Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Mike and Elaine weren’t doing punch lines; they were doing scenes. It lent their work a behavioral honesty Rollins had never seen; in American comedy, no one had. Unlike Groucho, Sid Caesar, Lucille Ball, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, and Francis the Talking Mule, the improvisers were too naturalistic for alter egos, shtick, gags, bits, acts, and one-liners. Mike and Elaine dealt in life, not jokes. They were real actors. With them, you could feel the humor. It was personal. That was new, too. Bob Hope and his generation of comics didn’t write “their” stuff; they were showbiz, personalities. In terms of self-disclosure, Mort Sahl came closer. But he was a commentator, an American’s editorialist. Nichols and May were . . . you and me. They spoke for us. Beginning at that table, Jack Rollins could sense the paradigm shift, he said, “from writers writing about ‘take my mother-in-law please,’ to human beings speaking.”

  And they improvised this? Which meant what, exactly? Pratt’s advance description of their act—“They improvise, Jack”—had sounded like a fairy tale or bullshit to Rollins. But his idea changed that afternoon at the Russian Tea Room, and expanded later, after he incredulously asked Mr. Nichols and Mrs. May back to his office/cubicle, a former servants’ quarters in the Plaza Hotel, for a closer look. Would they improvise something else for him, please? Per their request, Rollins suggested a first and last line and they improvised a scene right there just for him. “My god,” he thought, “I’m finding two people that are writing hilarious comedy on their feet!”

  Two days later, Rollins taxied them to the Blue Angel, New York’s toniest nightclub. He wanted impresario Max Gordon, owner of the Blue Angel and Village Vanguard, to have a look at the kid geniuses. Short, round, and looking like he had never seen the sun, Gordon was their ticket. And not the friendliest. “We weren’t frightened,” Nichols said. “We had just decided to do the best we could and let it go at that.” They, mere stars of the Compass, had only just arrived in New York. Neither expected a career in show business. “It was bizarre,” Nichols said. “We never thought we would get that far, certainly not in one weekend.” Mike’s one suit was freshly pressed; Elaine’s one dress wasn’t. The Vermeer of displaced anxiety, she worried its subtle greenish tinge wouldn’t show under the harsh lights. He was twenty-six; she was twenty-five.

  When directed, they did “Teenagers” and their disc jockey piece—another Compass carryover—and waited out the uneven applause for the verdict. Gordon, they could see, had no reaction; but Jack Rollins was beyond speech. He explained, “They were totally adventurous and totally innocent in a certain sense.” Max Gordon, meanwhile, had less interest in acts that didn’t remind him of other acts. Saying nothing, he rotated himself, an inch at a time, toward Rollins. They had worked together since the Belafonte days. “What is it?” Gordon kvetched. “Is it a boy or is it a girl?” Rollins shooed Gordon and his cronies into the back office for what seemed to Nichols like a short eternity. Then Gordon reemerged, scotch-in-fist. “You can open in two weeks,” he grumbled. “We have a new show coming in then.”

  But waiting two weeks in New York would not be easy for Mike and Elaine and the seventy dollars they had to share between them, some of which had been borrowed from friends. “Well,” said someone near the boss. “You can fill in down at the Village Vanguard until then.” That’s what they did. For those two weeks, Nichols and May debuted their act—twenty minutes, “Teenagers” and First Line/Last Line—as an opener for Mort Sahl at the Vanguard. That is, when Sahl permitted it. “No, no,” he would say, when he liked the crowd. “Skip them. I’m ready.”

  Uptown, the Blue Angel on East Fifty-Fifth Street looked to them like a movie star in gray quilted velvet. For Mike Nichols, who had waited his whole American life for a chance to commune with the inner circle of safety, assimilation, and, true to his European upbringing, class, the Blue Angel signified fulfillment. Almost. He was soon to learn Manhattan’s cocktail crowd was distressingly unlike the Compass-goers whose attentions he and Elaine had captured instantly, every night. Even as an audience, presumably setting the day’s cares aside, nightclub New Yorkers were hard at work, filling Nichols’s distracted ear with the forced laughter and flirtatious chitchat of business transactions and foreplay. These New Yorkers were their own entertainment. Nichols felt like wallpaper, an outsider at his own show.

