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[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars, creators, industry leaders, and writers helping to keep Broadway alive during the pandemic.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: The writer, director, and producer Mike Nichols was an influential giant, both on Broadway and in Hollywood.

[0:23] Gordon Cox: And this month saw the release of a new biography of his life and work, Mike Nichols: A Life.

[0:28] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I talked to Mark Harris, the writer and journalist who wrote the biography about what he's learned about Nichols' life, work, and enduring influence, and about all the juicy backstage stories he learned along the way.

[0:40] Gordon Cox: Hey Mark, thanks for joining me.

[0:42] Mark Harris: Thanks for having me.

[0:44] Gordon Cox: So before we talk about the writing process for the book, I wonder if you could start by giving us your take on what makes Mike Nichols a worthy subject for a biography like this one. And has your answer to that question evolved as you were working on the book?

[1:00] Mark Harris: Oh, that's that second part is really interesting. I haven't thought about that before. Um well, going in, I certainly thought he was a worthy subject, just because I have trepidation about the so-called boring parts of biographies. And you know, unlike with my other books, when you're doing a life, you're sort of hostage to the life. If there are lulls or long stretches where nothing interesting is going on, you're kind of out of luck. Um I had the sense, even going in that that was not going to be a problem if I was working on a Mike Nichols biography, that his career was so long and so varied that, you know, when there wasn't something going on in movies, there would be something going on in theater.

And before there was something going on in either, there was this extraordinary early career as a performer. Um, and before that, there was this extraordinary early life, which suggested no great future, or I mean it was really a kind of dark and tough beginning. So I thought going in that every stage of his life was going to be interesting. And then I think that if something changed during the years that I was doing the research, it's that I didn't realize quite how much it was going to turn into a book about the process of making things and about the trying to unfold the mysteries of what exactly it is that a director does, and how a creative person like Mike Nichols sees his own mission and his own career differently at 30 and 50 and 70. Those were themes that really emerged for me well after I had begun the research.

[3:02] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And tell us about how long you were you were working on this. You mentioned the years that you were working on it.

[3:10] Mark Harris: Sure. Yeah, I worked on the book probably a total of about four and a half years, and the first three and a half years of that was research and interviews, and the last year was writing.

[3:24] Gordon Cox: And so you never spoke with Mike Nichols before he died for this book?

[3:30] Mark Harris: No, not for this book, um, because I had no intention of doing this book before he died. I never imagined that I would write a Mike Nichols biography. Um, the only time we ever had a conversation like that were the times that I urged him to write his autobiography, which is a good thing.

[3:50] Gordon Cox: This is you and Mike, because you knew you knew that.

[3:52] Mark Harris: Yeah. For those for several years before he died, and you know, we did we I had interviewed him extensively for my first book, um, and we had talked many times over the years after that, uh and some before that, but um never about me writing a book. It I would only say to Mike, you know, you really oughta do it yourself. You really should should put your own life story down. And I'm sure I was, you know, the five thousandth person in his life to tell him that. And uh he it was not something that he was ambivalent about at all. I mean, very he just did not want to do it. Late in his life he suddenly got interested um in the notion of perhaps sitting down with a writer and um going through project by project, not not doing an autobiography, but but doing a kind of working history of his own life. And um and then that never happened.

[4:54] Gordon Cox: Right. And so then what prompted you to uh to decide to do it?

[4:59] Mark Harris: Well, I just really felt that it was a life and and a body of work or really several bodies of work that that expl that that you know would merit deep exploration. Um and you know, when I look for a book to write, the standards I look for are will it scare me a little bit? Do will I worry that I'm not up to it? Um, and will I be able to be interested in it every day that I'm working on it? And uh, you know, as soon as this idea came up, I realized that that yeah, this was something I was I would never tire of, that it might intimidate me, but I would never lose interest.

[5:45] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And so what for you were what was your research process? What were your primary sources, and then how did you think about sort of fleshing them out into what became the book?

