by Sam Wasson
In five short years, Sahlins’s theater had already achieved veteran standing in the improvisational world. Since none of its predecessors claimed runs longer than two or three years, and none of its contemporaries had stayed afloat—Flicker’s Premises had closed, and Shepherd, somewhere in America, couldn’t resuscitate a Compass—it was reasonable to conclude Second City’s success had finally run out. In 1964 you could have pulled the plug in good conscience.
Camelot was over. “After the [JFK] assassination,” Patinkin said, “we could not get audiences. People wanted to laugh, but I don’t think anyone knew what to laugh at, or if they could.” Audience suggestions turned to the nonsensical—“Waiter, there’s an alien in my soup,” “Ride red hyenas into the abyss!”—and in the miasma, Second City’s brain trust evacuated. Howard Alk, cable to the cutting edge, sold his share of the company to Sheldon Patinkin; Del Close, the one Sahlins counted on for constant lunatic intelligence, lost his taste for Second City’s success formula, became impossible to deal with, and was reluctantly fired; and Sills, though he still appeared at erratic intervals, no longer guarded the premises with his heart and soul. After the assassination, he suffered an identity crisis, too. The satire boom of the early 1960s had died that day in November.
It fell to Bernie Sahlins, the producer, to run the show. Smallish, Jewish, baldish, bookish, Sahlins looked like a producer; you’d want Bob Balaban or Wallace Shawn or someone good behind a desk to play him in the movie. A man of the arts, Sahlins could comfortably cross-reference his conversation with classical music and jazz, opera, movies, and literature; he took seriously the responsibility to serve good comedy to the people, and as a versed historian, he liked dreaming about Second City’s place in world civilization. But his real strengths were kindness and good business sense. When his Chicago company disassembled and the time came to wonder, again, what could be funny now that the country’s young hope had been murdered, Sahlins did not call on Compass reserves or Spolin’s former students at the Young Actors Company to restock the Second City trenches. He did not pillage the small but growing world of unemployed improvisers Flicker and Shepherd had cultivated to fill the vacancy. Rather, to rebuild Second City, Sahlins and Patinkin enlisted the William Morris Agency, a heretofore untapped resource in the history of improvisational casting. Paul Sills and his mother had already proved anyone can improvise, but the Morris office did not deal in anyones. As far as Sahlins and Patinkin were concerned, they dealt in funny actors and comics. They dealt in money. And money, which Second City needed, was in the jokes.
“But I’m not political,” Fred Willard insisted. “I can’t do that stuff.”
He was on the phone with his agent. “Fred, Fred, come on. They like you.” Sahlins and Patinkin, he explained, had seen Willard and Vic Greco, his comedy partner, play the Gate of Horn in Chicago, and wanted him to audition for Second City.
“I’m not right for that,” he persisted. “Have you seen those guys? I can’t improvise about psychiatrists and philosophers. I can’t improvise period!”
Willard, born in Cleveland, saw himself, accurately, as more of the silly type. Beholding his enormous, Music Man smile, you would think he was putting you on; no one could possibly be that genuinely happy, especially a funny person. But Fred Willard really was. Even in New York, where he had been trying to make it, he absolutely floated down the street, nodding cheery hellos like a small-town mayor in a Frank Capra movie. “I’ve always admired people who just didn’t have a care in the world and said what they wanted to,” he said. Onstage, his megaton innocence played like naïveté. “I like to play the guy that has no self-awareness,” said Willard, “kind of the likable buffoon who will stick his foot in his mouth and say the wrong thing.” He lived outside the world of Nichols and May. “Bernie [Sahlins] and I knew Fred was hilarious,” Patinkin said. “We also knew he was different than what our audiences were used to.”
Willard ended up auditioning (in a William Morris conference room in New York) with Robert Klein, a recent graduate of the Yale Drama School. Both got the job.