  Under Strasberg, he had learned about the Event, the unspoken, bottommost, largely unconscious intentions of characters and real-life people. You have to look for them, Nichols said, “under and around and beside the words.” They tell you the real truth, as New York audiences, in their unending ambition, showed Nichols theirs. Finding the Event, he suddenly understood, is the improviser’s project. It makes him a psychoanalyst, answering the question, “What is this scene we’re discovering really about?”

  Quite often, and regularly in comedy, the Event is the complete opposite of the spoken dialogue. Like in “Teenagers”: Nichols’s character wants May’s, but we receive in his voice and behavior signs of total terror. There’s the Event. It grounds the joke. It adds complexity. It drives the scene.

  It was sometime during Nichols and May’s busy, popular, monthlong debut at the Blue Angel, in November 1957, that Mike Nichols’s mother called him.

  “Hello, Michael. This is your mother speaking. Do you remember me?”

  Anger and laughter, an old duet. “Mom, can I call you right back?”

  He called Elaine. “I have a great piece for us.”

  “What?”

  He gave her the line and “she screamed with laughter.” The rest happened that night at the Blue Angel. Mike and Elaine took their stools and improvised “Mother and Son,” perfectly. “There it was!” Nichols recalled. “Our purest. It came out the way we improvised it and stayed there. The entirety of it onstage for the first time as we were searching.”

  New York understood that between and beneath the passive-aggressive (and aggressive-aggressive) “Mother and Son,” a very Jewish, yet very relatable kind of Event—a story of repressed hatred and mutual codependence—told the rude truth about 1950s America’s most inviolable folk hero: Mom. Jane Wyman? Donna Reed? Harriet Nelson? Ha! Elaine’s “Mother” is a shape-shifting master manipulator, lethally swift with every weapon in her arsenal, beginning with guilt, which she detonates on her adult, aeronautical engineer son. “Arthur, I sat by that phone all day Friday, and all day Friday night, and all day Saturday, and all day Sunday, and your father finally said to me, ‘Phyllis, eat something, you’ll faint’”—he can’t get a word in—“I said, ‘No, Harry, no. I don’t want my mouth to be full when my son calls me.’” Don’t the other rocket scientists call their mothers? Is it so hard? To call his sick mother? Yes. Sick. It’s her nerves. The doctor told her so. She’s a very nervous woman. Didn’t he, her son, know that? Just wait. Someday he’ll find a girl, get married, have children (“Mom—Mother, please . . .”), and when he does, “I only pray that they make you suffer the way you’re making me suffer. That’s all I pray, Arthur. That’s a mother’s prayer.”

  Nichols said, “Each of our mothers thought it was the other one’s mother we were talking about.”

  “Where’s Del?”

  Even without Mike and Elaine, the fledgling New York Compass—Larry and Rose Arrick, Severn Darden, Del Close, and improviser Paul Mazursky—had been developing nicely for a couple of weeks, playing to good reviews and small audiences in a restaurant near the Cherry Lane Theatre, when they got an exciting offer to appear on The Steve Allen Show. Two days before taping, Del didn’t show up to rehearsal.

  Telling no one, Del had given himself over to the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik and began a course of treatment that would prove unsuccessful. Terrified, secretly, that his unconscious mind might be smarter than he was, Del had always liked to show off, especially to Nichols, his contempt for analysis and analysands. His stubborn determination to prove himself right (and Nichols wrong) would have stood between Del and recovery, l
eaving the emotional basis for his stubbornness—so averse to improvisation—unexplored.

  What had happened to Del? Mazursky and others asked. Who had hurt him? Did he remember? Laughing, Del liked to say that he had been there, in Del Close Jewelers, on December 15, 1954, the day his father killed himself. In some renditions of the story, Del senior, according to Del, kindly asked his son to pass him a glass of water Del didn’t know was Drano. In others, Del watched his father gulp down battery acid and was instructed to stay put and watch what happened next. Sometimes Del didn’t appear until the hospital scene: “He drank a quart of sulfuric acid and the fucking monotheists kept him alive for three days,” was another version. “That’s two days longer than Christ hung on the cross.” It was, to Del’s horror, a Catholic hospital. “They wouldn’t kill him, the swine.” The facts of the story always changed, but the feeling behind them never did; the suicide story, as Del told it, was a funny one. But when he told it, his audiences never laughed. And so, despite his work with Reik, Del’s depression and addiction, compounded by the persistent public triumphs of Nichols and May and the personal blow, from which he was never to fully recover, of losing Elaine, body and soul, to Mike, persisted.

