by Mark Harris
As Fox’s financial crisis mounted, leading to a loss of nearly $40 million in 1962,35 Zanuck had taken a step that was unprecedented in the history of Hollywood’s major studios: He shut down the company. By the end of the year, he had laid off half of Fox’s employees “for an indefinite period,” and The New York Times reported that the only people left on the lot were “those actively engaged in completing …Cleopatra or assigned to future television or screen writing projects.”36 And, in a move that did not inspire renewed confidence, Zanuck handed the job of running Fox’s movie production, or the little that was left of it, to his son Richard, a twenty-nine-year-old producer with only a handful of credits, and told him to start swinging the ax.37 “Everybody was let go,” recalls Dick Zanuck. “There was nobody left. I personally spoke to everyone who had been there over five years, but we closed everything. We were down to a janitor. Fox didn’t even have anything ready to go, nothing even resembling a good script. They had one television show on its last legs—Dobie Gillis. That was it.”38
Many in the industry dismissed Dick Zanuck as a Hollywood prince-ling whose father’s nepotistic whim had landed him a job running a studio that no longer had a pulse. “A lot of people at the time said, oh, this is it—they’ll never start up again and that’s why he put the kid in charge,” he says.39 But neither Zanuck had any intention of presiding over the embalming of the family business, and Dick Zanuck’s own ambitions for the studio were not to be underestimated. Though he was based in Los Angeles and his father spent most of his time in New York and Europe, the two were in frequent contact, and the younger Zanuck began hiring screenwriters and developing a slate of modestly budgeted comedy and action films that would bring some life back to the lot and get movies flowing through the pipeline to theaters again.
The Zanucks were taking Fox into a new era of moviemaking, but cautiously. They would sometimes bring in projects from outside producers, as United Artists and Columbia were doing, and they also moved Fox aggressively (and wisely) into television production. But Cleopatra did not occasion a fundamental rethinking of Fox’s approach to movies: Like most studios, its lineup would continue to consist of westerns, war films, comedies, “filler” (usually low-cost horror flicks or beach party movies), and, once in a while, a bigger roll of the dice on a grand-scale historical epic or musical. These movies, known as road-show pictures, were long, large, and lavish: They opened initially in a limited number of huge movie houses, sometimes with two or three thousand seats, in engagements that offered reserved-seat tickets at significantly higher prices than the national average; only after those engagements had played out did the films move into first-run neighborhood theaters and smaller cities. Handled wrong, these movies could turn into Cleopatra or Mutiny on the Bounty. Done right, they were The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur, money machines that could often play theatrically for more than two years before exhausting their audience.
When Arthur Jacobs showed up with his proposal for Doctor Dolittle, Fox was in the market for a road-show movie. The studio already had The Sound of Music in the works, but its release was still a year away, and Dick Zanuck knew he had to start thinking about another hard-ticket spectacular that could follow it, maybe in 1966. Zanuck liked the idea for Dolittle, he knew that Jacobs, with whom he had worked on What a Way to Go!, could deliver a movie, and he felt comfortable with the proposed budget: Although $6 million wasn’t cheap, it was a long way from Cleopatra. On March 9, 1964, Jacobs met with him in Los Angeles, then flew to New York, where the following week he met with Darryl Zanuck at the St. Regis Hotel and finalized a deal for 20th Century-Fox to make the film.40 Jacobs and the studio began to hammer out some early financial details: Alan Jay Lerner would, as the writer and co-producer, earn $350,000, the first $100,000 of which would come when he turned in a treatment; Rex Harrison would receive $300,000 (a 50 percent increase from My Fair Lady); Jacobs himself would take $100,000, plus $50,000 in overhead to set up shop for himself on the Fox lot. Since Lerner’s longtime partner, Frederick Loewe, had decided to retire, an additional $50,000 to $100,000 was earmarked for a composer.41 By May, Jacobs had found one: André Previn, who had written scores (and occasionally songs) for two dozen movies, agreed to compose and supervise Doctor Dolittle’s music for $75,000.42
