The 60s
Page 49
This straight tone, this disciplined-seeming neutrality, could be devastating. “Negroes are getting more confidence,” Arthur Ashe’s opponent, Clark Graebner, observed to John McPhee around the time of the first U.S. Open in 1968. “They are asking for more and more, and they are getting more and more. They are looser. They’re liberal. In a way, ‘liberal’ is a synonym for ‘loose.’ And that’s exactly the way Arthur plays. I’ve always kidded him, saying, ‘If the Negroes take over, please make me a lieutenant. Not a general or a colonel. Just a lieutenant.’ ” The New Yorker storytelling style put on display an ordinary racism less dramatic and savage but more pervasive than the headline events of the civil-rights movement. A tale of post–Voting Rights Act race relations came in sideways, while McPhee and his readers faced forward and watched the match. “Even though Arthur is well accepted in a place like Philip Morris, he’s never going beyond that level,” Graebner says. “I accept Arthur any way, but many people don’t. He’s accepted only because he’s a tennis player….I think he’s too smart to marry a white girl. That’s a headache. If he marries a white girl, who’s going to house him? He’ll live in a very lovely residence somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t know where a Negro executive lives in New York. I don’t even know.”
Nobody knew how Arthur Ashe’s life would turn out, not even Ashe himself—he did not know that he would die at forty-nine—and that was the point. The sixties had set many things in motion that would take much of the seventies to play out: five more years of Vietnam, four of Nixon, ten before bell-bottoms would be replaced by shoulder pads and John Lennon was shot. But nobody knew what was temporary, what would turn out to be merely part of the cartoon sixties, and what would become a permanent feature of American life. As Roger Angell wrote while incredulously contemplating the Mets’ victory at the end of the decade, which proved, in case further proof was needed, that even though civilization had not ended and the revolution had not arrived, still a lot had happened in the past ten years: “I had no answer for the question posed by that youngster in the infield who held up—amid the crazily leaping crowds, the showers of noise and paper, the vermillion smoke-bomb clouds, and the vanishing lawns—a sign that said ‘WHAT NEXT?’ ”
Robert Rice
APRIL 15, 1961 (MIKE NICHOLS & ELAINE MAY)
ONE SURPRISING DEVELOPMENT in the entertainment business during the last half-dozen years has been the ascent of a generation of young comedians whose public attitude is indignation and whose subject matter is man’s inhumanity to man—of which, if their work is a reflection of their state of mind, they consider themselves to be outstanding victims. Gone is the time when being jocose about Bing Crosby’s toupee, Jayne Mansfield’s structure, or the outcome of the daily double at Hialeah was fashionable; the new comedy covers a bleak political-psychological-sociological-cultural range that reaches from the way public affairs are conducted in Washington to the way private ones are conducted in Westchester. Of the members of the group of suffering entertainers—though it may be disrespectful to use the word “group” to describe people who spend much of their time being disrespectful to groups—the two who have devised the most striking way of making their pain laughable are the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Nichols and May use the Stanislavski method of acting to perform comedy sketches in classic blackout form. The result is a wholly original technique that allows them, at one and the same time, to make funny faces and wear funny hats and to deal accurately and candidly with what one man who has worked with them calls “the secrets of the family”—the appalling (to them, at least) relationships that habitually exist between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, or, in short, males and females. As depicted by Nichols and May, mothers tend to whine, grown-up sons to snivel, adolescents to pant or prattle, unfaithful wives to simper, little boys to bluster, and husbands to drone. Their attitude toward the people they have invented is rigorously unsentimental but by no means unemotional; as well they might, they often seem to be enraged by the way their characters are behaving. A comment that both of them feel is a just description of what they do and how they do it was recently made by the critic Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It’s a good thing Mike Nichols and Elaine May are partners. How would either of them ever find anyone else he’d distrust so much?” One thing most Nichols and May characters are addicted to is clichés, spoken in tones of embarrassed and embarrassing sincerity. “I can’t stand to see you this way,” one of them, horrified by the agonies the other one is going through in an effort to give up smoking, will say, to the accompaniment of those circumstantial spasms of the larynx, the nostrils, and the jawline that are characteristic equally of a congenital clown and of a Method actor. Or “I wouldn’t respect you and I wouldn’t respect myself,” or “Darling, I’m so ashamed.” Not only is the acting of Nichols and May so substantial that they can construct believable characters out of literary rubble like that, but their literary discipline is substantial enough for them to know when a character is so solidly built that he can deliver a punch line. In view of the fact that family secrets, even when they are handled in a resolutely anti-soap-opera manner, are an inexhaustible source of best-selling copy, no one need be flabbergasted to learn that Nichols and May, neither of whom has yet reached thirty, have been deriving from their work in night clubs, television, and radio, and on Broadway, where their show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May is in its seventh month, gross annual receipts of nearly half a million dollars.
