In the origin story that Mike Nichols liked to tell, he was born at the age of seven. The first image of himself he chose to conjure for people was that of a boy on a boat, holding his younger brother’s hand, traveling from Germany to America. They were unaccompanied on that six-day crossing in 1939, their ailing mother still bedbound in Berlin. Their father was already in New York. His two small sons had not seen him for almost a year.
Nichols was not yet real even to himself. His name was Michael Igor Peschkowsky, or perhaps it wasn’t. Decades later, his brother, Robert, looking into his family’s history, told him that according to the ship’s manifest and the petition for naturalization that was later filed by his father, his name was actually Igor Michael Peschkowsky. Igor. A horror-movie name. Nichols looked at him impassively. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it was.” It didn’t matter. Whatever his name when he boarded ship, it was gone by the time he got to New York.
Nichols turned the transatlantic crossing into a story—his first self-revelation-as-anecdote, an approach that he would eventually refine into a shield and a disguise, but also into a style of directing, a means of conveying an idea or a feeling or a circumstance to an actor that he deployed with precision and finesse over a five-decade career in movies and theater. He first tried it out on journalists in his twenties, when suddenly everyone wanted to know who Mike Nichols was and where on earth he had come from. The story he told, droll and wry, with a slight undertow of despair, was that at seven he was packed onto the boat knowing only two sentences in what would become his new language: “I do not speak English” and “Please do not kiss me.” In some tellings, he spoke no English at all and instead wore those two warnings on a penciled sign that was pinned to his clothes before boarding. It was this picture—the New Yorker cartoon version of his early life, with a punch line that hinted at both utter solitude and defiant standoffishness—that Nichols used to explain his personality to others, and to himself: a portrait of the artist as the Little Prince, alone on his planet and at home nowhere.
If the boy who had existed for seven years before that journey usually went undiscussed in interviews, it was in part because Nichols’s life before America was so hazy to him that he could retrieve little of it until adulthood. His childhood in Berlin—his years as either Michael or Igor—barely existed in his memory. As a youngster, he attended the Private Jüdische Waldschule Kaliski, an elementary school that, during Hitler’s rise, became a Jews-only institution. Nichols’s father, a doctor named Pavel Peschkowsky, was a Russian Jew, albeit so secular that he didn’t even believe in circumcision. His mother, Brigitte Landauer, was a German Jew, wholly invested in and proud of her national heritage and also indifferent to her religion. Within their cultural circle, Paul and Brigitte were not atypical—as Lotte Kaliski, who founded the school Nichols attended, put it, “We all had to learn to become Jewish. Most of us came from very assimilated families and so did the children. But we understood that in order to give children a more positive attitude, they had to know something about their background.”
Whatever that education was to be, Michael—or, as Elaine May later teasingly called him, “little Igor”—was not in the school long enough to absorb it. His memories of the Kaliski school were few, and mostly miserable. He recalled a group of German children in black shirts stealing his bicycle. And, more vividly, he could picture “with awful clarity a scene with my gym teacher and my mother, and realizing they were lovers. She was a beautiful woman, and I remember her quarreling with him, and he ripped a necklace off her and threw it out a window, and she went running after it.” As an adult, Nichols spoke as if that moment were still raw, admitting, “I suppose I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to sort that out.” But at other times, he pushed the door shut. “A Jew in Nazi Germany, parents always fighting,” he would say, as detached as if he were musing about a stranger. “Aren’t all childhoods bad?”
