by Sam Wasson
6 “We were guinea pigs”: Paul Sand to author.
6 “some surprise little thing”: Jackie Joseph to author.
6 “Viola gave me, by her laughter”: Ibid.
7 “The games really are”: Ronnie Austin to author.
7 “We had to get a lot of safety pins”: Paul Sand to author.
7 “See each other with your toes!”: Carol Sills to author.
7 “I remember Sand”: Alan Arkin to author.
7 “We didn’t have a lot of money”: Ibid.
7 “I grew up with a lot of these games”: Leslie Bennetts, “If It Works, It’s Theater. If It Doesn’t . . . ,” New York Times, June 8, 1986.
7 Mother and son: Carol Sills to author.
8 “the diamonds”: Paul Sand to author.
8 “As a kid”: Robert Wahls, “Del Close Is Way Out—But Just for His Part,” New York Daily News, May 24, 1959.
8 The glass bottles, beakers, burners, droppers: Kim Howard Johnson, The Funniest One in the Room: The Lives and Legends of Del Close (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008), 8.
8 “Every kid assumes”: Kleinfeld, “Del Close,” 147.
9 “pre-Nazis, really”: Mike Nichols to author.
9 “Basically, they beat my grandfather”: Ibid.
9 “I’m incredibly lucky”: Mike Nichols, interview with Stephen Galloway, “Director Mike Nichols on His 60-Year Career: ‘Trouble Always Seemed Glamorous,’” Hollywood Reporter, May 10, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/mike-nichols-death-salesman-career-322677.
9 “I don’t speak English”: Mike Nichols to author.
10 “Is that allowed?”: Henry Louis Gates Jr., Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Pasts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 18.
10 “I don’t know what happened”: Lillian Hellman, “And Now—An Evening with Nichols and Hellman,” New York Times, August 4, 1970.
10 “I think there is an immigrant’s ear”: Peter Applebome, “Always Asking, What Is This Really About?,” New York Times, April 25, 1999.
10 “They fucked me on baseball”: Sam Kashner, “Who’s Afraid of Nichols & May?,” Vanity Fair, December 20, 2012, audio recording accompanying article, VanityFair.com.
10 “The kid was as far outside”: John Lahr, “Making It Real: How Mike Nichols Re-created Comedy and Himself,” New Yorker, February 21, 2000, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/02/21/making-it-real-2.
10 “He’s the one”: Ibid.
10 “That was cast in bronze”: Ibid.
10 “It makes for being socially adept”: Kashner, “Who’s Afraid of Nichols & May?,” audio recording accompanying article, VanityFair.com.
11 “I was motivated then”: Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment 27, no. 3 (May/June 1991), 29.
11 attempt the leftovers method: Mike Nichols to author.
11 Del would tell you about the time: Del Close bio in Theodore J. Flicker Collection, University of Southern California Cinematic Arts Library.
11 and Whitey the Albino: Johnson, The Funniest One in the Room, 24.
11 Dr. Dracula’s Den of Living Nightmares: Noted in source as “Dr. Dracula and His Tomb of Terror”; over the years, Close gave the show several different names. Kleinfeld, “Del Close,” 146.
11 “A plague of worms will descend upon you!”: Ibid.
12 “You call this entertainment?”: Ibid.
12 “It’s a matter of the threshold of pain”: Wahls, “Del Close Is Way Out.”
12 I want to squeeze you dry: Kleinfeld, “Del Close,” 146.
12 (“I don’t know why”): Mike Nichols to author.
12 “What I really want”: Paul Sills and Charles L. Mee Jr., “The Celebratory Occasion,” Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1964), 167–81.
12 “the way good theater should be”: Robert Koehler, “Sills Always Trying to Improve on Improv,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1985.
13 “bullshitting about the theater”: Mike Nichols to author.
13 in the pages of the New Yorker: A. J. Liebling, “Profiles: Second City: I—So Proud to Be Jimmy-Jammy,” New Yorker, January 12, 1952; “Profiles: Second City: II—At Her Feet the Slain Deer,” New Yorker, January 19, 1952; “Profiles: Second City: III—The Massacree,” New Yorker, January 26, 1952.
