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Lahr Nichols 2/21.L

Lahr Nichols 2/21.L

TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 196—LIVE OPI—AVEDON SPREAD-#1—140 SC.—#2 PAGE PROFILES MAKING IT REAL

How re-created comedy and himself.

BY

we do now, Mr. Success?” she said. Nichols, who has a sharp American but courtly European manners, bit his tongue. “All those ‘Mr. Success’ years would have been hard to explain to anybody if I tried,” Nichols, now sixty- eight, says. “What I really wanted to say to that envious woman was ‘Don’t worry.There’s still nothing happening in- side me. I’m not experiencing success or anything much.’ ” But feelings aren’t facts. From the moment Nichols made his name, in the late fifties, as the lanky deadpan half of the comedy team , he took up residence in success. As early as 1961, a letter addressed to “Famous Actor, Mike Nichols, U.S.A.” reached him. And, by the seventies, Nichols repre- sented the high-water mark in not just one but three areas of American enter- tainment. As a comedian, he improvised routines with which are among the treasures of ; as a stage director, beginning in the early nce, in the early seventies, Mike sixties, he had a string of commercial hits ONichols was sitting in a commer- that made him the most successful Broad- cial jet as it took off from J.F.K. Mo- way director since ; as a ments after it was airborne, the plane film director, he made the bold, intelli- went into what Nichols recalls as “an gent “Who’s Afraid of ?” unnervingly steep bank. Everybody (1966) and “” (1967).The looked at each other. Nobody knew latter, for which he won an Academy what it meant.” The came on the Award and which both summed up and intercom. “We are experiencing—” he influenced his generation, got him off began in his best “Right Stuff ” drawl. the blocks perhaps faster Then, suddenly, he said, “Just a minute!” than any director since . The mike went dead. In the long silence Nichols has made seventeen films in that followed, the people on the air- the last three decades. Success, however, plane started to panic. A woman a few as Winston Churchill said, is never final. rows in front of Nichols turned around On May 3, 1999—just one day short of and looked squarely at him. “What do sixty years since Nichols, then Michael

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Mike Nichols, opposite, with Elaine May, in 1960, and, above, last November.

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 197 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 197—#2 PAGE three of Nichols’s films, including “The Graduate.” “He knows when his ass is being kissed, and he knows when it isn’t, although it is most of the time. He casts a baleful eye on all of it, but in his heart he wants it and needs it.” In its de-luxe panoply, the Center extrava- ganza fulfilled one of Nichols’s life- long fantasies.“He’s on an island that be- longs to him, manned on the turrets by men with machine guns,” another close friend, Richard Avedon, explains. “Peo- ple can only get in with a passport, and then only his .” The need for a seamless armor is the legacy of Nichols’s friendless, despairing refugee childhood. When he arrived from , at the age of seven, he was totally bald; he’d been permanently denuded of all body hair at the age of four, a reaction to a defective whooping-cough vaccine. He knew just two English sentences—“I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me.” He’d lost his homeland, his language, his class pedigree, and, by the age of twelve, he would also lose his father. “I was a zero,” Nichols says now. He adds, “In every way that mattered, I was pow- erless.” Nichols sought something to counteract his paralyzing sense of inad- equacy and to disarm a world that he saw, and still sees, as predatory and cruel. “The most useful thing is if your enemy doesn’t know he’s your enemy,” Nichols told me, setting out the rule of dissimu- “Those D’s are misleading.” lation by which, over the years, he has kept the world in his thrall. “Never let •• people see what you want, because they will not let you have it. Never let any- body see what you feel, because it gives Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White crooked smile describes them too much power. You’re probably Russian émigré and a German beauty, as “that smile that tilts up at one end, that better off not showing weakness when- arrived in by boat from Ger- you can read so much into—a shared ever you can avoid it, because they’ll go many—he found himself at one of those joke, a certain skepticism.” Then, one by for you.” With its aspects of detach- occasions he likes to call a “ratfuck,” at one, various grandees of American pop- ment, generosity, and control, the impe- ’s Avery Fisher Hall, ular culture—, , rial posture has served him well. where more than three thousand citizens Elaine May,, , On Nichols’s gala, Elaine had gathered to celebrate his lifetime , , Art Gar- May couldn’t resist a wink at his jerry- achievement in film.The first part of the funkel, , Nathan built crown. “So he’s witty, he’s brilliant, evening was a cinematic homage. Just Lane—filed into the box, too, and flanked he’s articulate, he’s on time, he’s prepared, before it began, Nichols and his wife, the evening’s sovereigns. They were part and he writes,” she said. “But is he per- —the most observed of all of Nichols’s story; later in the ceremony, fect? He knows that you can’t really be observers—took their seats in the front in their encomiums from the stage, they liked or loved if you’re perfect. You have row of a box just beside the stage and sur- would individually swear allegiance to to have just enough flaws. And he does. veyed the illustrious guests below, among him like courtiers to a king—which, in a Just the right perfect flaws to be ab- them Richard Avedon, , way, he is. solutely endearing. And my three min- , , “He knows that all the Versailles stuff utes are up, but if I had another four sec- Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Bar- is bullshit,” says the screenwriter Buck onds I’d tell you every one of those flaws.” bara Walters. Nichols assumed the runic Henry, a close friend who has scripted Nichols is a purveyor of aplomb, a

198 , FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 198—LIVE OPI ART #A5297—120 LS.—#2 PAGE rare commodity these days. He lives like Well, it’s all blood under the bridge now.” result of a spill on the set—in no way im- a pasha and long ago took up the kingly But blood has a way of sticking to peded his show of good spirits. “Life is pastime of breeding Arabian horses. (In things; even the solvent of Nichols’s wit difficult and fucked up and compli- 1972, he had the national-champion can’t wipe out certain dark spots. In his cated,” Nichols says. “The cutting room stallion and mare, Elkin and Elkana.) movie career, things have not all gone isn’t.” At the studio, his power is ab- Over the years, Nichols, who calls him- Nichols’s way.There was a string of flops solute. “I really need to control it. Every self “a Dionysian who gets tired easily,” in the mid-seventies:“Catch-22” (1970), aspect of it, every nuance of the reading. has also been romantically linked to a va- “” (1973), “The How long every second of every shot is,” riety of goddesses—goddesses of litera- Fortune” (1975), and “Bogart Slept he says. “Partly because that’s the job, ture (’s Black Goddess, Here,” which Nichols closed down in and partly because I just have to. I’m Margot Callas, who was Nichols’s sec- production; there followed a seven-year happy when I’m controlling it and un- ond wife), goddesses of glamour (Suzy hiatus before his next film, the excellent comfortable when I’m not and crazed Parker), activism (Gloria Steinem), soci- “” (1983). Some of his later when it’s out of control.” ety ( Jackie Onassis), and the media movies—“Heartburn” (1986), “Regard- On the set, Nichols’s wit serves him (Sawyer, who became the fourth Mrs. ing Henry” (1991), “Wolf ” (1994)— well both as a social lubricant and as an Nichols, in 1988). Well before Nichols were more or less rumbled by the critics. equalizer. In conversation, he lays out grew into his grandiosity, his hauteur In 1995, after Nichols had shown the his colorful word hoard like a vender at a had him typecast in college plays as the final cut of “” (which went bazaar—a delightful abundance of eru- Dauphin and the emperor. With his on to gross more than a hundred and dition, playfulness, and surprise, which long Russian nose, he emits a kind of eighty million dollars worldwide) to helps take the odor off his Eeyore-like mandarin snottiness—what Woody Al- his editing team on Martha’s Vineyard, nature. His voice, which is nasal and len calls “his superb contumely,” adding, he sat down with them for a celebra- comes from the back of his throat, can “It’s supercilious in the way we all wish tory meal. “I was very emotional and wring all sorts of sardonic music from we had the genius for. He’s a nice version very angry. I couldn’t speak all through the sounds of words. “A retreat? How of in ‘.’ ” lunch,” Nichols told a friend. “The film moving. It’s not a sweat lodge, is it?” he At a dinner party in the sixties, Nichols was so good, so strong. I realized I’d had says, taking a call on his portable phone corrected Norman Mailer, who had de- no inkling of my anger at the people as the crew prepares for a scene with clared that his favorite line of poetry was who had written me off. My reaction, in- and . Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go quietly into stantaneously, was ‘Fuck you, bastards. “Come and see me. We can have a tiny that good night.” “Actually, it’s ‘gentle,’ ” You thought I couldn’t do this anymore. retreat in my trailer.” Nichols said. “ ‘Quietly’ wouldn’t scan, Well, look at this.’ ” While the shot is being set up, Nich- would it?” Mailer rounded on Nichols, So, here at his retrospective, Nichols ols hobbles away toward his trailer, calling him a “royal baby,” a put-down both masked and displayed his vindictive which is parked opposite the sound that Nichols thought was “pretty good.” triumph. As a parting shot, he announced stage; the makeup man standing at the (In jollier circumstances, Sawyer has that he was leaving the next day for Los shadowy threshold of the building cau- been known to refer to her husband as Angeles, to go into preproduction on tions Nichols about the ledge he’s stand- “His Royal Cuteness.”) his new film—a comedy called “What ing on. “Thank you, Roy,” Nichols says. At the finale of the gala, Nichols had Planet Are You From?” And he left the “Where were you when I fell in that planned to go onstage and say to the as- audience with a slightly altered version hole?” Among the myriad problems fac- sembled, “Well, that’s all very well and of W. H. Auden’s acid envoi—a ruler’s ing Nichols on this particular cerulean good, but what about my humanity? deadpan rebuke to those young upstarts day, as he clambers up the steps to his What about my fucking humanity?” But “who think they could do it better” and trailer, is what to get the cast as an end- scuppered the joke by who might dismiss the proceedings as of-production present. “My assistant speaking earnestly to that very point. merely “geezer aggrandizement”: came up with a silver—what do you So when Nichols stepped before his au- call it—vibrator,” he says. “I’m not sure. Death takes the innocent young, dience—a tall man with big, gnarly As poets have frequently sung, Maybe if it has Ars Gratia Artis on it.” hands and an indulged belly that pre- The rolling-in-money, Inside, the trailer is dominated by photos The screamingly funny, cedes him by some inches—he resorted And even the very well-hung. of his handsome children—Daisy,thirty- to another gripe. “Where the hell is five, who dubs movies into French; Max, ?” Nichols said. “He n mid-July, I caught up with Nichols twenty-five, who is a record-company was nothing when I found him.” His Iin his current kingdom, Sound Stage A. & R. man; and Jenny,twenty-three, a straight face caught the audience off 15, at Culver Studios, in Culver City, student at Brown—and by food (See’s guard and made the joke ambiguous. where a broken ankle and crutches—the Candies, jelly beans, nuts, chocolate- “It’s like the monster not showing up at chip cookies). Nichols, who has never the tribute for Dr. Frankenstein,” he met a calorie he didn’t like, is, as Candice continued. “Actually, I suspect that his Bergen says,“a poster child for unhealthy not showing up is related to my not go- living.” Because he’s currently immobi- ing to his A.F.I. tribute, although that lized and can’t climb up onto the space- was all the way across the country. . . . station set, a gizmo called a “god box” has

