Mike Nichols: The Last Director Who Knew Everyone and Did Everything

Mike Nichols was everywhere in the second half of the 20th century, from the Chicago comedy scene that he helped shape in the early ’60s, to hit Broadway shows, to movies that shaped the culture, to prestige TV. In a new biography that spares no anecdote, whether charming or dark, Mark Harris illuminates a man who demands to be considered among America’s great directors, yet who favored a collaboration style that brought out the best in his co-workers over the insistence on a singular vision that the culture tends to associate with capital-A Artists.

Nichols was a director of great artistic ambition: His film debut starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and his most famous 1980s hit, Working Girl, was interpreted by many as a love song to capitalism. Perhaps that makes him the quintessential boomer—a reputation The Graduate’s success would surely attest to—and yet, he was born 15 years before the boom commenced.

He was also an intellectual—his college pal Susan Sontag once said he was one of the only American directors who could properly direct Brecht—who veered often into the middlebrow, and loved not only money but the taste that it afforded. Shepherded by fashion photographer Richard Avedon, a godfather figure with whom it’s been alleged he had an affair, Nichols collected Arabian horses, lived in the Carlyle Hotel, and knew perhaps too well the difference between fine caviar and bad. He embodied a generation of celebrities with avant-garde credibility and mass appeal who also enjoyed nice things. He had, one former collaborator recalls to Harris, enough art that he could refer to “the small Picasso.”

And he loved women. Not as a womanizer, but as a collaborator, working with Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Emma Thompson, Whoopi Goldberg, and Natalie Portman to bring out some of the best performances of their career.

This complicated portrait that emerges from Harris’s meticulously researched book opens a new world into the passions that connected Nichols’ work in film and theater, as well as his lifestyle, personal demons, and those rumors about Avedon. (Spoiler: unconfirmed, unlikely—but not impossible.) Harris talked to GQ about Nichols’ relationship to money, his relationships with actresses, and where his legacy should stand in the landscape of American cinema.

You spent a lot of time with Mike Nichols towards the end of his life, when he was directing a film adaptation of your husband Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Had you been thinking of writing a book about him then?

No, definitely not. First of all, I do not think of myself at all as a biographer. Second, I don’t think I would ever have considered taking on someone who was alive. I am full of admiration for people who know how to do that, but I don’t think I would have known how to do that. So the extent of my thinking about it was to say to Mike, every once in a while, “I really wish you’d write your autobiography,” which is something that he had no interest in doing. He used to joke, in fact, that he had made sure that any future biographers’ tasks would be challenged. I did not think about it until after he died at the end of 2009.

So what convinced you to undertake this project?

Well, I tend to look for projects that frighten me. I find that energizing, you know? I look for things that I will never be bored by. And I knew he had such a singular life that the writing about his life would also mean learning about Broadway in the 1960s, and the Chicago comedy scene of the 1950s and Jewish New York in the 1940s. So I knew that aside from the fascinating details of his life, I would be fascinated by it on a level of cultural history. And I also knew that I had a ton of questions—the list of what I thought I didn’t know was much longer. And that felt to me like a really good way to go into a book.

Was there anything about him that seemed particularly enigmatic or elusive?

There were large questions and there were small questions. He had a really interesting gap in his filmography—he worked fairly steadily except for this eight year period between 1975 and 1982 when he made no movies. I was curious what that was about. I wanted to explore the relationship between his theater directing and his movie directing, because he really was unique in that regard. There are people who do both, but I think in just about every case, we would say that they are theater directors who make an occasional movie or movie directors who dabble in theater. Mike really was both equally.

And then there were big areas of his life—for instance, his first three marriages—that I had never asked him about. And there were big areas in his life, including his struggles with depression, that I didn’t know about until I started researching, because he really was largely past that by the time we met.

One of the things that I found so fascinating is that Nichols moved in this world of celebrities who were not quite public intellectuals, but famous, smart, wealthy people with great taste, like Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, or Richard Avedon. They were very interested in developing their taste, and often spent quite extravagantly. That sort of culture, or group of people, doesn’t seem to exist now: there’s no theatre director who lives in the Carlyle Hotel with his wife, who is a famous TV journalist, and who was taught how to buy art and collect antiques by a famous fashion photographer.

