In
his interviews, in his public life, Mike Nichols projected a kind of pained
intelligence, discriminating, focused, lethally sharp, but well aware that smartness
was no guarantee in life.
The
son of Jewish parents, he was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin and sent to the United States as a
little boy just as the Nazis were arresting Jews en masse. It was a perilous
escape. He knew only two sentences in English, one of which was “Please don’t
kiss me.” And he suffered from a condition called Alopecia, which left him
without any hair on his body.
Yet the overall impression of Nichols
in both his life and career was not vulnerability or otherness. Quite the
contrary. Writer Janet Coleman found him “Cold, hungry, ambitious, insufferable,
and brilliantly witty…He acted like a princeling deprived of his rightful
fortune.” Maybe this was all an act to protect himself, but it served him well.
He kept challenging company always. At the University of Chicago in the 1950s,
the young Susan Sontag considered him her best friend.
His improvisational collaboration with
Elaine May in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a phenomenon, and remains
something of a mystery. They broke up as a team in 1961 but stayed in contact.
Nichols said that May’s first rule in improv was “when in doubt, seduce.” He
felt that there were only three kinds of scenes: fights, seductions and
negotiations. They did blind dates and interviews and they sent up
psychoanalysis and smothering mothers. They were bright, they were hip, and
they brought an intellectual patina to their comedy that has been much imitated
but never equaled.
Trying to explain their success in a “Vanity
Fair” interview from last year, May said, “I brought a kind of rough,
cowboy-like attitude, and Mike was very attractive and groomed and…We were very
similar. I mean, he was a Method actor, and I was Method…We found the same
things funny; we were both mean and Method.” They broke each other up a lot on
stage, and they suggested that whatever they were laughing at was some smart
in-joke, an enormously seductive thing for a certain type of audience.
After the break-up, Nichols started directing Neil Simon plays
on Broadway like “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple,” hit after hit,
the laughs coming like clockwork. And Nichols was very serious and relentless
about those laughs. I once talked to a well-known character actress who worked
with Nichols on a comedy on stage in the 1980s. On opening night, she said, he
came to her dressing room and indicated several places in the script. “Those
are your laughs,” he told her. “And if you don’t get them, you’re fired.” I
asked if Nichols might have been kidding her. She didn’t seem to think so.
Nichols in the theater represented the smiling success of
success, and he made a similar splash when he directed his first two movies, “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) and “The Graduate” (1967), huge hits, enough
to set anybody up for life, practically. That first movie, an adaptation of
Edward Albee’s major play on marital love turned viciously bitchy and sour, was
an uneasy proposition. It cast the two biggest stars in the world then,
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as George and Martha, the main combatants,
even though she was much younger than the part called for and maybe not up to
the verbal slice-and-dicing.
But Nichols did a kind of magic act there, helped immeasurably
by the dingy black-and-white cinematography of Haskell Wexler, Taylor’s
willingness and her desire to impress Burton, and his own deep fascination with
the play itself, which did not end after the film was completed; he and Elaine
May played George and Martha at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven in 1980.
Yet when you watch the movie today, it is George Segal as Nick, the young
biology professor hoping to score with Martha for career advancement, who seems
to be closest to Nichols’s own sometimes callow smartness mixed with keen
awareness of that callowness.
“The Graduate” was a
novel about a kind of human surfboard, a Robert Redford type, but Nichols cast
Dustin Hoffman, a 30-year-old character actor from New York, and based the best
scenes, the seduction of Hoffman’s callow Benjamin by the sultry and very angry
Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), on the tick-tock timing of comedy that he had
pioneered with May. The alienation in that famous movie is surely, at least in
part, Nichols’s own.
Some said he didn’t make personal movies, that he was most
concerned with tickling the zeitgeist and having his cake and eating it too
with slick, “smart” hits. And that was true, to a certain extent. But there is
real disquiet in “The Graduate,” and Nichols allowed and facilitated the brute
strength of Bancroft’s performance. The rhythms of her scenes with Hoffman
often “work” in a somewhat remorseless way that is also based on Nichols’s
Broadway experience with Neil Simon plays, but there is terror in that movie
under the songs and the color and the flattering of youth. And he did end it on
a sour note, Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross)
sitting in the back of a bus and wondering what happens after a burst of
cleansing energy, after “happily ever after.”
Nichols was not infallible by any means when it came to choosing
what would be a hit for him in the movies. His filmography is smallish, which
would seem to indicate discrimination, but there are more than a few outright
duds: “Catch-22” (1970), “The Day of the Dolphin”(1973), “The Fortune” (1975), “Regarding Henry” (1991), “Wolf”
(1994). But there is also “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), a very grim, shivery movie
about male and female power struggles from the 1940s to the early 1970s, based
on material that couldn’t be less flattering to Jack Nicholson’s chauvinist
character Jonathan. “Carnal Knowledge” is empathetic and painful and hurt and
mysterious, and there would be a similar mood in a movie Nichols made years
later, “Closer” (2004), where he films new male-female power struggles with a
nearly lustful eye for the sexual allure of Natalie Portman and Clive Owen.
Otherwise, the rest of Nichols’s film career was spent as a
director who could please Meryl Streep. “Silkwood”(1983) and “Postcards from the Edge” (1990) are two of her better
vehicles, drastically different in tone, one weighty and paranoid and
depressed, the other light and bright and weightless and pastel. Whereas
“Working Girl” (1988) is a very dated look at 1980s capitalist striving that
Nichols seems to have went into without gulping.
Always it seemed like the man himself was better than that,
better than the way he tried to please his audience by shape-shifting into what
they might want. His air of disappointed grandeur was best revealed in his
superb performance in a 1996 film of Wallace Shawn’s play “The Designated
Mourner,” in which he put across the full horror of a man giving up and
repudiating culture. In the monologue where he describes defecating on a book
of poetry, Nichols seems furiously involved and scared and revealed, and he
goes into that without gulping, too.
“Why didn’t we stick with the act?” he asked May last year, in
that “Vanity Fair” interview. “It was your fault. You wanted to stop. We should
still be doing this.” They talked about doing it again. She had been a writer
on his movies, often uncredited. Nichols and May. They have an allure still as
a couple that has not dimmed, or been explained.
Nichols won a Tony award for directing “Death of a Salesman” in
2012, a prestigious capstone to his career in the theater. He was a success
almost all of his life, in one way or another. So why do I feel like things
might have gone differently for him, not better, necessarily, but more true to
himself and his sensibility (a lot to ask, I know, for a young Jewish boy with
no hair who just missed the Holocaust by a frighteningly narrow margin)?
In thinking about his films, the most powerful thing to me is
the scene where Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are in bed in “The Graduate,” and he
insists on talking instead of just having sex like they usually do, and she
sneers at him, “How about art?” They keep talking a bit until she has let her guard
down enough to admit that she had studied art at school. The look on her face
when she admits that! That is Bancroft’s achievement, of course, but it wasn’t
an easy scene, as Nichols himself admitted, and he understood that look on her
face. When his understanding of something like that was admitted, or confessed,
there was no one more sensitive and incisive than Nichols, but, understandably,
he felt the need to keep that hidden, most of the time.
(Photo Credit: Deadline)