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 199 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 199—LIVE SPOT PLS INSPECT FOR QUALITY been installed in his trailer, just oppo- crashes over him. In that moment of master, which is partly meant to disarm site the sofa. A microphone allows Nich- wipeout, all of Nichols’s power, self- me. He’s not without self-knowledge. ols to talk directly to his players as he consciousness, and royal command van- He knows how to use me to make cer- watches them. “It’s annoying,” he says. ish into childish delight. This wheezy, tain things happen to him in scenes.The “It’s like wearing a condom. You’re there teary collapse has been captured on rec- game is useful to us both.” and you’re not there.” ord (“Nichols and May at Work”); and But the previous week, for what Nich- “What Planet Are You From?” is anyone who has been in its force field ols said was the first time in his directing about an alien, played by Shandling, knows the strength of its infectiousness. career, he had screamed at his star, who is who, as part of a plan to dominate the “It’s incredible when you get it,” Neil also the film’s co-author. Nichols knows universe, is sent to earth to impregnate as Simon told me. “It inspires you to show that he can be withering.There was a mo- many women as possible and take over him more material to get it again.” ment during the filming of “The Day of the planet from within. Nichols inspects In the next shot, which is the movie’s the Dolphin” when Nichols saw himself a replay of the just completed scene finale, Shandling goes into a righteous becoming a tyrannical bastard. “I re- in which Ben Kingsley, the leader of harangue—“Why are we taking over member that I told the D.P.”—director Shandling’s planet, taps him for the pro- earth? Is that what it’s about? More, of photography—“toward the end that I creative mission. “The success of our more, more?”—and Nichols stops him was not proud of the way I had treated planet’s domination of the universe rests in mid-flow.“It’s a moment from an op- the guys and I wanted to apologize,” he in your hands,” Kingsley says, in his eretta,” he says.“We don’t want that ges- says. “And he—a very mild man—said, gravest British Received Pronunciation. ture. It’s too Jewish.” Speech, like the ‘It’s too late for that.’ It took my breath “Now, if you’ll come this way we’ll portrayal of a character, is in the details; away. It made me realize that I had to arrange your transfer and attach your Nichols watches over it with vigilance. put the brakes on completely. Because penis.” A big, chesty laugh rumbles “I constantly have to edit the things I nobody can fight back, the director has through Nichols’s body. “Kingsley was want to say,” he adds. “Shambling and I an absolute obligation to treat people put on earth to say that line,” he says, and get into this kidding thing, but then it decently.” By his own admission, he had laughs some more. Nichols has as many gets a little bit out of hand.” “He’s called gone “totally nuts” at Shandling, in an kinds of laughs as he does ironic inflec- ‘Shambling,’ is he?” I ask. Nichols fixes outburst that sent people scurrying off tions, but his high-pitched Big Laugh is me with a lidded glance.“Well, now and the set. He explains,“Garry came in and like no other. His eyes widen, his body then,” he says. Nichols continues, “He’s didn’t know the scene, although he’d stiffens, his pale skin reddens as hilarity playing the game of student with the written it. , of course, knew it perfectly. After it was over, I said something to her about her character.” Bening plays a ditzy recovering alco- holic, with no knack for picking Mr. Right. “Garry said, ‘I think she should be kooky.’ I said, ‘You do? Her clothes are kooky, the set is kooky, her lines are kooky—you want her to act kooky, too?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you come in prepared and do your own work?’ ” “It was mean,” Bening told me. “He was attacking Garry inappropriately. It was really out of line.” Shandling apologized for being unprepared, and Bening then met with Nichols in his trailer to defend Shandling’s right to have a creative conversation, a point that Nichols conceded when he, in turn, apologized to Shandling. In Nichols’s remorse, Bening saw a “fierce superego.” “He’s not as generous to himself as he deserves to be,” she says. “He’s got a voice in him that’s very harsh, and un- necessarily so.” In his surprising an- ger—he now says he was “much angrier than seemed warranted”—Nichols saw “the dim racial memory of rage,” that little boy in himself who is still angry “We can give you enough medication to alleviate and whom he constantly struggles to the pain but not enough to make it fun.” keep down. “He’s the one,” Nichols

TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 200—LIVE OPI ART #A5263—120 LS. says. “He’s somewhere saying, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ And I can’t stop him.”

“ ll the shit was in the beginning,” ANichols says of his life. Hitler— or his voice, broadcast from speakers on dockside lampposts—literally saw Nichols and his three-year-old brother, Robert, off to in 1939. Nichols remembers not being allowed to board the Bremen, which was leaving from Hamburg, until the traffic-stopping speech was finished. The brothers, each with ten marks in a purse around his neck, made the journey alone across the Atlantic. Their mother, Brigitte, was ill and stayed behind for a year and a half before rejoining the family; their doctor father, Paul, who had left Russia for Germany after the revolution in 1917, had gone ahead to New York in 1938, just before the Nazi takeover, to set up a practice on the prosperous Upper West Side. On their first night off the ship, Nichols remembers seeing Hebrew writ- “If I won forty-seven million dollars in the lottery, ing on a delicatessen and asking his fa- I wouldn’t change a thing. Not at first.” ther in German, “Is that allowed?” He also remembers watching his brother •• throw a tantrum while his father “pre- tended to call the police on the pay phone to deal with him.”“He had no ex- swered back,” Nichols says. He “had a and that’s one of them,” Nichols says. perience as a father,” Nichols says. “He mouth,” which made both his school- By contrast, Brigitte, who was thirty- had no idea what to do.” Paul saw his mates and his family wary of him. “My four when her husband died, at the age boys only intermittently during their first father wasn’t too crazy about me,” Nich- of forty-four, became “a nightmare of year in America. He placed them with ols says. “I loved him anyway. One of accusation,” someone who collected in- an English family, some patients of his the things I regretted for a long time justices. “She was one of those people who agreed to care for them while he was that he died before he could see who would hold you responsible for was establishing himself. “They were that he would be proud of me. I was ac- everything that happened to her and awful,” Nichols says. “They would kiss tually more what he wished for than how bad she felt now,” Nichols says. He their own children good night, then he thought.” He adds, “He could rage.” would try to kid her out of her misery. shake our hands. We’d get a spoonful of (Nichols still remembers his father, in “Everything wounded her,” he says.“She milk of magnesia and go to bed.”Things the heat of an unhappy family moment, was always wounded to the quick. ‘I didn’t improve much when the Pesch- saying to him and his brother, “I’ll be raised you so you could say that to me? kowsky family was reunited. “My par- glad to get rid of you two.”) “But he also Thank you very much, I deserve that.’ It ents fought all the time,” Nichols recalls. told funny stories, and he used to dance went on for hours, days.” “They would have divorced if my father for us in his underwear. He did routines Brigitte, who had no profession, no hadn’t died—something that my mother at parties that people loved to hear.” In money, no proper English, and only a immediately forgot.” Much later, Nich- later life, Nichols was told by the impre- few friends, would go to the Stanwood ols learned that his father “was impo- sario Sol Hurok, who had been one of Cafeteria, on Broadway,and sit alone for tent with her and not with many other Paul’s patients, “You’re not as funny as hours. Over the years, she worked in a women.” Both parents had a series of your father.” And it’s through his father bakery, a bookshop, even set up a trans- lovers.“There were always other people, that Nichols feels he understands the lation agency to support her boys. But in Germany and here,” he says. “It was stoic bravado of Chekhov’s characters. after Paul was gone they found them- just the way things were.” “He was the Russian as entertainer,” he selves plummeting well below the level Nichols felt “landlocked” in the fam- says.“What I loved him for—even when of middle-class gentility to which they ily, trapped in the battle between his he wasn’t noticeably loving me—was had been accustomed. Although Nich- warring parents. A lot of the contention that he had great vitality and joy of life.” ols blocked out the degree of their hu- was about him. “I wouldn’t go to school. Paul never let his darkness show in pub- miliating poverty, his brother subse- I wouldn’t get up in the morning. I an- lic. “I feel linked to him in many ways, quently reminded him of “bug-infested

