40 The New York Review
Charm Defensive
Simon Callow
Life Isn’t Everything:
Mike Nichols, as Remembered
by 150 of His Closest Friends
by Ash Carter and Sam Kashner.
Henry Holt, 336 pp., $30.00
For practitioners of what used to be
called the lively arts, Life Isn’t Every-
thing, an oral biography of Mike Nich-
ols, is manna from heaven, its brilliantly
orchestrated polyphony bringing him,
his work, and his world to vivid life. Its
subject is one of the rare individuals
who transcend their professions and in-
deed thei r output to become archetypal
figures of their time, acquiring the res-
onance of characters from a novel—in
Nichols’s case, one perhaps
by Balzac: Lucien de Rubem-
pré or Eugène de Rastignac,
those young men who set out
from positions of great weak-
ness to conquer their worlds.
Rubempré, of course, fails
and kills himself, which Nich-
ols sometimes contemplated;
Rastignac rises to the very
top, as Nichols so conspicu-
ously did, first as a dazzling
comic performer, then as a
masterful director of theater,
television, and film, earning
what Charles McGrath, writ-
ing in The New York Times,
called “the grand slam of
major American entertain-
ment awards”: a Grammy, an
Oscar, four Emmys, and nine
Tonys. But he somehow stood
apart from the tawdry passing
scene, a twinkling grandmas-
ter, above and beyond all the
awards—or ratfucks, as he
preferred to call them.
To those of us who knew
him and worked with him, he
was a uniquely alluring fig-
ure, radiant and lucid and infectiously
amusing, but for almost all of us, he was
also essentially unknowable, as Life
Isn’t Everything abundantly demon-
strates. The book’s title comes from a
speech Nichols made when collecting
one of those nine Tonys: “My love to
those who have not won tonight. I
just want to remind you of my motto:
‘Cheer up, life isn’t everything.’ It al-
ways stands me in good stead.”
Part of Mike’s allure was his wit, a
rare commodity in Anglophone public
life: we like our public men and women
to be funny, but wit is considered to
be just too clever by half. “There’s no
comeback to an epigram,” notes John
Lahr, one of the contributors to the
book and author of a New Yorker pro-
file of Nichols in 2000. “In other words,
the wit completely disarms the other,
and a lot of what Mike is about is dis-
arming the other.” Or maintaining the
mystery, he might have added—deflect-
ing discovery. Life Isn’t Everything,
which draws on witnesses from his ear-
liest to his final years, ending with one
of the last people he worked with, the
young English actor Rafe Spall, exem-
plifies the mystery by offering radically
contrasting glimpses of him across
over seven decades. Almost everyone
agrees that there was a great deal hid-
den behind that impeccable exterior.
The actor David Hyde Pierce recalls
him saying, “The art of being charming
is giving away a vital part of yourself
which you can absolutely part with.”
The charm was exceptional and very
conscious, and was all the more charm-
ing for it. My first encounter with him
was characteristic: the stage door
keeper of the theater I was playing in
put through a call to my dressing room.
“It’s a Mr. Mike Nichols.” It couldn’t be
the Mike Nichols, I thought: these great
ones don’t do that. They, or more likely,
their people, call the agent, the PA, the
manager. But no: “Hello,” the unmis-
takable voice said:This is Mike Nichols, and I have
a movie I’d like you to be in. Andit would help me very much if you
were to say yes, because, you see,
I’ve just made a personal oath
never to make another film with-
out you in it, and I don’t know what
I’d do if you were to turn me down.Immediately we were both laughing
at the absurdity of this, and the laughter
produced a kind of complicity, which
was his essential modus operandi. By
the end of the call I felt as if we knew
each other very well, but of course we
didn’t. The seeming intimacy, which
never wavered in the quarter- century
we knew each other, was a kind of
conjuring trick—by behaving as if we
knew each other deeply, we did, in a
sense. He was from the beginning won-
derfully candid about people he knew
or had worked with. “You must never
live in Hollywood,” he once said to me.
