Nobody at the University of Chicago knew what to make of Elaine May when she first showed up. She and Nichols could not have been a less likely match. May was born in Philadelphia, where her father, Jack Berlin, was a performer and director of Yiddish theater; her mother, Ida, sold tickets and made the programs. They first put May onstage when she was a baby. Eventually they moved to California, where their daughter dropped out of ninth grade, married and divorced a man named Marvin May at sixteen, and by nineteen had studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, worked as a private investigator, and decided it might be interesting to go to college. May had also become a mother; she and her ex-husband had a toddler named Jeannie, whom she left with her mother before hitchhiking to Chicago to get an education at one of the only American universities that didn’t require its students to have a high school diploma.
On campus, May came off as a sharp, tense, and wary woman among children. She didn’t bother to register for classes; she just showed up in seminars and lecture halls, already apparently conversant in every piece of literature anyone could mention, or able to fake it with such sangfroid that others fell silent. She would usually vanish before students or professors could get a bead on her. The night she saw Nichols for the first time, she said she “loathed [him] on sight.”
May could be somewhat forbidding at first glance—she wore a near-constant frown and had long dark hair through which she only occasionally thought to run a comb. Boys were wildly attracted to her; she couldn’t have had less use for their leering and jesting. One day, when she went into a coffee shop looking windblown and unkempt, a couple of guys laughed at her. “Hi, Elaine—did you bring your broom today?” one yelled. “Why?” she snapped. “Do you want something up your ass? Tired of each other?” Male students learned, if not to keep their distance, to approach her with caution and respect.
But she and Nichols had something in common besides the hostility that Sills had pointed out. “We were both seductive,” Nichols said, “and we were both very much on the defensive with other people. We both had big chips on our shoulders—chips that we in different ways whittled away at during the course of our lives and reduced in size.” In addition, they shared “reputations on campus as being dangerous to vicious depending on the stimulus, and so we were both interested in each other from that point of view.”
If, given the rather dramatic sense of themselves they shared, they were destined to become romantically involved, they did not remain so for long. David Shepherd, the cofounder of the Compass Players, the theater that was soon to become their training ground, referred to their liaison as “the three days that Mike lived with Elaine.” And a decade later, in response to press questions, Nichols would either joke it away (“We live very quietly and we date occasionally—right now, we are seeing Comden and Green,” he told Time magazine) or take what was already shrouded in mystery and render it even murkier. Did they sleep together? “No,” he told Playboy, “we never did . . . Maybe we did once or twice.” Whatever it was, he said, lasted “only sort of for a minute.”
Soon after they met, May, who could not have been less interested in domesticity, took him back to her place on the South Side, where they both lived, made him a hamburger with cream cheese and ketchup—one of the only things she could cook—and showed him her copy of the Kama Sutra, which she thought was a potentially interesting tool for improv. He was smitten. So, in her way, was she. That the two of them, both just twenty years old at the end of the school year, were too young and combustible to sustain themselves as a couple was hardly a shock. What was more surprising was how quickly they realized it and decided they wanted, perhaps even needed, to cling to each other as friends. After their stab at romance, Nichols knew they had found something deeper: He believed they would always, from then on, exempt each other from their cruelty. “She could, God knows, defend herself when attacked. But her toughness was an illusion,” he said. May saw in Nichols someone who could lift her spirits—“I’m a much more negative person than you,” she told him after a lifetime of work and friendship, “and I always have been: I the darkness, you the light.” And in May, Nichols saw something he had never found before. He felt early on, he said, that they were “safe from each other forever. We can’t do each other any harm or say anything wrong to each other.” And he also sensed that “she wouldn’t lose interest and move on. I knew instantly that everything that happened to us was ours.”
Their creative partnership would have to wait a little while. May was there to study; she had not been able to stand the regimentation of high school for more than three weeks, but she loved to read, and with the benefit of a couple of years at Chicago, she said, “I thought I would become extremely educated.” Nichols, however, had no interest in finishing his four years, and soon after he and May met, he dropped out to pursue acting full-time. He took whatever nearby jobs he could find, working just enough to get by. He was a clerk at Sears and a post office truck driver during the Christmas rush. At night he managed a tree nursery. And whenever possible, he continued working with Sills, who was now conducting formal classes in acting technique and theater games. Nichols loved them. “Once every [so often] you would . . . be possessed and speak languages you didn’t speak,” he said. “Like doing twenty minutes of iambic pentameter that we had not thought of but just came pouring out. That was thrilling. You’d be drained and amazed afterward, and you’d have a sense of your possibilities.”