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 201 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 201—LIVE OPI ART #A5272—120 LS. apartments” and of their mother “giving galaxy forever,” he says.“I thought about up to the point where she didn’t do the revenge a lot in those days.” laundry. We weren’t clean.” “She always A lazy and lacklustre student, Nichols had some mysterious illness,” Nichols had a quick mind and a formidable in- adds. When he went home after school tellectual inheritance. (His maternal to their drab rooms at 155 West Seventy- grandmother, , did first Street—“one of those tiny apart- the translation of ’s “Sa- ment houses with podiatrists on the first lomé” that Richard Strauss used for his floor”—he frequently found Brigitte opera; his grandfather , propped up on her living-room sofa bed among whose best friends were Martin (the boys shared the bedroom) with a Buber and B.Traven, was a writer turned table of pills,“maybe a hundred and fifty activist, who was a leader of the German bottles of medication, and the phone, on Social Democratic Party, and whose which she always was.” brutal execution by the Nazis had been In time, Nichols discovered that he the reason for the family’s exodus.) Nich- could make people laugh by telling ols filled his solitude with activities that stories about his mother. In fact, Nichols took him out of himself and into exotic and May’s definitive sketch, “Mother other worlds. At sixteen, he went with a and Son” (“Someday . . . you’ll have chil- date to the second night of ’s dren of your own. And, honey,when you production of “A Streetcar Named De- do, I only pray that they make you suffer sire.” “We just sat there,” Nichols says. the way you’re making me. [Sobs.] That’s “We didn’t talk. We couldn’t believe all I pray,Arthur.That’s a mother’s prayer”) there was such a thing.” He adds, “I just was inspired by one of Brigitte’s lethal wanted to be around theatre.” He also phone calls. As Nichols recalls, it went, read voraciously (all of Eugene O’Neill “ ‘Hello, Michael, this is your mother. by the age of fourteen, James Joyce’s Do you remember me?’ I said, ‘Mom, “Ulysses,” E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to can I call you right back?’ Literally. And India”); he was a constant moviegoer; I called Elaine.” He and May were play- he hung out in and at ing at the Blue Angel then. “I said, ‘I the Claremont Riding Academy. “I have a piece for us.’ I told her the line. got to exercise people’s horses; some- She said, ‘We’ll do it tonight.’ And we times, when people were thrown off, I did it pretty much the way it is now. She would catch the horses had the identical mother.” on the bridle path and Before he found a way to make light ride them back.” Ani- of his difficulties, Nichols was swamped mals calmed Nichols; un- by them. From his first day at the Dal- like his classmates, they ton School, on the Upper East Side, the were responsive, unself- clouds of exclusion and isolation glow- conscious, and unable ered over him. “The kid was as far out- to pass judgment. “The side as an outsider can get,” says Buck refugee ear is a sort of Henry, who was in his class. “He was seismograph for how Igor Peschkowsky when he was at Dal- one is doing,” Nichols ton. He did not speak English. He wore says. At high school, he a cap all the time.” Nichols says, “I re- explains, “I heard what member being on the school bus in New they thought of me— York and saying, ‘What means ‘emer- ‘nebbish,’ ‘poor boy’— gency’?” By the time he reached high and what they thought school (the progressive school Wal- of each other. A thousand den, from which he graduated in 1948), tiny victories and defeats Nichols had mastered English, had a in an ordinary conversa- make-do wig, and had learned the idiom tion. I didn’t know what to do with it.” and style of his peers, but his assessment To this day, even though Nichols of himself during these “searing, painful wears a wig, the intrusive, objectifying years” was that he was “the most popular eyes of others continue to be a threat. of the unpopular kids.”“That was cast in “Staring is something that still makes bronze, that’s where I was chained in the me absolutely nuts,” he says. He thinks

“I know what the audience wants.” Nichols in New York in 1960, inset, and last year.

202 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 202—#2 PAGE TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 203—LIVE OPI ART—AVEDON—#2—140 SC.—#2 PAGE of the public as “something to be con- all my life.”) Asher characterizes Nich- among them “Androcles and the Lion,” trolled and tamed.” “The first person to ols’s look as “something out of a German “St. Joan,” and “La Ronde.” He played come up to me at a party is in danger to Expressionist movie,” but says that, “de- Jean the valet in a production of Strind- this day,” Nichols says. “My reflex is to spite the strangeness of his appearance, berg’s “Miss Julie,” directed by Sills. attack the first couple of people. I can’t he did very well with the girls. He was “He wasn’t the working-class man and stop. Diane is right there, taking off the courtly, and he was well read, which got couldn’t come close to it,” Sills says now. edges, fixing it. By the third or fourth you a long way at that university.” Nichols agrees; it was, he says, a “pa- person, I can be friendly.” To Nichols, Nichols, who had begun therapy,was thetic, awful production.” He remem- the audience has always personified also deeply depressed. “I would spend bers “this evil, hostile girl in the front row Them—the annihilating mob of his long times in my room and just not staring at me throughout the perfor- childhood, whom he characterizes as come out,” he says. “Sometimes I would mance. I was about four feet away from “the beast” with “too much power.” He step over all the dishes and the Franco- her and she stared at me all through it, says, “I was so impaled on what people American spaghetti cans and hang out and I knew she knew it was shit, and thought. I had to train myself away from with some friends, then go back to my there was no way I could let her know that. I never had a friend from the time I lair.” Nichols d.j.’ed a popular show of that I knew.” A few days later, the show came to this country until I got to the classical music and chat at WFMT, but mysteriously got a rave review in the University of . I was seventeen.” his depression almost cost him the job. Chicago Daily News. Nichols recalls He ended up there by a fluke: it was “He was funny and knowledgeable but rushing up to Sills on the street with the one of the only schools in America that totally unreliable,” says Asher, whose paper; Sills was with the girl who had didn’t require the College Boards, and cousin owned the station. “They fired unsettled Nichols from the audience. He Nichols hadn’t taken them. “Once I got him a number of times.” scoured the review, while the girl read there, I had a very specific and powerful “I couldn’t be a person that many hours over his shoulder. “Ha!” she said, and sense of ‘Oh my God, look, there are a day,” Nichols explains. “I needed—still walked away. Nichols, who was already others like me.There are other weirdos.’ ” need—a lot of time lying on the bed ab- toying with the notion of a theatrical ca- The publisher Aaron Asher, who shared solutely blank, the way I assume a dog is reer, had just met his future: Elaine May. college digs with Nichols, says, “We in front of the fire. A persona takes en- were all freaks. We were way ahead of ergy. I just needed a rest from it. Not to ome weeks later, on his way back the country. There was sex. There was be anything in relation to anyone else.” Sfrom his disk-jockey gig, in the dope. There was a subculture.” Asher When Nichols did emerge from spring of 1954, Nichols caught sight of was just one of Nichols’s new friends, seclusion, he worked up his losses into a May in the waiting room of the Illinois who were “refugees or first-generation kind of legend. According to one of his Central’s Randolph Street Station. Jewish intellectual guys.” When Nichols theatrical cohorts, quoted in Janet Cole- Their friendship began with an im- mentioned to Asher that his grand- man’s “The Compass,” Nichols behaved provisation. “May I sit down?” he asked. mother had written the libretto for like “a princeling deprived of his rightful In a thick Russian accent, May replied, Strauss’s “Salome,” Asher joked, “Oh, fortune.” Nichols was so poor that he “If you veesh.” “Off she went,” Nichols really? Was she Hugo von Hofmanns- took to eating the leftovers from the cof- says.“She started us on that.”They played thal?” Nichols says, “I was looking at fee shop where the director out the scene, which Nichols character- somebody who knew who Hofmanns- was then a waiter. “He rattled his tin ized as “half spy, half pickup,” all the way thal was and that he wrote libretti for cup,” Nichols’s friend Hayward Ehrlich, home. “I think I went home with her Strauss. No such thing had ever hap- now an associate professor of English at and she made me her specialty, which pened to me before.” Rutgers, says. “When Mike appeared, was hamburger with cream cheese and The first person Nichols met at regis- you knew that he needed a cup of coffee ketchup—the only thing she cooked,” tration was ; they struck or a sandwich or something. It became Nichols recalls. “She didn’t know con- up a lifelong friendship. “I thought he his way of relating to people, to have ventional dishes. She was utterly a rebel. was terrific,” Sontag says. “I adored him them sort of help him out of his impov- That was part of the fun of it.” from the start. He was totally alive and erishment. I think Mike loved to mag- May was also a femme fatale.“Every- incredibly verbal.We talked about books, nify his sense of adversity so that in some body wanted Elaine, and the people who about feelings, about how to get free of way he could triumph over it.” got her couldn’t keep her,” Nichols says. our pasts. Because we were interested in Much to Nichols’s surprise, during But, even at their first meeting, which theatre, we were interested in observing his sophomore year he found himself led to a brief romance, he remembers people. I would happily have become his “near the center of the in-group” and “a feeling that “we were safe from everyone girlfriend physically, except I was intim- minor celebrity.” The theatrical talent else when we were with each other. And idated by the hair problem and felt he pool at the was also safe from each other.” He goes on,“I was untouchable.” (Thirty years later, extraordinary: Sills, Ed Asner, Sev- knew somehow that she would not do to Sontag confessed to Nichols that she ern Darden, Anthony Holland, Zohra me the things she’d done to other guys. I couldn’t accept the scars from her mas- Lampert, , Gene Troob- knew she wouldn’t lose interest and move tectomy: “I have this thing, and every nick. Nichols directed his first play, on. I knew instantly that everything that time I take a bath I’m horrified.” He said, Yeats’s “Purgatory,” with Asner, and happened to us was ours.” “Susan, now you know how I have felt he performed in a number of plays, May’s life had been as painful and

