Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Mike and Elaine, each feeling betrayed by the other, stopped speaking.

  Now double divorced, from Elaine and from his wife, Pat Scott, Nichols buried his despair in New York’s most epicurean circle—“the Blob” ­Stephen Sondheim called them—of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Richard and Evie Avedon, Adolph and Phyllis Green, and Sondheim himself. Arm-in-arm with dear friends, and at the head of a luxurious table, Nichols had everything but one thing—her, which was him. “Elaine gave me myself,” Nichols said. “I didn’t exist as a performer or any kind of a theater person except because of her and through her. Which is why when we split up I didn’t think I could do anything. I thought it was all over.” He dated. He traveled. He joined the Blob in Jamaica.

  “Oh, Mikey, you are so good,” Bernstein consoled him one day. “I just don’t know at what.”

  As he tired of Second City’s format, and the constraints Sahlins placed on improvisation, Del rechanneled his risk addiction onto the real world, life outside the theater, where no one, and no theory, could curb his appetite for neurotheatrical inquiry. One day—or maybe night—Del came to in the Chicago sewers with an acetylene lamp taped to his head, a .32 automatic in his hand, and a circle of dead and wounded rats at his feet. He had a theory about LSD. It forces you to justify. Like an audience suggestion. That’s how he had gotten to the sewer, probably. On LSD, your new brain, holding a gun to the temple of your old one, upchucks a rainbow of reality amendments and “you’ve got to make this kind of like a conceivable part of your normal behavior,” Del said, “so you don’t panic.” You have to “Yes, and . . .” the LSD or else pull the trigger. Fear death, actual or metaphorical, and you’re just replaying your old sketches. But court possibility, justify whatever materializes, no matter how strange or sinister the trip, and you’ll be free.

  For many months, since his return to the Premise in New York City, Ted Flicker had been brooding over the angry young man who had stormed backstage and accused him and his improvisers of satirical cowardice. His British success behind him, he began to see clearer now: the hypocrisy of his ostensibly left-leaning city, rife with racism, and the young president, a better actor than a politician. That angry young man, Flicker decided, had been right. “And I suddenly realized that we and The Second City were all giving a sort of intellectual stamp of approval to the very people we were satirizing by satirizing them gently; and suddenly we were the Establishment.” He closed down the Premise immediately and began thinking seriously about revolution.

  What was the most urgent, most sensitive issue in American life?

  They did not have to look far. Their colleague Godfrey Cambridge told of hailing a taxi, which slowed as it approached, and then sped up once the driver saw he was black, “and Godfrey grabbed the handle of the door,” Buck Henry said, “and ripped the door off the cab and threw it into the street.” Joan Darling’s best friend, Tony-winning black actress Diana Sands, “would come out of the theater,” Darling said, “and a cab wouldn’t stop for her.” Applying for an apartment in the West Twenties, Sands gave Sidney Poitier as a reference. But “they turned me down,” she said. The stories Flicker and Darling heard were grotesque; there was, however, something funny about how they, white folks, fumbled over what to call their friends—Negroes? Coloreds? Black people? It seemed a faux pas to even ask the question—“and they,” Darling said, “had the same difficulty with us.” Even for nonracists, the problems of race were mutually embarrassing.

  “It was Ted’s idea,” she said, “to take three black actors and two white actors and do an improvisational theater from the point of view of the black person. Ted and I weren’t just trying to do a show; we really wanted to learn the truth about the black experience from black people.” They were Godfrey Cambridge, Al Freeman Jr., Diana Sands—black—and Jo Ann LeCompte and Calvin Ander—white. A year earlier, the integrated cast of Purlie Victorious survived several months on Broadway, but the Living Premise, codirected by Flicker and Darling, was the first integrated repertory theater in New York. And it would be improvised.

  “I don’t really know anything about Negroes,” Flicker confessed at their first gathering in April 1963. “Do whatever you want to do.”

  They pulled up chairs and started talking. “Rehearsals,” Cambridge said, “were a little like group analysis”—a new technique in improvisation. The conversation lasted over a month. Sands told of her first “nigger” experience; she was in an all-white school, and as she approached the others, they ran off, chanting, “Run, run! Here comes the nigger!” Sands only found out what it meant later that night, when, after telling her sister how fun school had been, she got slapped for using the word. “We all must learn to get along with each other,” Al Freeman’s teacher had said. “We must all learn to get along with the little Chinese boy and the little nigger boy.” His father would have to tell Al what it meant. They had to carefully plan their evenings around not being able to get a taxi. Sands had a technique: she hid her face behind her coat until she got in. She remembered one promising date ruined after her suitor, trying to impress her, failed to catch a cab. Cambridge’s wife pleaded for just one evening out with her husband where she didn’t have to hear him call anyone a motherfucker. “It took a while for them to really tell us what they really felt about Kennedy,” Darling said. “They had to find out that we really meant it, that it was absolutely okay for Godfrey to have a tantrum about Kennedy.” Listening to Cambridge, Flicker radicalized. Do white barbers, he wondered, know how to cut Negro hair? “This morning, I was shaken by the fire hoses and the dogs in [Birmingham,] Alabama,” he confessed to his notebook. “I’m beginning to side with the no compromise crowd—I resented Bobby Kennedy’s suggestion that the demonstrations were ill-timed.”