[5:55] Mark Harris: Well, I spent a great deal of time at the library for the performing arts at Lincoln Center, um, because especially for I mean they have extraordinary archives and clip files, literal clip files, you know, for for decades they had people, you know, cut stories out of newspapers and put them in files, and those are just treasures because a lot of that material is not online in any form. Um but also particularly for the theater side of Mike Nichols's life, which is 50 years, um they had extraordinary resources. I mean, there I was able to, for instance, look at the stage manager's nightly notes for an evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, where you know, it said anything from, you know, Elaine and Mike were 10 minutes late and tipsy tonight. Um or the curtain went down at 1103, so we had to pay union overtime.

[6:58] Mark Harris: Um that was one of the most shocking facts in the book, is at some point you you said that that at one point their show was running three hours or more, and I thought, oh oh God.

[7:07] Gordon Cox: Well, well, it it wasn't three hours, it was two hours because they started at nine.

[7:12] Mark Harris: Right. Oh, that's right. You know, Alexander Cohn thought that a later start time would sort of mark them out as more youthful and and more a part of kind of New York nightlife. So yeah they started at nine which meant it wasn't that hard to go past eleven and that of course caused problems. So that library was I have to say a tremendous resource. And of course I read every book in which Mike was ever mentioned that I could find and then I interviewed about um 250 people who had worked with or known Mike over the years and that of course took a tremendously long time um in some cases just to track them down and and that those those two things sort of reading and um interviewing people and then of course watching and rewatching all the movies and also watching any videotaped archive of his stage work that I could find and the and there is a good deal of that sadly not his earlier work but starting in the 80s you can you can find a good deal of what he did.

[8:17] Gordon Cox: Right. Yeah and you talked to a whole bunch of really great people for this who uh tell us some of the notable ones for you.

[8:25] Mark Harris: Oh my gosh well, you know, Elaine May of course is kind of at the top of the list because she knew Mike and worked with him so closely at such a formative period in his life but also um people who worked with him several times over decades like Meryl Streep um were really helpful people who worked with him only once or twice, like um Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman, um Emma Thompson, Ann Roth. I it's funny, I seem to be naming all women, and I do think that I talk to a lot of men, of course, but I do think that that is reflective of um how much Mike enjoyed working with women and how he really did see them as collaborators and partners. He he didn't need to dominate the way a lot of uh directors of his era did and he was very very happy to have women as um creative uh sort of co-conspirators.

[9:13] Gordon Cox: Yeah do you is there a particularly memorable interview experience that you had over the course of the book?

[9:13] Mark Harris: Um uh the uh I think Elaine May was certainly the interview that I was most intimidated going into because she's Elaine May and also that wasn't helped by the fact that the first thing she said to me um in her office which is in her apartment building uh was I want you to know right up front that the only things that I can remember are the things I'm not going to tell you.

[10:06] Mark Harris: Um so it you know which was a great strategy um to to sort of rock me back on my heels a little bit but um it happily it also turned out not to be true. I mean she was she was incredibly uh forthcoming and had a memory like a steel trap and and uh also just a a really and I found this with a lot of the people I interviewed um that uh they had if they had worked with Mike and known him for any period of time they had an incredibly vivid sense of emotional recall they could they could not only remember incidents and conversations but they could put me back in a rehearsal room or on a sound stage or in a restaurant uh and and conjure up all of the feelings that were in that room at that time uh and and that was just hugely helpful to me and something I didn't really expect.

[11:03] Mark Harris: Yeah, why do you think that was? Was it because many of them were performers who, you know, sort of traffic in emotions like that and summoning them? I think there was that, and I have this sort of theory that, like, women especially were very, very good at doing that. And you know, the pool of women that I interviewed, I mean, there were people obviously who were very young who worked with Mike late in his career, but going back, you know, I interviewed a substantial number of women over 80, over 85, over 90 in some cases, and they were really part of a generation where women in a room full of men did not get to talk that much. They weren't listened to the way men were listened to. And so they had a lot of time to listen and a lot of time not only to listen but to assess, to sort of read the room and figure out what everyone else was thinking.

And in some ways, that has, as far as my research went, that made them much better observers and much more valuable than many men. I talked to a lot of men who could remember everything that they did and said, but not so much about other people. The lot of the women I talked to remembered everything about everyone, including themselves. But that was a kind of unexpectedly huge resource for me, their memories.

[12:39] Gordon Cox: And who surprised you most with a detail or a story or an insight?