204 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 204 complex as Nichols’s.“It’s almost hard to convey how neurotic we were,” Nichols TAKES says. Although she had dropped out of high school at fourteen—the only thing she enjoyed there was diagramming sen- tences—May was, as Edmund Wilson noted in his diary when he fell under her dark-eyed spell in the late fifties, “some- thing of a genius.” She had grown up in a nomadic acting family, spending a good part of her childhood playing a lit- had to trudge rose all together into the tle boy named Bennie in a travelling spangled air and settled again as soon run by her father, Jack as I had passed. Berlin. According to her second hus- After making my way through some band, , who wrote the pine groves and alder scrub, I came to lyrics for “,” the the swamp. No sooner had my ear death of May’s beloved father when she caught the hum of Diptera around me, was ten left her to a future of apprehen- the cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sive relations with men. She was married sounds of the morass under my foot for the first time at sixteen; by eighteen than I knew I would find here quite she had a child, , who was special arctic butterflies, the pictures of about four years old when Nichols met which I had worshipped for several May and was being raised in Los Ange- seasons. And the next moment I was les by May’s mother. By the time she among them. Over the bilberry shrubs, reached Chicago, May had studied act- with their dim, dreamy blue fruit, over ing, performed a hillbilly act under the the brown eye of stagnant water, over name Elly May, and written advertising moss, over mire, over the fragrant copy. May, who saw herself primarily as racemes of the lone and mysterious a writer, was unofficially auditing courses marsh rocket, a dark little Fritillary, at the University of Chicago and trying bearing the name of a Norse goddess, to develop a screen treatment of Plato’s passed in a low, skimming flight. I Symposium. (She once convinced a phi- pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, losophy class that everyone in the Sym- gray-stippled Satyrs. Unmindful of the posium was drunk and that that was the mosquitoes that covered my forearms point of Plato’s discourse.) “The only and neck, I stooped with a grunt of safe thing is to take a chance,” May al- delight to snuff out the life of some ways told Nichols, who was ravished by silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing her daring and her quirkiness. in the folds of my net. Through the Nichols and May had talent, but, smells of the marsh, I caught the subtle more important, they had chemistry. perfume of butterfly wings on my They were quick; they were guarded; hen came a year when I felt the hands, a perfume that varies with the they were crazy.They were also “insanely Turge to push on still farther and species; it may be vanilla, or lemon, or judgmental” snobs, bound together, explore the vast marshland beyond the musk, or a musty, sweetish odor Nichols says,“by tremendous hostility to River Oredezh. After skirting the bank difficult to define. Still unsated, I everyone else but never to each other.” for three or four miles, I found a rickety pressed forward. At last, I saw I had (May once said, according to Nichols, footbridge. While crossing over, I could come to the end of the swamp. The “that if somebody told her that I had see the huts of a hamlet on my left, rising ground beyond was a paradise of burned down her house with her whole apple trees, rows of tawny pine logs lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. family in it, she would say,‘Oh, I must ask lying on a green slope, and the bright Mariposa lilies bloomed under the Michael why he did that.’ ”) “I feel in patches made on the turf by the ponderosa pines. In the distance, opposition to almost everything,” May, scattered clothes of peasant girls, who, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the who no longer gives interviews, said in a stark naked, romped in the shallow olive green of slopes above timber line, Profile of the duo published in this mag- water and yelled, heeding me as little as and the gray and white of Longs Peak. azine in 1961. Like Nichols, she used wit if I were the discarnate carrier of my as a pesticide, and her juicy good looks present reminiscences. On the other —Vladimir Nabokov were a particularly disconcerting contrast side of the river, a dense crowd of “Butterflies,” June 12, 1948 to her sharp tongue. Once, Nichols re- small, bright-blue butterflies that had calls, when two men followed her down been tippling on the rich, trampled

RICHARD MERKIN the street making kissing sounds, May mud and cow dung through which I

TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 205/R7449M-133LS -L:IVE OPI—#2 PAGE “I think it’s overkill.” •• turned on them and said, “What’s the quick! Mike has a character!” Nichols Right Away,”an oral history of the Com- matter? Tired of each other?”“Fuck you!” reflects,“What is implied in that story— pass Players. “For me, it depended on a one of them shouted at her. May turned and it was true for the first time in my certain connection with Elaine and a and faced the guy.“With what?” she said. life—is affection. They had some affec- certain mad gleam in either her or my Nichols dropped out of college in tion for me. I began to understand that I eyes when we knew something was 1953, and, in 1954, he decamped to New could be kidded, and people could be starting.” The mad gleam meant, as York to study the Method with Lee fond of me, and that this would all be a he explained to me, “Oh, fuck, I know Strasberg. “I have decided that if I don’t pleasurable thing.” where you’re going. That’s a great idea make it as a nervous young man,” he you’ve just had, and when you get there wrote to a Chicago friend, “I will wait s intellectual high-wire acts go, I’ll be ready.” That focus—reminiscent and become like , who is Athere is no riskier or more astound- of a parent’s empowering gaze—was in- clearly the funniest man in the world.” ing enterprise than going out in front of spiring. “We had to figure out some- But in 1955, with no prospect of work, he an audience and creating something out thing or we would disappear, each of us,” returned to Chicago with the promise of of nothing. “You’re showing off how Nichols adds. (He would later find a twenty-eight dollars a week as part of a smart you are, how good you are,” Buck similar containing attentiveness in Di- new company called the Compass Play- Henry says. “You have the pleasure of ane Sawyer.“All of her is available all the ers, of which Sills and May were found- having not only performed it but written time,” he says.) With May, Nichols ing members. The goal of the Compass, it at the same time.” Improvisation—a could drop his mask. “I interested me which would evolve into Chicago’s leg- process, Nichols says, that “absorbs you, when I was with her,” he says. “It wasn’t endary Second City,was to do away with creates you, and saves you”—allowed the only that she was so great but that when conventional plays and make theatre by actors to stay on the edge of emotion and I was with her I became something more improvisational means. “I was terrified character without connecting deeply to than I had been.” of improvising,” Nichols says. “I didn’t their interior lives, and this suited both Onstage, in their own version of even know what it was. I hated it, and I Nichols’s and May’s private natures. “I Truth or Dare, Nichols and May kept was very bad at it.” Nichols cried in his would never have been a performer upping the ante on each other. Once, in scenes for months “because that’s what I without her, and I don’t think she would an improv about an egotistical d.j. and a thought I’d learned from Strasberg. Paul have without me,” Nichols says. “Elaine starlet called Barbara Musk, Nichols and Elaine kept me going. The fact of and I are, in some weird way,each other’s quizzed May about her next movie.“My Elaine—her presence—kept me doing it.” unconscious.” Nichols made the shapes; latest motion picture is ...called ‘Two In the first successful scene they did May filled them in.“She was shockingly, Gals in Paris.’ It is the life story of Ger- together, Nichols played a riding in- endlessly inventive. She could go on and trude Stein,” May said. “What do you structor, and May his pupil. “We both on—I couldn’t,” Nichols says. “I did my play in the picture, sweetheart?” Nichols realized as we got into the middle of the jokes, and then I was through.” asked. “Well, I was really just lucky scene that I would get to stand in the Within the , May enough to get the part of Gertrude Stein,” middle of the stage and watch her can- could be funny with several different ac- she said. “I had heard that Gertrude tering as both horse and rider around tors, but Nichols could be funny only Stein was going to be played by Spencer me.” During the scene, a member of the with her.“I never did a good scene of any Tracy,” Nichols said, maneuvering her cast ran into the bar where the other ac- kind with anybody else,” Nichols told into a tough spot.“Only as a child,” May tors were congregated, shouting,“Come Jeff Sweet, in “Something Wonderful shot back. When the conversation got

