42 The New York Review
Mike playing the role of the ringmas-
ter— elegantly, w ittily, of course —for
an adoring public.
Unsurprisingly, a great deal of the
book hinges on Mike’s creation of
himself and his deep concern with
identity. It is properly celebratory and
deliciously filled with his bons mots,
but from its opening pages, it shirks
none of the complexity of the man, ac-
knowledging the darkness so close to
the shining surface. Here is Avedon as
early as page xxi:
I think he goes into every experi-
ence expecting to be attacked—
armed, ready.... He said his dream
was, he’s on an island that belongs
to him, manned on the turrets by
men with machine guns. People
can only get in with a passport, and
then only his friends.Lahr (still on p. xxi) says, “From an
early age he was always braced, he
was always powerfully defended... you
didn’t mess with him. If you did, you
did it at your peril.”
David Geffen reports that Mike was
reluctant to be celebrated in an Amer-
ican Masters program: “He was sure
there were all these people who would
have these terrible stories about him,
which is not true at all, but that’s one
of the things he worried about, because
he could not forgive himself for so many
things.” And indeed, in the first chapter
of the book, we find Mike and Elaine
planning to form an improvisation
company with two brilliant colleagues
from Compass Theatre in Chicago.
The four pooled their money and sent
Mike and Elaine to New York to look
for an agent for the group. Instead, they
auditioned on their own behalf and got
taken on without any mention of the
other two. Life Isn’t Everything is no
whitewash job.
Again and again, it returns to the
question of identity. Under the infinitely
polished surface, complex things seem
to be lurking. At college, Nichols
seemed to others to be “like a prince-
ling deprived of his rightful fortune.” In
Lahr’s New Yorker profile he says:
I couldn’t be a person that many
hours a day. I needed—still
need—a lot of time lying on the
bed absolutely blank, the way I as-
sume a dog is in front of the fire. A
persona takes energy. I just needed
a rest from it. Not to be anything in
relation to anyone else.This sense of him as a performer of
himself was somehow compounded
by the alopecia that compelled him
to wear false hair—a wig and eye-
brows—a fact studiously ignored by ev-
eryone who knew him. Later in his life
they were superbly crafted; when he
was young, they were not. “When I first
saw him,” recounts the acting teacher
Joyce Piven, “he was in a red fright
wig.” The hair, said Susan Sontag, his
contemporary at the University of Chi-
cago, “was absolutely unmentionable.”
Later, after she had breast cancer, she
said to him, “I just cannot accept the
mastectomy. Every time I take a bath
I’m horrified.” He said to her: “Susan,
now you know how I felt all my life.”
The breadth of the witnesses is re-
markable, as are their candor and per-
ceptiveness. There are three notable
absentees—arguably the three most
important people in Mike’s life: his
nightmarish mother, Brigitte; his duo
partner, Elaine May; and Diane Saw-
yer, his fourth and final wife. Other
witnesses have trenchant things to say
about all three: Brigitte, who provided
him with so much of the material of
the comedy sketches (“Mike, it’s your
mother. Do you remember me?”); May,
who, in their work together, according to
Sam Wasson, “liberated Mike’s uncon-
scious”; and Sawyer, the wife in whom
he finally found a safe haven: “He just
couldn’t get over her lack of vanity and
her intellect,” says Candice Bergen. “He
described himself as Pinocchio, who be-
came a real boy. That’s the Diane effect.
He just strove to be better, to equal her.”
Over and over, actors testify to the
sterling quality of his direction, which
he did as much by inference as by in-
struction. Streep, who revived his inter-
est in filming after it had grown bitter
in his mouth, says:People ask me, “How did he di-
rect you?” And honestly, I can’t
remember any piece of direction
he ever gave me, except he would
often say, “Surprise me.” He’d also
say, “Do everything you just did,
but faster.”In my personal experience, what he
gave you was extraordinary trust, a
sense that you and you alone had the
key to the part, that you and he alone
in all the world understood the screen-
play, and that your performance was a
kind of secret achievement between the
two of you.
