Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius (Web Exclusive)
by Carrie Courogen. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2024. 400 pp., illus. Hardcover: $30.00.

Reviewed by Todd Berliner

When PEN America offered Elaine May a lifetime achievement award in 2022, it came with a stipulation: she must show up for the ceremony in person. Ninety years old and nervous during the run-through at New York’s Town Hall, May asked, “What do you do if someone talks too long? Do you shoot them?” May chose not to attend. She sent a video instead, and PEN gave her the award anyway. 

By the time we read this story near the end of Carrie Courogen’s illuminating new biography of Elaine May, we already know that May does not do anything she does not want to do. In her personal life and as an artist, she’s obstinate and she always has a good line. Courogen’s book captures all that’s interesting about the elusive artist—her brilliance and wit, her bohemianism and odd personality, her tendency to avoid attention, her troubled experiences in Hollywood, her successes and failures on stage, and her relationships with other artists and the people who supported her and loved her over the years. Most important, the book illustrates May’s many talents and accomplishments as a comedian, performer, director, playwright, screenwriter, script doctor, and inventor of improv. I can hardly imagine a more complete biography of an artist who, by just about everyone’s account, deserves the label “genius.” At age ninety-two, Elaine May has racked up many lifetime achievement awards lately. I guess PEN America was going to give her that award whether she showed up or not—an award, incidentally, titled the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. Who better deserves that?

Courogen’s chapters on May’s extraordinary life are impressively engaging and thorough. She read everything, including things you wouldn’t expect. She mines Stephen Farber and Marc Green’s Hollywood on the Couch for a bit of information about David Rubinfine, May’s psychoanalyst and third husband. At the archive of producer Alexander Cohen, she found the terse 1961 letter in which May resigned from her hit Broadway show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. She studied every recorded thing by or about May—movies, comedy albums, streaming shows, interviews, TV appearances, a rare podcast, and May’s documentary on Mike Nichols. And she renders the material with a journalist’s flair for storytelling and a historian’s dedication to sourcing, offering extensive footnotes for each bit of information. She did her homework and took excellent notes.

The investigative challenges of putting together this book must have been daunting, particularly since May herself refused to meet with Courogen (as she has done with most journalists who want to speak with her). Instead, Courogen pieces together May’s life through archives, trade journals, news articles, books, reviews, published interviews, personal interviews, and May’s artistic accomplishments. We learn not only about the famous achievements—stage performances with Mike Nichols, the four films May directed, writing Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998), and the recent Tony Award, at age eighty-eight, for her performance in The Waverly Gallery—but also her uncredited work as a script doctor/artistic advisor on Tootsie (1982), Reds (1981), and, according to Mike Nichols, everything he ever directed. Courogen manages to jigsaw these pieces into a compelling portrait of a woman who, after seventy years in film and theater, transformed from a rebel into an icon.

Sometimes, Courogen tells different versions of the same events. She offers us competing descriptions of Nichols and May’s spectacular inauguration as a comedy duo, complicating this crucial event in May’s life. In one version, it’s a story of two talented performers making their own way in show business. In the version told by Del Close, Nichols and May’s partner from The Compass Theatre, it’s a story of the duo’s betrayal of their fellow artists. In the hands of another author, an Elaine May biography might have been an adoring appreciation, but Courogen offers a more nuanced historical perspective. Elsewhere, Courogen shares that Nathan Lane, who worked with Nichols and May on The Birdcage, objected to “fag” jokes in the script because the word made him uncomfortable. “It was a weird thing,” Lane told Courogen. “Both Mike and Elaine came from a generation where fag was a punch line.” Lane’s perspective helps Courogen place May’s career within the broader context of comedy’s changing mores.

Courogen deftly handles the many enigmas she encountered, which often resulted from May’s tendency to lie, either for fun or self-protection. Courogen responds to May’s obfuscation with speculation, which, at various points, reflect May’s tendency to revise her stories, avoid publicity, distrust reporters, be outrageous, refuse to answer questions straight, or refuse to answer at all. In 1967, The New York Times published May’s last in-depth print interview, which May wrote herself. “The resulting piece,” Courogen says, “is partly satire … partly self-mocking performance art, with Elaine creating an exaggerated version of herself, playing the character of Elaine May to avoid exposing the real one.” Courogen uses May’s tendency to baffle interviewers to help us better understand the personality of a mysterious artist, at times paranoid, who wears a “steely set of armor” and approaches interviews as “a hostile interrogation.”

At times, Courogen’s speculations go on too long and seem forced, such as her excessive theorizing about the reasons behind May’s many failed projects in the 1960s. “Maybe it was inevitable,” Courogen hypothesizes. “Maybe…she’d had it too good…Maybe it was just circumstantial…Or maybe it was…shot after shot in the dark…maybe it was the sexism.” The word “maybe” occurs 133 times (according to my E-reader). Such speculations help us better contemplate May’s complicated life, but they can grow tiresome.

I had the most difficulty with Courogen’s speculations about sexism in May’s career, speculations based sometimes on meager evidence or no evidence at all. We have loads of factual evidence of sexism in the entertainment industry, so she has little need to speculate. Courogen nonetheless entertains the possibility that Paramount may have wanted May’s directorial debut, A New Leaf (1971), to flop (“Maybe they were just pretending to encourage her, pretending to let her think that she could pull this off just so they could watch her fail”). And she suggests that May’s excessive control over the production might have been Paramount’s fault (“Was it not needing or wanting anyone’s help, or was it that no one was really offering it?”). These are reasonable questions while doing research, but without evidence you don’t put such things in print, particularly when we have reasons to doubt both conjectures. Studios generally do not want their movies to fail, and May demonstrates the same controlling behavior on all her productions. Courogen later speculates that May did not direct a movie after the failure of Ishtar (1987) because she was female, another idea worth exploring. But it’s also surprising that Hollywood allowed May to direct a big-budget film like Ishtar in the first place after the commercial failure of Mikey and Nicky (1976). May already had a reputation for running over budget and missing her contractual delivery dates. So, when Courogen attributes such events to sexism, she starts to sound defensive on behalf of her subject. 

Still, Courogen mostly grounds her biography in historical detail, and her continued sensitivity to the place of women in the patriarchal world of entertainment enlarges the book. She references, for instance, the Director’s Guild’s 1979 task force on the underemployment of female directors, which found that May “was responsible for twenty percent of the entirety of female-directed films” between 1949 and 1979. She notes the “one-and-done pattern” of female directors in the eighties. And she situates May’s career within the Women’s Movement and Phyllis Schlafly’s conservative opposition. Here, Courogen tells a story not just of one extraordinary individual but of women in entertainment generally, placing May within the history of female directors such as Ida Lupino, Nora Ephron, and Amy Heckerling and female comedians like Sophie Tucker, Lucille Ball, and Phyllis Diller. 

After Kenneth Lonergan pleaded with May to perform in The Waverly Gallery, May ran into the show’s producer, Scott Rudin, who lived nearby. “If you can get a garbage disposal installed in my apartment, I’ll do the show,” she said to Rudin. I love that story. It shows us May’s personality and ability to get her way, delivered with perverse wit and a touch of enigma. Did she really do the play to get a new garbage disposal? Or did she say that because it was a good line? I had never heard that story before, although I would have known the line was May’s even if you removed the names. Courogen’s book is packed with moments as good as that one, and she weaves them together into a fascinating account of May’s life. I thought I knew almost all of the available information about Elaine May, but Courogen taught me a lot more.

Todd Berliner is Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2010). He is currently writing a book on Elaine May’s 1976 film, Mikey and Nicky.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 4