Nichols is light-haired, light-eyed, and light-skinned. He is not only the male lead but the master of ceremonies, and in the latter role he is debonair and self-assured enough. Once he plunges into a scene, though, it becomes apparent that he is a doomed man. His full-lipped and rather fleshy face is peculiarly suited to expressing the nuances of frustration, from the compressed mouth and round eyes of helpless resignation, through a whole gamut of pouts, to the expanded nostrils and knitted brows of ineffectual anger. His somewhat nasal voice can ring just about all the changes on querulousness. As the doomed man, he is flimflammed by telephone operators, browbeaten by his mother, and terrified when his girl friend submits to his amorous advances. Sometimes he tries to be satanically dominant—with his little sister, say, or with an audience of women gathered to hear him lecture on the drama—but his masterfulness and malevolence are usually feeble. Nichols’ characterizations are ably conceived and executed, but there is no more doubt in his mind than in anyone else’s that Miss May is the team’s virtuoso actor. She is a short, buxom young woman, as uncompromisingly brunette as Nichols is blond, with an enormous amount of crazy hair and crazy energy. She can arrange her features and tune her voice in so many different ways that it is impossible to say what she really looks or sounds like. As a movie starlet with wide eyes, a dazzling smile, and a husky voice, she is clearly one of the most alluring women in America; as a mother with sagging shoulders and jowls, twitching hands, and a whine, she is one of the most repellent; as an Englishwoman with protruding teeth, a rigid spine, and clipped diction, or as a clubwoman with unmanageable eyebrows, aimless gestures, and a shrill cackle, she is one of the most absurd.
However, describing Nichols and May as solo performers is beside the point, for the essence of the act is that it is a duet. If there is a difference in kind between the contributions of the two, it is that Nichols, as the one less likely to lose himself in what he is doing, is the one more likely to know when the moment has come to change the direction of a scene or to end it. Certainly it is Nichols who has taken day-by-day command of the team’s career. Alexander H. Cohen, the producer of An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, estimates that he has a telephone conversation about business with Miss May every ten or twelve days and that he has one with Nichols three or four times every day. “Mike’s middle name is Emergency,” Cohen, who has limitless affection for the eccentricities of actors in general and for those of Nichols and May in particular, said not long ago. “
He may call me at home from his dressing room during intermission to tell me the theatre is ‘in total darkness,’ and when I check with the stage manager I’ll find that one bulb burned out up on the bridge and has already been replaced.” The sort of thing that exasperates Miss May professionally is of a different order, which she recently summarized by imagining a situation in which the team appears on a television show with Dinah Shore. The hypothetical script calls for Miss Shore and Miss May to exchange the customary inconsequences before the team goes into its act, with Miss Shore beginning by saying, “Why, Elaine, you’re wearing the same dress I am.” Miss May finds it psychologically impossible to make any reply but “Certainly, didn’t you see it at dress rehearsal?,” and her part of the badinage is suppressed. Because Miss May’s imagination teems with mortifying predicaments like that, Nichols handles most of the public chitchat for the pair.