13 Had Mike heard of Tonight at 8:30: Mike Nichols to author.
14 Encyclopaedia Britannica: Stephen Metcalf, “A Heady Brew,” New York Times, Septermber 21, 2008.
14 your table at Jimmy’s: Ibid.
14 “a cultureless city pervaded nevertheless by Mind”: Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Penguin, 1996), 69.
15 “It was some sort of hotbed”: Beverly Solochek, “Daily Closeup,” New York Post, November 10, 1970.
15 “As a result of this generous”: Liebling, “Profiles: Second City: III—The Massacree.”
15 “five to six hours a night”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
15 “Your entire grade”: Ibid.
15 “There was so much hanging out”: Mike Nichols to author.
16 To cool off: Johnson, The Funniest One in the Room, 14.
16 “I knew all about those guys”: Mike Nichols to author.
17 “Mike was an absolute genius”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
17 “I could fucking hear her breathing hostilely”: Mike Nichols to author.
17 “We loathed each other”: Helen Markel, “Mike Nichols & Elaine May,” Redbook (February 1961), 99.
17 “I think she fucked Sills”: Mike Nichols to author.
17 “This self-supporting all-student”: Sydney J. Harris, “Praise for U. of C. Players,” Chicago Daily News.
18 “I want you to meet Mike Nichols”: Mike Nichols to author.
18 “Among the stories I had heard”: Ibid.
18 “had everything”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
18 “Here,” Nichols said: Mike Nichols to author.
19 “was to have a theater”: Lee Gallup Feldman, “A Critical Analysis of Improvisational Theater in the United States from 1955–1968,” PhD diss., University of Denver, 1969.
19 “Don’t go to Cleveland”: David Shepherd to author.
20 “I wanted them in my theater”: Jeffrey Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of the Second City and the Compass Players (New York: Limelight, 1978), 5.
20 They agreed a new people’s theater was necessary: David Shepherd to author.
20 but Shepherd objected: Ibid.
21 “All Paul told us”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
21 “He was building”: Ibid.
21 Shepherd observed, amazed: David Shepherd to author.
21 “I was good at that”: Mike Nichols to author.
22 people I’d like to work with: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 138.
22 It was The Fervent Years: Mike Nichols, Inside the Actors Studio, season 3, episode 7, hosted by James Lipton, aired May 18, 1997.
22 it was a fairly long one: Mike Nichols to author.
23 “Elaine’s shortcomings”: Ibid.
23 a hamburger with ketchup and cream cheese: Robert Rice, “A Tilted Insight,” New Yorker, April 15, 1961, p. 47.
23 “just happened to be”: Michael Braun, “Mike and Elaine: Veracity-Cum-Boffs,” Esquire, October 1960.
24 Velvele Ganef: “Jack Berlin in Four Mason Appearances,” Hollywood Filmograph 9, no. 22 (June 1, 1929), 15.
24 The Dance of Death: Ibid.
24 “carry-on bits”: John Keating, “From Bistros to Broadway,” New York Times, December 18, 1960.
24 “our people do not believe in breast binding”: Thomas Thompson, “Whatever Happened to Elaine May?,” Life, July 28, 1967, p. 54B.
24 surplus coffins: Sidney Fields, “In Mama’s Footsteps,” New York Daily News, December 19, 1972.
24 “extremely educated”: Gordon Cotler, “For the Love of Mike—and Elaine,” New York Times, May 24, 1959.
24 “it was as a writer”: Mike Nichols t
o author.
24 “I always learn the same thing”: Ibid.
25 “We analyzed voraciously”: Ibid.
25 “In a comedy, as in life”: Robin Updike, “Elaine May on Comedy: That’s a Laugh and a Half,” Seattle Times, September 24, 1997.
25 Oh boy: Mike Nichols to author.
25 A few months later: David Shepherd to author.
25 “simpler forms than those of the contemporary theater”: Janet Coleman, The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre That Revolutionized American Comedy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 47.
26 “What’s a scenario play?”: Ibid., 86.
26 Bowen called it Enterprise: Ibid., 87.
26 Greenwich Village Howard Johnson’s: Ibid., 255.
26 “I was fired when somebody”: Guy Flatley, “A Day in the Country with Mike Nichols,” People, 1976, available at Movie Crazed (blog), http://www.moviecrazed.com/outpast/mikenichols.html.
