60 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
husband, and hitchhiked from Los An-
geles to Chicago, where she hung out
at the university, attending classes but
never registering. That was where she
met Nichols, a University of Chicago
dropout who had found a home of sorts
as an actor on the local drama scene.
Nichols was widely regarded as (his
term) a prick. He was supercilious and
had a quick tongue—“a scary person,”
as one colleague put it. May
was introduced to him by
the Compass’s director, Paul
Sills, as “the only other per-
son at the University of
Chicago who is as hostile
as you.” (The Compass be-
came Second City, the leg-
endary feeder troupe for
“Saturday Night Live”; Sills
was its original director.)
They quickly recognized
that they were soul mates. They were
sophisticated, faster with a comeback
than anyone they knew, and unencum-
bered by conventional, or even uncon-
ventional, pieties. They saw through
everything and everybody, including
themselves.
More to the point, as May put it, “we
found each other hilarious.” Onstage,
they were complementary. “He was al-
ways directing the scene while he was
doing it,” one of the Compass players
remembered. “Elaine would never do
that. Her bursts were spontaneous. I al-
ways felt that in their act, she was re-
ally the driving force.” Nichols did not
disagree. “She was more interested in
taking chances than in being a hit,” he
said. “I was more interested in making
the audience happy.”
What made the show so hot? Nich-
ols and May were witty people, but they
used standard comic setups (the quar-
relsome couple, the all-thumbs first date),
and they lampooned some pretty soft
targets—the British movie “Brief En-
counter,” for instance, which they set in
a dentist’s office. (“There, I’ve said it. I
do love you. Rinse out, please.”) Despite
the reputation the act acquired, the di-
alogue was not remotely risqué. They
were not in Lenny Bruce territory. They
were barely in Mort Sahl territory.
Part of the appeal was the nature of
the comic pitch. Nichols and May were
making fun of the kind of people who
came to see them, a very marketable
brand of humor. Jules Feiffer’s cartoons
in the Village Voice, which started ap-
pearing in 1956, made fun of the kind of
people who read the Village Voice—“Oh,
my God,” Feiffer said to himself after
seeing Nichols and May perform, “they’re
me, but they’re better”—just as The New
Yorker’s cartoons make fun of the kind
of people who read (and write for) The
New Yorker. It’s not that people like to
laugh at themselves. They
like to laugh at people who
are just a little more fatuous
and self-absorbed than
themselves. The reaction
isn’t “That’s me.” The reac-
tion is “I know that type.”
Audiences must also have
been pleased that they were
getting humor with a bit of
a brow. The routines made
references to Béla Bartók
and Bertrand Russell; this was not Bob
Hope one-line-and-a-rim-shot stuff.
And Nichols and May weren’t telling
jokes; they were acting. This meant that
the laughs they got felt like quality laughs.
One ingredient in the reception of
the show may have had to do with what
made people nervous around the pair
back in Chicago. They channelled their
hostility into their act. It was funny with
a drop of acid. One of their closing num-
bers, besides the improv sketch, was a
twenty-minute routine that began with
them playing squabbling children, who
become bickering parents, who, at some
point, become the real Mike and the real
Elaine, yelling at each other onstage.
The fighting escalates until they become
physically violent, and, just at the point
where everyone in the theatre is feeling
acutely uncomfortable watching a show
that has somehow gone off the rails,
Nichols shouts at May, “What are you
doing?” And she says, “Pirandello”—that
is, metatheatre. They bow and go off.
They turned their wit on the audience.M
etatheatre—is that the person
or the actor?—is an underlying
theme of Mark Harris’s hugely enter-
taining “Mike Nichols: A Life” (Pen-
guin Press). Who was Mike Nichols
when he wasn’t playing Mike Nichols?
It’s not an easy question. As Meryl Streep,
who starred in three of his movies, ob-
served, the reason he understood acting
was that “he was acting all the time.”Harris’s biography is filled with sto-
ries, and Nichols, who died in 2014, was,
above all, a storyteller. As the director
of some twenty films and almost thirty
plays, he told stories written by other
people. But he also had a seemingly
inexhaustible supply of his own sto-
ries, and there are lots of stories about
Nichols, some of which are collected in
“Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols,
as Remembered by 150 of His Closest
Friends,” edited by Ash Carter and Sam
Kashner (Henry Holt). Many of these
are behind-the-scenes show-biz anec-
dotes—in other words, gossip. They’ve
been polished smooth by circulation,
and so have to be taken with a little salt,
but they give genuine insights into how
the Broadway and the Hollywood sau-
sages are made. It helps that Harris him-
self is a talented storyteller.
Making stories was how Nichols
coped with the world. The biographi-
cal question is: why was there a need to
cope? The answer is not mysterious.
Nichols was unusually self-aware, and
he liked to talk about his life. To some
extent, the Mike Nichols story is a story
by Mike Nichols.
His “real” name was Igor Michael
Peschkowsky, and he was born in Berlin
in 1931. His father, Pavel, was a doctor.
His mother, Brigitte Landauer, was from
an accomplished German family. They
were what T. S. Eliot called “freethink-
ing Jews,” but in Hitler’s Germany only
the Jewish part mattered, and in 1938
Pavel left to start a practice in New York
City. In 1939, Igor, age seven, and his
younger brother, Robert, who was three,
travelled unaccompanied across the At-
lantic to join him. It took six days. Their
mother did not arrive for almost a year.
For little Igor, fleeing Germany was
an adventure. The problems started here.
Pavel had changed his name to Paul
Nichols (his patronymic was Nikola-
yevich); his son changed his first name
to Mike, because Mike Nichols sounded
better than Michael (pronounced in the
German style: Mick-eye-ell). He Amer-
icanized himself, but he did not fit in.
At school, he was “as far outside as an
outsider can get,” a classmate, Henry
Zuckerman, remembered. (Henry Zuck-
erman became Buck Henry; he and
Nichols later worked together on sev-
eral movies, starting with “The Grad-
uate.”) Part of the problem was that he