An unnerving section of the book
describes his six- month descent into
paranoia, which brought him to the
very brink of suicide as a result of his
use of Halcion, a sleeping pill, which
had disastrous side effects. But for themost part he kept a clear head and an
even keel. The work varied in quality,
but he always had a surprise up his
sleeve, with, for example, The Birdcage
(1996), a glorious reunion with May,
who wrote the screenplay based on the
French play La Cage aux Folles, and,
on television, the majestic epic spread
of Angels in America. He was capable
of great humility. Having had a fero-
ciously difficult time directing the first
production of David Rabe’s Hurly-
burly—the author eventually refused to
talk to him—he went to see a revival of
it, directed by Rabe himself: “we shook
in our boots and were amazed to see
how wonderful it was,” he wrote to me
in his characteristic no- capitals mode:much better than ours and very
funny, clear and exciting. so ex-
citing to see that rabid dave was
right in our fights. so good to learn
something even after many years.
a brilliant ethan hawke and hilari-
ous and even more brilliant parker
posey, an adorable wally shawn
and many more. they tell me they
didn’t talk about it at all, just did it.
sometimes it takes time to under-
stand something. i guess.And he ended, with a typical self-
puncturing flourish, “off to more jury
duty. i am ready now to stop learning
and get back to complaining.”A few years before M ike died, he sub -
mitted to the cameras when he was in-
terviewed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. for
PBS’s Finding Your Roots. He knew a
certain amount about his background,
but Gates was able to tell him things
that astonished and moved him deeply.
His family’s history was a record of
persecution alternating with periods
of considerable wealth; a sizeable num-ber of his ancestors had been shot. His
Jewishness, which he had always worn
very lightly, now seemed central to his
life: “I pushed it so far away, and once I
discovered this, I had a very hard time
for a long time.” He admitted to Gates
that he was profoundly haunted by
guilt—survivors’ guilt:I never know what’s going to trig-
ger it because it’s gone most of the
time, and then suddenly some-
thing brings it up. Guilt, they say,
is stronger than love. And that’s a
horrible but true thing.He told Natalie Portman, “I’ve been
such a bad Jew.” When Gates published
a book drawn from the show, under the
title Faces of America, he chose a quo-
tation from Gustav Landauer, Mike’s
maternal grandfather, as its epigraph:Our complete ancestry is within
us. The individual is a result of a
long chain of ancestors who are
still present within us and exert
power over us. Men must go inside
themselves, to be connected with
what they originally are.Or to put it another way, “so we beat
on, boats against the current, borne
back ceaselessly into the past.” There
was more than a touch of Jay Gatsby
about Mike.
It is astonishing that a man who had
bu r ie d h i s for mer s el f s o d e e p i n h i s p s y-
che chose to appear on a television pro-
gram whose entire raison d’être was to
confront the past. It may be that Mike
was most able to connect to that bur-
ied self in public. As early as 1999, in
an interview with Gavin Smith in Film
Comment, he remarked of The Grad-
uate, “I kept looking and looking for
an actor until I found Dustin... who’s
a dark, Jewish, anomalous presence,
which is how I experience myself.” It
is highly improbable that anyone who
knew Mike would have used any of
those three adjectives to describe him.
The last words in Life Isn’t Every-
thing are provided by Mike’s muse,
Meryl Streep:He understood the process [of act-
ing] more than any other director
I’ve worked with.... He trusted
that if he saw the spark of some-
thing in you, he knew he just had
to entertain it out of you.
But I think more profoundly,
he was acting all the time. Right
from the beginning he was acting
being an American. He was acting
being a blond. He was acting being
confident. He was acting being the
smartest person in the room. That
is actually a definition of acting:
You have all these things that you
want desperately to be real. And
you live in them and they become
you. Whatever the process is, I re-
ally don’t understand. But I know
that he understood it.The final summing- up belongs to John
Lahr, who in his New Yorker pro-
file and in his many shafts of insight
throughout Life Isn’t Everything seems
to have penetrated him to the core: at
the end of his interview for the profile,
Mike expressed himself pleased. “I do
well with the fundamentally inconsol-
able,” said Lahr. Mike closed his eyes
for second and sighed, then said: “We
get a lot done, you know.” QBRAMLEYS,
NOT GRENADIERSThe apple trees are put up against a wall
and shot at dawn.
The bodies lie where they fall.
These are Armagh Bramleys, not Grenadiers,
given their russet tinge.
That’s blood coming out of an ear.
At the heart of the espalier is the stake
to which the branches are bound with pantyhose
to allow for a little give and take.
The apple trees are put up against a wall
almost as often as, in Gaelic football,
Maghery is bested by the boys of Mullaghbawn.
These are Armagh Bramleys, not Grenadiers
for whom the thought of pruning shears
will cause a twinge.
At the heart of the espalier is the stake
about which Grenadiers are known to bellyache.
That’s blood coming out of a nose.
The apple trees put up against a wall
and shot at dawn
are Armagh Bramleys, not Grenadiers,
given their russet tinge.
At the heart of the espalier is the stake
to which the branches are bound with pantyhose.—Paul Muldoon