On May 1, just two weeks before his six-month window of opportunity to make a deal was due to close, Jacobs nailed down an agreement with the Lofting estate. He now owned the exclusive movie rights to the Dolittle books, and Lofting’s widow, Josephine, was to receive 10 percent of net profits from the film.43 Fox’s publicity department started drafting press releases immediately, trumpeting the involvement of Lerner, Harrison, and Vincente Minnelli and announcing that “Doctor Dolittle is planned for world-wide release for Christmas 1966!—Hollywood’s Christmas present to the world! We visualize Doctor Dolittle as a classic international musical film which will be re-released in an orderly pattern every several years for many a year.”44
Jacobs had only one thing to worry about: As the Dolittle deal was closing, one of the key members of his team was suddenly becoming a lot more famous. In May 1964, Alan Jay Lerner was making front-page tabloid news in New York City. The prospective writer of 1966’s biggest fun-for-the-whole-family musical and his fourth wife, Micheline Muselli Pozzo diBorgo, were beginning a very public divorce battle that was about to provide local journalists with a year’s supply of raw meat. He hired Louis Nizer. She hired Roy Cohn.45
On the 20th Century-Fox lot, Jacobs settled in for preproduction. He had an office painted for Lerner and a parking space reserved for him.46 He wondered when he would get a call or a cable from Lerner and hear his co-producer say he was ready to begin work on the script for Doctor Dolittle. The call never came.
FOUR
When Mike Nichols sat down and started to read the copy of The Graduate he had received from Larry Turman, his first thought was that the story was “totally unoriginal.”1 His second thought was that he was going to make it into a movie.
Nichols didn’t know who Turman was, only that a producer had sent the book to his agent, Robert Lantz, and asked him to forward it. He had never heard of the novel. He had never directed a movie; in fact, only recently had he started thinking of himself as a director at all. Twelve months earlier, he had been an improvisatory comedian facing the demise of the creative partnership that had made him famous and utter bewilderment about his next professional move. Now, he had become, for the second time in four years, one of the hottest commodities in New York.
Nichols’s first round of celebrity came in October 1960, when he was twenty-eight and his show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, directed by Arthur Penn, opened on Broadway. Nichols and May had met when he was a student at the University of Chicago. They started performing together with the Compass Players (which later evolved into Second City) in the mid-1950s. Though their backgrounds were dissimilar, the armature they had acquired along the way was oddly complementary. Nichols, born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, was an immigrant, the sickly child of a German mother and a Russian Jewish father who had escaped Europe just before World War II; he had arrived in the United States at the age of seven and been educated in New York private schools and raised in a European intellectual tradition.2 May was born in Philadelphia to a family of Yiddish theater performer-directors; they moved to Los Angeles when she was young, and by the time she was nineteen, she was the divorced mother of a two-year-old girl. Both Nichols and May were outsiders who had endured stormy childhoods by sealing themselves behind walls of wit. Both had the ability to stand just far enough apart from the culture around them to observe it with the ruthless detachment of great comedians, and both had an astonishing gift for improvisation; May could lampoon, on the spur of the moment, the stylistic tics and affectations of writers she had never actually read,3 and Nichols, who had read all of them, knew just how deeply he could tap his own intelligence without scaring the audience away.
