Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  The audience: “Happily!” “Homosexually!” “Heroically!”

  “Heroically,” Flicker repeats. “That rather intrigues me. Okay, fellows”—this to Segal and Aldredge—“take it from here to the end. Heroically!”

  Segal glares at the audience, feigning anger to buy himself a second of thought. Then to Aldredge, “Well, Marty, why don’t we duel?”

  Though Flicker never aimed for political satire, he heeded New York’s taste for news-related scenes. An improviser, he knew to agree. Village tastes forced the improvisers to keep up. “We had to read every newspaper and magazine,” Darling said. “[Flicker] wanted us to cultivate a strong personal view.” Back in Chicago, Bernie Sahlins, a businessman, preferred his politics in private, and Sills, a humanist, used it only as a tool of communal unification. It was because he improvised, responding to that third player, the audience, that Ted Flicker reintroduced political cabaret—long ago replaced by the jingoistic 1940s and somnambulant 1950s—to New York City. “Being political hadn’t been popular for a long time,” Darling said. “Not since the WPA and the Living Newspaper.” Or as Flicker so succinctly put it: “They call out the names of people they hate and we improvise a scene.”

  As more and more journalists, tempted by dramatizations of the day’s material, came to the Premise, Flicker began to think of his theater as much as a news source as an entertainment venue. He wrote, “They somehow liked seeing us say what they frequently [are] unable to say in the papers.” Pining for Nichols and May, critics nailed Flicker for searching out gag lines and blackouts, and indeed they may have been right, but in his commitment to the political moment and concessions to popular tastes, he delivered improvisations his predecessors never would. Darling said, “Tom Aldredge did a composite of all the southern governors who were trying to stop the kids from going to school. He would string together all the names of all the governors, ‘I’m Governor Orval Wilbur . . .’”

  Reprioritizing in mid-1961, Flicker bowed out of improvising to focus full-time on directing, producing, and promoting. To replace him onstage, he hired—after a round of over seven hundred auditions—an ex-GI and Dartmouth graduate, Buck Henry. Outside of what he had seen of Nichols and May on Broadway, Henry had zero experience with the form. He loved it immediately because “it’s a writer’s device,” he said. “[Improvisation] unlocked a way at getting at certain ideas.” Like Nichols and May, Henry could speak in other voices, other styles. He came to the Premise with an Ivy Leaguer’s knowledge of world literature and a native New Yorker’s frisky cynicism. For the Premise, he invented an improvisational form, the ventriloquist and his dummy, often played by George Segal and Henry, respectively; Segal was better with accents, and Henry, smaller, fit nicely on his lap. The audience supplied political identities for both parts, and away they went, “and then, at the end,” Henry said, “the dummy, who was getting politically fucked by the dialogue, stood up and folded up the ventriloquist.” It became a Premise standard.

  The Premise exploded. “Since Broadway got so square,” wrote New York Herald Tribune critic John Crosby, and since “television’s greatest satirist, Sid Caesar, has fled to Las Vegas, the last refuge of satire and the satiric sketch seems to be the supper club and the Greenwich Village basement.” Harold Clurman, Tyrone Guthrie, A. J. Liebling, Sophia Loren, Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Rodgers, Jack Paar, Sarah Vaughan, Norman Mailer, Jules Feiffer, Kenneth Tynan, Nat Hentoff, Mel Brooks. They all came to the Premise. It was Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, the perihelion of cool, the Renaissance. Across the street from the Premise, you could catch Woody Allen at the Bitter End. “We saw Woody as often as we could, after our show got out,” Darling said. At the Dugout, a bar a few steps away, “we would see Bobby Zimmerman, just sitting there.” Around the corner, The Fantasticks had only just opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse. Walking east from Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue was like trick-or-treating for comedy. You’d see masters gathered in doorways. Bill Cosby. Lenny Bruce.

  Down the street from the Premise, on West Fourth Street, Sahlins and Sills opened a Second City outpost at Square East, and filled it with their original company—led by rising stars Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris—now that their Broadway run, a mixed bag, had ended. In came Flicker’s team to spy and admire. Their more famous colleagues had the “wit”—often no more than a high reference level—“but we intended to be slicker,” Henry said. Premise Players prided themselves on their six-minute scenes. Watching at Square East, Henry said, “I remember thinking, ‘This sketch is going on for twenty minutes! What’s the point of this?’ We’d sit in the audience making faces and looking down the aisle at each other, thinking, Is this ever going to end?”

