THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021 59
BOOKS
NOW DO IT AS YOU
How Mike Nichols met his moment.
BY LOUISMENAND
© BOB WILLOUGHBY / MPTV IMAGES
M
ike Nichols and Elaine May
opened for Mort Sahl at the Vil-
lage Vanguard in October, 1957. Apart
from their manager, Jack Rollins, whom
they’d met for the first time just a week
or two before, no one in New York had
ever heard of them.
Nichols and May had worked out their
comedy act in Chicago, playing mostly
hole-in-the-wall venues as members of
a local theatre group called the Compass.
They performed sketches—a man on the
phone with his mother, a movie star get-
ting interviewed, a man trying to pick up
his secretary in a bar. They had a script,
but left room for ad-libs, and they ended
the show by asking the audience to sug-
gest an opening line, a closing line, and
a style (Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Jack
Kerouac), and then improvising a skit.
They were an overnight hit. By the sec-
ond week, they were upstaging Sahl, a
man not renowned for the length of his
fuse, and he began cancelling their set.
They moved uptown to a tonier joint,
the Blue Angel, on East Fifty-fifth
Street, where they did a midnight show.
It quickly started selling out, and soon
they were the talk of the town (night-
life division). In those days, television
variety shows scouted talent in supper
clubs like the Blue Angel, and in De-
cember Nichols and May went on
“The Steve Allen Show.” In January,
they performed two sketches on an NBC
special, where they were seen by tens of
millions of viewers.
They were now nationally known
and in demand. Rollins asked for big
fees, and by the spring May had an apart-
ment on Riverside Drive, and Nichols
was living in a duplex on East Fifty-
eighth Street and driving a Mercedes
convertible. He was twenty-six. It was
the first time that he had had any money.
He found that he enjoyed the life style.
Nichols and May released an album,
“Improvisations to Music,” in 1958. It
made it onto the charts and was nom-
inated for a Grammy. In 1960, they took
their act to Broadway, where “An Eve-
ning with Mike Nichols and Elaine
May” ran for three hundred and eleven
performances. The album of the show
went to No. 10 in the Billboard rank-
ings and won a Grammy.
Some people who saw them per-
form—including the critic Edmund
Wilson, who went to the Broadway
show four times—thought that May
was the star. May is a kind of comic ge-
nius. Her father, Jack Berlin, worked in
the Yiddish theatre, and she had been
appearing onstage since she was a child.
She was fearless—also glamorous, sexy,
and terrifying to men. (She and Nich-
ols were not lovers.) There is a story
that when they were performing in Chi-
cago she would go onstage without un-
derwear and flash the audience.
She married when she was sixteen,
had a daughter ( Jeannie Berlin, who
became a movie actress), split from her
Nichols on the set of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” (1966), which swept the Academy Award nominations.