  From the offenses, patterns of hate and ignorance, natural scenes emerged. An integrated married couple—he’s Jewish, she’s black—fight, and as the room heats with anger, he gets more Jewish and she gets more black. Then there was the scene about the sweet old couple trying to stage a lynching. Flicker had them switch roles; this time, black plays white. Play any race you want. Get angry. The results of the experiment astounded everyone involved. “The color line is slowly disappearing,” Flicker noted, “with Negroes playing whites or Orientals and whites playing Negroes.” And sometimes they went too far; unchecked caricature offended both sides. But the hurt was discussed. “If you do it right,” Darling said, “you can’t survive improvisation without really connecting.”

  The Living Premise opened on June 13, 1963, with a kiss—between a white man and a black woman. Unlike the Premise or Second City or Compass before them, Flicker’s new team smashed audiences with flagrantly subversive sketches, intended, foremost, to disturb them to political action. Perhaps the most memorable, about a plot by two black men and a white woman to kidnap the First Lady (“He’ll [the president] have to make a stand now”), featured imagery as graphic as, “When Mrs. Kennedy enters the ladies’ room, I will open the can of chloroform, pour chloroform on the rag and place the rag over Mrs. Kennedy’s nose and mouth.” The sketch ends somewhere in the radical middle as the revolutionaries lose their nerve. Instead of waging war, they telephone Ralph Bunche, the first person of color to be awarded the Nobel Prize, and ask him to speak at a benefit dinner “to raise funds to finance a committee to study the possibility of making a survey on the question of the feasibility of a solution to the possibility of understanding segregation that might exist in some parts of the country.” The line “I want to see him [Kennedy] on TV, crying like I seen all them women down in Birm” was cut.

  The night of the first performance, Flicker knew he had a success as soon as he heard the gasps. Some confronted him directly: “If you don’t stop playing that scene I shall have to speak to the right people.”

  But it was too late. The learning had already taken place. “Real dramatic integration is actually possible only in improvisation,” Flicker said, “when all responses are quick, personal, and honest, an
d not the products of afterthought.”

  “And we all became real friends,” Darling said, “because we suddenly could say anything to each other.”

  To save himself from summer stock, Nichols accepted, quite absurdly, an offer to direct Barefoot in the Park (originally titled Nobody Loves Me), the second play by Neil Simon. In 1963, Simon was already the nascent master of what Buck Henry called “the running character joke,” an effective but sitcom-ish contrivance wholly out of sync with Mike Nichols’s improvisational instincts. “[Simon] takes a character with a funny failing,” Henry said, “and plays a joke off that failing, then refines that joke over and over, so that it becomes unbearably hilarious.” In style and sensibility, Simon and Nichols could not have been more opposed; a bonbon, Barefoot was born old. You could say the same of practically all of Broadway comedy—before Nichols put his hands on it.

  In rehearsal, if Barefoot in the Park started anticipating its laughs, Nichols would warn the ensemble, kindly, that they were not doing a comedy, “We’re doing King Lear here.” Quite consciously, he did not follow comedy “rules.” Rather than blocking, as George Abbott would, the actors’ every move with the precision endemic to Broadway comedies of the era, Nichols riffed. He wanted “to create an atmosphere of freedom for my actors.” “The whole thing,” by which he meant directing, can be seen as an “extension of improvisation. I don’t like to go into rehearsal with a set plan—and even if I do know what I want in a particular scene, I would rather that it come from the cast.” If the scene called for sadness, Nichols did not undermine the sadness in irony; staging a fight, he did not try for slapstick. “I wanted to do comedy as if it were just another play,” he said of Barefoot, “as if the people were alive. I didn’t want to keep tipping the comedy, having the actors running downstage, yelling, slamming doors, things like that.” Nichols permitted the entire ensemble the freedom to live between their lines, to perform the little actions of life that their characters would if they were actual people: light a cigarette, tie a shoe, stare off into space. It was an improvisational innovation utterly new to Broadway.

  For the first time in years, Mike Nichols was happy. In his former life as an actor, Nichols felt like a petulant child, scared and insecure; as a director, he assumed the best qualities of a father. He saw what you needed and what you were doing, and as an improviser, saw the moves ahead.

  He directed slightly and invisibly, as a careful teacher would. He allowed actors’ questions, ideas, impulses, no matter how odd or off, the consideration to evolve. It was a form of kindness, an invitation ample with interest and permission. And yet it wasn’t affirmation that gave the improvisation wings, but the gentle borders Nichols placed around possibilities, the way he said no without squashing what was good, or had potential, the way he said yes while adding a silver subtlety of his own.

  After the smash opening of Barefoot in the Park, which would run for three and a half years, Nichols quickly became the hottest director in New York.

