64 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
record some new songs for the movie.
In the end, though, Nichols chose
mostly songs from the album, which
may have been the key to reaching the
young male audience. I remember going
to the movie with a friend. We were
both fifteen. As soon as “The Sounds
of Silence” started playing, we were
each thinking, Wait a second. I own
that record! It was as though the movie
had been made just for us.
“The Graduate” was released at the
end of 1967. By the end of 1969, it was
the third-highest-grossing film in movie
history. Hoffman, who was nominated
for Best Actor, was paid scale, and net-
ted three thousand dollars. Nichols is
said to have got six per cent of the net
profits, and to have made six million
dollars. He also won the Academy Award
for Best Director.
In the decade that spanned “Steve
Allen” and “The Graduate,” Nichols
changed entertainment culture. With
May, he brought improv to Broadway.
He revolutionized stage comedy. He
helped break the grip of movie censor-
ship, and he directed a film that is con-
sidered, along with Arthur Penn’s “Bon-
nie and Clyde,” to mark the birth of the
New Hollywood.
T
hen it stopped. Not the work—
Nichols was always an A-list direc-
tor. His projects were well financed; he
drew on the best talent. As he knew per-
fectly well, some misses were in the cards.
Several of the movies he made after “The
Graduate”—“Catch-22,” “The Day of
the Dolphin,” and “The Fortune”—were
major critical and financial disappoint-
ments. But he went on to have many
hits, including “Silkwood,” “Working
Girl,” and “The Birdcage.” He contin-
ued to rake in the Tonys. He won two
Emmys for “Angels in America.”
He did make inexplicable deci-
sions, besides choosing material that
did not play to his strengths. He let ac-
tors like Al Pacino, in “Angels,” and
Kathy Bates, in “Primary Colors,” chew
up their scenes. He also, notoriously, di-
rected a “Waiting for Godot” with Robin
Williams, Steve Martin, Bill Irwin, and
F. Murray Abraham, not exactly ensem-
ble players. If there is any play in which
the laughs take care of themselves, it’s
“Waiting for Godot.” But Nichols let
the actors ham it up. He later said he
had not been able to find the play’s “cen-
tral metaphor.” Central metaphor?
“Godot” is about two guys on a road
somewhere, talking. One of them is tak-
ing off his boots ...
Unlike virtually every other director
associated with the New Hollywood—
Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Stan-
ley Kubrick—Nichols was not an au-
teur. There is no such thing as a Mike
Nichols picture. The critical queen of
the New Hollywood, Pauline Kael, hated
his movies. “Mike Nichols’s ‘gift’ is that
he lets the audience direct him,” she said
of “The Graduate.” “This is demagogu-
ery in the arts.”
Well, it is a mass-market entertain-
ment medium. Millions of dollars are
being spent; people are supposed to like
it. And most of the plays and films Nich-
ols directed people liked. As he learned
working with May, he was not a risk-
taker, and did not think of himself as
an artist. “It’s so funny you think of your-
self as an artist,” he told Richard Ave-
don, who badly wanted his photogra-
phy to be taken seriously.
Harris thinks that Nichols’s choices
were influenced by money. By 2000, he
was reportedly being paid for his movie
work, in addition to a seven-and-a-half-
million-dollar fee, twelve per cent of
the gross. That’s why he took on movie
projects he shouldn’t have and why he
did less new theatre than he might have.
Nichols liked travelling in life’s first-
class cabin. He lived in a triplex pent-
house in the Beresford. He bred Ara-
bian horses. He drove expensive cars.
When he was shooting on location, he
flew in his personal chef. There is a story
that he stopped the shooting on “Re-
garding Henry” (a major misfire) be-
cause the caviar being used in a scene
was an inferior brand. Even Avedon,
who had helped introduce Nichols to
that life, felt he had lost his head a lit-
tle. Nichols also got into recreational
drugs. Harris says that these included
crack cocaine, and that Nichols became
addicted to Halcion, which made him
anxious and suicidal. He is supposed to
have learned from a celebrity friend that
Halcion was causing his mood disor-
ders. Which celebrity—Randy Newman,
Quincy Jones—depends on who is tell-
ing the story, and this is one of those
Mike Nichols stories which feel embel-
lished, or more embellished than usual.A wealthy man did not have a personal
physician? Who was prescribing the Hal-
cion? He wasn’t getting it on the street.
But it’s also the case that expecta-
tions for Nichols’s career were shaped
by a misreading of who he was. “The
Graduate” is the story of a rich kid who
has an affair with a rich woman and will
presumably end up marrying her rich
daughter. Benjamin’s anomie is entirely
unexplained. There are no political ref-
erences in the novel or the movie. In
the scenes set on the Berkeley campus,
the students all look as though they were
in prep school. It might as well be set
in 1955. Nichols thought he was mak-
ing a movie about Los Angeles, not the
generation gap. There wasn’t a radical
or a countercultural bone in his body.
Part of what dated him was his fix-
ation on what used to be called the War
Between Men and Women. That’s the
nut of “Virginia Woolf,” and it’s the nut
of “Carnal Knowledge,” which came out
in 1971. The movie is based on a screen-
play by Jules Feiffer, and it ended up
doing well through the good fortune of
being banned in the state of Georgia.
This was catnip to moviegoers, but the
film is basically ninety minutes of Art
Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson talking
about tits and ass. It’s not just misogy-
nistic. It’s misanthropic.
What was frustrating to Nichols’s
admirers about the path his work took
after “The Graduate” was that he was
more sophisticated than a lot of the ma-
terial he ended up directing. There are
a few glimpses of the paths he might
have taken. In 1996, he was talked into
performing in a limited London run
of a Wallace Shawn play called “The
Designated Mourner,” an elliptical and
“knotty” text (as Harris calls it) about
people reacting to the rise of fascism.
There are three parts, and all the ac-
tors are sitting down—which suited Nich-
ols, who was never a physical actor. His
performance was filmed days after the
theatrical run ended, and it is uncanny.
It’s just a person talking, but it makes you
feel as though you never really watched
a person talking before. Streep flew to
London to see Nichols in the play. “It’s
some of the best acting I’ve ever seen any
man do,” she said. For, of course, what
you’re thinking all the time you’re watch-
ing this astonishingly lifelike person is
what an amazing acting job it is.