[12:46] Mark Harris: Gosh, you know, everyone had a good story to tell. I was certainly surprised, again, to go back to Elaine May, because that was such an important interview for me, that she could talk about the development of a sketch or a scene or a comedy routine between the two of them and almost in anatomical detail describe why something that didn't work didn't work and what they needed to do to make it better. And, you know, there's this famous sketch, the most sort of structurally innovative sketch that Nichols and May ever did, which is this thing called Pirandello, which is probably too long to describe, but basically it's a sketch that goes on for a long time and has several beats and is intended to stir up a sense of discomfort in the audience at points when the audience is supposed to not be sure whether what they're seeing is a sketch or an actual fight under the sketch that Nichols and May are having on stage.

And it was never recorded. It was not on their Broadway album, which was a huge hit. It wasn't filmed as far as anyone knows. So unless you were there and saw it, which means you had to have seen it, you know, in nineteen sixty-two or earlier, which lets me out, you know, that the chances are you can only rely on people's memories. So for her to describe it and to go through it moment by moment was just kind of a spine-tingling thrill for me.

[14:31] Gordon Cox: What are some of your favorite backstage stories in the book that you learned?

[14:38] Mark Harris: Well, it's interesting to me that we think so often of movie star excess, you know, wild misbehavior on movie sets. But sort of the most lurid stories that I heard were all about theater. Especially if you go back to the 60s and 70s, the really astonishing stories of misbehavior or eccentric behavior were all about the plays that Mike worked on. I mean, George C. Scott in Plaza Suite in Boston making a really cheerful call to his wife Colleen Dewhurst the night it opens in Boston to really good reviews, and saying, "I can't believe it, I'm finally in a hit." And then promptly disappearing for three days and deciding that he's just lost it and has had to quit. George C. Scott flushing or attempting to flush Maureen Stapleton's fur coat down a toilet.

Walter Matthau, this was actually a sort of disappointing story, but the stories about how much Walter Matthau undermined Art Carney when they were doing The Odd Couple together to the point where Art Carney one night literally walked off stage at the end of the play, got in his car, and drove to Connecticut and checked himself into a mental health facility. I mean, the really outrageous stories, and then even later, you know, like the entire company of the play Death and the Maiden mooning the opening night audience through a one-way curtain that they couldn't see. You know, I think theater has always been a refuge for people who couldn't get away with a certain kind of behavior anywhere else.

And Mike, who was himself immaculately well-behaved, really a lot of the time that he was directing plays had to be kind of a lion tamer. So the juiciest stories I think were, I think in a theater versus movies contest, theater wins that one.

[16:53] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Mark right after the break.

[17:03] Gordon Cox: And now here's more with Mark Harris, the author of Mike Nichols: A Life. Let's talk a little bit about what you learned about the way Mike Nichols works. He seemed to have a very specific process that seems to have evolved over the years, which is one of the things you talk about in the book. Tell us your take on sort of what made Mike so extraordinary in the way he worked and the way he talked to actors and the way he put, you know, stage projects together and films together.

[17:33] Mark Harris: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that surprised me was that going in, I really viewed his performing career as a prelude to a completely different career. And once I started researching, I realized that so much of the way he operated as a director derived from his years as a performer. And in particular, one of the most distinctive things about him, which was his ability to not only communicate with other actors and draw really great performances out of them, but almost to read them, to understand what they needed from him in order to free themselves to deliver the kind of performance he thought they could deliver. That really largely derived from his understanding of what it was like to be a performer, what it was like to fail on stage, what it was like to feel competitive with the other person who was on stage, what it was like to feel perfectly in sync with the other person who was on stage.

I mean, those years with Elaine May, particularly the nine months that they spent doing the show on Broadway, really I think were his first directorial training. And just as that experience as a performer taught him how to work with actors, his experience as sort of a quasi-director during their shows, I mean, he often said that Elaine May was the great inventor of the two of them, that she could, once you gave her a character, just fill it in endlessly. And he was more the shaper. He was the person who understood when a scene needed to move from one beat to the next, when the audience might be getting restless, when the perfect moment was to wrap a sketch up so that it didn't overstay its welcome. I think those, when he becomes a director, those instincts kick in in terms of how he works with writers and how he understands pacing a story on stage or for that matter on film.

