The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Nichols and May do a good deal of groping in the course of discovering what they want to say. Since they shoot from the hip, they necessarily score a great many partial hits and total misses. For the last year or so, they have been recording a series of one- to five-minute improvised comedy spots that are inserted, at the average rate of five times a weekend, into N.B.C. radio’s weekend program called Monitor. By now they must have attempted more than six hundred taped spots. Perhaps three hundred have been considered usable by the Monitor people, many of them after considerable cutting and splicing, and of those not more than a dozen or so represent Nichols and May at the top of their form. They have also been improvising regularly for the last year as the voices in a series of cartoon television tributes—for which they receive no billing, only a great deal of money—to Jax Beer, a New Orleans beverage that both of them now stock in their iceboxes. Their percentage of successes for Jax has been higher than for Monitor, but the percentage of real triumphs almost certainly much smaller. In a night club or a theatre, they do only their high-gloss set pieces, except for one improvisation, toward the end of each show, based on a suggestion from the audience, and they themselves say that the improvisation is seldom on a par with the rest of the pieces. When it does come off, though, it shakes an audience more than any set piece ever can. It also shakes Nichols and May. Things they are quite unable to explain happen to them when they are carried away by an improvisation. Once, in a night club, they held a couple of hundred semi-sober delegates to a sales convention spellbound for fifteen or twenty minutes with an improvisation inspired by Plato’s “Dialogues,” a work that they had no reason to believe any member of their audience except the one who suggested it was familiar with, and, moreover, one that they themselves had had no idea they felt any passion about. On another occasion, Nichols suddenly became aware, with a feeling much like terror, that he was speaking fluent Yiddish—a language he didn’t know he knew.

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  Nichols and May began their life together with an improvisation. It was a performance designed solely for their private entertainment, though it may well have also entertained, or astounded, a number of loiterers in the waiting room of the Randolph Street station of the Illinois Central in Chicago, which is where it took place. One evening in the spring of 1954, Nichols was walking through the waiting room on his way to a train and Miss May was sitting on a bench reading a magazine. They knew each other by sight, both having for a time hung around the University of Chicago and been associated with various little-theatre groups that originated on or around its campus. As Nichols remembers it, he had avoided becoming acquainted with Miss May, because he was sure she was sneering at him. He still speaks of “the look of utter contempt” that he believes was on her face as she watched him playing a part in Strindberg’s Miss Julie—the first time he recalls seeing her. Miss May denies that she ever regarded Nichols with contempt. “I didn’t regard him at all,” she said recently. In any case, that day in the waiting room Nichols resolved to face up to Miss May. He sat down beside her and, talking out of the corner of his mouth, assumed the character of a secret agent making contact with a colleague. She responded in a heavy Russian accent, and they went into a long scene that Nichols recalls as “half spy, half pickup.” They no longer remember just what they said, of course, but if by any chance the scene foreshadowed a spy spot they did a few months ago for Monitor, it may have begun something like this:

  NICHOLS: I beg your pardon. Do you have a light?

  MISS MAY: Yes, certainly.

  NICHOLS: I had a lighter, but (pause) I lost it on Fifty-seventh Street!

  MISS MAY: Oh. Then you’re Agent X-9?

  They both enjoyed their performance immensely. “It took the place of a lot of chitchat and coffee cups,” Miss May said not long ago. In subsequent weeks, they had further meetings and conversations, and evidently discovered how much they had in common. Both of them were, as an old Chicago acquaintance of theirs has put it, “on the lam from their childhoods,” which in Nichols’ case had been spent largely in New York and in Miss May’s largely in Los Angeles. Both of them had found the University of Chicago campus an asylum for insurgent spirits like theirs. Both of them were fascinated by the sort of theatre—Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht—that is a good deal more likely to fascinate insurgent spirits in Chicago than commercial managers in New York or Los Angeles. Both of them had sharp tongues. And both of them were broke. Nichols recalls that one evening in Chicago he was so hungry, and so reluctant to cadge either another meal from friends or another package of bologna from a grocery store, that he dined on a jar of mustard, the only eatable in his room. He also recalls that when Miss May asked him to eat with her, in a cellar she was then occupying, the dish she was most likely to serve was a delight consisting of a small amount of hamburger, a small amount of cream cheese, and a large amount of ketchup. He says it was delicious. It is possible that he really thought so, since not long ago a friend who was sitting with him in the living room of his East Side penthouse watched him sup, with every evidence of pleasure, on a glass of butterscotch Metrecal and a can of corn, eaten cold out of the can.

