was unable to grow hair on any part of
his body, not even eyelashes, the result
of a defective whooping-cough vaccine,
and his father refused to let him wear
a wig. So he was bullied.
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 anx-
ious and demanding, and a rift devel-
oped 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 indiffer-
ent, 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 sud-
denly 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 some-
times 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 ap-
pears 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.I
n 1962, more or less out of the blue,
Nichols was offered the job of direct-
ing 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 natu-
rally 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 di-
rected, “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 mov-
ies’ 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 be-
coming 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“Damn it, they sat me next to another crying baby.”