Both parents were having affairs, meanwhile, and they fought at home in front of the children, to whom they seem not to have paid much attention. In 1944, Paul died of leukemia. When the war in Europe ended, Brigitte’s sister was able to get out of Germany and join them, but within weeks of her arrival she was hit by a bus on Central Park West and killed.
The family was forced to get by on an uncertain income. Brigitte was anxious and demanding, and a rift developed between her and Mike, who was now a teen-ager. (The nagging-mother routine was inspired by a phone call from Brigitte.) She did allow him to be fitted for a hairpiece and false eyebrows, and, for the rest of his life, he had to make himself up every morning, as though he were going on a set.
Nichols later said that he never had a friend until he went to the University of Chicago. He entered in the fall of 1949, when he was seventeen. Nichols was well read, but academically indifferent, professionally undirected, and highly defended. He had nothing to back up his sense of superiority, which is not a good place to be.
This was the prick Elaine May met. To be accepted by someone equally quick, smart, and capable of cruelty seems to have changed Nichols’s life. The relationship validated him. Plus, he had found something he was good at: improvised comedy. When he was snotty onstage, people didn’t shun him. They laughed.
Success did not turn Nichols suddenly into a nice person. As Harris shows us, there was always a “scary” side to his work self. As a director, he sometimes abused the crew, picked on actors he took a dislike to, and fired people on a dime. He had a “no assholes” rule at work, but he knew that he was sometimes the asshole, and he regretted it.
Still, he was not usually an asshole, because he realized he did not need to be. He had an intuitive grasp of the micro-sociology of personal interactions, as a director ought to have. He picked up the cues almost before they had been delivered. Most people aren’t that fast. “His behavior, his manner are silky soft,” Richard Burton said of him. “He appears to defer to you, then in the end he gets exactly what he wants.”
A personality emerged that many people, including, and especially, rich and famous people, found adorable. Nichols lunched with Jackie Kennedy and dined with the William Paleys. Richard Avedon, Leonard Bernstein, Tom Stoppard, and William Styron were intimate friends. He went out with Mia Farrow and Gloria Steinem; in 1988, after several unsuccessful unions, he married Diane Sawyer. He worked with some of the biggest stars of his day, from Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Hanks, and most of them seem to have loved the experience.
In 1962, more or less out of the blue, Nichols was offered the job of directing a new play by a writer just starting out in theatre. The play was “Barefoot in the Park,” and the writer was Neil Simon. “This was the job I had been preparing for without knowing it,” Nichols told Harris. It wasn’t just that he felt naturally good at it. “If you’re missing your father, as I had all through my adolescence,” he said, “there’s something about playing the role of a father that’s very reassuring. I had found a process that allowed me to be my father and the group’s father.”
Elizabeth Ashley, who had just won a Tony, was attached to the production, and opposite her Nichols cast Robert Redford, then a little-known actor whose real interest was painting. The play, which opened on Broadway in October, 1963, was a box-office and critical sensation. Reviewers thought that Nichols had done something new. He won a Tony for Best Direction, and the play ran for almost four years. The next Simon play he directed, “The Odd Couple,” opened in March, 1965, and ran for close to two years. Nichols won another Tony. (He went on to win eight, the last in 2012, for “Death of a Salesman,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.) Then he moved to film. And the winning streak continued.
When Nichols got into the movie business, Hollywood was in crisis mode. Leisure dollars are finite, and the movies’ share was shrinking. In 1950, 12.3 per cent of Americans’ recreational budget was spent on movie tickets; in 1965, it was 3.3 per cent. Hollywood was not keeping up with the rest of the culture. There were a lot of reasons for this, but by 1965 two had become obvious. One was that the movie audience was becoming younger and more male. You were not going to reach them with Julie Andrews musicals.
The other problem, not unrelated, was the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry had adopted in 1930 as a system of self-regulation. Although it had been revised incrementally over the years, it was still about ten years behind educated taste. Foreign imports—Bergman, Fellini, the French New Wave directors, whose work was not subject to Production Code review—had at least the reputation of being racier and more explicit. Imports were a very small percentage of the American box office, but they were making Hollywood movies look dumb by comparison.
Nichols’s entry was perfectly timed. His first picture, the movie adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” poked a big hole in the already crumbling dike of the Code. His second, “The Graduate,” hit the demographic bull’s-eye.
Albee’s play features two middle-aged semi-alcoholics, George and Martha (he is an associate professor of history; she is the daughter of the college’s president), who pretend to have a son, and who invite a much younger couple over for drinks and serious head games. Why would a major studio, Warner Bros., choose to have this dark “psychological” melodrama directed by a man who had made his name with Neil Simon comedies, and had never stood behind a movie camera? (Indeed, Nichols had no idea how cameras worked—not even that you could use a long lens to shoot closeups from a distance.)
His hiring was the result of Nichols’s ability to establish friendships with people who were generally suspicious of offers of friendship—that is, celebrities. When he and May were on Broadway, Richard Burton and Julie Andrews were starring in “Camelot” in the adjoining theatre, and after his show Nichols, who knew Andrews through her husband, walked down the alley to hang out in Burton’s dressing room. Burton was more than a leading man. He was well read, like Nichols, and he knew theatre. They became friends.
Soon afterward, Burton went to Rome to shoot “Cleopatra,” and he and Taylor began their scandalous affair. They were trailed by paparazzi, and when Burton had to be away on another picture he asked Nichols to fly over and take care of Taylor. Nichols arrived and arranged a day trip to a place where she wouldn’t be recognized, and they, too, became close.
“Cleopatra” was one of the more spectacular flops in movie history, mostly because of extravagant production costs. Twentieth Century Fox actually sued Burton and Taylor for fifty million dollars for conduct detrimental to the picture. But “Cleopatra” had made them tabloid superstars, the Brangelina of their day. Although they were clearly a high-risk package, they were potentially box-office gold. Studios just had to be willing to roll the dice.
Harris says that Albee did not like the idea of Nichols directing the adaptation. “My play is not a farce,” he complained. But, in exchange for a lot of money for the rights, Albee had given up casting and director approval. He wanted Bette Davis for the female lead; so did Jack Warner, and so did Bette Davis, for whom the part might practically have been written. Albee thought that Taylor was too young—she was thirty-three, and Martha is in her fifties—but she was the actress the producer wanted. She took the part after Burton (they were now married) told her she must, to keep anyone else from taking it. She had never seen, or even read, the play.
Taylor told the producer that the director she wanted was Nichols, who had lobbied her for the job, and, after the Hollywood veteran Fred Zinnemann turned it down, Nichols was hired. When Burton heard the news, he signed on. Whatever else Nichols brought to the project, from the studio’s point of view, he drastically reduced the risk factor.
Nichols said that he never again felt as confident directing a movie. He believed that he understood the play. When Buck Henry asked him what “Virginia Woolf” was about, he said, “It’s about a man and a woman named George and Martha who invite a young couple over for drinks after a faculty party. They drink and talk and argue for ten to twelve hours, until you get to know them.” For a play that offers numerous invitations to allegorize—George and Martha and their imaginary child? Who might they be? Virginia Woolf . . . because she was possibly infertile? Because she was possibly a lesbian?—this was a radical simplification.
