Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  U of C students enjoyed a wealth of free time, mostly at places like Jimmy’s, or Steinway’s Drugstore, or the coffee shop where Nichols met Sills. Talk was the university sport, a twenty-four-hour game of ubiquitous critique played by the spectators. It didn’t even matter if you were smart; you just had to be good. You had to provoke. Lie, guess, stumble, fail, but be interesting. Don’t shrug. Take a side, whether you believe it or not, and squeeze it until something comes out of you. “There was so much hanging out,” Nichols said. “That’s where the education was, in talking to each other. That’s when my life began. I suddenly came in contact with the other wonderful weirdos of the world, people like Sills and Susan Sontag. These people wanted to talk about the things I loved. The theater. Music. Eugene O’Neill, Yeats, Dostoyevsky. You can’t imagine what a relief that was, to stay up all night and play with my people.”

  To cool off in the hot summer evenings, the folks of that part of Manhattan, Kansas, took to their porches, the orchestra seats of Pierre Street. The entertainment started as soon as the sun went down. Generally, the action was strictly small-town; a little gossip, some cards.

  The night of July 8, 1951, certainly began that way. The Union Pacific arrived on schedule and the tired ambled home.

  One of them, Del Close, was walking at a brisk pace, as if pursued. Wait, was that car following him? Porch audiences were rapt: Del started running, but he couldn’t lose the black Packard on his tail. Suddenly its doors flung open and out flew two hoods with handguns. Two shots later Del hit the pavement; the hoods hauled his body into the car and sped out of view.

  The police caught up with the Packard at a gas station not too far away. The bad guys—six high school kids—kept their eyes on the ground, away from the spinning red lights.

  “Where’s the body!” yelled Sheriff Goode.

  Dozens of cops—from the Sheriff’s Department, the Highway Patrol, and the City Police—held guard behind Goode, their guns pointing at the boys.

  But there was no body. No one had shot Del. It was a prank, an act.

  “Where’s the body!”

  Almost defiantly, Del raised his head, then his hand. “I’m right here,” he declared. “I’m the body.”

  The looks on their faces! Yes—that’s exactly what he wanted.

  It was all very serious and important-sounding inside the third-floor theater of U of C’s Ida Noyes Hall. The high arched ceiling, the echo, the Renaissance-y wraparound mural, The Masque of Youth; the play, Miss Julie, its author, August Strindberg; the growing reputation of the Tonight at 8:30 ensemble, hence the presence of critic Sydney J. Harris of the Chicago Daily News; and, more serious than the rest, Mike Nichols as Jean the valet, lecherous manservant to the Count, one in a bestiary of pricks his director, Paul Sills, had him play in any number of Tonight at 8:30 productions. There was Caesar, Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts . . . “I knew all about those guys,” Nichols said. “I was a ready-made prick.”

  Nichols did not suffer fools; in those days, they suffered him. The problem—part of it, anyway—was that he was so damn smart, even to the smarter-than-thou sets of U of C. “Mike was an absolute genius,” Sheldon Patinkin said. “Everybody on campus knew that. So did Mike.” An intimidator of intimidators, Nichols could defend his inner-Mikhail and twinkle his outer-Mike with a single stroke of wit paired to a Cheshire grin, kind and proud, at once a deathblow to your ego and an open hand to lift you off the floor. The effect made hating him or adoring him both impossible and inevitable, the bastard. How did he do it? Was it the supersonic hearing, the split-second advantage he had over the room, the class, the bar? Or was it his voice? You could practically hear him tasting those long consonants, rolling them around his tongue like a 1928 Château Lafite. Hhhhmmmmmmm, wellllll yesssssssssss . . .

  As Jean the valet, he plowed on with egregious hauteur, pointing fingers, raising fists, and declaiming into the spotlight, his attention breaking, line by line, from the play to the palpable rancor of the girl sneering at him from the front row. It was impossible to miss her. (“I could fucking hear her breathing hostilely,” Nichols said.) She was four feet from the stage.

  Every time Nichols edged out of the glare for a better look at her face, he was hit with a stream of contempt.

  There was no denying it. “We loathed each other,” Mike Nichols said, “on sight.”

  This person, he did not know, was Elaine May.

  Distracted now from his stagework (which, ironically, might have helped his performance as Jean the valet), he managed to get a better look at her. She had bored black eyes and long black hair, chaotically bobby-pinned into a savage argument of strands, a basically beautiful face, and under that trench coat, probably great tits. In short, he decided, there was nothing pretty about her except her eyes, hair, face, and figure.

  She did have one thing going for her, though. She could see he was terrible in the part. He had to respect her for that.

  “That night,” Nichols said, “I think she fucked Sills.” Nichols pretended not to care.

