Mike Nichols: A Life Reveals the Vulnerability and Humility of a Legend

Mark Harris’s seductive biography understands Nichols as a wizard of process.

Mike Nichols: A LifeTwo anecdotes that bookend Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols: A Life offer a key to the essence of its subject. In the first, Nichols, born Igor Michael Peschkowsky, says that when he was sent to America at the age of seven to escape the Nazis, he knew only two sentences of English: “I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me.” In the second, potential collaborators of the aging titan of theater and film, playwright Beau Willimon and actor Jake Gyllenhaal, recount running into one another at a party and discovering that Nichols cried at the same time when telling each of them, respectively, of seeing a production of The Heiress. Each story indicates Nichols’s control over the impressions he makes on those around him; he was determined that people see his power as well as the vulnerability and humility that was both performative and authentically rooted in feelings of dislocation and insecurity.

Or, simply, Nichols knew how to play a room, which is a requisite for a mover and shaker in any field, especially for a celebrity of his stature who came to know everyone and who was taught—in the wake of the success of the revolutionary sketch comedy of Nichols and May—how to live extravagantly and cultivate a knowing, cool-kid aura. As Harris has it, “playing the room” became not just a networking tool for Nichols, but essential to his process of directing and shaping material. Nichols spoke to his collaborators in sharp aphorisms: While directing the 2004 film Closer, he told stars Julia Roberts and Jude Law that a kiss was like the hippo scene in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, “everything balances on just the toe.” And Nichols combined the sketch instincts he honed with Elaine May with the method acting he learned from Lee Strasberg to inform plays and films with a behavioral minutia that enriched, and at times usefully distracted from, the plots themselves. If one wishes to consider Nichols on auteur terms, this attention to behavior would be the best element on which to seize.

Harris doesn’t exactly feel the need to make a case for Nichols in such a fashion, as Mike Nichols: A Life refreshingly lacks the defensiveness and superiority that can define cinephilia, which tends to regard notable film direction as an act of conjuring performed by a single person. Harris, who’s married to Tony Kushner, who wrote a handful of Steven Spielberg films and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America Nichols adapted into a stunning miniseries for HBO in 2003, understands the machinations of show business on a granular level. Much of this seductive biography is devoted to the act of corralling various egos in the service of a project and the tap-dancing such endeavors entail. Nichols’s early experience in sketch comedy and improvisation allowed him to invent and reinvent, sometimes on the fly, the personality necessary to bringing a project across the finish line. Harris understands that film and theater direction is most broadly and immediately management, and so Mike Nichols: A Life often plays as an intense and glamorous workplace comedy.

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The creation and reception of every Nichols project—Nichols and May, dozens of theater productions, and all of the films from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Charlie Wilson’s War—are covered in Harris’s book. As one might expect given the milieu, ego and alcoholism and other addictions are something of a leitmotif here. Walter Matthau was reportedly a great actor and terrible human being, often deliberately sabotaging the insecure, alcoholic Art Carney on the first stage production of The Odd Couple. On the play Plaza Suite and the film Day of the Dolphin, George C. Scott was considerably more volatile than Matthau, another alcoholic with a penchant for disappearing from sets for days-long benders. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s schedules on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had to be set in accordance with their lunches and drinking, ballooning the film’s budget, though their raw, pseudo-autobiographical brilliance led to a searing, unforgettable film—still Nichol’s best.

These and many other stories, including those of Nichols’s various struggles with prescription pills and cocaine, aren’t relayed merely for gossip. Harris captures how personalities inform the artistic process, particularly how Nichols’s devotion to reinventing himself from outsider to insider was rechanneled into an ability to hone scripts at a biological level. (Many Simon plays, especially The Odd Couple, were dramatically rewritten, sometimes in days.)

Mike Nichols: A Life reads much faster than its 600-page length would suggest, as Harris’s crisp, funny, empathetic prose essentially glides one through Nichols’s life and career. In fact, this polish is redolent of a Nichols film, which means that you may wonder what else might have been revealed had more space been made for gritty details. Nichols’s early brush with whooping cough, which led to an allergic reaction to a vaccine that made him preternaturally and forever bald, is offered up as a perhaps too-pat explanation for Nichols’s determination to fashion himself as a powerful man of the world. And certain productions—particularly a staging of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly with Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, and William Hurt—sound so contentious and fascinating that they practically demand a book for themselves. Nichols’s various setbacks—bad movies, bad plays, addictions, caustic behavior—are often acknowledged but also quickly brushed over. Mike Nichols: A Life consciously follows a rise-fall-rise-fall-rise arc, with a qualified happy ending waiting in the wings.

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As in many a Nichols film, though, there’s more anguish here than might initially meet the eye. The book has a haunting, beautifully intangible quality. We’re occasionally allowed to feel as if we’re catching true glimmers of Igor, the wounded, lonely Jewish boy who forged himself into a hybrid of Cinderella and Gatsby. A highlight of the book, perhaps its core, is a routine that Nichols does with May called “Pirandello” in which they play children who emulate the arguing of their parents, with an anger that purposefully overtakes the sketch to reflect the performers’ own intimate, passingly romantic, rivalrous, merciless, loving tensions.

This obsession with autocratically blending artists’ demons with shtick is nakedly evident in May’s own films as a director, which are taken more seriously than most of Nichols’s own. But Harris understands that such laceration also figures in Nichol’s sensibility, from the painful, minutely observed moments in The Graduate to the bleakness of Carnal Knowledge. After discarding the overt stylization of his early films (the conscious pleas for auteur approval in other words), Nichols buried his occupations, namely his sense of alienation, underneath deceptively smooth and placid surfaces, a stratagem that paralleled the awkward and anxious immigrant he hid underneath the somewhat smug, peerlessly witty, have-it-all smoothie with the penthouse and too many Tony awards to count. Harris allows “Pirandello” to linger over Mike Nichols: A Life as a Rosebud, as a portrait and a mirror hiding in plain sight. Harris understands Nichols as a wizard of process, spinning neuroses into art that, at its best, danced on the fault lines between the personal and the commercial.

Mike Nichols: A Life is now available from Penguin Press.

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Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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