  The trail that led Nichols to the Illinois Central waiting room began in Berlin, where he was born in November, 1931, to parents who qualified in almost every possible respect as objects of Nazi persecution. His father was a Russian-born Jewish doctor, Paul Peschkowsky, who, after the revolution, had settled in Germany. His mother’s family was prominently identified with the German Social Democratic Party; in fact, her father was an early victim of Nazi assassins. Hitler became Chancellor when Nichols was two. Nichols’ chief memories of his personal life in the Germany of the thirties are of attending a segregated school for Jewish children and of being taunted and jostled sometimes on his way to and from school by boys with respectable ancestors. He was able to leave the country at an early enough age to have been spared experiences more devastating than those. In 1938, his father acquired the papers that were needed to effect his own departure from Germany and admission to the United States, and sailed for New York, with the idea of sending for his family when he had qualified to practice medicine here and was able to earn a living. Upon his arrival, he took the name of Nichols. A year later, Michael arrived, accompanied only by his younger brother—now an interne in San Francisco. Their mother was ill, and had been unable to make the trip with them, as she had planned. She came in 1941, only a few weeks before the United States entered the war. Dr. Nichols rapidly built up a good enough practice to maintain the family comfortably in the West Seventies, near Central Park. For the first three or four years here, Michael was bandied about from school to school; finally, he was installed, for his high-school years, in the Walden School, an institution of the kind known as progressive. It is possible that his attitude as an adolescent toward the adult world is recapitulated in the last line of a summer-camp spot that he and Miss May did for Monitor. The camp director says, “If I didn’t hate kids so much, I’d close this camp.” In 1944, Dr. Nichols was stricken with leukemia, and died. Since he had not been working long enough in this country to accumulate much of a reserve, the family had to reduce its standard of living sharply, but Michael was able to continue at Walden as a scholarship student. However, organized education was one of many things he had little use for. Once he had squeezed through Walden, with a minimum of effort, he had no idea of undertaking any further formal studies, except, perhaps, those connected with the theatre, a vocation to which he felt called but for which he was certain he would never be chosen. “I knew I was bright, but I didn’t think I had any talent,” he said recently. “I simply couldn’t imagine a part anyone would cast me for.” He did make a halfhearted investigation of the Department of Dramatic Arts of New York University, but when he discovered that one thing N.Y.U. students were expected to master was the words and melody of the school anthem (“Oh grim, grey Palisades…”), he left indignantly and got a job as a shipping clerk in a company that made costume jewelry
. After a year there, it occurred to him that if it came to choosing between rhinestones and alma-mater songs, there was probably something to be said for alma-mater songs. He therefore enrolled in an academic course at the University of Chicago, but he made a point of seldom attending classes or taking examinations. The intellectual and artistic ferment on the Chicago campus did stimulate him, though, and he began to come to grips with his destiny when he joined practically every theatre group in sight. One of his first appearances was in the production of Miss Julie that was the occasion of Miss May’s giving him the alleged fisheye. Presently, he was able to free himself partly from a mustard-eating economy by getting a job as an announcer for an FM radio station that concentrated on classical music, which he admires and knows a good deal about. He was on his way from the radio station to his lodgings, on the South Side, when he encountered Miss May in the waiting room.