I remember being at Mike’s [funeral] service in 2015, and a lot of people there, as they were leaving, said, “There’s never going to be another gathering like this again.” And it wasn’t just because everyone there was famous—they meant that there were people there from about six different worlds. And Mike really was one of the last of the great New York celebrities from an era when the walls between different kinds of celebrity were not as high as they are now. There was this porous world where directors, novelists, politicians, and people in publishing, people in fashion, people in magazines, people in music [mingled]. Mike lived in the world of comedy and the world of theater and the world of movies.

And because he became famous as a performer at a very young age [as a part of the comedy duo Nichols and May, with Elaine May], he had infinite reach. He really did know everyone over an extraordinarily long period of time—and famous people who were much older than he was wanted to meet him and wanted to go work with him. I don’t think you’re going to find anyone else who worked with Lillian Gish and Natalie Portman. That’s like really a century-long range.

That’s so interesting what you’re saying about the walls of celebrity being more porous. When did that really change?

One thing that changed was that the financial gap between what you could make in movies and what you could make in theater became so huge that those really did become two completely different worlds. Actors could shuttle between them but now…[when] movie people are acting in theater, it’s either an act of charity or an act of love. And that wasn't really the case 50 years ago, when someone like Walter Matthau could read The Odd Couple, and think, This is a way for me to get rich, to invest in this.

One of the interesting things about Mike’s early career—and this is something that I didn’t know until I researched it—it wasn’t just that he was making money and was interested in making money. It was how he made money. I was fascinated by the fact, for instance, that when he directed his first play, Barefoot In the Park, it’s this huge overnight hit. It eventually runs for four years, but really he was only making—and I know that this is not a small amount of money—but his royalties from that were between $500-$1000 a week. And his initial directing fee, I think, was $10,000 or less. Directing a play on Broadway wasn’t really a way to get super rich, especially when you could make several thousand dollars for a single TV appearance on a talk show or a variety show, or six figures for being the voice of a radio ad campaign. The things that were huge paydays for Mike initially were not necessarily the things that I would have guessed would be huge.

Mike did most of his work in Hollywood for the first 30 years of his movie career, before these mega-salaries kicked in. Those high seven figure salaries for directors were not remotely a thing that happened when he was just starting out. And it’s not like he owned a piece of The Graduate or anything. That movie became the third highest grossing movie of all time, and I’m sure Mike made a good deal of money, but it was his second movie. He wasn’t a huge profit participant or something.

Later in his career, though, he was primarily making money off of investing in plays?

I mean, nobody gets rich from plays. It’s certainly possible to get rich from musicals, but Mike only did two of those: The Apple Tree in the 1960s, which was not particularly a hit, and Spamalot, which was. And he was the producer of Annie, which was a tremendous hit—he himself referred to it as a kind of annuity for him for a long time.

I don’t want to make it sound as if Mike only cared about money because that’s the furthest thing from the truth, but he did care about it and worry about it and talk about it.

It’s just interesting to me to think about someone who was making the kinds of movies and artistic choices he did, and was also spending so extravagantly, and so interested in developing taste. You know, you don’t see Greta Gerwig collecting Arabian horses.

I think when you grow up middle class, and suddenly and unexpectedly dipping into poverty, which did happen to his family, you lose any sort of high-minded notion that being rich is vulgar very quickly. He didn’t have the embarrassment about having money that someone who never in his life had to worry about money might have had.

You discuss one of my favorite Mike Nichols-related quotes, which was that Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown once said that her magazine wasn’t for girls who had ever heard of Mike Nichols. I think that’s funny in particular because Nichols had such a celebrated relationship with all his actresses. I’m wondering what you think she meant by that.

The funny thing is I think that Helen Gurley Brown was possibly right at the time, but wrong eventually because what she was really saying was that Nichols and May, in particular, were sort of a niche interest—that they were for the in crowd, for New York sophisticates. And her Cosmopolitan was for every woman. But after their first appearance that really made them into stars, Elaine said, we weren’t sure if anyone would get us, but it turned out everyone got us. So it’s not as if they were this elite thing. They recorded three albums, one of which went to the top of the charts.

What do you think was the secret to the incredible rapport that he established with actresses?