His ancestry—the “family legend,” as he called it—was dramatic, filled with art and politics, wealth, loss, privation, and bloodshed. When he left Berlin as a little boy, he knew hardly any of it. His mother and his aunt had given him and Robert the good part—he was a cousin of Albert Einstein, no less, and thus had a famous relative already in America, a story he became so certain was prideful apocrypha that he was astonished when it turned out to be true. But they left out virtually everything else. He knew that his father was now a two-time emigrant; as a young anti-Bolshevik supporter of Alexander Kerensky, he had fled Russia, crossing the Gobi Desert into Manchuria and eventually resettling in Germany. But not until Nichols was almost eighty did he learn that a fortune in gold had helped Pavel Peschkowsky start his new life. “Jews with goldmines!” he marveled when, during a guest appearance on a TV genealogy show, he first heard the truth. One of his great-grandfathers, Grigory Distler, had taken possession of what was thought to be a depleted mine on Sakhalin Island and found an immense undiscovered trove of gold, enough to give his daughter Anna and her son—Nichols’s father—seventy-five bars. The inheritance enabled their passage out of Russia and allowed Peschkowsky to set up a successful medical practice in Berlin. “I always had this picture of my father somehow working his way up,” Nichols said. “They were rich! Who knew? I wish to God I had gotten to know my father better, because I had it all wrong.”
His mother, Brigitte, came from unhappier circumstances. Her father, Gustav Landauer, was an intellectual polymath who studied metaphysics and translated Shakespeare into German. He was also a political firebrand, a committed believer in the philosophy of an anarchist, post-governmental agrarian utopia, and an agitator who served jail time for his insurrectionist articles in Der Sozialist. Bearded, oratorically fiery, and six and a half feet tall, he cut a formidable public figure. In 1903 he married Hedwig Lachmann, a poet and translator whose adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé became the libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera. Landauer was interested in religion as a field of research but had no use for it in his home, nor did his wife, despite being the daughter of a cantor. Brigitte grew up in Hermsdorf, a largely Jewish suburb of Berlin, in a house filled with literature and art. “I played with Jewish children,” she recalled, “but we were the only ones who celebrated Christmas and Easter . . . an entirely secular Christmas, with presents, stars, tinsel . . . At school I was the only child who sat alone while the others studied religion and recited their prayers.” Lachmann, who demanded near-constant quiet so she could work, and the stern, imposing Landauer were not natural parents. “There wasn’t the family ‘togetherness’ one finds so often today,” Brigitte said later. “We met at meals, but otherwise did little together.”
What stability she had was shattered in 1918, when her mother became one of the first victims of the flu pandemic and died at fifty-two. Her father had just risen to become commissioner of enlightenment and public instruction during the very brief existence of the socialist Bavarian Soviet Republic, part of an ad hoc leadership cadre set up largely by poets and philosophers. In a matter of weeks, that interregnum fell to the German army, and Landauer became a hunted man. He made arrangements to hide Brigitte and her older sister, Gudula, in the home of friends and went on the run. In April 1919 he wrote, “My beloved children—Some of my friends were or are still imprisoned. But do not worry about me! I am looked after very well in every respect and I will be cautious. My greatest concern is that false rumors will reach and worry you . . . My second concern is that agitated bourgeois and peasants might harass you. I hope not. If it does happen, be wise and prudent . . . Do not forget to take the little bit of money that is in the house, as well as your and your mother’s jewelry. I hope to hear from you soon!” Less than three weeks later, Landauer was murdered by members of the paramilitary Freikorps; he was beaten with gun butts and kicked to death, then shot in the head. Brigitte heard the news while riding in a Berlin streetcar. She was twelve.
In 1922, Peschkowsky, then twenty-two, arrived in Berlin, where he finished college, attended medical school, got his doctor’s license, and set up a successful practice catering to artists, theater people, and fellow Russian émigrés. By then Brigitte was employed as a hospital social worker. They married in 1930. Michael, their first son, was born a little more than a year later, on November 6, 1931. A second son, Robert, was born in 1935.
A photograph of Michael gazing at his newborn younger brother shows a little boy with a full head of wavy dark brown hair. Soon after that, he was given an injection of whooping cough vaccine and, he was told, suffered an allergic reaction that resulted in a complete and lifelong inability to grow hair. He would grow up bald. It was, says his brother, “the defining aspect of his childhood.”
