Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  A month before opening night, Sills could not have told you what he was going to present as his first offering. So unformed was his approach, he even told Variety he was opening Second City with an original play, “North Side Story,” by Elaine May (it didn’t happen). Sills started writing, of all things, a scenario, a picaresque about the Common Man, which didn’t hold together. Time running out, he eventually broke it down into individual sketches, one of which, “The Dream of Richard Nixon,” he asked David Shepherd to write. Bowen wrote, too, a scene called “Businessman,” a parody of Nietzsche’s Superman. (Facing a racist Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, Businessman declares, “Egads! That’s not only unfair, that’s contrary to the standard business practice of operating the Negro race at a profit.”) Bowen’s and Shepherd’s sketches made it into the opening-night show, Excelsior and Other Outcries, along with an opera, a Freudian western, an Ingmar Bergman parody, “Seven Sealed Strawberries,” and others.

  A style emerged. The unimpeded marriage of Spolin and Satire, as observed by U of C graduate Philip Roth, joined “precise social observation with extravagant and dreamlike fantasy.” Sills, Duncan said, “planned ­every second from the minute the light dimmed to the applause and bows”—a marked departure from Compass anarchy. Duncan himself—as cute as a Kennedy—would open the show with a simple, refined introduction that signaled Second City as a class outfit; it became, with few variations, a signature greeting. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Second City. Tonight we’re very pleased to bring you scenes originally improvised by actors both from their own ideas and suggestions from the audience, audiences such as you . . .” The whole of Sills’s Second City presentation, from the cocktail attire of the improvisers to Bill Mathieu’s Mozartian curlicues on the Wurlitzer, had an uptown elegance that would have been out of place at the Compass. This time, his commercial designs—situating Second City at the comfortably louche intersection of bourgeois and beat—were no secret. It was an older crowd; the improvisers themselves were older. But in keeping with the Compass format, Second City’s second act would be improvised to the tune of “Ladies and gentlemen, we want you to give us ideas—from current events, your daily lives, the dark recesses of your minds—which we will dramatize for you. Just call out whatever comes to mind.” Sahlins set admission at $1.50, intentionally cheaper than a movie.

  Walking off the street the absolutely freezing night Second City premiered on December 16, 1959, you gave your money to the guy at the card table and your coat to Melinda Dillon, the girl someone told to take the coats. In the absence of an actual coatroom, Dillon hung them wherever she could in the ladies’ room, but only when she was able to squeeze herself free of the sardine tin that was the lobby, from which a short flight of stairs took you into the theater, where a hostess led you to a table near where Kalujian, the rug dealer, on his hands and knees, was still nailing down the carpet. The waitress assigned to fade out the lights at the end of the show faced a challenge. On cue, she would have to cut a maze through the house to get backstage, to the light board, which, ordinarily manned by Howard Alk, who doubled as an improviser, would be abandoned at curtain if she didn’t get there in time. The rest they had pretty well rehearsed. As Bill Mathieu started the opening song, “Everybody’s in the Know,” and Barbara Harris, in pearls and black shirtwaist dress, appeared to sing, Sills and Sahlins were still in the kitchen, in a frenzy of last-minute hamburger flipping. One hundred and twenty Chicagoans filled the place that night and laughed for two straight hours. “The success of the early Second City company was an absolute shock to everyone,” Bill Mathieu recalled. “It was astonishing. All of a sudden, we weren’t just Chicago’s darling, we were fucking successful!”

  Months after they opened, Time declared the Second City the place where “the declining skill of satire is kept alive with brilliance and flourish,” and Playboy, the company’s neighbor in Chicago, raved “the best satire to be seen in the U.S.A. today.” (“I practically lived at Second City”—Hugh Hef­ner.) Even if team Sills hadn’t been wonderful, his theater might have won its praise by default. In 1959 Second City held the only comedy real estate in America. Outside of Jules Feiffer’s syndicated corner of the Voice, you simply couldn’t count on getting a regular fix of satirical storytelling anywhere else (certainly not on TV—yet). The Chicago Tribune’s chief theater critic, Richard Christiansen, spread the good word. “And it became, in those days, the thing to do,” he said, “go to Second City.” As the clock struck midnight on the 1950s, Sills, Sahlins, and Alk agreed they didn’t have to advertise.