[19:35] Gordon Cox: Yeah, it seems like it seems to me a very particular kind of talent to do that, that which you were talking about, that sort of directing on the fly in the middle of an improv scene. You know, that he was directing in the moment while also being a part of that scene. It feels like that must have informed a lot of how he kind of his freedom in the way he worked moving forward.

[19:58] Mark Harris: Right. And I don't think he even would have called it directing at the time. You know, I don't think he saw it as directing. If anything, he probably saw it as a form of writing, of kind of authorship on the fly, but in fact it really was sort of directorial training wheels.

[20:15] Gordon Cox: Yeah, and more than one of his notable films kind of originated in the theater, you know, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, of course, and Angels in America and Closer.

[20:15] Mark Harris: Yeah, exactly, Closer. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about, you say toward the end of the book, that it seemed at least to you, you got the impression that the way he worked on film was that he kind of melded the normal film process, more traditional film process, and the theater process to create sort of his own way that he ended up working. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that.

[20:49] Mark Harris: Yeah, I think it's true. I think, you know, in the 1960s when he started first directing theater and then directing film, he saw them as very separate challenges, you know, that there was probably some commonality in the way he worked with actors, but of course, film involved a gigantic set of technologies that he was really working to master. But late in his career, I think he started to feel much freer to take some of the techniques that he used to pull a stage production together and apply them to film. And it didn't matter to him that that wasn't the way most directors worked. I mean, one thing that he really liked doing early in his film career was extensive rehearsal periods.

[21:39] Mark Harris: I mean, some movies don't have rehearsals at all. Um, but Mike did in a couple of cases, not only uh long rehearsals, but actual workshops. I mean, he got the uh four people in closer together in New York many months before um they were ready to shoot, uh, just as a way of turning them into an ensemble and opening them up. And you really see uh I mean, sometimes I think to a maddening degree in his later work, he really believed in sitting around a table and talking and telling stories as a way of unlocking his actors, um, uh, of making them feel uh less shy about telling stories. And I mean he really believed very strongly in uh directing by analogy. Uh, you know, he once more than once uh he said that he thought the uh main job of a director, and this is this begins the book, is to take any situation, no matter how extreme or extraordinary or uncommon, and answer the question, what is this really like?

To answer it for the actors in the scene and to answer it uh for the audience. And uh, you know, one way that he could work his way or help an actor work their way to an answer to the question, what is this really like? was to say, maybe it's like this. Maybe it's like when you were in high school and such and such happened, or maybe it's like when I was in high school and and something happened. You know, he started doing that really for the first time with Elizabeth Taylor on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and uh Dustin Hoffman on The Graduate, and you can flash forward decades later, and uh he does it with a completely different generation of actors, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman in Closer, um, the young actors, uh Justin Kirk and Patrick Wilson and Ben Shankman in Angels in America.

It it's a technique that he really loved, and sometimes it bewildered young actors as he got older, uh, like into his literally late 70s and early 80s, he would get a little looser about tying the whole thing together at the end of the story. You know, he would tell a story and then it would just drift into a story for the sake of a story and and wouldn't wouldn't always connect in an incredibly apparent way to what the issue was at hand, but almost always it did if you listened closely enough. And as you looked at his body of work as a body of work, not as these individual projects, which seem separately, can they seem like such disparate kinds of stories? You know, there's everything from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to to to Wolf, right?

Um, what sort of unites these stories as uh as characteristic of the kinds of stories that Mike Nichols liked to tell? Um, you know, it was important to me not to push a kind of overall cohesive theme onto his work to a greater degree than he thought was there or than was actually there. Um, because I don't think that overall he was the kind of director that uh assembled one project after another with the idea that eventually they would add up to his singular vision. Uh he was famously cagey about the answer to your question. He once said that um he thought that most of his work had to do with a man and a woman, and usually it was centered around a bed, and that was the closest he could get.

But you know, all you have to do is is look at uh Angels in America or The Birdcage to realize it wasn't always uh a man and a woman, and it wasn't always a bed either. Um I think there are there are some kinds of characters that uh Mike really loved. He loved um uh telling stories about people who were trying to keep up a front, like that that was um, you know, who were trying to keep something together, or who who just really wanted something and were stuck uh, you know, partly because of idiosyncrasies in themselves, who couldn't quite figure out how to get it. Um and he loved any story that um allowed for actors to to shine in a way that would make even the unlikeliest, most distanced audience member connect to them.