At the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power, Nichols’s father did not think of leaving Germany, as many Jews did. But by 1938 it had become apparent that all Jews—even the wealthy, even the secular, even those who, like Brigitte, felt German to their core—were in grave danger, and he began planning an escape for his family. “One thing that I’m sure hastened his [departure],” Robert Nichols says, “was that . . . Jews could no longer see any [non-Jewish] patients. They could function as practical nurses or orderlies, but otherwise, they could not practice at all as of mid-1938.” Returning to Russia, where two of Peschkowsky’s uncles had just been put to death for counterrevolutionary activities, was not an option. Instead, he would leave for New York immediately; his mother, Anna Distler—Michael and Robert’s only living grandparent—would soon flee Berlin to return to Manchuria. Brigitte and the boys would join Pavel in America as soon as he had found work and a place for them to live. Under German law at that time, he and his family were considered Russian, not German—because he came from Russia, the boys were never technically German citizens, and were therefore somewhat freer to travel. He secured the necessary papers and left Germany that August.
Upon arriving in New York, he got work as an X-ray technician for a local union. By the beginning of 1939, he had passed the state medical boards and was ready to set up a practice under the new name he had chosen—Paul Nichols, a nod to his late father, Nikolai, who had also been a physician. (Paul’s patronymic was Nikolayevich.) “By the time I spelled Peschkowsky,” he joked to his sons, “my patient was in the hospital.” He was ready to have his wife and children join him, but back in Berlin, a medical issue had arisen: Brigitte had been diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis, a life-threatening condition in which blood clots can travel to the lungs. At that time, extended bed rest was wrongly considered to be an effective treatment. She was sent to a convalescent hospital. Michael and Robert would have to make the journey alone. Their aunt Gudula, who had been taking care of them in their mother’s absence, sewed 15 marks—about $40—into the lining of their clothes and took them to the embarkation point of the SS Bremen, a luxury ocean liner, for the trip, where she placed them in the care of a steward. Their father would retrieve them at the other end. They set sail on April 28, 1939.
In later years, Nichols would speak of his “unbelievable, undeserved, life-shaming luck” in being able to emigrate. Brigitte had a distant cousin in Connecticut—not Einstein, but someone who was willing to sponsor the family, a financial guarantee without which the United States was refusing the entry of most Jews from Europe. He and his brother left on the Bremen just two weeks before the ill-fated departure of another ship, the St. Louis, that came to be known as the “voyage of the damned,” in which hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich for Cuba were denied entry at one international port after another; many of them were returned to Germany and eventually killed in the Holocaust. “I remember everything about getting on the boat,” Nichols said. “We were on the gangplank when everything stopped because of Hitler’s speech . . . They had loudspeakers on every corner . . . I remember the sound but not the content.”
But it was not, he took pains to say, a moment of fear. Nichols thought of himself as an immigrant but not as a survivor. He would reach his fifties having spent “years, decades, when I didn’t think about it” before coming to realize how deeply a sense that “this is all borrowed time” resided within him. As a child, he saw the boat trip as an adventure. “I remember when we got to the end of the gangplank I jumped as hard as I could because I wanted to see the boat go up and down,” he said. And the voyage itself wasn’t scary. At seven, he was a self-contained, unsmiling child who had not seen his father for eight months and had gotten used to a mother who “was ill . . . and would be ill for much of the rest of her life.” The only thing that could rattle him was the emotional display that the sight of a bald little uncared-for refugee boy holding a three-year-old’s hand was likely to engender among adults. “Please do not kiss me” was an essential directive because “if you were alone people tended to kiss you,” he said. “And I hated it.”