In most respects, though, Nichols and May are a team that carries teamwork to extraordinary lengths. As trained and convinced Method actors—Nichols took lessons from Lee Strasberg, the theoretician-in-chief of the Actors’ Studio, and Miss May studied under the late Maria Ouspenskaya, an alumna of the Moscow Art Theatre—they both insist that establishing and maintaining a believable personal relationship onstage is the foundation of good acting, and therefore of good comedy, and that any effects, however showy, that are irrelevant to such a relationship are inartistic, and therefore unfunny. The way they compose their pieces is an even more impressive demonstration of teamwork than the way they perform them. The characters Nichols plays and the words Nichols speaks were invented by Nichols, and the characters Miss May plays and the words Miss May speaks were invented by Miss May. Everything they do started as an improvisation and was gradually hardened and polished in the course of performance without ever having been written down or even discussed much. “We’ve killed some promising things with too much talk, so we’ve learned to talk very carefully,” Miss May said recently. Miss May tends to use words in a special way. There is little carefulness in the accepted sense in the way they talk to each other privately during practically every intermission. In fact, these colloquies are often conducted in such injurious terms that the team sounds much like a married couple on the way home from a particularly disorderly cocktail party; how-dare-you-treat-me-this-way is a recurrent theme. The sense in which they can be said to exercise care after the curtain comes down is that they confine themselves to discussing their general attitude toward each other while the curtain was up, and avoid all mention of details of inflection, gesture, or grimace. They cherish the spontaneous nature of their work so fiercely that they have a calculated policy of remaining as ignorant as they can of such minutiae. Their instinctive reflex when one of the scenes is analyzed in their presence is not to listen, and when one of them is written down, not to look. In order to be able to cue Evening’s backstage crew properly, the show’s stage manager, shortly after it opened, obtained a script by the use of a tape recorder and a typist. One day, Miss May injudiciously read what she had been saying in a solo scene as a Parent-Teacher Association chairlady. She was amazed to find that, in her words, “there isn’t a joke in it.” The discovery made her so self-conscious that she wasn’t satisfied with the way she performed the scene for a couple of weeks, which was how long it took her to stop listening to herself telling all those non-jokes and to regain her confidence that her acting was funny enough to compensate for the absence of verbal wit. Since Miss May and Nichols have more respect than any audience for their mysterious ability to mesh their separate notions into a coherent piece ad lib, it is improbable that they have ever studied the script of one of their joint numbers. They are able to account for their rapport only in the most general way. A recent manful, if not altogether lucid, attempt by Nichols to explain it was, “Neither of us is capable of having a different kind of idea from the other.” As for Miss May, she defines the element that binds their work together as “a tilted insight.”
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Although it is clear from what Nichols and May do that their insight tilts in the direction of being aggrieved, they seldom make their grievances explicit. Their method of voicing an opinion is to embed it in an ostensibly factual report rather than to proclaim it in an editorial. They make known their suspicion of mother love, for example, by enacting a seven-and-a-half-minute telephone conversation between a young man and his mother, who has phoned him because for weeks he has neglected to phone her. The sketch, one of their most renowned, reaches its climax when Nichols says, “I feel awful,” and Miss May replies, “Arthur, if I could only believe that, I’d be the happiest mother in the world.” They have a forthright attitude toward adultery, which, in essence, seems to be that committing it and not committing it are equally pointless; it takes them ten and a half minutes to expound this theory by way of a series of three scenes in the lobby of a hotel. The first is between a conscience-stricken American couple. (NICHOLS: “You want to know how bad I feel? If I hadn’t rented that room already, I’d say forget it.”) The second is between a tight-lipped English couple. (MISS MAY: “I’m early.” NICHOLS [not moving]: “Nice to have the extra time.” MISS MAY [sitting down]: “Yes.”) The third is between a preposterously exuberant French couple. (NICHOLS: “Where’s George?” MISS MAY: “My husband?