  The next morning, after a late stolen breakfast, Nichols was crossing the street outside Steinway’s, rereading Sydney J. Harris’s review in the Daily News. An amateur group reviewed in a national paper. That alone was extraordinary, but the review itself was a jawdropper. “This self-supporting all-student organization has maintained the highest possible level of repertory in world drama . . . Mr. Nichols exhibits an ease and intelligence in the ambivalent role of the valet, who is one of Strindberg’s most perceptive creations. His technique is sometimes a bit ragged, but his emotional understanding of the role is more than adequate compensation.” Nichols could not believe it, but there it was, still: a rave. It was about then that Nichols spotted Sills heading in his direction. With him was the evil girl from the night before. Now they were going to have to speak to each other.

  “I want you to meet Mike Nichols,” Sills said to the girl, “the only other person on campus who is as hostile as you are.”

  “Hello.”

  “Yes, hello.”

  “Mike,” Sills continued, “this is Elaine May.”

  Of course he had heard of her. Everyone had. By 1951, Elaine May stories were already campus currency all across the University of Chicago. Drop her name and your coolness quotient doubled. Get her to talk to you, or better still, respect you, and you were hip for life. “Among the stories I had heard,” Nichols said, “was about the time Elaine appeared in a philosophy class, and convinced everyone, including the professor, that everyone in Plato’s Symposium was drunk. When she was sure she had gotten her point across, she got up and left the class.” That she had never enrolled at U of C only added to her allure.

  Even those who were not selected to spend the night with Elaine puzzled over the combination to her lock. “Elaine,” Sheldon Patinkin said, “had everything.” Uncommonly clever, impossibly informed, offhandedly dangerous, and biographically mysterious (was she Argentine? Philadelphian? Los Angeleno?), she didn’t look like she knew her power. Elaine always seemed like she had just woken up someplace she didn’t want to be and had gotten lost on her way back to bed. Lunch crumbs stuck to her blouse.

  But Elaine was a scalpel. Though she was small and at times looked languid and vulnerable, she had no compunction about announcing you were completely wrong; she could make a good case for suicide; she had no interest in “niceness” or “being nice” and was called rude as often as she was called right, which she basically always was, about the fate of the world, and more terrifying than that, about you. That was Elaine’s specialty. She was always right about you.

  “Here,” Nichols said, handing the Daily News over to Sills. Sills opened the paper and started reading the review. Elaine, too.

  A rave? That? Elaine blurted “Ha!” and walked off.

  And that’s how Mike Nichols, who really did not like Elaine May, decided he had to have her.

  David Shepherd, a tall, fiery patrician in the passenger seat of a truck, was hitchhik
ing, he decided, to Cleveland. He had with him about ten thousand dollars and a dream to found a people’s theater in America, a neighborhood haven where any workingman or -woman could go after a long day and, for a few coins, have their world performed back to them. “My idea,” he said, “was to have a theater close to where people lived so they could come without dressing up, without making a reservation; where there would be food and drink; where the circumstances would be informal; and where they could see plays that had to do with the life they led, and not with another class or another culture or another country.” European voices had long since contaminated America’s theater, especially in his hometown of New York. The whole East Coast, in a way, was like that; it seemed embarrassed to be American.

  That’s why David Shepherd (Harvard-educated, wire-frame glasses) was hitchhiking to Cleveland, to the Midwest, where the real America lived.

  All this he told the guy beside him at the wheel, a truck driver on his way to Indianapolis. “Don’t go to Cleveland,” he said to Shepherd. “Stay with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to crash on the road if you don’t keep me awake telling me your stories.”

  He got off at Gary, Indiana, and started dreaming aloud his theater, but the locals were unresponsive. They had television.

  Shepherd’s theater, he argued unpersuasively, would steer clear of professional actors, conduits of the bourgeoisie. Shepherd’s “actors” would be regular people just like you and me, getting up there after long working days to do scenes from our lives, about our problems, dreams, fears—anything. But us, not them.

  A lovely notion, but how regular, everyday Americans could be made to act, David Shepherd wasn’t sure.

  From Indiana Shepherd continued on to Chicago—to Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago—in the fall of 1952. He decided it might be wise to start first with educated bohemians, his tribe, and progress, hopefully, to the workers.

  Word of Paul Sills’s weekly workshops—whose meaning and effects mystified even its participants—pulsed the experimental strain in Shepherd, and spoke, somehow, to a means of getting regular people onstage. Sills, meanwhile, caught Shepherd in a Tonight at 8:30 production of The Man of Destiny, and although Shepherd was no actor, Sills sensed something pure that he respected. They agreed to meet at Steinway’s.

  Shepherd was the first to arrive. The motley assortment of students, professors, beats, day workers, and steelworkers swarming Steinway’s told him of a genuinely diverse population at the threshold of great potential. “I wanted them in my theater,” Shepherd said, “watching stories about Hyde Park.” He took a seat at an open table and waited for Sills to appear.

  Sitting at a table nearby, a leonine figure orating to a group of students with near-brutal conviction caught Shepherd’s interest. It was hard to miss him. His charisma was tremendous.

  Then Shepherd put it together. He was watching Paul Sills.