During those few days, the boys had the run of much of the ship. There was a nursery with stuffed animals, and a nanny on staff to keep an eye on them during mealtimes and pack them off to their stateroom if they misbehaved. There were adults who found amusement in the beaky young boy with the serious demeanor. “I remember looking for the prow of the boat, or was it the bow?” Nichols said. “I remember asking a fellow passenger, in German, where was the tip? . . . He pointed to the tip of my nose. And I said, ‘No, no, no, don’t kid around!’” And there were movies, including the first one he ever saw, a dubbed German version of the 1938 Clark Gable–Spencer Tracy adventure Test Pilot—“test pee-lote,” he said, sounding out the words on the screen. “That and another movie . . . I think it must have been Gunga Din. Because the army they were fighting was often shown in close-up, I thought they were fighting giants. I remember that I hadn’t grasped perspective yet.”
As promised, their father was waiting at the harbor to pick them up. “The first thing I saw getting off the boat was a kosher deli,” said Nichols, “and in the neon sign were Hebrew letters. I said to my dad, ‘Is that allowed?’ And he said, ‘Here, it is.’ And from then on it was fun stuff. We’d never had food that made noise like Rice Krispies. Or drinks that were alive like Coke. And we just had fun.” He also had a new name—one he hated. The short i with which both of his parents pronounced Michael—“Mick-eye-el”—made Michael Nichols sound like a nonsense name, or the start of a nursery rhyme. He shed it as soon as he learned that there was an American abbreviation. At home, he remained Michael. Everywhere else, he was, from the moment he could say it without an accent, Mike Nichols.
Nichols’s recollection that they “just had fun” papered over a great deal of pain that began almost immediately upon their arrival in the United States. The reunion with their father did not last long. Paul Nichols had counted on a future in which Brigitte would arrive with the children and take care of them while he worked. Even if he had been ready to serve as a full-time parent to two little boys, he didn’t have the disposition for it—the first bedtime story he ever told Mike was about the sinking of the Titanic—and he had not yet found an apartment suitable for a family of four. Within days of their disembarking, he sent Mike and Robert off to live on Long Island with two of his new patients, a well-to-do British couple with children of their own who had agreed to take care of his boys while he established himself in Manhattan. For the next several months, the two were essentially foster children. They rarely saw their father and lived in a home in which they were treated as second-class citizens. “They were awful,” Nichols said of his caretakers. “They would kiss their own children good night, then shake our hands. We’d get a spoonful of milk of magnesia and go to bed.”
It was nearly a year before Brigitte arrived and the family was reunited. The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was still in place when she received permission to rejoin her Russian husband in America. She left Berlin in March 1940, her naturalization papers identifying her as Russian rather than German. Growing up, the boys were told that she was one of the last Jews to be allowed to leave Germany—that they had been saved from losing their mother by a matter of weeks, if not days. It was not precisely true—in fact, Brigitte would work hard for the next year and a half to bring her older sister over—but it was consistent with her sense that her well-being was terribly precarious, and it was close enough to accurate for Nichols to feel that “we had somehow miraculously walked through the flames and landed on West 70th Street . . . I almost felt guilty.”
At the time the Nichols family settled in Manhattan, Jews represented a quarter of the city’s population. No longer clustered on the Lower East Side, as their ancestors had been fifty years earlier, they had moved into, and reshaped, other neighborhoods. Still locked out of residential buildings on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, where “business and social references required” in real estate listings was a barely coded way of saying “No Jews allowed,” they looked elsewhere. Many chose the Upper West Side, where poorer Jews lived in tenements with Black and Puerto Rican neighbors, middle-class families found apartments on West End Avenue or Riverside Drive, and the wealthiest lived on Central Park West. Other Jewish families had moved into Harlem, where, after thirty years, many of them were now leaving for the prettier streets of Morningside Heights or Washington Heights, or enclaves near Mosholu Parkway, in the Bronx, or Williamsburg or parts of Queens. Most New York Jews just before the United States entered World War II were not religious; a survey at the time showed that 72 percent of young Jewish men had attended no services in the past year. Of those who chose the Upper West Side, as the Nicholses were planning to, about half worked in clothing manufacturing; they liked the neighborhood because it was an easy subway commute a few miles south to the Garment District.