26 “One night”: Mike Nichols, “A Show Soliloquy: Mike Nichols and the Midas Touch,” Show: The Magazine of the Arts 5 (March 1965), 32.
26 crushed crackers and ketchup: Rice, “A Tilted Insight,” 60.
27 “Every moment must be physically comprehensible”: Nichols, “A Show Soliloquy,” 33.
27 Philco Television Playhouse: Ibid.
27 Elaine would bring the typewriter into bed: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
28 David Shepherd played Sills: David Shepherd to author.
28 (“I do think our politics”): Sheldon Patinkin to author.
28 “I don’t know why they’re laughing”: David Shepherd to author.
28 No one, least of all him: Carol Sills to author.
28 Shepherd invited Spolin: David Shepherd to author.
2. 1955–1956
29 a hole they literally knocked in the wall: Coleman, The Compass, 98.
29 Hyde Park was still “experimental”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
30 “I was going on something”: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 6.
30 “I want to have a ‘Living Newspaper’”: Ibid., 28.
30 “The idea”: Ibid., 31.
30 air conditioner broke down: Coleman, The Compass, 101.
31 “a man who takes more words”: William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932–1972, vol. 2 (New York: Little, Brown, 1974), 580.
31 “A vast hush had settled”: Ibid., 576.
31 “None of us had seen or heard anything on TV”: Sheldon Patinkin to author.
31 “We were the first people on stage”: Paul Sills and R. G. Davis, “A Dialogue,” Yale/Theatre 5, no. 2 (1973), 26.
32 “Just go to the people”: Ibid.
32 Barbara, a local teenager: Barbara Harris to author.
32 she was mopping closer to the stage: Coleman, The Compass, 60.
32 “When you watched her”: Mike Nichols to author.
33 He missed them, his old company: Ibid.
33 a Victrola on the floor: Barbara Harris to author.
33 “Improvise?” he asked: Mike Nichols to author.
33 “But, Paul”: Ibid.
33 artisans modified performances: Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Improvisation in the Commedia dell’Arte in Its Golden Age: Why, What, How,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 38 (2010), 225–49.
34 “What about Elaine?”: Mike Nichols to author.
34 “She only had to touch”: David Shepherd to author.
34 “I wanted to explore more Elaine and me”: Mike Nichols to author.
35 “Why are you pointing your finger at me?”: Mike Nichols, in Becoming Mike Nichols, directed by Douglas McGrath (HBO Documentary Films, 2016), DVD.
35 Lake Michigan: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 68.
35 How could anyone rehearse spontaneity?: Mike Nichols to author.
35 Kent Micronite: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 51.
35 “we talked and debated”: Mike Nichols to author.
35 shouting around a table: David Shepherd to author.
35 “The Kafka scene”: Mike Nichols to author.
36 He put his voice in his nose: Ibid.
36 “The stuff never stopped coming out of her”: Ibid.
36 “Darling, you just walked through my Noguchi”: Nichols, Becoming Mike Nichols.
36 “My impulse to learn from Elaine”: Mike Nichols to author.
36 “only sort of for a minute”: Joan Juliet Buck, “Live Mike,” Vanity Fair (June 1994).
37 a dramatic improvisation: Nichols, Becoming Mike Nichols.
37 “When you have to make things up”: John Keating, “From Bistros to Broadway,” New York Times, December 18, 1960.
37 “Where Elaine and I really met most passionately”: Mike Nichols to Alice Arlen, “Mr. Success,” Interview, December 1988, p. 121.
37 “But when we got here”: Ibid.
37 innumerable fights and infidelities: Galloway, “Director Mike Nichols.”
37 “a nightmare of accusation”: Lahr, “Making It Real.”
37 started the taking of pills: Ibid.
37 “were invaders”: Mike Nichols to author.
38 “Let’s do a scene about two teenagers”: Ibid.
38 “What we did”: Mike Nichols to Alice Arlen, “Mr. Success,” 121.
38 “It wasn’t that Elaine pulled me out of myself”: Mike Nichols to author.
38 “Elaine and I had a rule”: Clifford Terry, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, or Even Hollywood, California? Not Director Mike Nichols,” Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1966.