“It’s a dreadful place. One morning
you wake up and find you’ve turned
into stone, or Streisand.” I appeared in
two films for him—Postcards from the
Edge and Angels in America—but that
didn’t materially alter things. They
just seemed like a continuation of the
conversation we were having. There
was unquestionably a sympathy be-
tween us; there were shared interests;
there was a delight in language and a
curiosity about life. The pleasure of
being around him was intense, and he
gave the impression that it was mutual.But do I feel that I knew him? Not at
all.Mike left no autobiography. Various
people, myself among them, tried to
coax one out of him, but his answer
was always the same: he couldn’t, he
said, endure the idea of a book tour. No
amount of assurance that a tour was en-
tirely optional could change his mind.
Then Knopf editor Shelley Wanger, we
learn from Life Isn’t Everything, tried to
commission a book from him about his
craft, about the work of theater and film.
He was toying, he told her, with writing
a book about his early experience ofHollywood; it was to be called Another
Fucking Beautiful Day, which tells us all
we need to know about how seriously he
took it. He might also have felt a book to
be redundant. From the moment fame
sought him out and made him its own,
his every small step was chronicled in
the press, and largely in his own words.
It was, I suppose, a sort of oral auto-
biography. An articulate interlocutor is
always a gift to editors, and Mike was
for them quotability incarnate. From
1959, when he and his comedy part-
ner, Elaine May, made their thirteenth
highly successful network television
appearance (and their third on The
Dinah Shore Show), just after their
sold- out one- night appearance at the
unusual venue of New York’s Town
Hall, the press was at his door. “For the
Love of Mike—and Elaine” joshed the
Times headline on that occasion; fifty
years later, in the same paper, McGrath
wrote, unkindly but accurately:Mr. Nichols’s greatest improvisa-
tion is still himself. He wakes up
every morning in his Fifth Ave-
nue apartment, collects himself
and, wearing a wig and paste- on
eyebrows, plays a character called
Mike Nichols.The string of articles, profiles, and in-
terviews continued unabated until his
death in 2014.His story was a remarkable one. He
was born in Berlin in 1931 to a Russian
father and a German mother. His ma-
ternal grandfather, Gustav Landauer,
was the commissioner of enlightenment
and public instruction in the short- lived
Bavarian Soviet Republic; his mater-
nal grandmother, Hedwig Lachmann,
was the librettist of Richard Strauss’s
Salome (and also, as it happens, trans-
lated Balzac). Then there was, in re-
action to a routine inoculation against
whooping cough, his dramatic and
permanent loss of hair at the age of
four, his escape from Germany with his
brother in 1939, his unhappy childhood
and adolescence, the family’s descent
into abject poverty after his
father’s death, his sense of
isolation at school, followed
by liberation on enrolling at
the University of Chicago, his
encounter with the theater
there, and then the astonish-
ing collaboration, rooted in
improvisation, with Elaine
May, which broke the mold of
contemporary comedy.
“Nichols and May would
seem to be among those co-
medians,” said The New York
Times in 1959, “who come
along once in a decade to reg-
ister on people at all cultural
levels—they have both snob
and mob appeal, like Chap-
lin, Fred Allen, and the Marx
Brothers.” When the part-
nership ended, he discovered
his talent for directing with a
Neil Simon comedy, Barefoot
in the Park, on Broadway,
which led to a series of slam-
dunk theatrical successes,
and then, with Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf (1966), a
seamless segue into movies,
on his first outing directing the most
famous acting couple in the world.
Meanwhile, Mike had been learning
how to comport himself in the circles
into which his new wealth and fame
had propelled him. His mentor was the
photographer Richard Avedon, from
whom he received a thoroughly Bal-
zacian induction into the beau monde:
“Dick was going to start teaching me
all about the good life, because, re-
member, I was a young asshole, I didn’t
know anything, I wasn’t from here, I
had come from another place,” he told
Ave don’s biog rapher i n Something
Personal:Dick was instructing me on the
right things to eat, such as caviar,
and how to eat, and how to order
in a restaurant, and how to travel,
and where to travel, and how to
dress. And how to get comfortable
with other people, which was a big
thing—he said to me, “Just ask
them about themselves and they
don’t stop talking.”In Venice one night, on the way back
from dinner, Mike said to Avedon and
his wife, Evie, “Well, you two may like
this stuff, but I can’t stand these counts
and princesses, it’s too much for me,”
to which Evie replied, “You’re so full of
shit, Mike—you love it, admit it.” “And
of course she was right—I did love it, allMike Nichols on the set of Catch-22, Guaymas, Mexico, 1969Bob Willoughby/MPTVImages