I mean, he himself saw his own life reflected in everyone from Benjamin in The Graduate to Karen Silkwood in Silkwood. I mean, he he literally did say, I think uh all movies turn out to be about you, the person who makes them at some point, and often you don't uh realize that that's true until years later. Um so one thing they all had in common wasn't that all of Mike's movies were about Mike, but that he wanted you to be able to recognize uh human behavior in any movie he made. Uh and and the movies where he got stumped or stuck.

[27:09] Gordon Cox: How would you characterize the mark he made on theater in particular?

[27:15] Mark Harris: Well, I was really perplexed by this at the beginning of my research. I found that a really hard question to answer because you know you read about uh his productions of The Odd Couple or Barefoot in the Park really being considered landmarks. But if you read Barefoot in the Park, if you read the play, um it it seems, or it it seemed to be from a distance of you know 55 years, uh a pretty straightforward early 1960s comedy uh of a kind that was pretty common and that became more common. And so, you know, I I really puzzled over why people literally called this revolutionary when they when they saw this on stage. I thought, what could they possibly have been seeing? And the more people I talked to who saw the productions, and the more people I talked to who were in them.

Um the the aspect of them that was revolutionary seemed to be inherent in what Mike brought to them as a director, which was that even if you had these lines which were sort of one joke after another, snappy patter, slightly arch, overbright, uh sitcom-ish dialogue, that he pushed at every point to have the actors embody those characters, embody the characters saying them in a way that did not feel sitcom-ish, that felt personal and hypernatural almost, whether he was staging a poker game uh at the beginning of The Odd Couple, which is, you know, I think a director's nightmare, having to put people around a table and keep them there for 40 minutes, um, or whether he was just having the audience look at Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as a pair of newlyweds trying to set up an apartment in the first week of their marriage.

Um, it was the little behavioral things, the gestures between the lines, or the moments when uh a character would say a line, but Mike would have them do something physical that had nothing to do with what they were talking about, because that was really what they were um preoccupied with. Um he he could deepen a moment that way, he could deepen a performance that way, he could even deepen a character that way.

[29:28] Gordon Cox: What do you feel like artists today can learn from Mike Nichols' life and work?

[29:33] Mark Harris: Um, I would love it if directors could look at his work and take away from it that you can create an extraordinarily distinctive and rich and witty and varied body of work in different genres and in different mediums, while also maintaining a real spirit of collaboration. Creative, uh creating a really distinctive body of work does not have to mean excluding the visions of the people that you work with. Mike was famously willing to take an idea from anyone, and I don't think that you can look at his um movies and argue that that made his work uh any less his own. I mean, you know, Mike was a novice director on his second film when he made The Graduate, and Robert Surtees, the uh cinematographer, had been working for 35 years.

And uh by Mike's admission, Surtees learned new things on that movie himself, but also taught Mike every day a kind of uh new lesson in what the camera can do. And Mike was really open to that and grateful for it. And I don't think you can look at The Graduate and say uh it's it's any um less a Mike Nichols movie simply because he gave his cinematographer uh so much room to explore. I think a movie can be very much your own if you allow other people's uh talents and and distinctiveness to shine. And I think the same thing is true uh on stage.

[31:17] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Well, we look forward uh to seeing what uh collaborations arise in the spirit of Nichols uh when theater is back up and running. Uh thank you so much for talking to me, Mark.

[31:28] Mark Harris: Nice to talk to you.

[31:29] Gordon Cox: Thanks, it was a pleasure.

[31:33] Gordon Cox: That was Mark Harris, whose new book, Mike Nichols: A Life, is now available.

[31:39] Gordon Cox: If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, I'd really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

[31:46] Gordon Cox: It really helps us grow our audience of folks who love theater as much as you and I do. Or tell a friend. You can find past episodes of Stagecraft or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and on all the other pod places, including Spotify and on the Broadway Podcast Network, which is another great place to find more theater for your ears.

[32:03] Gordon Cox: I'll be back in two weeks with another new episode. Until then, find me on Twitter at G CoxVariety.

[32:09] Gordon Cox: Thanks for listening and see you soon.