39 David Shepherd, suddenly: David Shepherd to author.
39 “I forgot all about the audience”: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 9.
39 Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker: Mike Nichols to author.
40 “There were little moments”: Robert Morse to author.
40 “That was the best thing”: Mike Nichols to author.
41 “She respects the play”: Ibid.
41 “It was thought crass to graduate”: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 90.
41 snuck into the women’s dorm: Coleman, The Compass, 9.
41 “number one”: Mike Nichols to author.
41 “would leap first”: Ibid.
41 come up to Chicago and audition: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 138.
42 “I began to think of myself as Jewish”: Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 474.
42 “I really didn’t know what to do up there”: Ibid.
42 What they saw: Barbara Harris to author.
43 polished revue-style entertainment: David Shepherd to author.
43 “In the American culture”: Paul Sills and Charles L. Mee Jr., “The Celebratory Occasion,” Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 2 (Winter 1964), 167–81.
43 “was leaving the community”: Ibid.
44 “Hey guys”: Shelley Berman to author.
44 “It was a whole new idea”: Lahr, “Making It Real,” 268.
44 “The next time you fuck me up on stage”: Coleman, The Compass, 164.
3. 1956–1959
45 as fascination: Dickson Terry, “Let’s Face It: Beards,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 23, 1958.
45 ($34,000): Kliph Nesteroff, “An Interview with Theodore J. Flicker,” Classic Television Showbiz (blog), December 3, 2014, http://classicshowbiz.blogspot.com/2014/12/an-interview-with-theodore-j-flicker.html.
45 Joining forces: David Shepherd to Ted Flicker, July 11, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2.
45 And where, Flicker wondered: Barbara Flicker to author.
46 “Look at my rabbit”: Nesteroff, “An Interview with Theodore J. Flicker.”
46 “He made the audience his ally”: Ibid.
46 “the cardinal sin of improvisation”: Ibid.
46 They needed rules: Ibid.
46 Collecting the more successful scenarios: David Shepherd
to author.
46 “If I succeed”: Shepherd to Spolin, December 8, 1955, Spolin Papers, Northwestern University, Box 6, Folder 20.
46 floorless Volkswagen: Johnson, The Funniest One in the Room, 65.
47 “Ted’s idea”: Coleman, The Compass, 215.
47 “It was Del”: Ted Flicker, “Some Fragments of Memory,” Performink 11, no. 31 (March 12, 1999).
47 The scenarios, Del agreed, were total bullshit: Coleman, The Compass, 214.
47 Flicker impressed upon Close: Ibid., 215.
47 Lights up!: Myles Standish, “Compass Players Act in a Rococo Barroom,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 7, 1957.
49 “emerge burning with humiliation”: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 141.
49 “most rewarding theatrical experience”: Ted Flicker to “Harold,” June 27, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
49 “Isn’t this a beautiful first wedding?”: Coleman, The Compass, 219.
49 Missouri made Elaine queasy: Elaine May to Ted Flicker, undated letter, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
49 What if, Flicker suggested, they came to St. Louis: Flicker to Elaine May, Del Close, Nancy Ponder, and Severn Darden, October 7, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
49 “I shall take what I want from COMPASS”: Ted Flicker to Severn Darden, October 16, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2.
49 he urged Mike and Elaine to be patient: Flicker to Mike Nichols, August 25, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
49 “Am very glad Elaine and Mike”: David Shepherd to Ted Flicker, undated letter, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2.
50 Flicker had one of two bedrooms: Classic Television Showbiz (blog), “An Interview with Theodore J. Flicker,” December 3, 2014.
50 They worked out a plan: Ted Flicker to “Harold,” June 27, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
50 “This is not as exciting”: Ibid.
50 “almost every aspect of manufactured mass thinking”: Ibid.
50 “We are testing new techniques”: Ibid.
50 “is that we are not appealing”: Ibid.
50 “the most talented girl”: Ibid.
51 Every morning at 4411 Westminster Place: Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away, 160–61, and Coleman, The Compass, 225.
51 “You can’t imagine the excitement”: Ted Flicker to “Harold,” June 27, 1957, Flicker Collection, USC, Box 2, Folder 5.