206 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 206—LIVE OPI ART #A5291—120 LS. onto the soundtrack of the movie, May scene,” Nichols told Jeff Sweet.“It didn’t Some weeks later, from New York, said that she’d recorded the title song. matter how clever the lines were. If they where he had gone with Scot (though, as Nichols promptly asked her to sing it. weren’t hung on a situation, you were May had predicted, the marriage didn’t On the spot, May ad-libbed an entire only as good as your last line. . . . But if last much longer), Nichols called to ask song, which ended: you could grab a situation, whether it May if she’d like to audition with him for was a seduction or a conflict or a fight, the New York agent . Rollins There was dashing Dmitri, elusive Ivan once you had that spine, then things handled such cabaret talent as Harry And Alyosha with the laughing eyes. Then came the dawn could come out of it.” And when the Belafonte and .“They were The brothers were gone jokes were found, Nichols husbanded immediately astounding. They were I just can’t forget those wonderful guys. them. “If there was a laugh to be gotten complete,” Rollins says, of the first time and Elaine didn’t set up the feed line, he set eyes on the team, at his office in The University of Chicago proved Mike would work with her until she the Pierre Hotel. “He is Mr. Practical. the perfect place for nurturing their par- did,” another Compass member, the co- She is insanely creative. But Mike is the ticular ironic and informed voices. “It median , said. “He did one that made the act live in this world.” was the most referential community that everything but lasso her.” For a while, ac- By the following Tuesday, Nichols and I think ever existed in this country,” says cording to Janet Coleman, Nichols and May were playing the Village Vanguard. Nichols, who improvised entire scenes in May worked with Berman, a trio that “A couple of weeks later, we were on the style of writers suggested by the au- May suggested they call “Two Cock- ‘,’ ” Nichols says. “Then we dience. “At the Compass, we could drop suckers and Elaine.” “I actually liked were on ‘Omnibus,’ and we were very fa- ‘Dostoyevsky’ as a name and get a laugh. Shelley,” Nichols said. “But one day mous. The whole thing took about two We were living in the context in which he came offstage and said, ‘Hey, guys, months.” After the “Omnibus” show, the referential joke was just the highest Mike had three scenes in that set, and Nichols remembers calling May at 4 A.M. currency.”They were also coming of age I only had two.’ It was a whole new idea to say,“What do we do now?” in a “safer, quieter place” than New York. in Eden to count. The group was fin- “Chicago is not a city of fashion, nor is it ished in six months.” s McCarthyism, the Cold War, and full of pride and excitement over its art,” Nichols and May themselves nearly Aracial unrest made their generation Nichols says.“They were very calm about foundered in 1958, when they were work- anxious, Nichols and May struck a new Compass. They came. They laughed. ing in St. Louis, where a new Compass disenchanted chord in American life. They went home.” Players venue had been launched. Nich- “Nobody was doing any humor about Nichols and May were beginning to ols had recently married the Chicago post-Korean War young people, that find resources in themselves that they TV personality and singer Pat Scot urban generation,” says the hadn’t known they had, including the (“Isn’t it a beautiful first wedding?” May and playwright , who, when ability to make anger work for them. said at the ceremony), who joined him he first heard them, “didn’t dare laugh, “Rage is the best engine, of course, if you on weekends. During the week, on because I was afraid of missing some- have a tremendous gift to employ it prop- a strictly platonic basis, Nichols and thing.” He adds,“Humor was erly,” Nichols wrote to a friend. Once, May shared a room, which she vacated still. When I saw Mike and Elaine, sud- when Nichols was performing a sketch when Scot arrived. On those days, May denly you felt not just that this is funny about pretentious snobs at a private party, stayed with another company mem- but that this is true.” Woody Allen, who the actor playing the effete host offered to ber, . Nichols was jealous of wanted to write for Nichols and May, put on a record. “Would you like to hear Close, not for romantic reasons but be- says that comedians like them “were ‘The Four Seasons’?” he asked. “Perhaps cause May was so much a part of his touching on some kind of truth—truth just ‘Winter,’ ” Nichols replied.“To freeze identity that he couldn’t share her. “I of character, social truth, truth of wit. his ass was a pleasure,” says Nichols, who persecuted the shit out of Del,” Nichols And, suddenly, part of that whole new found that with jokes he could “cow the says.“Nothing could stop me. Elaine fi- sense of truth was that they wrote their shit” out of the public. “When a joke nally said to the producer, ‘I can’t stand own material.” With Nichols and May, comes to you, it feels like it’s been sent by it anymore—you’ve got to fire Mi- Jewish angst, Freud, literacy, irony, and God.” He adds, “What it is, really, is dis- chael.’ ” Nichols was summarily fired. sex were ushered into the discourse of covering your unconscious.” mainstream comedy. They, along with There were other discoveries. When , , and, Nichols was onstage, even the “curse” of later, and Woody Allen, imagining what others thought of him were the renegades who led comedy became an asset: “I could hear what the away from the ersatz to the authentic. other actors were thinking, where they “The nice thing is to make an audience were going, what the audience was laugh and laugh and laugh and shudder thinking.” Nichols also learned “the later,” May said. The frisson was the Aristotelian things” about the building shock of recognition. Nichols and May of a scene—conflict, theme, resolution. had the uncanny ability at once to com- He and May found ways to “grab the op- ment on character and to fill it from posite.” “There had to be a core to a within. “They were like music,” Steve

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 207 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 207—LIVE SPOT PLS INSPECT FOR QUALITY # 2 Martin says, referring to the swift inti- those high-school paragons they never pair of actors having trouble with each macy of their overlapping rhythms, the were but now got to play.“We were those other onstage. Suddenly, in a terrifying deft interplay of May’s soft, breathless people, and it healed something, weird as shift, Nichols and May were in the mid- voice and the reedy clarity of Nichols’s it sounds,” Nichols says. Onstage with dle of some ugly private squabble. At one sound. For instance, in their sendup of May, Nichols felt, “I could be anybody point, in what Buck Henry characterizes public outrage over Charles Van Doren I needed to be. I used to have a mental as “a moment of unbelievably intense and the “Twenty-One” scandal: image of cracking a whip when I was embarrassment for everyone,” Nichols talking to the audience. I could control turned to the audience and said, “My NICHOLS: Thank heaven for the investigation. them with jokes.” Offstage, the person partner and I . . .” May said,“Well, screw MAY: Oh, yes. NICHOLS: When I feel worst I say to my- he presented as Mike Nichols was an- this,” and started to walk offstage. Nich- self, “At least the government has taken a other version of his stage persona—witty ols grabbed at her, ripping May’s blouse firm stand.” and apparently able to handle every- as she pulled away. She started to cry. MAY: Oh, yes. Well, they can’t fool around with this the way they did with integration. thing. “ ‘We’d like to say a few words “Michael, what do you think you’re do- NICHOLS: No. about adultery—it’s coming back.’That’s ing?” she said. “I’m doing ‘Pirandello,’ ” MAY: This is a . . . who I was.” He adds, “You start imitat- Nichols said. Breaking into smiles, they NICHOLS: . . . moral issue. MAY: Yes. ing somebody who is calm about all that. took their bows. But at one performance NICHOLS: A moral issue. You imitate it long enough, and it be- Nichols and May actually came to blows: MAY: Yes! Yes! It is a moral issue. comes true.” Nichols hit her back and forth across the NICHOLS: A moral issue. MAY: And to me that is so much more in- But, while his public persona stanched face, May clawed at his chest until it bled, teresting than a real issue. old anxieties, success brought new ones. and the curtain had to be brought down. May cared more about process, Nichols “We cried together. It didn’t happen “Smart is not necessarily funny,” Mar- more about results. “She was always again,” he says. “I think, in many ways, I tin says. “You can go through a whole brave,” he says of her desire to improvise. persecuted her. I went on at her, ‘This is evening of smart and have laughed com- “But I became more and more afraid. I too slow, this has to go faster.’ ” pletely perfunctorily.” But Nichols and wasn’t happy with getting paid a fortune The end was slow in coming. In Oc- May could be approached from either a for something and not having tried it tober, 1962, Nichols took the lead in dopey or a smart place. For example, out in advance.” By the late fifties, May’s play “A Matter of Position,” which their classic sketch about two teen-agers Nichols was earning more than half a opened in . “It was sort of smoking and making out in the front million dollars a year. He adds,“The au- about me, which she never quite admit- seat of a car contained two pieces of in- dience didn’t give a shit whether you ted,” Nichols says. But, with him on the spired physical business: May in the were improvising or not.They’d come to stage and May in the audience, the bal- middle of a passionate kiss opening her see good comedy.” ance of their relationship irrevocably mouth to breathe and emitting a puff of The team’s creative differences came shifted. “Suddenly, Elaine was not next smoke (a joke Nichols later used in “The to a head in their brilliant Broadway to me, doing it with me, but out there Graduate”), and the clinching lovers try- show, “An Evening with Mike Nichols judging me,” Nichols says. “It was hor- ing to pass a cigarette from one trapped and Elaine May” (1960), which I saw rendous.” The play itself added to the at- hand to another. during its yearlong run. “We were irre- mosphere of fiasco. As the Philadelphia However, sometimes smart alone proachable,” Nichols says.“We never got Sunday Bulletin wrote,“Those members could bring down the house. Nichols a negative review.We never had an empty of the audience who had not already beat began his sendup of Tennessee Wil- seat. Everybody loved us. Everybody felt a hasty retreat before the final curtain, as liams—a high-pitched, hard-drinking they had discovered us.” But discovery— many did, were left with a sensation of Southern playwright called Alabama the fearless adventure of creating in the numbness that was too far down to be Glass—with the playwright explaining moment—was gradually being leached attributed to heartburn.” Nichols and his newest work to the audience.“Before out of their performances by the repeti- May were no longer two against the the action of the play begins,” Nichols tion of set routines. May grew increas- world. May was looking for a replace- drawled,“Nanette’s husband, Raoul, has ingly unhappy.“Sometimes she’d be late. ment for Nichols, and Nichols was say- committed suicide on bein’ unjustly ac- What is so difficult? Two hours out of ing to people, “Get her to cut the play or cused of not bein’ homosexual.” twenty-four. It’s a perfect job. It wasn’t I’m leaving.” The play died in Philadel- “Most of the time, people thought that way for her,” Nichols says. “We had phia; and, although they didn’t exactly we were making fun of others when we huge fights about it. I never could un- speak the words, so did their friendship. were making fun of ourselves,” Nich- derstand why she found it so difficult.” “It was cataclysmic,” Nichols says. ols says. “Pretentiousness. Snobbiness. The most stunning moment of the “Mike was in a state of deep depres- Horniness. Elaine was parodying her evening—a kind of augury of their col- sion,” says Robby Lantz, Nichols’s the- mother, as I was mine, and a certain girl- lapse—was a sketch called “Pirandello,” a atrical agent at the time.“He really wasn’t ishness, flirtatiousness in herself.” He twenty-minute exercise in which Nichols functioning. He went to bed. Period.” adds, “It was utterly freeing.” And re- and May began as two little kids, playing Nichols was now half of a comedy team. deeming. In the teen-ager sketch, for in- at insulting each other like Mom and He had lost his best friend, his liveli- stance, Nichols and May were sending Dad, then became Mom and Dad yell- hood, and the scaffolding of his identity. up the cheerleader and the football star, ing at each other, and then turned into a “Mike has no tolerance for failure,” says

