Mike Nichols A life

Mark Harris, 1963-

Book - 2021

"A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges--some of the worst largely unknown until now--by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back. Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind without parallel: while still in his 20's, he was half of a lucrative hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four hit Broadway plays, picking up the Best Director Tony for three of them, and by his mid-30's the first two films he directed, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, were the highest-grossing movies of 1966 and 1967 respectively, and The Gradua...te had won him an Oscar for Best Director. Well before his 40th birthday, Nichols lived in a sprawling penthouse on Central Park West, drove a Rolls Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Avedon and the Aga Khan as good friends. Where he had arrived is even more astonishing given where he began: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he and his younger brother were sent alone to America on a ship in 1939. Their father, who had gone ahead to find work, was waiting for them; their mother would follow, in the nick of time. His name changed by his father to "Michael Nichols," the young boy caught very few breaks: his parents were now destitute, and his father died when Mike was just 11, leaving his mentally unstable mother alone and overwhelmed. Perhaps most cruelly, Nichols was completely bald: as a small child an allergic reaction to an immunization shot had caused total and permanent hair loss. His parents claimed they could not afford to buy him even a cheap wig until he was almost in high school. Mark Harris gives an intimate and even-handed accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art"--

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Subjects
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Mark Harris, 1963- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiii, 673 pages, 32 unnumberered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 647-650) and index.
ISBN
9780399562242
  • Part 1. What It Was Really Like
  • 1. Starting From Zero (1931-1944)
  • 2. Agent X-9 (1944-1952)
  • 3. A Sense of Your Possibilities (1952-1955)
  • 4. The First Thing We Ever Did Together (1955-1957)
  • 5. This Boy and Girl (1957-1959)
  • 6. A New and Very Strange Experience (1959-1960)
  • 7. The Most Important People (1960-1962)
  • 8. Playing the Role of a Father (1962-1963)
  • 9. Okay, That's Great, Now Let's Try This (1963-1964)
  • 10. The Funniest Distance Between Two Points (1964-1965)
  • 11. I Want To Know This Place (1965-1966)
  • 12. One Considerable Intelligence (1966-1967)
  • 13. Prove You Belong Here (1967)
  • 14. It's Beginning to Make Sense (1967-1968)
  • 15. The Only Way to Live Your Life (1968-1969)
  • 16. Cold to the Touch and Brilliant to the Eye (1969-1971)
  • 17. Dolphins Are Smarter Than Human Beings (1971-1973)
  • 18. Mr. Success (1973-1975)
  • Part 2. What Happened Next
  • 19. Everything Goes on the Line (1975-1977)
  • 20. The Rapture of My Depth (1977-1980)
  • 21. Reunions (1980-1981)
  • 22. Am I Doing This Right? (1981-1982)
  • 23. Oh, This Is Trouble (1983-1985)
  • 24. A Shot Across The Bow (1985-1986)
  • 25. Borrowed Time (1986-1987)
  • 26. Pinocchio and Cinderella (1987-1988)
  • 27. Still Here (1988-1990)
  • 28. It Never Goes Away (1990-1993)
  • 29. The Best Route to Revenge (1993-1996)
  • 30. Something Scary (1996-1999)
  • 31. The Ultimate Test (2000-2001)
  • 32. More Life (2001-2003)
  • 33. Big Isn't True (2003-2005)
  • 34. Good Night, Stars (2005-2009)
  • 35. Way Out There in the Blue (2010-2014)
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Works
  • Image Credits
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Harris follows two outstanding works of film history (Pictures at a Revolution, 2008, and Five Came Back, 2014) with this robust biography of legendary director Mike Nichols. Harris' skill as a storyteller in on full view as he follows Nichols' immigrant's journey from Berlin in 1939, when the seven-year-old and his three-year-old brother, Robert, traveled alone to New York to join their father, through the early years as an outsider and indifferent student, and then on to his improbable and wildly successful career, first as an improv actor with Elaine May and then throughout a 50-year run as a stage and film director. This ground has been covered before, notably in the oral history Life Isn't Everything (2019), but Harris brings new dimension and context to the story, showing in vivid detail and with a novelist's feel for narrative, that Nichols' directorial career, despite its phenomenal beginning (Tony Awards for his first three Broadway shows and blockbuster success with his first two movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate), had its share of low points. Nichols' reactions to such film flops as Catch-22 and The Day of the Dolphin are covered much more fully here than in the necessarily celebratory oral history, and they provide some of the book's most revealing glimpses of Nichols' personal vulnerability. Like the best biographies, Harris brings his subject's life and work together in a perfectly unified whole.