Paul Nichols soon found a place one block north of where he’d been staying—a new six-story building at 155 West Seventy-first Street where he could afford a first-floor office to see patients and two rooms on the fifth floor to live. It was neither a slum nor a luxury high-rise, just a modest apartment building on a middle-class street off Broadway where immigrant Jews could find a foothold and begin a new life. It was named, perfectly, Gatsby House. In 1941, Nichols and his family moved in.
Conditions were fine for the children, but cramped for the adults, especially two adults whose marriage had been tempestuous in Berlin, who hadn’t seen each other for almost two years, and who were used to the privacy and autonomy that more space had afforded them. Here, the boys shared the bedroom and their parents slept on a hide-a-bed in the sunken living room; two steps up were a little dining area and a kitchenette. “It was a very small apartment,” says Robert Nichols, “but I think we were comfortable financially. There was no sense of deprivation at all in our early childhood. Life was good, finally.” As he had in Berlin, Paul Nichols was quickly able to build a word-of-mouth practice that attracted artists and musicians. Among his patients were the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the music-and-concert impresario Sol Hurok, whose insignia, “S. Hurok Presents,” was a familiar sight affixed to a recital or a performance. Sometimes there would be free tickets from grateful patients who found their new doctor witty and charming. (Hurok enjoyed Nichols’s company but later told him, “You’re not as funny as your father.”) Paul Nichols was soon able to afford a Packard Clipper to get around the city for house calls.
Mike picked up English quickly. “I remember being on the schoolbus,” he said, and, seeing an ambulance, “saying ‘What means EM-er-GEN-cy?’ and then knowing it a couple of weeks later. And then the next stage, which all refugee kids remember, which is when you speak English and your parents speak German. They [speak] in German, you answer in English. And then there’s this weird sort of bastardizing of language that also happens in a refugee family: ‘Haster den room ge sweeped?’” His parents had initially enrolled him at Dalton, one of the best of the private schools in Manhattan that accepted Jews, and he was immediately advanced to the fourth grade. As a consequence, he missed the year in which his classmates had been taught cursive writing, and never caught up. “To this day,” he said at thirty-five, “I have the handwriting of an idiot.”
“He printed everything, all his life,” says the director Jack O’Brien, a longtime friend. “He couldn’t make a cursive line. Those sweet stories he tells about ‘emergency’ and learning the language are standard Mike, and they’re lovely, but my feeling is, he was terribly cowed by America, and he didn’t have the confidence in the pen that he had in his imagination, both visually and orally. I think that he didn’t believe the written word was his métier. So he left it behind.”
Dalton was the first of “a series of very chic . . . schools where we were taught French from playing cards and were served something every hour—second breakfast, mid-morning snack, hearty lunch, early afternoon cookies,” said Nichols. He learned fast, but he still couldn’t blend in. He spoke with an accent and wore a cap indoors to conceal his hairless head; his father would not get him a wig, believing that it was better for him to get used to his condition. “Children used to yell, ‘Hey, baldy!’” says Robert Nichols. The playground was a nightmare. The best Mike could hope for, he later said, was to be “the most popular of the unpopular kids.” One of his schoolmates that first year was Henry Zuckerman, who decades later would change his name to Buck Henry and become one of Nichols’s most important collaborators. The two barely got to know each other. “The kid was as far outside as an outsider could get,” Henry said. “I was a zero,” said Nichols. “In every way that mattered, I was powerless.”
Mike’s parents had little time or inclination to coddle him. His father could be jovial—“What I loved him for,” said Nichols, “even when he wasn’t noticeably loving me, is that he had great vitality and joy.” At his warmest, he would send Mike into fits of laughter by dancing around the apartment in his underwear. Socially, he was dapper, elegant, a wit and a storyteller, the life of every party. But he was often absent, and when he was at home, “he could rage” and would on occasion threaten to call the police when the kids misbehaved. “He had no idea what to do,” said Nichols. And his mother was busy; soon after arriving, she started working at home as a typist, completing or translating letters and manuscripts for fellow immigrants. Being told to “go out and play” was, for Mike, like receiving an order to endure public humiliation. So he made his world smaller. He stayed home and played chess after school with Gordon Rogoff, a boy his age who sometimes came to the building to visit his aunt and uncle, and would show up only after being firmly nudged by them to go spend some time with Mike. “What I understood was that I was probably the only person his age who might be willing to play with him,” said Rogoff.