…But, darling, I don’t know. Didn’t you bring him?”) In much the same deprecatory manner, they deal at length with female civic-mindedness, industrial bureaucracy, modern child-rearing, radio journalism, the cult of Southern squalor, and adolescent courtship. In addition, they have made dozens of summary, but no less disenchanted, comments on subjects they evidently regard as not complicated enough to merit exhaustive treatment, like space travel, Christmas, police corruption, summer camps, the Presidential election, psychiatry, and almost anyone’s literary output. Their evaluation of the novels of Fëdor Dostoevski takes just ten seconds; Miss May laughs hilariously for nine and a half seconds, Nichols says, “Unhappy woman!” and the lights go out. The painstakingly documentary nature of almost any Nichols and May scene that runs much longer than ten seconds tends to provoke a kind of laughter that, while voluminous, is distinctly uneasy. At a midweek matinée, there is generally a tinge of hysteria in the obbligato of soprano giggles that accompanies Miss May’s impersonation of the P.-T.A. chairlady, and few audiences are able to keep their mirth from sounding shrill as they watch “Teen-agers,” a detailed examination of what a high-school boy and a high-school girl on their first date say and do in the back seat of a parked car. Some people even find Nichols and May too precise to be funny at all, among them a number of ardent admirers who look upon the team less as entertainers than as important social critics, or even leaders of a crusade for a more decent world. One such devotee, a social critic himself, recently asserted that he remembers being moved by just three broadcasts: the radio announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the radio announcement of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the first television performance of “Teen-agers.” Few comedians, surely, have ever received such an accolade—and still fewer, not including Nichols and May, have ever sought one.
Perhaps the most complete, and certainly the most complex, statement given by Nichols and May of their distrust of each other and everything else is an eighteen-and-a-half-minute scene they call “Pirandello.” It uses that skeptical Italian playwright’s system of questioning the integrity of all human relationships to demonstrate that two small children who play at being their parents and apparently become their parents really are two actors playing a scene in which children become their parents—or, rather, really are Mike Nichols and Elaine May playing two actors playing a scene in which children become their parents. It is a piece that gives Nichols and May a chance to be leery of each other from, so to speak, the cradle to the grave, and it provides a splendid setting for the disclosure of family secrets as well. It lets them express in detail what is conceivably a chief ingredient of their common view of life—that people, whether they are children, adults
, actors, or Nichols and May, treat each other in much the same way: abominably. It lets them disparage in passing, to name just a few of the objects of their scorn, Zorro comic books, cocktail parties, the theatrical temperament, profane language, witty women, and skeptical Italian playwrights who question the integrity of all human relationships. It lets them display their profound sense of theatre, since they have worked the material so that it yields suspense and a number of frightening climaxes as well as laughter. And it lets them act their heads off—particularly Miss May. Her portrayal of a solemn, inarticulate little girl is one of the most meticulously observed, most heartfelt, and funniest characterizations on Broadway. Nichols and May use “Pirandello” to close the first half of Evening, presumably so that an audience can smoke off its shock in the lobby. As a matter of fact, though “Pirandello” may be their definitive statement, it is the only thing of its kind they do. The ways they unburden themselves most naturally and most often are by turning everyday events into melodramas, by turning melodramas into everyday events, and by enacting Most Embarrassing Moments, a category of human experience they seem to be inordinately, not to say painfully, well acquainted with. The dialogue about giving up smoking and the telephone conversation between the mother and son are fair examples of the first method. Typical of the second are a pair of radio skits, one a version of Oedipus Rex that has Oedipus saying plaintively to Jocasta, “Look, sweetheart, you’re my mother,” the other a domestic contretemps that has the husband saying cheerily to his wife when she tells him she has been chosen to be the first woman into space, “I’ll manage the house somehow.” As for Most Embarrassing Moments, perhaps the funniest radio skit they ever did was about a psychiatrist with the hiccups, and another effective one concerned a traffic policeman trying to elicit a bribe from a woman driver too obtuse to understand his hints. They also operate quite often in the area of humor that is currently known as “sick.” False teeth, falling hair, protruding ears, and gross overweight crop up a good deal in their work. “Sweetie, have you ever thought of bleaching your mustache?” is a fairly characteristic thing for Nichols to say to Miss May when they are groping for new material.