Nichols and May’s partnership took
them to New York City, where they began to gain a reputation with performances at the Village Vanguard and other clubs, television appearances, and Improvisations to Music, a 1959 comedy album of two-character vignettes spoofing everything from cold war spy thrillers to Brief Encounter (relocated to a dentist’s chair). Nichols’s talent for rooting out what he called “the secrets under the lines—the secrets that aren’t in the lines,”4 and the almost flirtatious energy with which he and May could lob the ball back and forth, each raising the other’s game repeatedly in the space of a four-minute routine, made them media favorites, and the cult began to grow. Their move to Broadway, at a time when Broadway success meant feature stories in Time and Newsweek and exposure on The Ed Sullivan Show, was a smash, and the ease with which many of the show’s language-rich routines translated to a hit LP helped make Nichols and May into nationally known stars. For its entire 306-performance run, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May wasn’t just a hot ticket; it was a showbiz magnet, attracting luminaries not just in New York City, but from Los Angeles, as studio chiefs and producers regularly made excursions eastward to scout new talent, and from London, where new directors, young actors, and pop singers were just beginning to assert their claim on America’s attention. By the time the show closed in July 1961, the list of celebrities who had knocked at the stage door and paid their respects was staggering. Everyone wanted to know Mike Nichols.
Even when they were on Broadway, hunting for the laugh and then for the twist that would lead to the bigger laugh, Nichols and May had their share of rough nights and clashes; during one performance, they hit and scratched each other onstage as the audience, caught off guard, wondered nervously whether they were in character.5 They were and they weren’t. “We were both seductive and hostile people,” Nichols said later, “and we were both very much on the defensive.”6 Perhaps inevitably, given the pressure to follow success with more success and the tension of working in so airlessly interdependent a dyad, their partnership took only a little more than a year to rupture after the show closed. Their rift, which Nichols called “cataclysmic,”7 came soon after his agreement to take the lead role in May’s play A Matter of Position in Philadelphia. The two fought furiously, and the transformation of their working relationship from that of collaborative performer-writers to one in which May did all the writing and directing and Nichols did all the performing was more than either could take. Nichols enjoyed being directed by Arthur Penn, but not by May. He quit, the show closed out of town, and although the two would eventually mend their relationship and work together again several times, Nichols was now on his own.
It was a producer named Arnold Saint-Subber who nudged him toward directing,8 handing him Nobody Loves Me, a comic play about young newlyweds by Neil Simon that nobody, including Simon, thought was working particularly well. Nichols agreed to direct the play in summer stock. “In the first fifteen minutes of the first day’s rehearsal I understood that this was my job, this was what I was preparing to do without knowing it,” he said.9 Nichols discovered within himself a natural talent for drawing good work out of actors and for guiding playwrights through rewrites without making them feel threatened or trampled. He also found, to his own surprise, a kind of emotional comfort in being at the center of the action. “I think people try to become famous because they think: If you can get the world to revolve around you, you won’t die,” he remarked to a reporter.10 The comment typified the way Nichols handled himself with a press corps that was insatiably curious about his life with and without Elaine May—it was fast, funny, and so offhand that nobody could be certain whether it was self-revelation or just a good line.
Neil Simon, who didn’t believe Nobody Loves Me was funny until he heard the audience laughing, came away flabbergasted by what Nichols brought to the table. His play, retitled Barefoot in the Park, opened in New York on October 23, 1963, to rave reviews that launched the careers of its two young stars, Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, turned Simon into a brand-name playwright, and almost instantly made Nichols the comedy director at the top of every playwright’s and actor’s lists.
