A Cautionary Tale: The Roller Coaster Life of Mike Nichols (Preview)
by Robert Koehler

Mike Nichols, as the saying goes, had a life. His stratospheric rise in the 1960s from one-half of the groundbreaking improv comedy duo with Elaine May to hitmaking Broadway director to winning the Best Director Oscar, happened in eight years, making him as famous as the stars he directed. He became a brand at a faster clip than perhaps any other director in the history of American theater or cinema. Within a decade of living in roach-infested apartments, he was living in an Upper West Side penthouse and owned a stable of Arabian horses. He belonged to an elite group of directors who regularly alternated between theater and the cinema and did significant work in both. Others, like Antonioni, Friedkin (in opera), and Herbert Ross, made sporadic switches (Antonioni discovered Monica Vitti while directing her in a stage comedy), but besides Ingmar Bergman’s protean stage and screen career, and several British directors from Tony Richardson to Sam Mendes, only Elia Kazan matched Nichols’s sheer output and commercial impact in both art forms. Nichols won an unprecedented six Tonys for directing—some while he was also nominated for Oscars—and, in 1966, had the country’s number-one box office hit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, while four of his shows were running at the same time on Broadway.

That all this extraordinary success by age thirty-five came from hardscrabble beginnings could sound, to readers too young to remember Nichols’s golden moment in the Sixties, like so much publicist’s fodder. But Mark Harris describes it all in his extraordinary biography with the eye of a storyteller rather than the dutiful reportage of a mere chronicler. Considering a new book several months after its release that already has the reputation of a contemporary classic—some-thing rare in biographies (Robert Caro’s LBJ biographies may be the only comparable case), and even rarer in showbiz biographies—raises all sorts of complications. The book’s stature has already made it appear unassailable, and there’s no question that, just as Caro is LBJ’s biographer, so is Harris to Nichols. Others may come along later and try to tell the Nichols life, but they’d be wasting their time. It’s been told. Here it is.

Topping the complications is that because Nichols’s creative life was spent equally if not more in the theater than in filmmaking, the theater half is more or less outside the boundaries of a review for a cinema journal. I’ve argued before that Bergman was a theater director first and a film director second—an argument that Bergman himself supported many times—and the same can hold for Nichols. (Kazan’s position, because of the crucial impact of his best stage and film work on each art form, is roughly balanced between the two.) But because of the ephemeral nature of theater as a live event and the relative permanence of film and digital recording, these directors’ legacies are now entirely on the cinema side of the equation. Nichols felt his life change when he saw Kazan’s legendary productions of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and they lodged in his memory as a resource when he realized, while preparing his first Broadway show, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, that directing was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

But the point is that this resource was a memory, which is where live theater goes. (Although it’s true that the wonderful New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, adjacent to Lincoln Center, holds in its special collections audiovisual recordings of some of Nichols’s stage productions, the sheer rarity and exclusivity of this record makes it virtually inaccessible to the general public.) It is Nichols’s film directing that leaves a lasting record, and it is there where his visible legacy exists. We don’t know his version of Barefoot, but we can refer to the Gene Saks-directed film version starring some of Nichols’s cast (including Robert Redford); conversely, we don’t know another legendary Broadway work, the original Virginia Woolf starring Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen and directed by Alan Schneider (except on an audio recording by Columbia Records), but we have Nichols’s film debut as the definitive version since it was the one that was recorded…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 1