  Premise and Second City improvisers were siblings, with all the attendant affection and competitive rivalry. But fundamentally they were one. Second City’s Severn Darden, an old friend of Flicker’s, was known to join the Premise Players onstage before his late show at Square East, and Del had an open invitation to teach Premise workshops whenever he was in town. “Del would tell us what we were doing right and wrong,” Henry said. To Joan Darling, “We were a growing community, with Second City and among ourselves. Our show and their show had camaraderie to it. That was very important to Ted. We became so appreciative of each other. It is the only way to improvise. You must learn to trust the other person and you trust your own intuition.” It was what Flicker had intended: a true ensemble.

  “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Lenny Bruce said to him during one of his Premise visits. “You do it with love.”

  5

  1962–1963

  Mike Nichols found himself in Madison Square Garden, on May 19, 1962, standing inches behind Marilyn Monroe as she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” The spotlight on Marilyn was so strong, he and Elaine could see right through her dress. “It was as though she were nude,” Elaine said. “We were both riveted.” And then, to their horror and delight, the dress split.

  Except for that last part, it had all been rehearsed the day before. After Bobby Darin went off, Nichols and May would be announced. They would take the giant stage and read aloud from a list of imaginary birthday telegrams written to the president by important politicians (and one from Robert Frost). For example: “If things had been different, tonight would have been my birthday. Richard Nixon.”

  They did not improvise.

  The American sense of humor, Elaine sensed, had changed, or needed to. Kennedy’s election had so improved the country’s mood, targets that once were evergreen had shriveled—a disappointing side effect of happiness. The nation’s comics, most of them liberal, had less to protest now that their president, noted for his cinematic smile and grace with an ad-lib, proved to be something of a laugher himself. (Eisenhower never laughed.) The current gathering at Madison Square Garden, noted Variety, sealed the deal; it “dramatized, as no previous evidence has, that the present administration is enamored of, and in turn admired by, large segments of entertainment.” How do you laugh at your own side, especially when your side is already laughing?

  Elaine could not work this way. She needed the discomfort of parts unknown. Yet here they were, gripping their champagne at the after-party, nodding at the other VIPs, as far from artistic risk as they could possibly be, and incidentally, very, very close to Monroe and Bobby Kennedy as they danced by.

  “I like you, Bobby,” they heard.

  “I like you too, Marilyn.”

  After three years at the top, Nichols and May were done as improvisers. “I would have gone on,” Nichols said. “But she got sick of it.”

  With his base in Greenwich Village still going strong, Flicker opened successful Premise touring companies in Miami and Washington, D.C., where Vice President Johnson and Lady Bird really did laugh, and had begun to investigate opening Premises in Toronto and Puerto Rico, when the opportunity to play London came in the summer of 1962. It was a momentous offer for Flicker and the entire improvisational movement.<
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  No one, American or otherwise, had ever improvised on an English stage. It was, quite literally, illegal to perform material previously unapproved by the Lord Chamberlain, Britain’s censor, opponent of anything that might “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and of a nature calculated to shock common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind.” Which posed two considerable problems for Ted Flicker and his players: one, their form, impossible to preapprove, and another, their content, which did not break for decency. So Flicker devised a plan. From some forty hours of New York–recorded improvisations a typed transcript over a thousand pages long was produced. “We thought they wouldn’t possibly read all that,” Joan Darling said. “If they ever came backstage and said you couldn’t do that scene, we would say, you approved it. Look at page 724. Or if they had read it we would say, maybe it’s on page 628.” They sent the transcript overseas and it worked.