And when Mike’s parents would go out—sometimes together, sometimes separately—the older teenage girl they hired to babysit couldn’t coax him out of the apartment. “He wasn’t a happy child,” says Marianne Mosbach, a German Jewish refugee who would come over, play with the boys, and do her homework after putting them to bed. “All the kids would make fun of him, and he would come home from school in a pretty bad mood. I was smart enough never to ask him ‘How was your day?’ because of the way he would stomp in.” Instead of going to the park or the playground, they would make paper boats out of old newspapers and push them around in the sink until Mike got bored or irritated at losing an improvised race. Then he would putter around the small kitchen alone, making his own snacks and experimenting with food. “He would take leftover coffee and put it in the freezer to make cubes for iced coffee,” says Mosbach. “His mother thought that was very clever.” He warned Mosbach to leave him alone unless he needed something on a high shelf. He didn’t want company.
“I was motivated then, and for a long time after, by revenge,” said Nichols. That angry little boy remained embedded within, “saying ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ And I can’t stop him.”
He didn’t last long at Dalton. After a year, his parents moved him to the neighborhood public school, P.S. 87, where he was treated roughly and, for the first time since coming to America, encountered anti-Semitism from one of his instructors, who referred to him as “a Jewish kid” in a tone of manifest hostility. Mike knew that Hitler hated Jews, but it seemed to him that this teacher must have been talking about someone else, not a boy who was already used to Christmas presents and Easter eggs and had never seen the inside of a synagogue, who was, says Robert Nichols, “about as un-Jewish as it’s possible for a Jew to be.”
“I came home a little concerned, and my mother was great. She sort of put an arm around me . . . and she told me what it meant to be a Jew and what the problems were,” Nichols said. “None of this had ever been spoken about before, or she wouldn’t have had to have this little talk.”
During the school year, Mike grew even angrier and became increasingly ungovernable, talking back at home, refusing to get out of bed in the morning, and sometimes cutting school altogether and hiding out in the cavernous Beacon Theatre, a 2,900-seat movie palace a few blocks away, with plenty of balconies and recesses where a kid could make himself scarce. “It was sort of my playground,” he said. Mike loved the movies, but there was no thunderclap, no “This is what I want to do with my life” moment. The theater was just a comfortable refuge from an apartment where he felt “landlocked,” caught between parents who, when they weren’t mad at him, were at each other’s throats, either about him or about things he didn’t yet understand. Nichols’s father was impatient, and his mother, who saw herself as being in a semi-permanent state of frail health, was now desperately trying to raise more than $1,000 to sponsor her older sister’s emigration. (Those efforts would fail; Gudula would survive the war but spend it hidden in the house of a social worker outside Berlin.) “It was hard for them to have a fresh little kid around,” said Nichols, “which I was.” Finally, at a loss, they sent him away. At ten, he was enrolled in Cherry Lawn, a boarding school in Darien, Connecticut, about an hour from home. He would remain there for the next three years, returning to New York every weekend and for vacations and holidays.