208 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 208 a former collaborator who tried to rally were “King Lear.” “Let’s do it as though curse me and then come down and meet him after May’s departure. “I didn’t we don’t know what’s going to happen,” me in the lobby to listen to it. It was know what I was or who I was,” Nichols Nichols remembers telling the cast. the joy of discovering things together.” explains. His predicament was summed “Let’s not let them know it’s funny.” As a comedian, Nichols had watched up one afternoon on Park Avenue by But it was Simon who didn’t know himself become what he calls “a show- , a member of the de- that his play was funny. At the first biz baby.” “I was narcissistic,” he says. “I luxe set he’d become part of. Bernstein Bucks County rehearsal, he sat outside would get mad. I bitched about our put his arm around Nichols. “Oh, the rehearsal hall. “Suddenly, I heard a billing. I did all the things I dislike. Mikey,” he said, “you’re so good. I don’t roar,” Simon says. “ ‘Thank God, they Comedy is the only work in the world in know at what, but you’re so good.” must be up to a good part.’ I went inside. which the work and the reward are si- It was Mike telling them a story during multaneous. Comedians get it on the hat Nichols was good at, it turned the break. Then we went back to the spot. They get the laugh. It’s very cor- Wout, was something that his act- play—no more laughs.” rupting to your character.” But as a di- ing classes with Strasberg, his improvis- “Doc said,‘Let’s call it off.This is not rector Nichols got to play adult instead ing, and his comedy act with May had all a play. I never thought it was a play,’ ” of baby. “There was something about been a preparation for: directing. In Nichols recalls.“I said,‘Let’s decide after serving something that wasn’t me,” 1961, in New Jersey, he’d directed a col- the first preview. Let’s just see how it is Nichols says. Within fifteen minutes of lection of Jules Feiffer cartoon sketches, with an audience.’ Of course, they yelled starting rehearsal for “Barefoot in the “The World of Jules Feiffer,” with music and screamed and fell out of their chairs. Park,” he had a life-changing revelation: by Stephen Sondheim. “It was clear to Doc never worried again.” Nichols adds, the experience of taking care of others me that he was extraordinary,” Feiffer “I had instant maturity.” made him feel taken care of. “I had a says. But it was not clear to the produc- This marked the beginning of what is sense of enormous relief and joy that I ing fraternity or to Nichols. As an ap- probably the most successful commercial had found a process that both gave me prenticeship, Lantz sent him on what partnership in twentieth-century Amer- my father back and allowed me to be my Nichols calls “the lamest possible job,” to ican theatre. “We were obsessed in the father and the group’s father,” he says. direct Wilde’s “The Importance of Be- same way,” Nichols says of Simon. “I Nichols’s love for his actors was pal- ing Earnest” and play the Dauphin in could wake him up at two in the morn- pable; he created a protective environ- Shaw’s “St. Joan,” at a theatre ing and say, ‘I’ve figured out what’s ment for them.“They’re giving everyone festival. “Every night at midnight he wrong with the third act,’ and he would the right to assess, evaluate, criticize ev- called and said, ‘Get me out of this. I don’t want to do this,’ ” Lantz recalls. “I said, ‘This is precisely what the doctor ordered.’ ” And so it proved.The Broad- way producer Arnold Saint-Subber was shopping for a director for ’s “Nobody Loves Me.” Although Saint- Subber didn’t have enough confidence to guarantee the tyro director the Broad- way show, he was prepared to let Nichols try out the play in Bucks County, Penn- sylvania. Nichols had only seven days to mount “Nobody Loves Me,” which was later retitled “.” After the first reading at Saint- Subber’s house, when none of the actors laughed, the notoriously nervous Simon, known as Doc because of his ability to swiftly rewrite a line and make brilliant comic fixes, wanted to call off the play. Nichols was unruffled. “The play was so light, so sweet, so funny,that my job was to make it real,” says Nichols, who im- pressed Simon with his extraordinary calmness. “I was absolutely confident about what everything should be and where everybody should be.” Nichols told his talented cast—, , Mildred Natwick, “Have you ever wanted something so bad that you’d Kurt Kasznar—to treat the play as if it actually save up the money to buy it?”

TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 209—LIVE OPI ART #A5270—120 LS. —#2 PAGE erything about them—their noses, their tomers. “The experience of living in the Park,” he and Simon stood at the asses, their intelligence, their worthiness front of the audience for all those years in back of the theatre watching a scene in or lack of worthiness,” he says. “They’re Chicago did something to me,” Nichols which the bride, after a week of mar- really out there.” Nichols was a shrewd says.“It gave me some closeness to them, riage, screams that she wants a divorce. father—clever about wielding his au- some trust.” His sensitivity to audience “I said to Mike, ‘I don’t think we should thority and about maintaining bound- reaction was the issue in a dramatic be watching this,’ ” Simon recalls. “He aries. During “Barefoot in the Park,” falling-out he had with , said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘It’s too personal, Redford came to Nichols in a quandary: whose play “” was probably what they’re doing on the stage.’ And he was being upstaged by the showy Nichols’s greatest artistic triumph—a Mike says, ‘Good, I’m glad you like it.’ ” Elizabeth Ashley.“I can’t bear it,” he told beautifully staged and terrifying barracks Between 1963 and 1984, Nichols Nichols. “Every night when I kiss Ash- tale of homosexual baiting. When it chalked up about a dozen Broadway ley,she kicks her leg up behind her. I feel came to Rabe’s next play, the powerful hits in a row, half of them with Simon. like I’ve been used. I’m embarrassed.” “,” Nichols explains, “I was “Over and over again, he’d say when “Why don’t you do it, too?” Nichols sug- desperate for him to cut. I kept saying,‘I everybody was getting nervous, ‘It’s only gested. Redford did as he was told and won’t do this to the audience.’ I could a play.They’re not going to be waiting for got a huge laugh; Ashley promptly not get him to see the show from the au- you in front of your house with torches,’ ” stopped her upstaging. dience; he only saw it from the light recalls Simon, whose hit play “The Sun- Some of Nichols’s charges could be booth.” Rabe, who finally went mute in shine Boys” was a script that he had notoriously bumptious. Sometimes he protest (“He couldn’t reach me. I was abandoned until Nichols encouraged tamed them with his high-definition not listening,” Rabe told me), stayed him to complete it. But one thing about humor. Once, during a heated rehearsal with the show until it opened but spoke theatre did make Nichols nervous: seeing of “,” hardly a word to Nichols. Nichols won his stage business and his contributions looked out at Nichols in the auditorium the argument and the cut play was a suc- to scripts go into movie versions without and said, “Mike, can I have my cock cess, but it cost him their relationship. remuneration. He was the first director to back now?” “Props!” Nichols said. With Improvisation had given Nichols demand, and get, a share of the author’s other wayward actors, like George C. another invaluable directorial impulse: royalties, which, when added to his di- Scott, he knew when to be politic. Dur- “To damn well pick something that rector’s royalty and his piece of the sub- ing the rehearsals of “,” Scott would happen in the scene—an Event.” sidiary rights, quickly made Nichols a disappeared for three days.“We’re in the As Nichols explains it, the Event in very rich man. (According to his accoun- middle of a scene, and George walks in. any scene subliminally seeks an agree- tant, if all his stock and film income were Collar up—it’s winter—hands in coat ment with the audience on the human lost, he could still “live comfortably” pockets. He’s just standing there looking experience. “While you’re expressing on his production royalties.) “I wasn’t at us,” Simon recalls. “I look at Mike, what happens, you’re also saying under- pleased with giving it to him, but I can’t and I’m anxious to hear what he’s gonna neath, ‘Do we share this? Are you like argue with it,” Simon says. “I would say. Mike said, ‘Hi, George. We’re on me in any way? Oh, look, you are. You rather have him do it and have the play Act II, page twenty-one.’” On the other laughed!’ ” The building of this agree- be great. I never worked with anyone in hand, Nichols could be strict about cer- ment through observation and detailed my life—nor will I ever work with any- tain kinds of behavior. At an early re- comic business was Nichols’s signature: one—as good as Mike Nichols. And, hearsal of “The Prisoner of Second Av- , in “The Odd Couple,” sud- when you talk about percentages, what enue,” the cast, which included Peter denly single and so nervous on his first Mike asked for was more than made up Falk and , was blocking a date that when he lights the woman’s for by what I made on ‘The Sunshine scene on the stage of the Plymouth The- cigarette he closes his Zippo on it; the Boys.’ ” atre. “One of the actresses said, ‘Mike, if newlywed Elizabeth Ashley, in “Bare- Money played a large part in how she stands over there, I don’t think this foot in the Park,” who knows nothing Nichols measured his achievement.“He part of the house is gonna see me,’ ” about housekeeping, holding a match to always pushed with agents—I speak for Simon recalls. “Mike turned and whis- a log in the fireplace, or slamming from us all: more money, more power, more pered to the producer, ‘Fire her.’ ” room to room in a passionate argument billing,” Robby Lantz says. “Eventually, Nichols’s authority rested, in large with her husband while simultaneously the demands became cruel. Artists in part, on his unique understanding of the undressing. the theatre should not take from each audience. Onstage, and later in film, his Nichols has a gift for making things other things that are not necessary.” But work sought—some would say too ea- real. During the tryouts for “Barefoot in Nichols, who had almost been wiped gerly—to speak to the audience in a out in his first show-biz incarnation, popular way. At its best, this sensibility was building an unassailable second ca- produced “The Odd Couple,” one of the reer. “The butterflies in my stomach century’s classic comedies. At its most won’t stop fluttering until I have thirty indulgent, it allowed , million dollars,” the producer Lewis as Estragon in “” Allen overheard Nichols telling Lillian (1988), to break the play’s artifice of iso- Hellman. “He’s ruthless when he wants lation and ad-lib with the paying cus- to be, or sometimes maybe even when

