playing, we were each thinking, Wait a second. I own that record! It was as though the movie had been made just for us.
“The Graduate” was released at the end of 1967. By the end of 1969, it was the third-highest-grossing film in movie history. Hoffman, who was nominated for Best Actor, was paid scale, and netted three thousand dollars. Nichols is said to have got six per cent of the net profits, and to have made six million dollars. He also won the Academy Award for Best Director.
In the decade that spanned “Steve Allen” and “The Graduate,” Nichols changed entertainment culture. With May, he brought improv to Broadway. He revolutionized stage comedy. He helped break the grip of movie censorship, and he directed a film that is considered, along with Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” to mark the birth of the New Hollywood.
Then it stopped. Not the work—Nichols was always an A-list director. His projects were well financed; he drew on the best talent. As he knew perfectly well, some misses were in the cards. Several of the movies he made after “The Graduate”—“Catch-22,” “The Day of the Dolphin,” and “The Fortune”—were major critical and financial disappointments. But he went on to have many hits, including “Silkwood,” “Working Girl,” and “The Birdcage.” He continued to rake in the Tonys. He won two Emmys for “Angels in America.”
He did make inexplicable decisions, besides choosing material that did not play to his strengths. He let actors like Al Pacino, in “Angels,” and Kathy Bates, in “Primary Colors,” chew up their scenes. He also, notoriously, directed a “Waiting for Godot” with Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, and F. Murray Abraham, not exactly ensemble players. If there is any play in which the laughs take care of themselves, it’s “Waiting for Godot.” But Nichols let the actors ham it up. He later said he had not been able to find the play’s “central metaphor.” Central metaphor? “Godot” is about two guys on a road somewhere, talking. One of them is taking off his boots . . .
Unlike virtually every other director associated with the New Hollywood—Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick—Nichols was not an auteur. There is no such thing as a Mike Nichols picture. The critical queen of the New Hollywood, Pauline Kael, hated his movies. “Mike Nichols’s ‘gift’ is that he lets the audience direct him,” she said of “The Graduate.” “This is demagoguery in the arts.”
Well, it is a mass-market entertainment medium. Millions of dollars are being spent; people are supposed to like it. And most of the plays and films Nichols directed people liked. As he learned working with May, he was not a risk-taker, and did not think of himself as an artist. “It’s so funny you think of yourself as an artist,” he told Richard Avedon, who badly wanted his photography to be taken seriously.
Harris thinks that Nichols’s choices were influenced by money. By 2000, he was reportedly being paid for his movie work, in addition to a seven-and-a-half-million-dollar fee, twelve per cent of the gross. That’s why he took on movie projects he shouldn’t have and why he did less new theatre than he might have.
Nichols liked travelling in life’s first-class cabin. He lived in a triplex penthouse in the Beresford. He bred Arabian horses. He drove expensive cars. When he was shooting on location, he flew in his personal chef. There is a story that he stopped the shooting on “Regarding Henry” (a major misfire) because the caviar being used in a scene was an inferior brand. Even Avedon, who had helped introduce Nichols to that life, felt he had lost his head a little. Nichols also got into recreational drugs. Harris says that these included crack cocaine, and that Nichols became addicted to Halcion, which made him anxious and suicidal. He is supposed to have learned from a celebrity friend that Halcion was causing his mood disorders. Which celebrity—Randy Newman, Quincy Jones—depends on who is telling the story, and this is one of those Mike Nichols stories which feel embellished, or more embellished than usual. A wealthy man did not have a personal physician? Who was prescribing the Halcion? He wasn’t getting it on the street.
But it’s also the case that expectations for Nichols’s career were shaped by a misreading of who he was. “The Graduate” is the story of a rich kid who has an affair with a rich woman and will presumably end up marrying her rich daughter. Benjamin’s anomie is entirely unexplained. There are no political references in the novel or the movie. In the scenes set on the Berkeley campus, the students all look as though they were in prep school. It might as well be set in 1955. Nichols thought he was making a movie about Los Angeles, not the generation gap. There wasn’t a radical or a countercultural bone in his body.
Part of what dated him was his fixation on what used to be called the War Between Men and Women. That’s the nut of “Virginia Woolf,” and it’s the nut of “Carnal Knowledge,” which came out in 1971. The movie is based on a screenplay by Jules Feiffer, and it ended up doing well through the good fortune of being banned in the state of Georgia. This was catnip to moviegoers, but the film is basically ninety minutes of Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson talking about tits and ass. It’s not just misogynistic. It’s misanthropic.
What was frustrating to Nichols’s admirers about the path his work took after “The Graduate” was that he was more sophisticated than a lot of the material he ended up directing. There are a few glimpses of the paths he might have taken. In 1996, he was talked into performing in a limited London run of a Wallace Shawn play called “The Designated Mourner,” an elliptical and “knotty” text (as Harris calls it) about people reacting to the rise of fascism.
There are three parts, and all the actors are sitting down—which suited Nichols, who was never a physical actor. His performance was filmed days after the theatrical run ended, and it is uncanny. It’s just a person talking, but it makes you feel as though you never really watched a person talking before. Streep flew to London to see Nichols in the play. “It’s some of the best acting I’ve ever seen any man do,” she said. For, of course, what you’re thinking all the time you’re watching this astonishingly lifelike person is what an amazing acting job it is. ♦
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