Sheldon Patinkin directed Willard, Klein, David Steinberg, and the others, Second City’s latest wave of improvisers, with a blithe hand that could have been construed as no hand at all. He waited out rehearsals lotus-legged, a cigarette in his mouth, saving his energies for the show’s running order—deciding which sketches should go where—a task Patinkin fulfilled with formulaic exactitude. He had learned from watching Sills. Start big, with a full company piece; let us get to know our improvisers. Once the audience is comfortable, give us smaller, two- or three-person sketches to deepen our relationship to the performers as individuals. By then we’ll have had enough laughs to tolerate a more emotional piece, a people scene, the sort Sills once nurtured as director. Finally, we’ll go back to funny again, but this time, because the players have grown on us, the sketches will be more intimate and sometimes stranger than before. Completing the circle, we’ll feel as though we’ve actually gone someplace with these people and returned with something new. Black out on a big laugh.
Where Paul Sills, resolving the paradox at the heart of all good direction, gave individual company members rein to discover and express their uniqueness within the framework of his own, Patinkin was too technically minded, too mired in the business of stagecraft and running order, to manifest the ineffable glue of ensemble. But if Second City’s mid-1960s shows lacked point of view, one could argue Patinkin was only taking the audience’s suggestion. A cultural moment ago the targets were clear, but the transitional climate of the present era did not lend itself to satire. In the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, finding America’s enemies was just as difficult as parsing the various conspiracy theories. What could really be understood? What were the facts? The only thing that seemed clear was that nothing made sense and every “truth” was in question. In December 1964, the Village Vanguard convened a panel of professionals under the banner “Is Satire Futile?” There among the turtlenecks, one satirist theorized, “Well, maybe everything today is so absurd you just can’t make it any more absurd.”
In this mad, mad, mad, mad world, certainty read like absurdity. It was smart to be dumb. Or play dumb. Consider Dr. Strangelove, and Peter Sellers’s cartooning of the title villain (not to mention the effects of his tripling up on roles)—which, to Mike Nichols, comprised the best improvisational work he had ever seen—the antic senselessness of A Hard Day’s Night, the giant pie fight that culminates The Great Race, the whole of Jerry Lewis, Laugh-In, The Magic Christian, the first gurgles of pop art and the burgeoning theater of the absurd. The culture of spontaneous impulse that gave birth to abstract expressionism and improvisation had slowed down and reversed course—toward the synthetic, a world of parody, not satire. Satire must take a stand. It must be violent. But America was too confused to be angry.
David Mamet, working then as one of Sahlins’s busboys and ice-cream-soda makers, had a comparable association to the Second City style, likening it to Beckett and Pinter and Chekhov, the bleakest absurdists, whose plays he had discovered, over many afternoons, in the drama section of the Oak Street Book Shop not too far from Wells Street. “Pinter especially struck me,” he said, “because it was so reminiscent of what I’d seen at Second City, ’cause the idea at Second City was the almost unquantifiable serial comedic sketch where it was funny and—I think it derived from the same place as Chekhov, the idea that life finally couldn’t be quantified, that it was funny and sad and bizarre at the same time and yet it could be accomplished in a seven-minute blackout.”
Hanging out backstage one night, Mamet watched Willard bound onstage to introduce an improvisation with “Let’s take a sleigh ride through the snow-covered forests of entertainment!” At that precise moment, Mamet thought, he would not be following his father into law.
Fred Willard was the ideal vessel for put-on comedy. Forever switching channels between phony game-show hosts and deluded newscaster types, his brain was given t
o the sort of “people who you can listen to, and think that they’re making sense,” he said. “Then all of a sudden, you realize that what they’re saying is complete nonsense.” He loved nonsense, silly non sequiturs, and vacuity, comic notions that were funny precisely because they couldn’t be fully understood. A satiric brain looks for truth, patterns, and logic; Willard went fast in the other direction. One of his wacky blackouts, still in the Second City repertoire today, begins with a man and a woman. “Miss Jones, take a letter,” he says. As he dictates, she starts blinking uncomfortably. She tells him it’s her contact lenses. “Here,” he says, “let me help you”; he helps her remove her contact lenses and steps back in awe. “Miss Jones!” the man exclaims. “You’re beautiful!” Apolitical, asocial, a-everything but funny, Willard introduced Second City to a weirdness that echoed the new enlightenment.