  Ted Flicker and Elaine May were sitting in Central Park, discussing his next venture, a dream realized, opening the first permanent improvisational theater in New York. Years earlier, Compass had opened and closed in a restaurant off Cherry Lane—the result of bad management and a drugged-out nervous breakdown à la Del Close—but with the steaming success of Second City in Chicago, Flicker found the money, a basement saloon space at the corner of Bleecker and Thompson, and had a shot, he thought, at righting the wrongs of his predecessors. Star personalities and divergent philosophies shattered his St. Louis group (Flicker took partial responsibility; he had let them)—so he would build his new company, still unnamed, on a bedrock of unity and something like love. Whomever Flicker found, he vowed they would be individuals together. His conversation with Elaine diverged back to the Kitchen Rules. Did they still believe in what they wrote back in Westminster Place, these three years later? Basically, yes. You always start with a premise, a Who, What, Where—

  “That’s just what you ought to call it,” she said. His new theater.

  “Of course.”

  The Premise.

  Paul Sills moved his mother to Chicago, installed her at the Lincoln Hotel, and hired her to run workshops at Second City, one for the professional improvisers and another for anyone in the community interested in learning and playing her games. Viola didn’t go in for psychoanalysis—Freud was in the past, she in the present—but her public workshop sessions, true to Viola’s original intentions as a social worker, were geared toward an undeniably therapeutic climax, personal liberation. Still, if anyone got metaphysical, she’d wag a finger. “Don’t get misty-moisty!” But many in Viola’s open group, children and adults, showed no professional interest in the theater. They had come to Second City just to play.

  Taking a cue from Mike and Elaine and Shelley Berman, Del Close put on a Vegas tux and attempted to survive as a nightclub comic. He played the Gate of Horn in Chicago, the Hungry i in San Francisco, some holes in Jersey. It didn’t work. Prematurely psychedelic, he went on about “Resistentialism,” a little-known French school of philosophy, he joked, devoted to investigating “the inherent perversity of objects.” Why are these coat hangers hell-bent on destroying humanity and where do they all come from? (From beer-can openers, their larval form.) You mustn’t forget about the drugs: peyote procured from a cactus garden in Del Rio, Texas; LSD provided by the United States Air Force to determine, as Del put it to one journalist, “the best type personality for space travel”; and in basements and on fire escapes with friends in New York, mescaline, “a reality lubricant,” sampled along with passages from Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

  Del claimed he didn’t need help, but Elaine looked out for him whenever she could. She gave him money; she doctored the script for his comedy album, The Do-It-Yourself Psychoanalysis Kit. He turned her on to grass.

  Del was in Hollywood, barely making ends meet at the Club Renaissance, when he got the call from Howard Alk: Sills, their captain, had gone sullen and remote; success had once again “disturbed his muse,” according to Sahlins. “Paul paled at the thought of endlessly doing shows in a single style. The telltale signs of his restlessness were evident.” Sahlins overlooked Del’s legacy of drinking and drug use, stubbornness, unreliability, lies, sadistic flashes, and his self-serving, often brilliant theories of improvisation, none of which paid heed to Sahli
ns’s business, the making and selling of topical comedy to Chicago’s bourgeoisie, and asked him to come to Second City. He suspected Del’s presence would be a spur in Sills’s side, and actually keep chaos away from Second City, which, considering what we already know about Del Close, was ironic to them both. It was the summer of 1960.