  Until they got to London and slipped into their preview performances five sketches about the First Family and one incendiary sequence about a racist governor from the American South, who, upon dying, goes to heaven, and discovers God is black. That’s where they were stopped. The satiric representation of heads of state, even American ones, violated the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843. The Lord Chamberlain’s office demanded that Flicker send, posthaste, an accurate play text for its approval. Of course, he had no accurate play text to send. For backup, Flicker cabled his new friends, Premise fans, at the White House, “Do you have any objection to our continuing the Premise Kennedy scenes in London?” Within hours, Flicker got a response from Pamela Turnure, press secretary to the First Lady: “No objection Premise continue scenes.” But the Lord Chamberlain was not going to take orders from Mrs. Kennedy, and without words on pages, threatened to send Her Majesty’s troops to the Comedy Theatre, the scene of the crime, and forcibly shut down the Premise. So Flicker, a marvelous talker, began negotiations with the government. The Lord Chamberlain gave the improvisers a choice: either they could say they were improvising and secretly submit scripts for approval—a flagrant cheat, Flicker thought—or the reverse; they could improvise so long as they didn’t advertise it. Fingers crossed behind his back, Flicker agreed to the latter. Three months later, the black God was back in the show, and just as he was about to cut into his steak dinner one evening, Flicker was handed a telegram from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. “In view of the admission by certain actors that they improvise every night,” he read, “I must ask you to forward immediately any explanation you may be able to offer. In the meantime, you will please take steps to insure that the play is performed in exact accordance with the licensed manuscript.” Flicker laughed.

  The Premise Affair, as it would be known, played out in the press for months, into the fall of 1962, stirring in the English a curious taste for Flicker’s scandalous American technique. In came waves of sold-out audiences that included Peter O’Toole (drunk backstage, he presented Joan Darling a rose) and Stanley Kubrick, in London wrapping his film of Lolita. He and Flicker had known each other in New York; in fact, it was Flicker who had taught the director the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules. “I told him the best thing I could think of,” Flicker said. “He had such great actors, he should explain some of the rules I had and then just let it go and have at least five cameras going from every angle.” When it came time for Kubrick to film Lolita’s first scene, a long, dreamy whirl of James Mason and Peter Sellers, Flicker said, “That’s what he did.” But only with Sellers. “He was the only one allowed,” wrote James Mason, “or rather encouraged, to improvise his entire performance.” Kubrick told Flicker he was so pleased with the results, he planned to further explore the improviser in Sellers in his next film, soon to begin production, Dr. Strangelove.

  Prime Minister Macmillan and Princess Margaret arrived together, and laughed, remarkably, at jokes directed against them. “They should have fled from the theater,” mused Flicker during the show; so too did the anonymous angry young man that appeared backstage after the curtain call. “If you make fun of Prime Minister Macmillan,” he berated the Premise Players, “and Prime Minister Macmillan comes to see you and enjoys it or does not leave the theater in a rage: or if you are able to get your president to wire you permission to make fun of him, you can’t really be striking any telling blows, can you?” Flicker assured this person he was mistaken. The Premise was entertainment. It wasn’t supposed to hurt.

  “Can it be,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, apropos of the Premise Affair, in September 1962, “that the European tradition, which regards improvisation as a means to a perfect, fixed and stylised end, is fundamentally inimical to the American tradition, which regards improvisation as an end itself—as the key, in fact, to a new kingdom of theatrical entertainment? If so, we had better reconsider; for our way of thinking excludes from the theater the kind of invigoration that jazz brought to music.” Unimaginable where speech is not free, improvisation is both the prodigal son of the First Amendment, “an open forum” Barbara Harris called it, and, as the unmitigated expression of individuals joined in self-governed reinvention, a diorama of the American political ideal e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” It is the tree and fruit of the American mind.