  Two weeks after Del disappeared, the New York Compass folded.

  No less than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the 1950s “the most humorless period in American history,” and Adlai Stevenson, sounding like a Compass player, remarked, “You get your nose rubbed into this solemnity and this seriousness of our time and it begins to have its effect on you, it buries your own natural spontaneity of personality.”

  Satirists acknowledged the death of their industry. Groucho Marx was one of them. In 1958 he confessed, “There are no Marx Brothers movies because we did satire, and satire is verboten today.” (MAD magazine? Anarchy, not satire.) It had been going on for years. In 1952 cartoonist Al Capp retired from Life because, he wrote, America had lost its “fifth freedom,” the freedom to laugh. That same year, in the New York Times Book Review, cartoonist Walt Kelly published “A Crying Need for the Cleansing Lash of Laughter,” a Hail Mary call to reenlist the intimidated. Then came cartoonist Robert Osborn, in the Saturday Review, protesting the “emasculation of American humor,” and Kenneth Rexroth, in the Nation, with “The Decline of American Humor.” The Atlantic ran “Vanishing Comedian”; the Saturday Evening Post asked, “Are You Afraid to Laugh?”

  On the night of January 14, 1958, Mike Nichols and Elaine May did their sketch about two teenagers trying, and trying not, to make out, on the NBC program Omnibus, and America’s fear of laughter began to subside. As the satirist Jules Feiffer recounted, “It was the first time I had ever seen a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, talking about having sex, or not having sex, or trying to have sex on television.”

  Nichols awoke at 4:00 a.m. the morning after Omnibus aired and checked the papers. All raves. Raves beyond raves. After three months gigging New York nightclubs, they were nationally famous, stars.

  He called Elaine. “What do we do now?”

  Jack Rollins, the man who discovered Nichols and May, heard the office door open—he had upgraded to a bigger place at West Fifty-Seventh—and in peeked a small, shy, nervous person.

  “My name is Woody Allen, may I come in?”

  This nervous person had come, he said—actually, his friend, Len Maxwell, had dragged him there—because he wanted to write for Nichols and May, who he knew “were touching on some kind of truth—truth of character, social truth, truth of wit.” But, Rollins explained, Nichols and May did all their own writing—though, technically, they never actually wrote, per se. They improvised. But yes, they generated their own material. Allen thanked him and left.

  A month later, Allen returned and asked Rollins if he and his partner, Charles Joffe, would manage him, personally, as a writer. He then read, aloud, a sketch he had written. It was hilarious. He—doing it—was hilarious. But, again, Rollins had to decline. He and Joffe didn’t manage writers. They managed performers. If the performers also wrote, like Nichols and May, then Rollins and Joffe handled their writing too. But Woody Allen didn’t perform. He only wrote.

  But Rollins had that feeling. He knew love when he felt it. They would take on Woody as a writer, just a writer, for a trial period of six months. In that time, Rollins said, “we suggested he should consider trying to perform.”

  Paul Sills got together with Howard Alk and Roger Bowen at the Greenwich Village Howard Johnson’s—precisely where their famous friend Mike Nichols worked back when he couldn’t afford to eat—to discuss jump-starting another branch of Compass in Chicago. David Shepherd had declined their offer. Instead they found their backing in Bernie Sahlins, good to go on the six grand he’d earned from selling his share in a tape-recording factory. Since the earliest days of Playwrights, Sahlins had rallied behind Sills, and considered an investment in his latest venture a gamble safeguarded by the coffeehouse craze sweeping the beat scene. Espresso was big business and good people were available. Sills had interest from Bowen, Andrew Duncan, and Sills’s ex-wife, Barbara Harris, then living on pennies she earned at her hospital job. And there was Severn Darden, out of place as a stand-up at the folk music venue the Gate of Horn. But the name “Compass” belonged to Shepherd, so with an ironic low bow to A. J. Liebling, who had famously trashed Chicago in his 1952 New Yorker series, they decided to call their place the Second City.

