Let Us Now Praise Mike Nichols
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Version 0 of 1. LIFE ISN’T EVERYTHING Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends By Ash Carter and Sam Kashner There are people who think of oral history as auditory mosaics. You assemble those little tiles, the tesserae, from as many interviews as possible, and create the image of a biblical scene or portrait of a saint, proceeding in chronological order. But the big difference is that with mosaics you know the wanted result. Whereas with oral — or aural — history, you don’t know where the interviews will take you, and you are apt to get surprises, pleasant and (rarely) unpleasant, as the case may be. When the subject is someone in literature or the performing arts, the respondees are likely to be of more than average articulateness, which makes their responses more fun to read, but also more complicated to organize. How do you avoid near repetition or occasional contradiction? The predominant characteristics have to do with love, truth and reality, but it is not as if any one of those, as exhibited by Mike Nichols, did not allow for astonishing diversity. One of Nichols’s oft-repeated phrases was “Life isn’t everything,” but then what was beyond life? Everything else, or some relevant nothing? As his usual stage manager, Peter Lawrence, expresses it: “There was always Igor Peschkowsky in Mike. There was always that German Jewish boy who arrives in America looking like a boiled egg.” (He had a condition that caused him to lose all his hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes.) His English consisted of just “I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me.” Lawrence believes this to be “apocryphal, but he claimed it was true.” He became ambidextrously a film and stage director of genius, an achievement that few directors can claim, especially if you throw in television. Ash Carter, a writer and editor, and Sam Kashner, the author or co-author of several books, have skillfully handled things in 14 chapters and a coda. They have drawn on 150 respondents, friendly and mostly jovial, along with a good many quotations from Nichols himself. I am especially fond of two simple remarks. One when Richard Burton asked Mike to look after Elizabeth Taylor in Rome. Replied Nichols, “If it’ll help.” The beauty of this is the number of ways it can be taken. The choreographer Casey Nicholaw recalls the other, Mike’s comment to an actor during rehearsal: “That was wonderful, now do it as you.” “Life Isn’t Everything” covers the brilliant student days at the University of Chicago, in the city where contemporary improv was born. Nichols teamed up with Elaine May, and this soon-to-be-celebrated duo performed at a number of Chicago nightclubs and theaters. His fame would grow over the years, exponentially. Somebody once wrote a letter addressed merely to “Mike Nichols, Famous American Director,” and it got to him. He could make everyone in a room feel smarter and wittier; he had, as Renata Adler notes, “presence.” And he had “that incredible capacity for friendship that makes you think you’re absolutely unique,” Anjelica Huston recalls. After his first film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in 1966 (with Taylor and Burton), Nichols directed “The Graduate.” Dustin Hoffman says, “I was dubbed a perfectionist for years and years, and all I could think was, I learned from Mike Nichols.” Altogether, the pages about “The Graduate” constitute some of the best writing about Hollywood and could make, by themselves, a devastating satire. In Tom Hanks’s words, “The Graduate” was “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of disaffected youth.” On the set of his next major movie, “Catch-22,” a grotesque contest ensued as to who was the director, Nichols or one of his stars, Orson Welles. In the case of “Carnal Knowledge,” Jules Feiffer, who wrote the screenplay, states that “it was always about the work and never about his ego, never about his sense of importance.” This could be said about all of Nichols’s films, the sort of thing that makes Art Garfunkel say, “He has been a Santa Claus in my life.” The British playwright David Hare asserts: “In my opinion, ‘Carnal Knowledge’ is Mike’s masterpiece. I think it’s one of the great American movies.” Rita Moreno, who was in it, speaks of Nichols, not without covert admiration, as having had “an icy kind of heart.” He was, by the mid-80s, thrice married to three lookers, and thrice divorced. As Richard Avedon observes, “He has this thing for collecting beauty, including the wives.” Eric Idle allows how “he could be brutally frank”: “I see I have to give you my asshole speech,” Mike said to a difficult actor. According to Idle, “the guy was lovely and adorable ever after.” Nichols hated musicals, which is why he directed Monty Python’s antimusical, “Spamalot.” But he could make exceptions, and did nicely by “Annie.” In 1996, he agreed to be in a dreadful play by Wallace Shawn, “The Designated Mourner,” presumably because it allowed him to be alone on the stage much of the time. People came in sizable numbers because they wanted to see Mike Nichols act, directed by another director, his friend David Hare. By this time, his mastery was indisputable; he could merge fabulousness with fastidiousness, make hits of such disparate projects as “Streamers,” an armed-service play, and “Working Girl,” essentially a mildly feminist opus. And then there would be the movie version of “Angels in America” as well as a successful revival of “Death of a Salesman.” He was also successful as a breeder of Arabian horses — something as goyish as you could get, and indeed Nichols felt bad about having neglected his Jewishness. He was very close to Meryl Streep, and would, I guess, have married her had she not been a wife already. And then came his final success, his marriage to Diane Sawyer, a “shiksa goddess,” in the words of the director Jack O’Brien. She was good-looking, tall, smart and a journalist. “I finally got it right,” he said. And they were together 26 years, until his death in 2014. He also enjoyed a great friendship with Emma Thompson, and had to explain his forgetting to thank her in front of the crew for her work on the HBO version of the play “Wit”: “Because you’re part of me, and so I don’t separate you out anymore.” But during “Angels” he made amends on her birthday, she says, with “a Scottish pipe band in kilts, a goofball choir, Audra McDonald and a [expletive] huge ice angel!” Tony Kushner sings his praises: “I think his work is spectacularly rich and generative of meaning,” and the meaning “comes from a deep engagement with the particulars.” Streep, one of the stars of “Angels,” says: “You have a very important piece, and you feel the responsibility to everybody who ever had AIDS. But it’s funny. And funny is where stuff goes into your heart.” As another of the stars, Al Pacino, puts it: “It was all direction. When he talked about what he had for breakfast in the morning, it was direction.” And then there’s Mary-Louise Parker, also in “Angels”: “He understood the humanity of it and the poetry of it equally.” John Bloom, a film editor, calls Nichols “the most generous man”: “A Château Rothschild 1982 or something, which cost, I don’t know, a couple of thousand dollars, would be a Christmas present.” But then he was the first director to be paid a million dollars for a movie, and the first director to get 5 percent of a play’s gross. About the success of “Angels,” Bloom remembers, “To rise like a phoenix once again, for him, was very important.” Kushner says, “He was very skeptical, in an enormously pleasant and entertaining and civilized way.” But here is Emma Thompson: “Because he was intellectually so able, he could be very mean, and that’s something I think is very important to acknowledge. We’re not talking about some sort of saint here. We’re talking about a person who was very, very aware of his own foibles and his own failings.” Jack O’Brien, himself a major stage director, says: “He fired people. He humiliated people when he could do it. He was not proud of his past.” Still, 26 years of mostly rosy times, illness apart, with his loving dream girl, Diane — it was like those old Hollywood movies and their happy endings. |