September 24, 2020 41
of it, I ate it all up.” It transpired, after
both he and his tutor in savoir vivre
had died, that—in true Balzacian fash-
ion—they had been lovers for over ten
years while married to various other
people. He packed a great deal into his
life.
After his first great explosion of
work, he forged ahead with renewed
energy: in 1967 he directed The Grad-
uate, which remains a startling piece
of work, both cinematically and in its
social analysis. Indeed, the two are
the same: the camera is as alienated
as the action. It is Antonioni à l’amé-
ricaine. His great avant- garde gam-
ble, Catch- 22, which followed three
years later, shows a genuine desire to
push the boundaries of film; he never
went there again, but it was brave to
have done such a thing when he had
two mainstream hits under his belt.
The following year, he directed what
is probably his masterpiece, Carnal
Knowledge, a remorselessly bleak vi-
sion of male sexual bewilderment and
the havoc it wreaks in the lives of men
and their partners; it is perhaps even
more painful to watch now than when
it came out in 1971.
Earlier, in 1967, before he shot The
Graduate, he directed a play quite un-
like any he had hitherto done: a modern
American classic, Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes. Again the excite-
ment that surrounded his every move
was reflected in the press: the mere
announcement of the production a full
nine months ahead of the opening, at
Lincoln Center as part of its repertory
theater season, caused a sensation war-
ranting several column inches. A re-
porter was dispatched to the first day
of rehearsals, where he was able to
witness nothing more exciting than a
semi- mumbled readthrough. The pro-
duction was greeted with uncontained
rapture. Clive Barnes in the Times
recalled an old dream: “For the first
time at the Vivian Beaumont I have
seen something that looks, moves and
behaves like a national theater.... This
is in total a magnificent performance.”
All this adulation was bound at some
point to provoke a backlash. It came be-
tween the hard covers of a best- selling
book, The Season. The screenwriter
and dramatist William Goldman took
a year off to see every show on Broad-
way in 1967–1968 in order to paint a
portrait of theaterland at that moment
in time. Trenchant, witty, and nakedly
biased, Goldman took no hostages, and
Nichols was the biggest beast he got in
his sights. The Little Foxes, he said,was another triumph in a string of
triumphs for Mike Nichols, and one
could leave it at that. Except that
Little Foxes was different, for with
the reception of this work, Mike
Nichols became something rare in
American life: a culture hero.Elia Kazan had received the same acco-
lade a generation before, said Goldman.
“Obviously, there were differences....
[Kazan’s] work is passionate, serious,
significant. Nichols’ work... —charm-
ing, light and titanically inconsequen-
tial.” Everyone he had spoken to, he
said, shared his view that the production
was “atrocious,” encouraging the audi-
ence to engage with it rather than theplay. “This is self- serving direction, and
no one is better at it than Nichols.” Butthis doesn’t really matter. What
counts is that there is a new cul-
ture hero in the land. And we have
made him. He reflects us: our time,
our taste, our needs, our wants.
And what we want is Nichols. And
what Nichols is, is brilliant. Bril-
liant and trivial and self- serving
and frigid. And all ours.It is one thing to be attacked, but to be
elevated into the symbolic embodiment
of everything that is wrong with the age
almost amounts to flattery.
It didn’t trouble Mike in the least.
He continued to work in the theater in
such a wide range of plays as to seem
almost promiscuous: two more Neil
Simons (Plaza Suite, The Prisoner of
Second Avenue), a brace of Chekhovs
(Uncle Vanya, The Seagull), a fierce
David Rabe antiwar play (Streamers),
Trevor Griffiths’s savage Comedians,
a soul- searching Tom Stoppard (The
Real Thing), a crude farrago of a com-
edy (Social Security), and the musical
Monty Python’s Spamalot. He did what
pleased him, and if it didn’t please the
public, well, he closed it. After making
six movies in short order, the last two
of them financial flops, his pleasure
in filmmaking was exhausted, and he
abandoned film for nearly a decade.
Then, inspired by his discovery of the
talent of Meryl Streep, he came back to
it in 1983 with the excellent Silkwood.
He made a very great deal of money.
That was part of the Balzacian imper-
ative, too. “Money!” cries Père Goriot
on his deathbed. “Money is life! Moneymakes everything happen.” Lahr re-
ports that in the 1970s the producer
Lewis Allen overheard Mike tell Hell-
man that “the butterflies in my stomach
won’t stop fluttering until I have thirty
million dollars.” His sometime assis-
tant Hannah Roth Sorkin notes thatthere was a tension, because mak-
ing big successful movies that
made money, that’s what got you
access to the actors you wanted,
the scripts you wanted.... It was,
I need final cut. I need to have
endless rights... the ability to say
never, never, never. That ability
comes from success.The price of this Faustian deal became
progressively burdensome.It is much to the credit of Life Isn’t
Everything that it has been edited to
present a serious debate conducted
among some very bright people. It ends
up feeling somewhat melancholy. Mike
doesn’t always come out of it too terri-
bly well. Eventually, inevitably, he be-
came addicted to the high life he lived.
He started breeding Arabian stallions,
which became a performance, too.
He was aware, he told Arabian Horse
World Magazine, that “it is more like
my other job, making movies, than I
thought.” The public sales of his steeds,
which he staged like variety shows,
were duly subjected to critical scrutiny.
“The reviews of Mr. Nichols’s presen-
tation,” noted the Times, “were raves.”
With calculated chutzpah, he held one
of these sales the same week his pro-
duction of Streamers opened. This is800.537.5487 • WWW.PRESS.GEORGETOWN.EDUHardcover, ISBN 978-1-64712-004-7, $29.95
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