I think Elaine May was a big part of the secret. I really do. Mike was born in 1931, so if you think of men of his generation, there aren’t a lot, besides him, whose formative creative collaboration was with a woman who was at least his equal, whom he really felt that he learned from. I think that sets a tone early in one’s career. And if you spend your twenties as Mike did, in the company of this incredibly razor-sharp, challenging woman, who he really did think was his better—he really said that he thought Elaine was the creative genius of the two of them, and that he was the shaping guy—I think it sets you apart.

And so it seems very natural to me that when you look at his later collaborations with women, whether they were with actresses like Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or Julia Roberts or Whoopi Goldberg, or with non-actors—writers like Nora Ephron and Ann Roth, the costume designer—not only was Mike not insecure about working with women, he genuinely liked it.

I want to ask you about Avedon—one of the first moments when you bring him up in the book, you have a footnote that says you did vigilant research to verify that this affair happened between Nichols and Avedon, but couldn’t find any confirmation. Can you walk us through how those rumors started and circulated?

There was a book about Avedon written by his former assistant in partnership with a co-writer, for which Mike was interviewed, but apparently was not asked about this. There are two separate suggestions [in that book] that Avedon said that the two of them had had an affair. I knew that it was something that needed to be both looked into and addressed.

As I say in the note, it’s perfectly conceivable that the two of them could have had an affair. I don’t think anyone should be shocked by something like that. But the timeline, the duration, and the language with which it was discussed did not really add up for me. And this was something that I asked a number of people about who would have been in a position to know. The short answer is I didn't find anything.

And I found that it didn’t really make sense either—the idea that there was this clandestine, ten year, almost quasi-marriage. Those ten years didn’t comport with anything that was going on then in Mike's life, and they didn’t comport with the memories of anyone who knew him.

I used to work at Vanity Fair and it would come up, but always with waggled eyebrows.

When I did interviews with some people who said, are you going to write about Mike and men, And I would say, “Sure—who? Can you give me any detail I can chase?” And then the people I interviewed would sort of say, “Oh, well, I’ve never heard anything specific. I just heard rumors.” Rumors about who? “Well, nobody ever specific.” So again, certainly it could have happened, but I can’t write about not only rumors, but secondhand rumors.

You mentioned that you were quite surprised to learn about his addiction issues, which I found very surprising as well, including that he was using crack cocaine at some point.

I was actually much more surprised by the depression than the substance stuff. Mike talked about his period of cocaine use later in life, and he was quite frank about that. So that was not a huge shock to me. I was more surprised by the depression. I was well into research before I realized that it was something that he struggled with for a very long time.

Finally, how would you consider his legacy, both as an artist and as a filmmaker? It was interesting to read about the projects he turned down or regretted doing, and to hear about his own comparisons of himself to directors like William Friedkin or Robert Altman, who was sort of a foil to Nichols in many ways. Where would you put him in the orbit of American filmmaking and art?

I think that now, when we talk about visionary directors, we tend to talk about men, mostly, who are also the writers of their movies, and whose work we feel is trying to add up to a cohesive, artistic whole. When we talk about someone like Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson, we tend to think of men who were really the singular authors of their own work.

And I love directors like that, but I think we often tend to undervalue directors like Mike, whose spirit was in its deepest place collaborative. People who did not write their own movies, but who deeply valued what writers could do. People who loved actors, who loved the idea of making a movie by bringing the most skilled people together to realize a vision, not by fighting those people to realize a personal vision. Sometimes it’s to realize that writer’s vision, sometimes it’s to impel an actress to give an all-time great performance.

He really was not concerned with amassing a body of work that was his and his alone. He really let himself be guided by passion and delight in the thing that he was going to direct, whatever it was. And within that, I think there are things that carry over from one movie to another. His way of cooking up a tiny detail in the background or helping an actor find a perfect way to physicalize some emotion that might be at odds with what they're saying or the throwaway line that reveals an entire character.

I always think of the scene in Working Girl where Joan Cusack and Melanie Griffith are going through Sigourney Weaver’s closet and this coat has a $500 price tag on it, and Joan says, “It’s not even leatha!” Or it’s a distinctive moment like Anne Bancroft in The Graduate not caring when Dustin Hoffman puts his hand on her breast, and instead tries to get a little stain out of her blouse. It’s the small detail that will make a big scene or a big moment that much more real, that will make the audience say, “Oh, I recognize that reaction, that odd little thing.”

Originally Appeared on GQ