  They picked a table, started talking, then seeing aloud. Then dreaming together. They agreed a new people’s theater was necessary, and Brecht, whose writings had only just appeared in English, had something to offer them both—left-wing politics for Shepherd and community ideology for Sills. To move an audience to enlightened action, Brecht theorized, the theater had to favor didactic rather than emotional techniques. Involving stories and characters was empty escapism: it sedated audiences, failing to connect the stage drama to their own lives. To restore the connection, Brecht advocated, paradoxically, alienation. He decreed sets should be minimal; performers subdued; the action of the play vulnerable to interruption and bulging with allegory; the fourth wall broken. Distancing audiences from the illusory aspects of the drama, the full-fledged sets and costumes, would awaken them to their own objective minds.

  Brecht’s actors were talking to you.

  But Shepherd didn’t want to bring Brecht’s plays to Hyde Park. Sills wanted to direct The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but Shepherd objected; they needed something closer to home. Bringing the people Berlin, even the people’s Berlin, they would only be repeating the sins of Broadway. But Sills, inspired by Brecht’s avant-garde techniques, was an entrancing speaker, and by the end of their coffee, Shepherd was convinced.

  Sills decided to move toward a production of Cocteau’s The Typewriter, and convened a handful of actors, including Mike Nichols, for one of his famous workshops. Using his mother’s games, Sills urged his players to explore not their characters, but themselves. The play would come later. The two dozen students in attendance didn’t quite understand what any of this had to do with Cocteau, but Sills’s urgency was too compelling to question. “All Paul told us,” Patinkin said, “was we were going to learn Viola’s games. He didn’t tell us why. I kept asking questions, but Paul did not want to discuss it. He wanted to keep us out of our heads and just do it.” It was only later that Patinkin understood what was happening. “He was building an ensemble. That’s what happens when you play the games.”

  Shepherd observed, amazed, as Sills watched his game players play. They were creating constantly, and without the help of lighting, costumes, sets, script, or even story. In or out of the theater, Shepherd had never seen such interconnection. These people were all working together, like a family, to alchemize empty space into art.

  In the spring of 1953 Shepherd agreed to bankroll Sills’s repertory theater, and Sills agreed to help Shepherd build his people’s cabaret, the one he had dreamed about as he’d hitchhiked West.

  Nichols could not afford music or girls with expensive taste (his), but realized, if he took a stack of LPs into the listening booths at the record store near campus, he could listen all day for free, and if he took a girl and a stack of LPs into that booth, expounded on a little music theory, and at the precise moment in the crescendo of that trio from Der Rosenkavalier (“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”) casually name-dropped Saint-Saëns, he and the girl could be back in his dorm room in no time, listening to records all night. “I was good at that,” Nichols said. “If you can believe it.” Believe it: Big on nostril and short on jaw, Mike Nichols was hardly Chicago’s most physically attractive resident, but he was probably its most seductive. Intelligence, sensitivity, charm, and all other courtly assets he had in natural abundance—that was the European in him. But what put Nichols over the top with girls—with anyone, really—was the gourmet quality of his attention. It was total. Total to the point of empathy. Glancing into that booth, you would not see him touching his concentration to hers, savoring her unrevealed self as Proust could intuit a full personality from a single scent, but if you were to listen, you could hear the cadence of a mind microscopically alert to the cues she didn’t know she was giving him, like when to enter and when to exit conversation, when interjecting would help and when it would hurt. So Sherlock Holmesian was Nichols’s sense of the other, and so powerful, it was construed as calculated by many who feared and admired it. But calculation you can hear in the pauses. They’re empty, like white rooms. In seduction, Nichols’s pauses, redolent with agreement, were full of the present moment—hers.

  Sills and Shepherd invited Mike Nichols to join the Playwrights Theater Club, the repertory theater they set up in a converted Chinese restaurant (actors slept rent-free in booths downstairs), but mostly, he stayed faithful to his job as DJ at WFMT (which paid better), where his voice and musical tastes earned him some neighborhood fame. He appeared at Playwrights on a part-time basis, acting for Sills here and there in basically serious European classics like La Ronde and Volpone (on a break from summer stock, Del Close caught the show passing through Chicago and thought, These strike me as the kind of people I’d like to work with—which would turn out to be a prediction). Nichols soon came to imagine a professional life in the theater, but not in Chicago, where Playwrights was the only show going, but in New York, where Strasberg taught and Kazan directed. It was The Fervent Years. Reading Harold Clurman’s personal history of the Group Theatre—as of then, the most impactful p
henomenon in the history of the American theater—had given Nichols renewed purpose and direction. He would be an actor.

  From WFMT’s studios downtown Nichols walked to the nearby Randolph Street Station, where he picked up the train back to his apartment in Chicago’s South Side. One evening, in the spring of 1954, he sailed through the station waiting room to his seat on a bench, and stopped cold—at a hostile thicket of black hair perched over a magazine.