Sills didn’t get it. Nor did he want to. When he appeared, mostly by surprise, the director threw out scenes and blackouts as hilariously oddball as Miss Jones, shoved Patinkin aside, and returned the show, block by block, to natural scale. It didn’t matter how close to opening night they were. Sills would force Willard back to reality.
“Okay, Willard, get up there,” he barked.
Willard did as he was told.
“You meet a friend on the street and by the end of it you’re going into a hair salon. I don’t care how long it takes. Go.”
Willard and his partner began. Hello. Oh, hello, Joe. How are you, Jerry? Their conversation, as regular conversation tends to be, was chitchatty and bland. Willard got bored. “I think I need a haircut,” he said.
“Stop!”
The actors turned to Sills. He was fuming. “You can’t just say you need a haircut. You have to get there together.” It sort of almost made sense.
Sills decided another scene needed an oblique reference to Brecht.
“Paul,” Willard began. “I don’t think the audience is going to get that.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s pretty obscure.”
Sills snickered at a passing waiter. “He never heard of Brecht!”
“No, Paul, I don’t think the audience—”
Second City’s most popular scenes were now pop culture parodies. Television, its viewers increasing in numbers and, one could argue, its content already decreasing in originality, both stole from Second City’s audience and provided it a variety of clichés to offer as suggestions. “That was a big change,” Patinkin said. “We became a little broad.”
No matter how funny or fun, parody—or “friendly satire,” to quote Elaine May—did not speak with subversive urgency. Neither were laughs a substitute for improvisational prison breaks of human intuition, but Second City, without Sills, was in the laughter business. Accordingly, Viola Spolin was let go. “I had to fire her,” Patinkin said, “because she was saying a lot of not nice things about how we were running things.” In her place, he promoted Spolin acolyte Jo Forsberg, a devoted presence since the earliest Second City workshops, and together, they founded Second City’s—indeed the world’s—first improvisational comedy training facility. Note the difference: Spolin-style improvisation had ceded to improvisational comedy or, as it would come to be known, improv comedy. Or just improv. “She began modifying many of Viola’s games and adding her own exercises,” wrote Forsberg’s son, Eric. “She wanted to make the work as applicable as possible to developing sketch material and doing a show.” Once trained, Forsberg’s students might join her Second City Children’s Theater, or a touring group, Second City’s constellation of farm teams, and play colleges and business functions across the country. But there was no formal progression to the mainstage. To Sahlins, funny was funny; it didn’t matter where it came from or if it had been properly schooled. Now, if he needed new improvisers in the resident company, all Sahlins had to do was pluck from either the Children’s Theater or the road. It was an efficient innovation, providing the growing theater, and all its arms, a consistent stream of ready-made talent. But the joke was on Second City: in 1965, there were other, more convenient venues for the nightly intake of humor, some as close as the black box in the living room.
Elaine May was at a party on Riverside Drive with her former therapist, now husband, David Rubinfine. Normal people surrounded her. They were talking. That she could prove. She could see them talking. What she couldn’t prove—what they were saying—she could intuit. There were tells. She knew them better than they did.
It had been years since Elaine had spoken with Mike Nichols, approximately the exact amount of time, to the day, since her last success, their final performance as Nichols and May. Coincidence or correlation? wondered the party, New York City, the comedy world, and every English-speaking man, woman, and precocious child who had ever stayed up late with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May on vinyl. What was she doing and what was going wrong? The one-act musical she had written for Bob Fosse, Robbers and Cops, she withdrew; the Third Ear, her own sketch-improv ensemble held at the onetime Premise Theater, was an early casualty of the new antisatire climate; The Office, directed by Jerome Robbins with Elaine as an incompetent secretary, played ten previews then closed.