  Miss May arrived at Nichols by just as rocky a road. She was born in 1932 in Philadelphia, though it might as well have been any other large city in the United States, Canada, or Mexico, because her father, Jack Berlin, was the director of, the writer for, and the principal actor in a travelling Jewish theatrical company. She herself began appearing onstage at an early age, playing little boys, who, to the best of her recollection, were all named Benny. When she was ten, her father died and her mother went into partnership with one of Miss May’s uncles, who operated a Chicago establishment called Fogarty’s Grill. A couple of years later, the family moved to Los Angeles. Miss May’s schooling was brief indeed. Because she was on the road, she didn’t start it until she was eight, and because her resistance to education was monumental, even by comparison with Nichols’, she stopped it when she was fourteen. The only thing she ever liked to do in school, she has said, was diagram sentences. Mathematics she found impenetrable and history inconceivable. She has too hard a time remembering what year anything happened to her to be able to say what year something happened to Pepin the Short. While still in her teens, she was married to a young man named Marvin May, and something more than a year later she had a daughter, who, to show how circular life can be, is now attending the Walden School. (The Mays’ marriage was ended by divorce some seven years ago.) Miss May looks back with distaste on her years in Los Angeles, a city she abhorred and abhors. “I feel in opposition to almost everything anyway, but it comes to its height in Los Angeles,” she recently explained. Though she says she felt no specific urge then, and feels none now, to be an actress—or, in her words, “be anything”—the theatre was evidently her destiny, just as it was Nichols’, because soon after her marriage she drifted into Mme. Ouspenskaya’s acting classes. She acquired a good deal of useful training there, she thinks, though she had a difficult time at first, particularly with a standard Method exercise in which the actor is expected to portray a seed that gradually sprouts from the ground, grows into a tree, buds, and bursts into leaf. Miss May has always been strict about living the part she is playing. “They all had to wait for me. I couldn’t bud to save my life. I knew I wasn’t a tree,” she recalled not long ago. She also drifted into association with various theatre enthusiasts in Los Angeles, and when some of them moved to Chicago to pursue their work, she followed, and found herself in the circle in which Nichols had been moving.

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  The friendship that developed between Nichols and Miss May after the scene in the station was only a prologue to their professional association. When about six months had passed, Nichols resolved that the time had come for him to plunge, and he returned to New York to study under Strasberg. At first, he tried living in the city and paying his way by working. He got a job as a waiter in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, for example, but it ended abruptly after two weeks, when, upon being asked for the fortieth time in one day, what kind of ice cream the establishment served, he grinned maniacally—he has one of the best maniacal grins in the business—and answered, “Chicken.” There were other on-the-job crises, and so he moved to Philadelphia (life is circular), where his mother, who had remarried, was living, and still lives. He got a job with a Philadelphia radio station and commuted to New York twice a week for his lessons with Strasberg. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Miss May joined one of the theatre companies that Nichols had been in. She acted in an assortment of plays that included Peer Gynt, Red Gloves, Murder in the Cathedral, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and both she and the company scored such smashing successes that when she had been with it for only a few months her salary was raised from twelve dollars a week to twenty-five. Then, in the spring of 1955, the Fire Department closed the company’s theatre, and one of its producers, David Shepherd, who was a theatre buff with a little money and a lot of admiration for what went on in European cabarets, said, as Miss May recalls it, “The hell with all the forms,” and organized Compass Theatre—not a theatre but a night club, in which half a dozen actors (four male and two female), using brief scenarios based on ideas they either thought up themselves or elicited from the spectators, improvised scenes. Compass, of which Miss May was a charter member, proved sufficiently attractive to the drinking public to pay its performers fifty-five dollars a week. Late in 1955, a vacancy occurred at Compass, and Nichols, in Philadelphia, was asked by Shepherd to come to Chicago and fill it. Nichols had not maintained any contact with Miss May during the time they were apart—“Neither of us ever maintains any contact with anybody,” he remarked a few weeks ago—but they had no difficulty in resuming their friendship at the point where they had suspended it, and they found working with each other, and at Compass, exhilarating. Most of the major pieces they do today had their origin at Compass. (Compass cheated about improvising in one respect; if a scene worked out well, it was kept in the repertory, though it changed from one performance to the next.) As a matter of fact, one of their scenes, a series of hysterical dialogues between a man who has lost his last dime in a coin telephone and a procession of operators, was first performed by Miss May and Shelley Berman, a contemporary of theirs at Compass who has also graduated from the fifty-five-dollar-a-week class. It is the only big Nichols and May number that involves no family secret. Considerably more representative of what they used to do together was a scene, evidently containing the first inklings of “Pirandello,” that covered the history, from childhood to old age, of a couple who spent their lives playing games with each other. (A Compass improvisation could go on for an hour, if that was the way the actors felt about it.) The scene started with their playing Monopoly, proceeded through gin rummy, and finally arrived at chess. Nichols always lost. At last, when they were doddering and palsied, he was able to cry “Checkmate!” Miss May dropped dead. Nichols paid her no attention. “I won! I won!” he shouted, jumping with glee. End of scene.