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Harris (Five Came Back) delivers an entertaining portrait of actor, director, and producer Mike Nichols in this bracingly candid biography. Drawing primarily on interviews conducted by himself and others, Harris captures the award-winner's "precision and finesse" during his "five-decade career in movies and theater," which included directing the 1967 film The Graduate and the 1984 play The Real Thing. Nichols's first major success came in 1960 with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a comedy act that "more than doubled its investors' money"; his fame continued as he released his first feature film in 1966, an adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Though Nichols's work style--he "wasn't shy about using his personal experience to motivate his actors"--is front and center, Harris empathetically digs into his subject's private life: never far below the surface was the self-aware young Jewish immigrant from Germany who became a master of self-presentation and invention (Nichols took "great care never to look or sound too excited about anything"). Harris also doesn't gloss over Nichols's demons, including his drug use, demand for perfection, and "irritability and condescension" on set. The result is a joyously readable and balanced account of a complex man. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Editor and journalist Harris's (Five Came Back) engrossing, pull-no-punches biography of American movie and theater director Mike Nichols (1931--2014) presents both well-known and more obscure portions of his subject's life and work through a chronological arrangement, with copious excerpts from interviews with actors, writers, designers, and other creative folks. The author divides the narrative into two- or three-year chunks, examining Nichols's Jewish family's escape from Germany on the cusp of World War II; his early successes in clubs, radio, and television as a duo with Elaine May; and his collaborations with Neil Simon on Broadway and his renown for movies such as The Graduate. Neither avoiding nor emphasizing Nichols's excesses of consumption and failed marriages, Harris creates a fully rounded portrait of a person who could command the respect and support of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and master his craft yet still feel insecure when confronted with disappointment. VERDICT A compelling storyteller, Harris sweeps readers up into the whirlwind of Nichols's life. Likely to become the definitive book about Nichols, Harris's exhaustive take should have widespread appeal, especially given the dearth of currently available literature about this important and influential entertainment icon.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A full-dress biography of a quintessential artist who mastered stage, screen, and (especially) comedy. Mike Nichols (1931-2014) was a one-man argument against auteur theory: What aesthetic sensibility unifies his spiky routines with Elaine May, the gentle Neil Simon comedies he directed, films like The Graduate and Working Girl, and his epic TV adaptation of Angels in America? In this thorough and compassionate life, Harris doesn't search too hard for a common thread; more than anything, it seems, Nichols was hungry for an audience's attention and had an innate enough grasp of staging and actors to (usually) get it. The son of German immigrants, he was a college dropout who formed a tight (but not romantic) bond with May, who shared his taste in brainy comedy and disaffection with 1950s supper-club stand-up. Their success in New York gained him entry to Broadway and then Hollywood, where his acclaimed adaptations of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate made him a household name. Just as important for Nichols, success opened doors to high society, where he was guided by photographer Richard Avedon. (Harris debunks reports they had a sexual relationship.) Nichols ran hot and cold professionally, and the author is refreshingly honest about creative low points like Day of the Dolphin as well as his mercurial, addictive personality. He could be snappish and patrician with casts and crews, and by the 1980s, he had developed a Halcion addiction and a crack habit. Nichols' scattershot output makes him difficult to pin down, and by structuring the biography around his projects, Harris underdevelops his subject's inner character; we learn nearly as much about his prized Arabian horses as his children. It may simply be that Nichols' life was his work, but focusing on his creative triumphs at times obscures the man who made them. A sturdy, sympathetic biography about one of pop culture's rangiest creators. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One Starting from Zero 1931-1944 In the origin story that Mike Nichols liked to tell, he was born at the age of seven. The first image of himself he chose to conjure for people was that of a boy on a boat, holding his younger brother's hand, traveling from Germany to America. They were unaccompanied on that six-day crossing in 1939, their ailing mother still bedbound in Berlin. Their father was already in New York. His two small sons had not seen him for almost a year. Nichols was not yet real even to himself. His name was Michael Igor Peschkowsky, or perhaps it wasn't. Decades later, his brother, Robert, looking into his family's history, told him that according to the ship's manifest and the petition for naturalization that was later filed by his father, his name was actually Igor Michael Peschkowsky. Igor. A horror-movie name. Nichols looked at him impassively. "Maybe," he said. "Maybe it was." It didn't matter. Whatever his name when he boarded ship, it was gone by the time he got to New York. Nichols turned the transatlantic crossing into a story-his first self-revelation-as-anecdote, an approach that he would eventually refine into a shield and a disguise, but also into a style of directing, a means of conveying an idea or a feeling or a circumstance to an actor that he deployed with precision and finesse over a five-decade career in movies and theater. He first tried it out on journalists in his twenties, when suddenly everyone wanted to know who Mike Nichols was and where on earth he had come from. The story he told, droll and wry, with a slight undertow of despair, was that at seven he was packed onto the boat knowing only two sentences in what would become his new language: "I do not speak English" and "Please do not kiss me." In some tellings, he spoke no English at all and instead wore those two warnings on a penciled sign that was pinned to his clothes before boarding. It was this picture-the New Yorker cartoon version of his early life, with a punch line that hinted at both utter solitude and defiant standoffishness-that Nichols used to explain his personality to others, and to himself: a portrait of the artist as the Little Prince, alone on his planet and at home nowhere. If the boy who had existed for seven years before that journey usually went undiscussed in interviews, it was in part because Nichols's life before America was so hazy to him that he could retrieve little of it until adulthood. His childhood in Berlin-his years as either Michael or Igor-barely existed in his memory. As a youngster, he attended the Private JYdische Waldschule Kaliski, an elementary school that, during Hitler's rise, became a Jews-only institution. Nichols's father, a doctor named Pavel Peschkowsky, was a Russian Jew, albeit so secular that he didn't even believe in circumcision. His mother, Brigitte Landauer, was a German Jew, wholly invested in and proud of her national heritage and also indifferent to her religion. Within their cultural circle, Paul and Brigitte were not atypical-as Lotte Kaliski, who founded the school Nichols attended, put it, "We all had to learn to become Jewish. Most of us came from very assimilated families and so did the children. But we understood that in order to give children a more positive attitude, they had to know something about their background." Whatever that education was to be, Michael-or, as Elaine May later teasingly called him, "little Igor"-was not in the school long enough to absorb it. His memories of the Kaliski school were few, and mostly miserable. He recalled a group of German children in black shirts stealing his bicycle. And, more vividly, he could picture "with awful clarity a scene with my gym teacher and my mother, and realizing they were lovers. She was a beautiful woman, and I remember her quarreling with him, and he ripped a necklace off her and threw it out a window, and she went running after it." As an adult, Nichols spoke as if that moment were still raw, admitting, "I suppose I've spent a large part of my life trying to sort that out." But at other times, he pushed the door shut. "A Jew in Nazi Germany, parents always fighting," he would say, as detached as if he were musing about a stranger. "Aren't all childhoods bad?" His ancestry-the "family legend," as he called it-was dramatic, filled with art and politics, wealth, loss, privation, and bloodshed. When he left Berlin as a little boy, he knew hardly any of it. His mother and his aunt had given him and Robert the good part-he was a cousin of Albert Einstein, no less, and thus had a famous relative already in America, a story he became so certain was prideful apocrypha that he was astonished when it turned out to be true. But they left out virtually everything else. He knew that his father was now a two-time emigrant; as a young anti-Bolshevik supporter of Alexander Kerensky, he had fled Russia, crossing the Gobi Desert into Manchuria and eventually