  According to Motion Picture Daily, Mike and Elaine were the best comedy team in America. But they got stuck. TV notoriety, and the unyielding pressure to produce new and perfect family-friendly improvisations for network audiences, troubled the free flow that had come so easily to them in the Compass years, before the world started expecting genius a hundred times a night. Repeating and fine-tuning hit scenes was a worthy sacrifice to Nichols, a way to improve, sort of like rehearsing; but to May, for whom risk meant discovery, refinement was gilded barbed wire. “You cannot fail [in television], and because of that you can’t try anything new.” Nichols said, “Elaine May has a wonderful motto. The only safe thing is to take a chance. I think she means that if you stay safe, and don’t take a chance—don’t do something that’s different from the last thing, something that makes you nervous and holds dangers—if you keep trying to do the thing that worked last time, the encrustations of mannerisms begin to take you over. And pretty soon you’re no good at all—and therefore not safe at all.”

  It separated them. Nichols and Pat Scott bought grand furniture and moved into a spacious East Side apartment with air-conditioning in every room. May took a place across the park, on the Upper West Side, but didn’t move in. Not right away. “If I ever get organized,” she said, “I know I’ll enjoy every minute of this dream too.” Partying with the intellectual elite, she arrived in old slacks and sneakers. Mike came to the same parties shining like Gatsby. At Sardi’s, an admirer approached Nichols with, “I understand you were born in Berlin.” “Not anymore,” he smiled.

  By default Nichols became their spokesperson. He bloomed in conversation. Elaine, meanwhile, stayed quiet, forking her salad inquisitively, as though she didn’t trust lettuce. “Because if I don’t like the interviewer,” she explained, “I become not so much hostile as sullen and childish. And if I do like the interviewer, I read the story and feel personally betrayed by what he’s said.” Moreover, once she said it in the press, she’s said it permanently. She could never take it back, explain it better, start over. “It’s like that terrible feeling you get after you drop the letter into the mailbox,” she said. Television had the same effect.

  Passionate and devoted analysands, Nichols and May still shared psychoanalysis, free associating, separately and expensively, five days a week, he with Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, she with Dr. David Rubinfine.

  To break the ice, Jack Rollins suggested Broadway, their natural habitat. As improvisers, Nichols and May could not be handled as actors; they needed to return to a live audience of their own species, the Manhattanites. Like Compass audiences, but with money, the upper Fifth Avenuers knew Brecht from Ben Hecht, Ingrid from Ingmar, and unlike nightclub crowds, they made ideal collaborators. “Everything we’ve done has happened with the three of us,” Elaine said, “we two and the audience.” Arthur Penn, whose productions of The Miracle Worker and Toys in the Attic were going strong on Broadway, would direct An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a compendium of their best scenes, though he “was in this particular case more of a friend than a director,” Nichols said, “an eye and an intelligence that we could trust absolutely.”

  Out-of-town tryouts, in Falmouth and Westport, Connecticut, were positive for Nichols, a chance to test and further clarify each scene’s Event, a strategy of growing importance, he felt, especially as their Broadway debut approached. During one tryout performance of “Pirandello,” about a play fight within a play fight within a (maybe) real fight, they actually did fight, drawing blood and real-life tears. Were the scenes improvisations anymore? If not, were they lying to their audience? If yes, shouldn’t they rehearse once more? With opening night, October 8, 1960, rushing toward them, Nichols imagined his own humiliating reviews. Elaine, too.

  Most nights, before they went out onstage, she would whisper, “I’m psychotic with fear,” and he would come back, “I’m gibbering with fright.”

  Critics and audiences saw none of it. They loved An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, found it balm to the wounds of Broadway comedy. Feigning dumbness for a quick laugh, Broadway served up trivialities like Critic’s Choice, Send Me No Flowers, and Under the Yum-Yum Tree. An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May lacked the improvisational purity of their Compass days, but it was rich in character and plausibility and deep connection with its audience.