The new school didn’t lack bullies, including one who would routinely hold his head underwater. But as he entered junior high, Mike was a little less given to anger and sullenness. Instead, like many outsiders, he grew watchful. With his accent now all but gone, he was less of a target and more able to observe other kids from the sidelines. “I think there is an immigrant’s ear that is particularly acute for ‘How are they doing it here? What must I do to be unnoticeable, to be like them?’” he said. “You’re forever looking at something as someone who just got here.” Cherry Lawn had more options than his public school had offered, including a drama department, but Mike had little desire to put himself onstage—and, his teacher told him, little aptitude. She “said I was intelligent and not in any way suited to the theater. I think she was right,” he would joke soon after his first directorial success. Instead he preferred to watch other kids, onstage and off. What did popularity look like? Or confidence? Or Americanness? How did kids behave with their friends? How did some people just naturally become the center of attention? And, conversely, who hung back? He learned to spot nervousness, vulnerability, diffidence—what it looks like when your joke fails, when you start to talk and nobody listens, when you boast because you’re afraid of something. “You must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense,” he said, “you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger, where is their generosity?”
No longer trapped in two rooms seven days a week, no longer under the constant examination of his high-strung mother and his gruff father, Mike found it surprisingly easier to deal with both of them when he did go home. Family time was now a special occasion; weekends were treats, made bittersweet by the knowledge of how quickly he would be back on the train to Connecticut. Over one Thanksgiving holiday, his mother took him to Midtown for the premiere of Casablanca at the Hollywood Theatre. The opening was coincident with the Allied push into North Africa, and they sat near representatives of de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, who sang along to “La Marseillaise.” Sometimes they’d attend a Broadway musical like One Touch of Venus. Nichols was interested in plays as well; in the seventh and eighth grades, probably after seeing Ah, Wilderness!, he read every Eugene O’Neill play he could find, enthralled, as someone who had worked hard and quickly to master English, to discover that “you can be a very great writer without necessarily using words very well. That was a whole startling idea.” As an audience member, “I liked the theater very much,” he said. “But movies were where you could watch and not be you. You could be a lot of other people. I liked that. And it was always mixed with, oy, I’m gonna get sent away again.”
By 1943, Mike knew, even though he wasn’t home to witness it all the time, that his parents’ marriage was in trouble. “As my mother later explained to me, Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t have marital difficulties. It wasn’t possible to concentrate on such luxuries,” he said. But now, whatever his parents had long suppressed was exploding, and without much of a sense of discretion. When they fought, he would escape to the Beacon when he could—“‘I’m going to the movies’ became ‘Screw this, and screw you,’” he said.
“There were a lot of problems,” says Marianne Mosbach, whom Brigitte now had looking after Robert. “There was a lot of discord. His mother was absolutely beautiful. She had gorgeous skin and a beautifully shaped face and a very soft, seductive voice that she used to her advantage. At the time, she wasn’t focused very much on her kids. Many men admired her and I think that after her time in Germany, she enjoyed the attention.” She barely bothered to conceal her affairs, nor did Paul have the slightest interest in hiding his.
Mike had little doubt that his parents were heading for divorce when tragedy struck the family. Paul Nichols had been feeling tired and ill, and one day he went downstairs to his office, examined his own blood under a microscope, and diagnosed himself with leukemia. He believed it was a result of exposure to radiation in his first months in America, when he was improperly shielded from the X-ray equipment he was running.
“He had a sense of drama,” says Robert Nichols. “One memory I have is . . . of him standing, when I was eight years old, at the threshold of our living room. He said, ‘I have a terrible sore throat.’ And he went downstairs and looked into the microscope.” When Paul Nichols returned to the apartment, Robert says, “my mother, who helped him in the office, says he said [in German], ‘You poor child. I have only two weeks to live.’”
His decline was shockingly swift. He was hospitalized immediately with what doctors assured him was mononucleosis rather than leukemia. “All his doctor friends said, ‘Oh, no, it looks like it, but it isn’t,’” said Nichols. “They told my mother to lie to him, and of course she couldn’t.” Mike was called home from school immediately. He sat by his father’s hospital bed, looking at the bottle of urine being collected at its side, and at the stubble on his face, something he and his brother had never seen before. Paul Nichols died when he predicted he would, about two weeks later, in June 1944. He was forty-four years old.
“I wish I’d known him longer. We missed each other. We were just getting to the point when we might have found each other,” said Nichols. “He died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.”