  Nichols and Miss May spent a couple of years exchanging joyous thoughts like that with each other and with their colleagues. Then Compass suffered a complex of business ailments, and in the fall of 1957 it had to be disbanded. Shepherd reconstituted the company in St. Louis, with the idea of taking it on to New York, and a new Compass, with Nichols and May as its cadre, did enjoy a four-month run in St. Louis, in what Miss May has graphically described as “a tiny place called the Crystal Palace.” The move to New York did not come about, though. The only insurance that the team had taken out against such an emergency was to get, from a friend of Nichols’, the name, address, and telephone number of Jack Rollins, a New York manager who was presumably looking for new acts to manage. Since both Nichols and May were in New York, participating in the abortive negotiations for Compass to appear here, they called on Rollins and, over lunch at the Russian Tea Room, gave him an idea of what they did. He was struck by the excerpts they offered between mouthfuls of beef Stroganoff, and asked them to return a day or two later for a more formal audition, in his office. On the basis of that performance, he undertook to represent them. They returned to St. Louis, where Compass had three or four weeks to run before making its next-to-last disappearance from any stage. (It was revived for about s
ix months in 1958.) Meanwhile, Rollins arranged for them to have an audition at the Blue Angel when they got back to town. In discussing the audition, Rollins uses such inescapable managerial adjectives as “unique,” “exciting,” and, of course, “great,” but for once they seem to be approximately accurate. (He has also said of the audition, “They’re so unshowbusiness they didn’t know to be scared.”) The audience at the Blue Angel cheered them, and the club’s owner immediately offered them a booking in ten days, when he would be changing shows. He was so carried away, in fact, that when they looked forlorn at the idea of having to wait so long to work—they had just forty dollars between them at the time—he put them at once into another of his clubs, the Village Vanguard, to serve as a curtain-raiser for Mort Sahl until the vacancy at the Blue Angel occurred.

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  Since then, Nichols and May have coasted rapidly uphill. At the moment, any night club in the country would be glad to get them; the two records they have made are selling well; Evening does close to capacity business on West Forty-fifth Street; Monitor is pleased with them; they have won a couple of scrolls for excellence in making commercials; and not long ago Rollins informed an acquaintance, in a hushed voice, that offers for television spectaculars had been coming in at such a rate that he had had to reject eight of them that very week. The abrupt transition from the obscurity and penury of Compass to the luxuries of stardom has left Nichols puzzled and Miss May rather breathless. Nichols, who, of course, spent much of his childhood in the neighborhood of Central Park West, has had no trouble adjusting to taxicabs, Brooks Brothers shirts, and a penthouse. He says, though, that success has made no inward impression on him, whatever it has done outwardly. “My ambitions are not connected with success,” he told a friend not long ago. “I perceive nothing operationally different in my life.” Miss May, on the other hand, speaks of having money as “an enormous kind of adventure.” When she arrived in New York, she had seldom worn high heels, had sometimes worn second-hand clothes, and had had her hair set only twice. Climbing out of her black stockings and tennis shoes and making the acquaintance of Lord & Taylor salesladies, interior decorators, and an eminent hairdresser named Mr. Kenneth has been a process that has alternately entertained and repelled her. “My dresser at the theatre is a nice lady,” she told a friend shortly after the show opened. “She lets me dress myself, mostly.” Miss May says that while she was having a decorator do the apartment—a roomy one on Riverside Drive—where she lives with her daughter, Jeannie, she couldn’t resist occasionally saying to an antique dealer who was becoming particularly rhapsodic over a cobbler’s bench or a dry sink, “You mean it’s second-hand?”