  Every night, the show ended with a spot-improvisation, First Line/Last Line. They took suggestions for those first and last lines, and then for a style—literary, dramatic, or otherwise. Reviewing some of their suggestions, one marvels at the high reference level of their third partner, the audience. Theatergoers of late 1960 asked for Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Damon Runyon, Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, James Gould Cozzens (!), O’Neill, T. S. Eliot, Proust, Coward, Faulkner, Wordsworth, Shaw, Salinger, Brecht, Tolstoy, Kerouac, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, Joyce, J. M. Barrie, and Thorne Smith—and those were only their suggestions in previews, before they opened on Broadway. That night, October 8, 1960, Nichols and May treated the audience to not one but two rounds of First Line/Last Line. They were, Round 1: First Line: “Have you seen New Moods and Strange Fancies at that uptown art gallery?” Last Line: “No I haven’t seen it.” Style: Kabuki. Round 2: First Line: “I’d like to make my position perfectly clear.” Last line: “And so to bed.” Style: Elizabethan and Open End with David Susskind.

  “When you do it every night,” Nichols said, “your head gets weird and you could do things you could never again do,” like improvise in styles you thought you never knew, or in Elaine’s case, achieve the impossible, like the perfect verse she improvised one night, clear out of the blue, when Nichols, improvising as disc jockey Jack Ego, asked her, a movie starlet, about her new film, a musical adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.

  “Oh, could you possibly sing it for us?”

  “Of course. There was dashing Dmitri, elusive Ivan / and Alyosha with the laughing eyes / Then came the dawn, the brothers were gone, I just can’t forget those wonderful guys.”

  It was, Nichols would reflect, the most beguiling of her many miracles.

  Such was the cultural climate of Camelot, when improvisers and their audience could share Dostoyevsky and laugh. The dashing president’s “best claim to greatness,” Norman Mailer wrote, “was that he made an atmosphere possible in which one could be critical of him, biting, whimsical, disrespectful, imaginative, even out of line. It was the first time in America’s history that one could mock the Presidency on so high a level, and we may have to live for a half a century before such a witty and promising atmosphere exists again.” Sophistication was in.

  Audiences reeled, and yet, to Mike and Elaine, all this was a bit like jumping through fancy hoops. Surrounded in champagne and accolades and the unexpected disappointments of success, the pair forged dutifully on. Tickets sold and they frayed. Laughter—when they got it and when they didn’t—slowly eroded their innocence. She would say to him, one day late in their run, that she couldn’t take it anymore. “Take what?” Nichols replied. “It’s an hour and a half and all we do is talk!” Yes, but why? Why keep going? The improvisations hardened, the anger reversed course. Bitterness metastasized. What were they doing? “Satire is revenge,” Elaine understood. But they had been avenged many times over.

  Alan Arkin ambled into Second City a failure. He had lost, maybe, everything.

  A year earlier, in New York, his wife, Jeremy, had taken their two children, Adam and Matthew, and left him.

  A perfectionist since the age of five, when he first started imitating Chaplin and Danny Kaye, tearing apart his face in the bathroom mirror admonishing himself for being himself, Arkin was not a natural
candidate for improvisation. Aside from Hugo’s, the hot dog stand at the corner of Hollywood and La Brea, and his amazement at the prodigious gifts of Paul Sand, he barely remembered his six-month tenure at the Young Actors Company, and even if he had, Viola’s games technique would not help him get where he needed to be—where he had been aiming his every grain of concentration for the last twenty years—onstage in New York, or on film in Los Angeles. But those parts were not forthcoming. He was a character actor, which is to say he didn’t look like a leading man. He looked Jewish.

  Depressed, he accepted a job at the St. Louis Compass (David Shepherd’s wife, Honey, a friend of Arkin’s, had recommended him). Arkin’s summer at the St. Louis Compass—he joined Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, and Nancy Ponder—was double-edged. Working a steady gig, finally, satiated the stage addict in him, but improvisation required an acquiescence of self he did not associate with art. Real acting was hard work. “I wasn’t loose enough or facile enough,” he reasoned.