  Americans have always been improvisers. “In the language of the Declaration of Independence, for example, Americans accorded themselves the right to revolution, that is, the right to create new forms,” writes Professor Kerry T. Burch. “The US Constitution’s amendment process similarly codifies permanent revisability as a defining feature of our democratic-inspired political culture.” Americans are a work in progress, an ensemble revolution, making it up as we go along. Changeability—the intended imperfection of our foundational documents—opens the way to a more perfect union. And individuals: “Because of the chemistry and the way people were playing off each other,” Miles Davis wrote of jazz collaboration, “everybody started playing above what they knew almost from the beginning. Trane [John Coltrane] would play some weird, great shit, and Cannonball [Adderley] would take it in the other direction, and I would put my sound right down the middle or float over it, or whatever.” Through improvisation, they made each other better. Giving themselves over to syncopation, playing, literally, off-beat—a term jazz shares with humor—they discover new beats. Surprise and variation, touchstones of improvisation, are requisites of both, amendments—to the melody, the scene, the “law”—permissible only when speech is free. “I think what we look for,” explained jazz pianist Bill Evans, “is freedom with responsibility.” Without that freedom, we would be perennially scripted, locked into quarter-note time, unable to evolve new rhythms out of those conflicts that arise from our melting pot morality or, as Del Close described it, the “democratic mess.” We can clean it up with improvisation.

  Normally, Del would appear at Second City just in time to witness the company at the height of panic, take a sip of the chaos he authored, and rejoin the group. But one night in 1962, an hour before showtime, the panic upgraded to fear. Where was he? Everyone knew about the drugs. “His idea was that his body was a wonderful toy and he could put any kind of chemical into it,” Avery Schreiber said. “I once had to take him to the hospital when he accidentally shot up developing fluid.” No one could ever be sure if Del’s wife, Doris, would be home to intervene (or partake?) at the crucial moment. In fact, Doris was said to appear so erratically, some insisted she didn’t exist at all. Or was she, as Del said, cooling out at the sanitarium? No one knew.

  Unable to reach him by phone, Sheldon Patinkin raced to Del’s apartment around the corner from the theater. Patinkin got no answer banging at the door, so he ran around the back, to a low window, where he saw Del inside, facedown on the floor. “Del!”

  Patinkin collared the closest neighbor, got to a phone, and called Sahlins at the theater.

  “Bernie—”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Del’s on the floor!”

  In moments, Sahlins and
an ambulance were outside Del’s house.

  “It was pills,” Patinkin said. He was alive. From the hospital, where they pumped his stomach, Patinkin and Sahlins took Del to a small clinic on Chicago’s South Side, “and got him committed.” As Sahlins signed the papers and personally took care of the bill, Patinkin replayed the scene in his head. Del had picked an interesting time to try to kill himself, maybe the perfect time. Back at the theater, he knew they were an hour from showtime. He knew people would be there, waiting for him. He must have known someone would come and rescue him. In that sense, it looked staged. But the results of the stomach pump revealed traces of a lethal dose.

  “Del wanted to direct,” Patinkin said. Upon Alan Myerson’s departure, the responsibility was split between Sills and Patinkin. Whenever Sahlins allowed Del to step in, he always found himself sorting out the mess.

  A month later, the head doctor at the sanitarium where Del was being treated informed Sahlins that the patient could rejoin Second City on a supervised-release basis.

  Patinkin acted as Del’s chauffeur every evening for months. Mostly, their car rides were calm and quiet. But once onstage, Del would occasionally break scene to curse at the audience. Then he would join the scene again. Then Patinkin would take him back to the hospital.

  Nichols and May—this time as Mike Nichols, actor, and Elaine May, playwright—stood on opposite ends of the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, seething. (She had written A Matter of Position specifically for him; he would play a young executive desperate to be liked.) It was “in every way a catastrophe,” Nichols said, “first to last.” She refused to implement the script changes he and Arthur Penn, the director, asked of her, cuts mostly. “Cuts and revisions were made up to the point where they would change the nature of the material and emasculate the play,” she wrote in the New York Times, when their difficulty went public. “A play is more than a formula made up of words and jokes and scenes. Somewhere it must have something to do with the realities of human behavior. This has always been my premise for comedy.” And Nichols could not bear to be alone up there. Not while she was down there, whispering to director Arthur Penn, probably, about everything he was doing wrong. It was Miss Julie all over again, with Elaine in the front row soundlessly eviscerating his Jean the valet. Nichols heard she was looking for other actors. Also whispering, but into May’s ear, was her boyfriend, formerly her psychologist, Dr. David Rubinfine. What was he doing there? Finally, Arthur Penn quit, “because she wouldn’t cut it,” Nichols said. “Luckily my lawyer found a way out, which was I had director approval, and it was no longer Arthur, and I just closed it in Philadelphia.”