  Producer Larry Turman did not share Hollywood’s sense of humor. At Harold Pinter’s plays, he laughed. The whole theater held its breath, but Larry Turman tee-heed at those claustrophobic, menacing pauses, swarming with rage and jammed with betrayal. “Mordant,” he called Pinter. Not black comedy—that had something of the grotesque—but uneasy, bitter comedy. That was Larry Turman’s idea of a good time.

  With a thousand dollars of his own money, he had taken an option on a 1963 novel, The Graduate, which he thought could make a Pinteresque movie, “a nervous comedy,” he said, “with edge, and intelligence.” In England, where Turman had just produced I Could Go on Singing, Pinter’s sense of humor had taken root, but in Turman’s native America, where the highest-grossing film of 1963—the year The Graduate was published—was It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, comic landsmen were harder to find. The Pink Panther came out the same year. “The reason I couldn’t get any studio to finance the film,” Turman said, “is because nobody thought it was funny.” Because, really, The Graduate wasn’t Hollywood-funny; it was real funny. Like Nichols and May.

  Mike Nichols. Yes. Turman had seen Barefoot in the Park. “I thought it was oozing smart direction and style,” Turman said. “Mike knew where all the laughs were.” Could he direct The Graduate? He had never directed a movie before. “Yeah,” the producer thought, recalling Nichols and May’s comedy albums, “that sounds right.” For the picture to work—to keep its seriousness and its humor—The Graduate had to be handled in the Nichols and May manner.

  Turman would send the book to Mike Nichols.

  John Brent called Alan Myerson. “Are you watching?”

  “Watching what?”

  “Turn on your television.”

  “What? Why?”

  “This is the signal.”

  “What are you talking about? The signal for what?”

  “The signal for all those lonely men who live in boardinghouses to pull out their weapons and become an army.”

  It was November 22, 1963. The president had been shot.

  Sills thought: civilization is over. We are rushing into a time of madness and we may never recover. He had a wife, Carol, and children. His friends had children. Somewhere along the way they had lost touch with what was good. “We and everybody we knew were just amazed that such a thing could have happened,” Carol Sills said, “and wondered what to do and started saying, ‘We should get together with our community and make a life that’s real.’” Sills called the owner of Square East, Second City’s home in New York, and asked for his help. He needed to find a place, a bucolic setting outside the city, maybe upstate, where he could build, from scratch, a community of improvisers, and relearn how to live together.

  The teacher waited until two forty-five to tell her class, eighth graders, that the president had been killed. Then she ended class early and told them to go home. But Billy Murray didn’t do as she said. Instead of home, Billy ran to the drugstore across from school, where a crowd had gathered, men mostly, waiting for the afternoon paper to tell them exactly what had happened. They just stood there, strangers in silent riot, their distress mounting with every rumor. Billy’s father was among them. He took his son’s hand, and together they went home and turned on the TV to see—to actually watch, live—the country breaking. “That was when television really took over,” Murray said. “That moment of waiting for the newspapers, it never happened again.”

  Elaine knew what would happen. Comedians would run from this. “But I don’t think we should ignore it. I don’t think we can ignore anything that is so much in people’s minds all the time.”

  The night after, Del Close faced Second City’s most apprehensive audience to date. “We do know what happened,” he assured them. “Let’s make a deal: we won’t stand around wondering why you’re here if you don’t sit back wondering why we’re here.”

  A connection was made, and the audience thawed. They had been understood. All through the sketches, they laughed, not wildly, but enough to assure Sahlins and Patinkin they had been right to open the theater. Many, they knew, didn’t want to be home tonight. Television could only give so much; people had to be with people.

  Del reappeared, before intermission, to take suggestions. He was a touch paler than normal, even for him, and zigzagging; it could have been the speed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to ask you now—”

  “The Kennedy Assassination!”

  Del stormed downstage and scowled into the lights. “Just what the fuck was it you wanted to see, sir?”

  Patinkin flinched when he heard it. Second City’s first “fuck.”

  6

  1963–1967

  Second City was bleeding to death. Bernie Sahlins knew that.

  Since his Square East improvisers had signed with big agents and scattered to Broadway—Arkin to Enter Laughing and Barbara Harris to Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad—Sahlins had woken up to a cruel irony of the little-theater business:
as soon as his unknowns made a success with him, they left him. They would upgrade to more money, more power, just like Mike and Elaine had. How could they not? Second City was a wallflower at the show business ball. It needed to be. Improvisers needed to fail, and fail safely; and in the Midwest, far from Broadway and Hollywood, they really could. Second-class stature was the secret ingredient, a petri dish of comedic mitosis; Chicagoness set the stage for anonymity, risk, discovery, the mulch of intellectual progress. But when improvisers felt the entertainment business gazing on them, they turned Second City into their personal showcase, a full-time paid audition, and, suddenly fearing failure, they pulled back on their risky, responsive choices, got out of the moment, and froze their best scenes—their scenes. They were stars now. But improvisation, the art of the huddled masses, was constitutionally averse to kings. “Bernie,” Patinkin said, “was borrowing all the time. Many times I thought we were going to close.” It didn’t make sense. Success led to failure, failure to success. What kind of business was this?