resettling in Germany. But not until Nichols was almost eighty did he learn that a fortune in gold had helped Pavel Peschkowsky start his new life. "Jews with goldmines!" he marveled when, during a guest appearance on a TV genealogy show, he first heard the truth. One of his great-grandfathers, Grigory Distler, had taken possession of what was thought to be a depleted mine on Sakhalin Island and found an immense undiscovered trove of gold, enough to give his daughter Anna and her son-Nichols's father-seventy-five bars. The inheritance enabled their passage out of Russia and allowed Peschkowsky to set up a successful medical practice in Berlin. "I always had this picture of my father somehow working his way up," Nichols said. "They were rich! Who knew? I wish to God I had gotten to know my father better, because I had it all wrong." His mother, Brigitte, came from unhappier circumstances. Her father, Gustav Landauer, was an intellectual polymath who studied metaphysics and translated Shakespeare into German. He was also a political firebrand, a committed believer in the philosophy of an anarchist, post-governmental agrarian utopia, and an agitator who served jail time for his insurrectionist articles in Der Sozialist. Bearded, oratorically fiery, and six and a half feet tall, he cut a formidable public figure. In 1903 he married Hedwig Lachmann, a poet and translator who adapted Oscar Wilde's Salome into a libretto for Richard Strauss. Landauer was interested in religion as a field of research but had no use for it in his home, nor did his wife, despite being the daughter of a cantor. Brigitte grew up in Hermsdorf, a largely Jewish suburb of Berlin, in a house filled with literature and art. "I played with Jewish children," she recalled, "but we were the only ones who celebrated Christmas and Easter . . . an entirely secular Christmas, with presents, stars, tinsel . . . At school I was the only child who sat alone while the others studied religion and recited their prayers." Lachmann, who demanded near-constant quiet so she could work, and the stern, imposing Landauer were not natural parents. "There wasn't the family 'togetherness' one finds so often today," Brigitte said later. "We met at meals, but otherwise did little together." What stability she had was shattered in 1918, when her mother became one of the first victims of the flu pandemic and died at fifty-two. Her father had just risen to become commissioner of enlightenment and public instruction during the very brief existence of the socialist Bavarian Soviet Republic, part of an ad hoc leadership cadre set up largely by poets and philosophers. In a matter of weeks, that interregnum fell to the German army, and Landauer became a hunted man. He made arrangements to hide Brigitte and her older sister, Gudula, in the home of friends and went on the run. In April 1919 he wrote, "My beloved children-Some of my friends were or are still imprisoned. But do not worry about me! I am looked after very well in every respect and I will be cautious. My greatest concern is that false rumors will reach and worry you . . . My second concern is that agitated bourgeois and peasants might harass you. I hope not. If it does happen, be wise and prudent . . . Do not forget to take the little bit of money that is in the house, as well as your and your mother's jewelry. I hope to hear from you soon!" Less than three weeks later, Landauer was murdered by members of the paramilitary Freikorps; he was beaten with gun butts and kicked to death, then shot in the head. Brigitte heard the news while riding in a Berlin streetcar. She was twelve. In 1922, Peschkowsky, then twenty-two, arrived in Berlin, where he finished college, attended medical school, got his doctor's license, and set up a successful practice catering to artists, theater people, and fellow Russian ZmigrZs. By then Brigitte was employed as a hospital social worker. They married in 1930. Michael, their first son, was born a little more than a year later, on November 6, 1931. A second son, Robert, was born in 1935. A photograph of Michael gazing at his newborn younger brother shows a little boy with a full head of wavy dark brown hair. Soon after that, he was given an injection of whooping cough vaccine and, he was told, suffered an allergic reaction that resulted in a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. He would grow up bald. It was, says his brother, "the defining aspect of his childhood." At the beginning of Hitler's rise to power, Nichols's father did not think of leaving Germany, as many Jews did. But by 1938 it had become apparent that all Jews-even the wealthy, even the secular, even those who, like Brigitte, felt German to their core-were in grave danger, and he began planning an escape for his family. "One thing that I'm sure hastened his [departure]," Robert Nichols says, "was that . . . Jews could no longer see any [non-Jewish] patients. They could function as practical nurses or orderlies, but otherwise, they