210 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 210—LIVE SPOT—PLS INSPECT FOR QUALITY—#2 he doesn’t want to be,” Lantz says. “He doesn’t let anything stand in his way.” TAKES

ichols was also avid for artistic ex- Ncellence, which he needed power to protect. He learned this lesson in his first taste of Hollywood, in the mid-sixties. Elizabeth Taylor had chosen Nichols to direct her in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?,” even though she had never seen or read the play: she trusted, she hen I was very young, and was said, Nichols’s sense of the tragic, which Wdealing with my buddies in she’d intuited from their friendship. And those wine-and-urine-stained hallways, it was Taylor whom Nichols invoked something in me wondered, What will when Jack Warner, reversing production happen to all that beauty? For black plans, insisted on shooting in color. As people, though I am aware that some Nichols recalls, “I said, ‘Mr. Warner, it’s of us, black and white, do not know it impossible for several reasons. The sets yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat are built. Elizabeth’s thirty-three years at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, old—her makeup will never withstand , and the men, and we talked color. How can she go from thirty-three about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I to fifty-six and have us believe the wondered, when that vengeance was makeup in color?’ ” But Warner insisted. achieved, What will happen to all that The screenwriter and the producer, beauty then? I could also see that , whom Nichols sardon- the intransigence and ignorance of ically nicknamed Slugger, said nothing. the white world might make that “Well, O.K., I’ll tell you what,” Nichols vengeance inevitable—a vengeance that told him. “You make it in color. I’ll go does not really depend on, and cannot home. I like it at home.” Warner imme- really be executed by, any person or diately conceded: “All right, black-and- organization, and that cannot be white,” he said.“After that, he treated me prevented by any police force or army: very kindly,”Nichols says.“Until he threw historical vengeance, a cosmic me off the picture at the end.When it was vengeance, based on the law that we mixing time, he saved time and trouble recognize when we say, “Whatever and just had his crew mix it.” goes up must come down.” And here But even here Nichols had unex- we are, at the center of the arc, trapped pected leverage. Each night from the in the gaudiest, most valuable, and set, the editor, Sam O’Steen, would play most improbable water wheel the him the sound mix over the phone and world has ever seen. Everything now, Nichols would give him notes on what to we must assume, is in our hands; we change. Finally, Nichols got word to have no right to assume otherwise. If Warner that he wanted to cut a deal.War- we—and now I mean the relatively ner was worried that the film, which was conscious whites and the relatively about adultery, drunkenness, and brutal conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, family battles, would not be approved by insist on, or create, the consciousness the powerful Catholic Legion of De- of the others—do not falter in our duty cency.In exchange for being allowed back now, we may be able, handful that we on the set, Nichols came up with a plan to are, to end the racial nightmare, and deliver the Legion: “When the Mon- achieve our country, and change the signor sees the picture, Jackie Kennedy history of the world. If we do not now will sit behind him. When it’s over, she dare everything, the fulfillment of that will say, ‘How Jack would have loved it!’ ” prophecy, re-created from the Bible in Jackie Kennedy did as her friend asked; song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Warner got the Legion’s blessing; and Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, Nichols duly finished his film, the first the fire next time! film ever for which all of the four lead- ing players were nominated for Oscars. —James Baldwin Nichols, whose film technique is not Letter from a Region in My Mind,

RICHARD MERKIN showy, is a director’s director. “He tends November 17, 1962

TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 211-R7449J-133LS-LIVE OPI—#5—PAGE 211 to get actors to give him their finest wrong for the preppy Benjamin Brad- I had never seen long lenses used that hours,” says, citing dock, a Wasp college athlete who has an way to illuminate a character moment.” Kathy Bates’s long monologue in “Pri- affair with one of his parents’ friends. In Spielberg’s encyclopedic apprecia- mary Colors.” For Nichols, who him- “There is no piece of casting in the tion of Nichols’s cinematic innovations, self gave a tour-de-force performance twentieth century that I know of that is he lists the handheld camera in “Who’s in Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated more courageous than putting me in Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which “fur- Mourner,” at London’s Royal National that part,” says Hoffman, who considers ther complicated” the anxiety and turned Theatre in 1996, the director’s job is to the film “the most perfect movie I’ve ever the couple’s war into “a dance”; the “bril- help the actors turn psychology into be- been part of,” adding “I was a paralyzed liant use of light” in “Day of the Dol- havior. When Nichols talks to actors and person. I had come from a paralyzed phin,” when the aquarium lights are to students at the New Actors Work- background—the suffocation of that turned on and a dead body is discovered shop, which he founded with Paul Sills family. I was not acting.” floating inside the tank; the way Nichols and George Morrison, in 1988, he is What Nichols saw in Hoffman—“a built, bit by bit, the paranoia and terror generally oblique, offering up examples dark, Jewish, anomalous presence”— in “Silkwood,” which was, for Spielberg, from his own life to clarify a theatrical was, of course, himself.Through impro- “one of the most frightening and sus- moment.“You kind of just free-associate visation, Nichols had learned to “treat penseful things I had ever seen in a all day long,” says the writer-director yourself as a metaphor”; Hoffman gave movie”; the long opening shot in “Carnal Nora Ephron, who worked with Nichols him the same opportunity in film. “If Knowledge,” at the college party, and on “Silkwood” and “Heartburn.” “Then the metaphor is powerful, it’s always un- the way he “made love to Ann-Margret suddenly you get something that actually derneath you and you’re always surfing through the lighting.” That controversial is good enough to find its way into the it. You’re always serving it,” says Nichols. film, which Nichols considers his dark- thing you’re working on.” The veteran Even Hoffman’s whimper, Nichols says, est, was a coruscating look at predatory director says,“Mike’s scenes “was my little whimper when Jack War- sexual chauvinism and at women’s suf- have a kind of inner content, which the ner would tell a joke—in fact, people fering, themes that resonated with Nich- audience feels and follows. He’s very had to tell me to try not to whimper when ols’s own life at the time. “He was not lucid.” “What you’re looking for every he told jokes, that he would notice.” nice to his girls,” says a close friend of day is one little surprise,” Nichols told Hoffman remembers Nichols taking those middle years, when Nichols was about directing. “It’s like him aside when he was listless in front of married to his third wife, the Anglo- seeding a cloud and hoping it will rain.” the cameras, a couple of months into the Irish novelist Annabel Davis-Goff, The process requires patience, luck, shooting, and saying, “This is the only who is the mother of two of his children, and a gentle touch. Once, during the time you’ll ever get a chance to do this Max and Jenny. (He had split up with casting of “Carnal Knowledge,” Jules scene. It’s going to be up there for the Margot Callas in 1964.) “He was a terri- Feiffer, who wrote the script, told Nich- rest of your life.” Hoffman adds,“He re- ble household tyrant.” ols that he was worried about putting the ally meant it. It makes me cry,because he “Carnal Knowledge” dramatized this twenty-three-year-old Candice Bergen had that kind of passion, and it had that tyranny.The night before Nichols was to in the lead. “Can she act?” Feiffer asked. importance. I’ve never forgotten it. Mike shoot the crucial scene—the bedroom “Mike said, ‘She’ll act for me.’ And she worked like a surgeon every second.” fracas between Jonathan ( Jack Nichol- did.” In his recent biography of Edward Steven Spielberg calls “The Gradu- son) and the depressed Bobbie (Ann- Albee, Mel Gussow quotes Richard Bur- ate”“a visual watershed,” and invokes the Margret), in which Jonathan goes ber- ton (who played the harried professor in moment when Benjamin races home serk trying to force Bobbie out of his “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?”) on ahead of Mrs. Robinson to tell her daugh- house and calls her “a ball-busting, cas- Nichols. “He appears to defer to you, ter Elaine, whom he loves, about his af- trating, son-of-a-cunt bitch!”—Feiffer then in the end he gets exactly what he fair with her mother. “All of a sudden, sat with Nichols as Nichols explained wants. He conspires with you rather than the mother appears in the door behind why the scene had to go.“It’s just so ugly, directs you, to get your best,” Burton said. Elaine, Elaine turns, and the focus racks it’s so awful, people are gonna hate it, Nichols’s goal is to match the actor to to the mom. But when Elaine turns back and they’re gonna hate the movie,” Feif- the part. “If I can cast the right people the focus stays—Elaine is actually out of fer remembers him saying.“We went for and figure out the things they should be focus—and very slowly comes back until a bite,” Feiffer adds. “I just sat in the car doing in the scene, they don’t have to do she is sharp and she realizes that Benja- listening to him go over and over why he anything but show up,” Nichols says. min and her mother have been shtupping. couldn’t shoot it. Finally, he just looked “Nobody has to act.” Over the years, at me and said, ‘No, we’ve got to do it, Nichols has made some particularly dar- because it’s true.’ ” ing, less than obvious choices—Art Gar- But after the box-office failures of funkel in “Carnal Knowledge,” Adrian both “Carnal Knowledge” and the ambi- Lester in “Primary Colors,” Hank Aza- tious but misguided “Catch-22”—a ria in “The Birdcage”—but the outstand- story whose surreality was not Nichols’s ing example of inspired casting is Dustin strong suit—Nichols began, by his own Hoffman in “The Graduate,” since Hoff- admission, to lose his way. Once, during man was both unknown and physically this period, he sat idling in his Rolls-

