At various private schools Nichols proved to be an indifferent student but picked up the habits and intonations of the Eastern upper class, shedding entirely his German accent. His friendship with another theater nerd, Elaine May, led to their developing a popular series of two-character comedy sketches in small nightclubs. When they took their act to New York in the fall of , they won over the impresario Jack Rollins who also discovered Woody Allen and became an institution in Greenwich Village.
An adapted version of their cabaret act was a Broadway sensation in the —61 season and helped reconceive comedy. Nichols and May were like conjoined twins who finally separated. Brilliant as they were together, the pair grew emotionally estranged.
The pair was as close as lovers both were a bit coy about the depth of their romantic liaison, which was evidently brief, back in Chicago and fell out as lovers do. When May wrote a poison-pen play A Matter of Position about an imperious fellow, clearly modeled on Nichols, who took to his bed and refused to budge, he starred in the piece for what proved to be a disastrous trial run in Philadelphia. Then he took to his own bed, in deep depression. There was a formality between us that only happens when you hurt someone.
Most of the admirers he earned over the course of his career had little to no acquaintance with his brief period as a performer, though those early comedy routines sparkle to this day and can be found on audio streaming services such as Spotify. As a casual project while he considered his future, and as a favor to a friend, Nichols agreed to direct a revue called The World of Jules Feiffer , which comprised sketches by the anarchic Village Voice caricaturist who also wrote plays.
Hollywood noticed. Walton sneaked in nightly to watch the final skit, which was improvised and changed at each performance. I hoped I would never see her again. Once hired, Nichols quickly and wisely asserted himself. He really did know everyone over an extraordinarily long period of time—and famous people who were much older than he was wanted to meet him and wanted to go work with him. When did that really change? One thing that changed was that the financial gap between what you could make in movies and what you could make in theater became so huge that those really did become two completely different worlds.
And that wasn't really the case 50 years ago, when someone like Walter Matthau could read The Odd Couple , and think, This is a way for me to get rich, to invest in this. It was how he made money. The things that were huge paydays for Mike initially were not necessarily the things that I would have guessed would be huge. Mike did most of his work in Hollywood for the first 30 years of his movie career, before these mega-salaries kicked in. Those high seven figure salaries for directors were not remotely a thing that happened when he was just starting out.
Later in his career, though, he was primarily making money off of investing in plays? I mean, nobody gets rich from plays. And he was the producer of Annie, which was a tremendous hit—he himself referred to it as a kind of annuity for him for a long time. I think when you grow up middle class, and suddenly and unexpectedly dipping into poverty, which did happen to his family, you lose any sort of high-minded notion that being rich is vulgar very quickly.
The funny thing is I think that Helen Gurley Brown was possibly right at the time, but wrong eventually because what she was really saying was that Nichols and May, in particular, were sort of a niche interest—that they were for the in crowd, for New York sophisticates. And her Cosmopolitan was for every woman.
They recorded three albums, one of which went to the top of the charts. What do you think was the secret to the incredible rapport that he established with actresses? I think Elaine May was a big part of the secret. I really do. And if you spend your twenties as Mike did, in the company of this incredibly razor-sharp, challenging woman, who he really did think was his better—he really said that he thought Elaine was the creative genius of the two of them, and that he was the shaping guy—I think it sets you apart.
And so it seems very natural to me that when you look at his later collaborations with women, whether they were with actresses like Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or Julia Roberts or Whoopi Goldberg, or with non-actors—writers like Nora Ephron and Ann Roth, the costume designer—not only was Mike not insecure about working with women, he genuinely liked it.
Can you walk us through how those rumors started and circulated? There was a book about Avedon written by his former assistant in partnership with a co-writer, for which Mike was interviewed, but apparently was not asked about this.
There are two separate suggestions [in that book] that Avedon said that the two of them had had an affair. I knew that it was something that needed to be both looked into and addressed. But the timeline, the duration, and the language with which it was discussed did not really add up for me. And this was something that I asked a number of people about who would have been in a position to know.
One of the great contemporary artists, Mike Nichols created a body of film work that received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations. Over his career, he won one Oscar, four Emmys, nine Tonys and a Grammy.
Directed by Douglas McGrath Oscar-nominated writer of Bullets over Broadway and writer-director of Emma and Infamous , Becoming Mike Nichols features an intimate, relaxed and candid exchange between O'Brien and Nichols, which took place over two days in the summer of at the Golden Theatre, where the groundbreaking An Evening with Nichols and May had its smash Broadway debut in Nichols offers insights into his childhood as a 7-year-old immigrant to America his family escaped Nazi Germany in , as well as the genesis of his career as a performer at the University of Chicago.
Despite suffering from stage fright, Nichols rose to stardom as half of the improvisational comedy duo Nichols and May, having met the comedian during his time with The Compass Players in the mids. They never rehearsed and Nichols' ability to let go and "revere the unconscious" became the catalyst that informed his later directorial style.
And what I didn't know is that it applies to directing, too.
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