One worried. Was she planning her long-awaited comeback? Or had she, the J. D. Salinger of comedy, disappeared for good? Had her ex-partner’s winning streak demoralized her out of the game? Did she resent Mike Nichols? Or was she—quoting ancient publicity—too much a perfectionist to secure and sustain regular writing gigs in Hollywood? Or, actually, was it the other way around: was it Elaine who was through with them, through with rewriting other people’s scripts (The Loved One, draft, June 1962)? In that case, why wasn’t she writing her own stuff? Or was she writing?
It was not too early in the 1960s to regard May’s career caesuras as the product of an insularly male industry. Betty Friedan and history could attest to that—a consistent deprivation of women directors on Broadway and in Hollywood. But women writer-directors! Women writer-director-actors? They were nonexistent. And of the zero percent, what percentage were mothers? May’s household now consisted of four children: three from Rubinfine’s previous marriage, and her teenage daughter, Jeannie Berlin (née May).
Domestic life galvanized Elaine’s genius for procrastination. She designated a corner of her Manhattan brownstone’s basement the office and started sharpening pencils and rearranging furniture. She accepted a part in the film of Enter Laughing—which director Carl Reiner let her improvise, partially—because “my typing finger needed a rest.”
She still thought of Mikey and Nicky, the paranoid pas de deux she’d begun on napkins and legal pads over a decade earlier, in Chicago.
And trying to hide from her basement, Elaine went to parties, where she hid from people’s questions, but they cornered her, and trying to evade them, she redressed herself in tailor-made aphorisms never intended to be funny, but they were, and people gathered, laughter built, crowds formed.
From the crowd that evening on Riverside Drive emerged her old partner, Mike Nichols, and his new girlfriend. He came toward her.
It had been years. First, pleasantries amid the discomfort, the jokey defensiveness, both fumbling for the impossible chord, social grace and raw honesty, the sound that said they were happy now despite the hurt, despite the past. They could not lie, not to each other. Because of old love, they laughed. He introduced the girlfriend. English. Porcelain. Lovely. Mike did everything well. He took hard weather better than she could, better than anybody. That had always been their secret, one of them, anyway; he was the sail, she was the storm. “But is he perfect?” she once asked. “He knows you can’t really be liked or loved if you’re perfect. You have to have just enough flaws. And he does. Just the right, perfect flaws to be absolutely endearing.”
It was good to see her. “Everything felt different,” Nichols said.
He said something funny to Elaine and Dr. Rubinfine, then kindly excused himself from their company to rejoin the party. “See?”
May said to her husband, loud enough for Nichols to hear. “I told you Mike was wonderful.”
He heard. “Life had renewed,” is how Nichols described that moment. “It was back. It had begun again.”
Fearing the worst, Sheldon Patinkin rushed to Del’s apartment and, as he had before, banged on the door. He did not expect it to open, slowly.
“Will you come sit with me?” Del asked. “I’m being devoured inch by inch by the Spider King.”
LSD.
Del’s apartment, a hoarder’s paradise of books and comic books, smelled of cats and cigarettes. Patinkin was told not to touch anything. “Everything was an experiment,” he said. That pile of composition books represented a train of thought Del would resume as soon as he could plug—watch out!—that cable running through the living room into the camera he was building on the coffee table—so put your tea there—with technology he had adapted from ancient Mayan . . .
Though Del had been fired from Second City, he stayed in town, loitering, flailing. He had nowhere to go. From a distance, Sahlins, through Patinkin, kept semisympathetic watch on his well-being, trying not to get tangled in Del’s web of promises and excuses. “I sat with him,” Sheldon said, “until it passed.”
Patinkin let him talk. “Del was so bipolar,” Second City pianist Bill Mathieu said, “so up and down, so many glints of genius and so many arid stretches of nothing. He was completely unpredictable, a total mystery, and into drugs like Charlie Parker was into drugs or Miles was into drugs. You can’t separate it from the work.” Some of what Del explained to Patinkin he understood. When he couldn’t evolve improvisationally, when he felt he couldn’t grow the form, or test his experiments on real people, he decayed. Del was on a quest for improvisation’s LSD. Could an ensemble improvise a play? Could improvisers sustain a narrative an hour or forty-five minutes long? He needed to know.