Larry Turman had been impressed by Nichols’s work on Barefoot in the Park, which would shortly win him his first Tony Award. But when Turman sent him The Graduate and asked him to consider directing it, “I was really responding to the funny nervousness of his performances with Elaine May—I felt some connection there. When you read The Graduate, you feel the way I felt watching him: You laugh, but you’re nervous.”11
Nichols laughed when he read The Graduate and wasn’t nervous at all. He had loved The Catcher in the Rye,12 and he saw Holden Caulfield’s literary descendant, slightly more grown-up but still utterly baffled, in the pages of Webb’s story. “I thought it was a good, old gag,” he says. “Kid, older lady—that’s how everybody got started back then. It was a good subject. And I thought, I know how to do this.”13
A few nights after he got the book, Nichols told Turman he was interested. The project and Nichols’s involvement were announced in The New York Times on March 15. Soon after, the two men had lunch at the Plaza Hotel with William Hanley, who had completed a draft of the screenplay for The Graduate, been paid his $500, and was now moving on to considerably more lucrative work on action films. “I thought the book was terrific,” says Hanley. “Charles Webb’s dialogue couldn’t be improved on—it was pointless to try. All the script needed was structure.” At the lunch, Nichols expressed his desire for changes in a new draft. “I didn’t want to make them,” says Hanley. “I just knew it wasn’t going to work with us, and I said to Larry Turman, ‘I’m gonna back out—you need Mike Nichols more than you need me.’”14
With Hanley gone, Turman needed a new screenwriter who would be willing to take Nichols’s notes, but Nichols was in no rush to find one. He was flooded with offers to direct plays; moreover, he told Turman, The Graduate would have to be his second movie, not his first. Nichols had no desire to make a film version of Barefoot in the Park or of anything else he went on to direct in New York. “I couldn’t! What would I do? They were dead for me,” he says of the first four plays he staged. “There was nothing to discover. Unless I can be terrified and mystified and feel, ‘I’m lost, this is the one that’s going to destroy me, how could I have made this mistake’…that terror is the life of it.”15 But he did think that adapting a play to the screen might make for a logical first footstep into Hollywood, and he’d found a property he liked: The Public Eye, one-half of a pair of one-acts called The Private Ear and the Public Eye by British playwright Peter Shaffer that had opened on Broadway two weeks before Barefoot in the Park. Universal had announced that Nichols would direct the film, and Shaffer had recently begun to work with him on a screenplay for the three-character piece.16 That bought Turman a little time, not only to get a viable screenplay drafted, but to use Nichols’s name to lure a studio. Given all the buzz around his director, The Graduate’s future looked bright.
Over the next six months, every studio in Hollywood turned the film down.
On April 13, 1964, Hollywood took its annual Monday off for the Academy Awards. There had been no frantic winter campaigning season; the Oscars, though they drew a reliably huge television audience, were in some years a take-it-or-leave-it affair, even for the nominees. This spring, studio traditionalists were in a particularly glum mood: Twelve of the twenty acting nominees were from the United Kingdom or Europe; one company, United Artists, had dominated the major nominations, just as it had done for the last several years; and it was becoming apparent that, for the first time since the 1940s, the Best Picture Oscar was not going to go to an American picture—the winner would be Tony Richardson’s raunchy smash Tom Jones.
“Wonder why we hate ourselves,” Hedda Hopper snapped in her column.17 The answer was evident: Even by its own declining standards, the Hollywood studios had mustered an embarrassing lineup of films in 1963 and then failed to nominate the best of them, Martin Ritt’s Hud. Two of the year’s Best Picture nomin
ees, Fox’s Cleopatra and MGM’s slow-moving Cinerama omnibus How the West Was Won, had been scorned by critics and were clearly the beneficiaries of bloc voting by the large roster of studio employees that, at the time, made up much of the Academy’s membership. It was not a year for Hollywood to celebrate its own accomplishments. Some young stars—Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Julie Andrews, Jack Lemmon—showed up as presenters, along with veterans like Edward G. Robinson and Ed Begley. Warren Beatty was in the audience with Leslie Caron; his sister, Shirley MacLaine, was also there, and up for Best Actress. But overall attendance among the nominees was sparse; three of the four acting winners—Hud’s Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas and veteran British character actress Margaret Rutherford for The V.I.P.s—didn’t even show up.18
The fourth winner did, and provided the evening with its headline. Sitting in the audience, a nominee for Best Actor, Sidney Poitier, his palms sweating and his tension increasing with every category, thought, “I’m never going to put myself through this shit no more.”19 Poitier knew that all eyes were on him, that his win would provide a moment of genuine meaning for black Americans and an occasion for an avalanche of self-congratulation within his industry. He had been here before, five years earlier, when, as the costar of The Defiant Ones, he had become the first black man to be nominated for Best Actor. Now, he could be the first to win—a moment that he knew would make history and yet change almost nothing.