  4

  1959–1962

  The two barely habitable storefronts at the corner of Wells Street and Lincoln Avenue, formerly occupied by Wong Cleaners and Dyers and a failed hat shop, did not exactly call out to Paul Sills as the ideal location for the Second City, his latest effort to bring improvisation to the people. Just off Lincoln Park, that block of Old Town Chicago—an industrial ragtag of warehouses and moving trucks—seemed never to have heard a laugh in its slow, silent life. But rent was cheap and you might say the neighborhood was ripe for discovery. Over there, across the street, the Lincoln Hotel sat atop the Lincoln Diner, open all night. Emma’s Boarding House, where itinerant improvisers could find something like a bedroom, lurked a few steps away. New York City was to the east.

  The Mob watched all through the summer of 1959 as Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and the multitalented who-knows-what Howard Alk stapled carpet to the floor (a dollar a yard) and filled the bar with martini and wine glasses Sahlins got, used, from a failed restaurant. To find the dressing room, upstairs, you had to leave the theater and take a separate flight of stairs. As for the box office—a card table—it would fold up and play the lobby during shows. Then, in daylight, they’d switch roles. Here and there, as Sills’s team hammered and nailed, confused patrons of Wong’s turned up at the table with claim tickets Sahlins could do nothing about. Wong left no forwarding address. Back to work: The creaky bentwood chairs—one hundred and fifty of them—Sahlins picked up at an auction (a dollar a piece), and the tables—Formica tops, cast-iron bottoms—looked like they had been conceived by schizophrenics and assembled by paraplegics. The décor originated as telephone booths painted black, artfully smashed and hung over a photo collage of Roman antiquities that had been cut out of coffee-table books. The lights Sahlins purchased secondhand, and under enough darkness the red dust around the clam-shaped stage could pass for a velvet curtain. Second City was black and red. “There was something very sexy about the look of the place,” Andrew Duncan said. “A sin kind of thing.” They had no money to advertise.

  Meanwhile, Sills built the company. His recruitment strategy went something like this: “Severn, it’s Paul. I’m doing this thing. Do you want to be a part of it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  No need to audition.

  They were Severn Darden, Barbara Harris, Andrew Duncan, Roger Bowen, Howard Alk, Bill Mathieu on the Wurlitzer spinet—Compass holdovers—Eugene Troobnick, and Mina Kolb, the funniest woman Sills had ever seen. Mina wasn’t intellectual, physical, oddball, or an extremist. She wasn’t like the others, hence her power. She had
a way of blinking, of saying nothing, or just one thing—and after long bouts of silence—that would clarify everything around her. As she once put it: “I didn’t know what was going on.” You’d see her sitting one emotional inch outside of the scene, watching it unfold, seemingly vacantly, and then, out of Mina would come some approximation of what you didn’t know you had been thinking; it hit the ensemble like a splash of cold water. She had never improvised before Second City.

  So there they were. Now what?

  “We weren’t particularly definite in our plans,” Sahlins said. He turned to Sills.

  Thankfully, Sills had learned from Compass. For the first time, he had peopled his company—true improvisers all—with the knowledge that actors, like Mike Nichols, and stand-ups, like Shelley Berman, operated with too much personal need to cede themselves to chance. And though he cringed at the bald showmanship of Ted Flicker’s team in St. Louis, Sills appreciated its variety and, when compared to the scenario-heaviness of Shepherd’s Compass, its speed. It was apolitical. With Shepherd out of the picture (he was opening new Compass theaters along the East Coast), Sills could rid his theater of agenda and dogma—obstacles to communal discovery—and rush headlong into play.

  Booze would help. There you have perhaps the most significant commercial innovation in improvisational history: this new experiment would have its own bar. One hundred percent of the proceeds would return to the proprietors, Sahlins, Sills, and Alk. Between a ceiling thrashed with exposed wires and a floor littered with broken bits of plaster, they workshopped. It was better not to know what. Common Sills directions were “No, no, no,” “blah, blah, blah,” and, in concise moods, “blah, no.” Runners-up included “Do something,” “Yes, fine,” and “Goddamnit, stop!” When they were hot, Sills danced; when they stumbled, he would vault into such a rage, improvisers would duck preemptively. He threw chairs, stormed out, yelled—anything but discuss the work. “Severn,” he might say, “do that after you do the other thing, then go back there and start over.” Too much direction, he knew, would put the players in their heads. How do you talk about intuition? A false gesture from the improvisers and he would leap from his table and rush the stage, arms breaking the air, intoning passionately. “Most of the time,” one said, “we had no fucking idea what he was trying to say. We didn’t know if he knew.” Sills wanted them to react. And if they reacted against him, fine: that was improvised.