could not practice at all as of mid-1938." Returning to Russia, where two of Peschkowsky's uncles had just been put to death for counterrevolutionary activities, was not an option. Instead, he would leave for New York immediately; his mother, Anna Distler-Michael and Robert's only living grandparent-would soon flee Berlin to return to Manchuria. Brigitte and the boys would join Pavel in America as soon as he had found work and a place for them to live. Under German law at that time, he and his family were considered Russian, not German-because he came from Russia, the boys were never technically German citizens, and were therefore somewhat freer to travel. He secured the necessary papers and left Germany that August. Upon arriving in New York, he got work as an X-ray technician for a local union. By the beginning of 1939, he had passed the state medical boards and was ready to set up a practice under the new name he had chosen-Paul Nichols, a nod to his late father, Nikolai, who had also been a physician. (Paul's patronymic was Nikolayevich.) "By the time I spelled Peschkowsky," he joked to his sons, "my patient was in the hospital." He was ready to have his wife and children join him, but back in Berlin, a medical issue had arisen: Brigitte had been diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, a life-threatening condition in which blood clots can travel to the lungs. At that time, extended bed rest was wrongly considered to be an effective treatment. She was sent to a convalescent hospital. Michael and Robert would have to make the journey alone. Their aunt Gudula, who had been taking care of them in their mother's absence, sewed 15 marks-about $40-into the lining of their clothes and took them to the embarkation point of the SS Bremen, a luxury ocean liner, for the trip, where she placed them in the care of a steward. Their father would retrieve them at the other end. They set sail on April 28, 1939. In later years, Nichols would speak of his "unbelievable, undeserved, life-shaming luck" in being able to emigrate. Brigitte had a distant cousin in Connecticut-not Einstein, but someone who was willing to sponsor the family, a financial guarantee without which the United States was refusing the entry of most Jews from Europe. He and his brother left on the Bremen just two weeks before the ill-fated departure of another ship, the St. Louis, that came to be known as the "voyage of the damned," in which hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich for Cuba were denied entry at one international port after another; many of them were returned to Germany and eventually killed in the Holocaust. "I remember everything about getting on the boat," Nichols said. "We were on the gangplank when everything stopped because of Hitler's speech . . . They had loudspeakers on every corner . . . I remember the sound but not the content." But it was not, he took pains to say, a moment of fear. Nichols thought of himself as an immigrant but not as a survivor. He would reach his fifties having spent "years, decades, when I didn't think about it" before coming to realize how deeply a sense that "this is all borrowed time" resided within him. As a child, he saw the boat trip as an adventure. "I remember when we got to the end of the gangplank I jumped as hard as I could because I wanted to see the boat go up and down," he said. And the voyage itself wasn't scary. At seven, he was a self-contained, unsmiling child who had not seen his father for eight months and had gotten used to a mother who "was ill . . . and would be ill for much of the rest of her life." The only thing that could rattle him was the emotional display that the sight of a bald little uncared-for refugee boy holding a three-year-old's hand was likely to engender among adults. "Please do not kiss me" was an essential directive because "if you were alone people tended to kiss you," he said. "And I hated it." During those few days, the boys had the run of much of the ship. There was a nursery with stuffed animals, and a nanny on staff to keep an eye on them during mealtimes and pack them off to their stateroom if they misbehaved. There were adults who found amusement in the beaky young boy with the serious demeanor. "I remember looking for the prow of the boat, or was it the bow?" Nichols said. "I remember asking a fellow passenger, in German, where was the tip? . . . He pointed to the tip of my nose. And I said, 'No, no, no, don't kid around!'" And there were movies, including the first one he ever saw, a dubbed German version of the 1938 Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy adventure Test Pilot-"test pee-lote," he said, sounding out the words on the screen. "That and another movie . . . I think it must have been Gunga Din. Because the army they were fighting was often shown in close-up, I thought they were fighting giants. I remember that I hadn't grasped perspective yet." Excerpted from Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.