212 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 212—LIVE SPOT PLS INSPECT FOR QUALITY Royce at a Beverly Hills traffic light when a pimp in a flashy car pulled up be- side him. “That’s a Silver Cloud,” the pimp said. “And you, man, are the silver lining.” And so it had seemed, until, after his third miscue, with “Bogart Slept Here,” it wasn’t. Nichols told the world that he’d lost his appetite for making movies, but what he’d lost was a vital sense of connection to what he was doing and what he wanted to say. “Usu- ally it happens right away, when I’m reading a script—I see a moment, and I know what that moment is, and it’s my hook into the whole thing,” Nichols says. In the years between closing down “Bogart Slept Here,” in 1975, and start- ing “Silkwood,” in 1983, those moments of compelling inspiration eluded him. In the interim, besides developing a film version of “A Chorus Line” (which he subsequently abandoned), he produced the musical “” and the one-woman Broadway show that launched ’s career. Then, sometime in the middle of the eighties, visions of an altogether differ- ent kind appeared to Nichols: for about six months, he experienced a Halcion- induced psychotic breakdown. He be- came delusional—he was convinced, for example, that he had lost all his money, and that he’d turned from being “the hero of the story” into the villain. “Be- cause I’d lost the money, I was the bad guy. I’d brought shame and unhappi- ness to my family,” he says.“It was a hor- rible feeling of abject despair and self- •• loathing.” He was wide-eyed and gaunt. Nothing seemed to help. He called Buck Henry to ask if he’d give him enough stopped taking it, he had learned, he A-list.” This puts Nichols’s survival at sleeping pills to end his life if it was ab- says, “what people are like when you’re the top of the Hollywood tree at thirty- solutely necessary. “Of course, I said I not so shiny and you don’t have your four years and counting—longer than would,” Henry says. “I was lying.” At powers.” (His marriage to Davis-Goff such legends as , Billy one low point, Nichols sat with the pro- broke up shortly thereafter.) Wilder, , and . ducer ,now the head of Sony His collapse proved cautionary, and Spielberg adds, “You want him because Pictures, and tallied up his assets item by his subsequent movies, from Neil Si- you know that he’s going to tell the story item on a foolscap pad. Calley says, “I’d mon’s “” and “” better than it was told in the screenplay add the numbers up and at the bottom it to “Primary Colors” and “The Birdcage,” you bought. You’re going to be getting would have thirteen million six, and I’d were an aggressive reassertion of his basically two scripts for the price of one.” say, ‘Do you see thirteen six?’ He’d say, commercial shine. With the exception of Nichols knows the value of stories like ‘Yes.’ I’d say, ‘Now, can you accept that?’ “Primary Colors,” a subtle dissection of “,”“All the Pretty He’d say, ‘The only thing I could accept power and marriage, the films are crowd- Horses,” and “The Reader”; they are would be you telling me that when I go pleasing fables. Nichols’s impulse was works he has produced, or will produce, into debtors’ prison you will take care of clearly to build himself as solidly as pos- but wasn’t interested in directing. He the children.’ ” (Max was then eleven sible into the Hollywood system.“Every loved the intellectual showboating of and Jenny was nine.) By the time Hal- development executive, every studio pres- Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” a play about chaos cion was identified as the chemical ident, has a list of directors,” Spielberg theory,and wanted to make it into a film, source of his problem and Nichols says, “and Mike has never been off the but he couldn’t make the numbers work.

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 21 & 28, 2000 213 TNY—2/21 & 28/00—PAGE 213—#2 “You don’t want to take advantage of your structed alien—stand facing each other owned six paintings by Balthus, includ- friends and say, ‘Would you mind doing to reaffirm their marital vows. Bening is ing the infamous “The Guitar Lesson,” this at a quarter of your price?’ ” he says. saying,“Harold, meeting you has taught which hung over his bed. (“I had to get “If movies hadn’t changed so radi- me the universe is one big screwed-up rid of it,” he says.“It pissed off too many cally, what Mike would have been, per- place where everyone’s just trying to women.”) But there is still a Stubbs, a haps should have been,” Jules Feiffer work out their problems, but I’m hon- Fischl, and a beautiful Morandi study of says, “is the successor to a director like ored to work them out with you, be- bottles whose hard-won peace echoes —working in romantic cause...I think...I love you.” When the current mood of its owner. He is on comedy with urbane wit and style. But the lights come on, Nichols says, “I have record as saying that the best definition those times passed. So he had to shuffle this experience over and over. I make a of happiness appears in ’s around to find something to replace movie because it draws me, and when I “.” “Happiness is equi- that.” In choosing his projects, Nichols get it all finished I think, Christ, look, it’s librium,” the main character says. “Shift needs to feel, he says, that “only I can do about me.” The alien, who comes to your weight.” “It’s good, and it’s true,” this.” When he picked “What Planet earth merely to exploit women, has been Nichols continues Stoppard’s thought. Are You From?,” he thought, Yes, this is humanized by love—and he becomes, as “You have to stay light on your feet and for me. I know what to do with it. Nichols points out, “simultaneously the remember what’s important and what’s Nichols’s next film, starring Robin leader of his planet.” In Nichols’s eyes, his not.”These days, Nichols teaches; he at- Williams and with a script by Elaine marriage to Diane Sawyer has wrought tends meetings of Friends In Deed, an May, will be a remake of the classic Eal- the same miracle. “True love made Pi- outreach charity for people with AIDS ing comedy “Kind Hearts and Coro- nocchio a real boy,” Nichols said in a TV and other life-threatening diseases, nets.”“I can only follow my excitement,” interview. “We all sort of feel like we’re which he founded with Cyn- Nichols says. “Sometimes I wish it were contraptions, like we pasted ourselves thia O’Neal; and he keeps up a prolifer- more high-minded, and sometimes I’m together—a little bit from here, a little ating E-mail correspondence. He visits glad that it’s not. I have no choice either bit from there—and then, if you’re very his horses, and he even cooks now: his way. I don’t think ‘The Graduate’ and lucky, along comes someone who loves specialties include lemon pasta, risotto ‘Carnal Knowledge’ were any different you the right way, and then you’re real.” with smoked mozzarella, and sour- from what I’m doing now.” But the fact “Mike spent many years without cream-peach ice cream. Sawyer leaves remains that the early pictures said new happiness. I mean, there were dark years notes on the floor beside their bed when things in an ironic, challenging way, and where it wasn’t quite working in rela- she slips off to the network every day the later work ruffles no feathers. tionships,” Calley says.“He was in them at 4 A.M. to anchor “Good Morning In any case, Nichols’s asking price for but they weren’t giving him a lot of joy. America”; before going back to sleep, mainstream movies has gone up: he now With Diane, he doesn’t have to pretend according to Sawyer, Nichols “opens one gets about seven and a half million dol- not to be who he is to make a partner eye and says, ‘Tell it like it is.’ ” lars just for taking on a film, plus ap- comfortable.” Intimacy requires equality; On the chaise longue in the bedroom proximately twelve per cent of the gross. and Sawyer, who has her own con- is an embroidered pillow with words that “So it’s hard for him to say no,” John stituency, checkbook, and clout, is in play on a line from one of Nichols’s fa- Calley says. Some of his friends wish he every way an equal to Nichols, whom vorite movies, “Lawrence of Arabia,” in would.“He knows I don’t like a lot of the she first met while waiting to board a which an Arab tells Lawrence to aban- stuff he does. I think it’s beneath him,” Concorde flight from Paris. Even today, don a straggler in his party.“It is written,” Buck Henry says. “He should be doing if asked to shut her eyes and picture him, the Arab says. The cushion gives Law- more ‘Hurlyburly’s.” But Nichols, who Sawyer sees Nichols as she did that first rence’s answer: “Nothing Is Written.” It has heard the arguments, is unmoved. day: “All that light in his eyes and some seems an apt motto for Nichols’s journey. “All movies are pure process,” he says.“A sort of invitation. He’s just full of invita- Nichols, who keeps no diaries and few commercial movie isn’t less process than tion. It’s like, ‘Let’s be young together. mementos of his extraordinary life, is an art movie. You can’t make your deci- Let’s see things for the first time and tell still all future. “He can go on and on sions about a film on the basis of ‘Is it each other the absolute truth, want to?’ ” until he chooses not to go on anymore,” important enough? Is it serious enough?’ After their chance meeting, Sawyer ap- Spielberg says of Nichols’s moviemak- It’s either alive or it’s not for me. If it’s proached Nichols for a TV interview: “I ing career. But the greatest of Nichols’s alive, I want to do it.” He adds,“If you’re just had this idea of wild intelligence and mise en scènes is himself: he has created funny, and you stay funny, I think that’s that there’d be some surprise there,” she a person who lives well in the world. already doing pretty good.” says. The surprise was, she says, “that At the end of our time together, he there was no end to the surprises.” sat back on the sofa and declared him- n the pale-gray calm of his midtown Nichols and Sawyer live on the sev- self pleased with the conversation. “I do Iediting suite, Nichols sits behind his enth floor of a handsome Fifth Avenue well with the fundamentally incon- editor, Richie Marks, who works away at apartment building with a view of the solable,” I said. The words seemed to an Avid console, tweaking the finale of Metropolitan Museum of Art from their surprise Nichols and to press him back “What Planet Are You From?” on a trip- library. Most of Nichols’s art collection in his seat. His eyes fluttered shut for a tych of screens. Bening and Shan- was sold off at bargain-basement prices moment, then opened. “We get a lot dling—the earthling and the recon- in his Halcion panic; at one point he done, you know,” he said. ♦

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