Sills was ready to take the next step. He had gone as far with Tonight at 8:30 as he could; he wanted to start a semi-professional company. In 1953, he, Shepherd, and Eugene Troobnick founded the Playwrights Theatre Club on North LaSalle Street, in downtown Chicago, in a storefront that had last housed a Chinese restaurant. The company couldn’t afford to pay its members a living wage. What little money there was came from Shepherd, an owlish, serious-minded twenty-nine-year-old Harvard grad with an M.A. in theater from Columbia who came from a wealthy family. Shepherd knew little about acting but was full of lofty ideas about creating political theater for the proletariat, and he was impressed by Sills’s work. The two envisioned a repertory company that would perform Brecht and Cocteau and Büchner but also plays by its own founders; the shows would be rehearsed for a week or ten days and then given a bare-bones staging with minimal costumes and props over a weekend. The troupe Sills assembled included many of the actors from his classes, a couple of recent graduates like Ed Asner, and some new arrivals—including Tom O’Horgan (later the director of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar) and Barbara Harris, a teenager who showed up one day, saw that a group of people were putting on a play, and said, “Can I be in it?” They gave her a job sweeping up. “She just wandered in and turned out to be a genius,” Nichols said. “That’s how Paul was. He said, come and do it, you’ll be okay—anybody that wanted to.”
May was one of the only members of the acting company who could also write, and Sills created a children’s theater program within Playwrights so he could stage her version of Rumpelstiltskin. Nichols was around a little less. He had just gotten a job that was turning him into a minor local celebrity, working as the DJ of a classical music program at WFMT, a mom-and-pop radio station. His roster was thoughtfully curated, but it was his droll, anarchic patter between selections—his engineer, Cal Herrmann, remembers him ripping a teletype off the machine, then urgently announcing, “There is no news tonight!”—that built him a cult following in the area. Sometimes friends and fans would even come to the studio to watch him work. Soon WFMT let him start a new weekend show, The Midnight Special, an eclectic hour of folk music, oddities, and LP cuts determined entirely by his own taste and whims. “There was a lot of folk, but there were also songs by Charlotte Rae and Flanders & Swann, and Wally Cox singing ‘There Is a Tavern in the Town,’” says the writer Deborah Eisenberg, who, as a kid in the Chicago suburbs, listened regularly and found herself transfixed by the amused, polished sound of the man whose references seemed limitless without being intimidating. “[Mike’s] voice was so reassuring, so natural, so actual. It all suggested a big world that existed elsewhere.”
The radio gig was Nichols’s first real taste of attention, but it locked up his Friday and Saturday nights, which meant he had to turn down Sills and Shepherd’s offer to become a full-time member of Playwrights. When he could—and sometimes even when he couldn’t—he would sneak away to join them, to the ongoing consternation of the couple who owned the station. “He was funny and knowledgeable but totally unreliable,” said Aaron Asher. “They fired him a number of times.”
Like many enterprises founded and run by creative people in their twenties, Playwrights was inherently, almost comically unstable and quarrelsome. From the moment of its founding, it was in a state of churn, contention, and high-minded dispute. Sills was performer driven; he wanted a theater where actors would feel “liberated,” often via improvisation, to construct a “shared reality” that would “raise the consciousness of the community.” Shepherd cared very little about technique; he wanted plays and productions that would change the world and speed the revolution.
But both men imagined a theater that could serve as a finger in the eye of an increasingly uptight and conservative society. At the time, Sills said, “the main thing we experienced was the repression of any kind of deviant behavior under the guise of anti-Communism.” None of them could understand why there weren’t more people, especially artists, fighting it. “A pall of McCarthyism lay over the land,” said Bernie Sahlins, a producer at Playwrights, “and all you heard on TV were mother-in-law jokes.” Playwrights was originally envisioned as a savage, destabilizing cultural counterthrust. But it took less than a year for Shepherd to become utterly disillusioned by the work they were doing and by the audience it was attracting. “I have built a miserable, self-centered arts club which talks over the heads of its bourgeois members at the same time it licks their feet for support,” he fumed in his journal in May 1954. “For a brief moment last fall . . . Paul and I saw that the goal of our theater should be a riot in the audience. How could we forget it?”
By that point, Nichols was ready to move on. He had been acting in Chicago on and off for three years, and he had dipped in and out of productions at Playwrights, appearing when he could. But he didn’t share Shepherd’s ideological fervor; like most of the group’s actors, he had one eye on his own career, and he no longer felt he was making progress, either professionally or creatively. The theater scene in Chicago was growing every year, but it still had nothing like the national reputation it would eventually acquire; it was a breeding ground for committed amateurs and little more than a whistle stop for touring stars from New York. Nichols’s ambition was considerable; when a road production of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour arrived in Chicago, he had sought out its star Patricia Neal to ask her to record a Roald Dahl story for their theater. Neal agreed to do it, but when he told her of his desire to become an actor, she looked at the yearning, ungainly young man in the ill-fitting toupee and gently tried to push him away from show business.
Nichols wasn’t dissuaded, but his confidence in his own abilities was waning. “At some point at Playwrights Theatre Club,” says troupe member Joy Carlin, “we looked at each other and I said, ‘I don’t know how to act.’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t either. What do we do?’” It didn’t take him long to decide. He quit his job at WFMT and said goodbye to May, Sills, and the company. In the summer of 1954, after almost five years away, he moved back to New York City.
Nichols had almost no money—a condition that now felt permanent to him—but he did have a plan: He wanted to study with Lee Strasberg, the director and teacher who had, a couple of years earlier, taken charge of the Actors Studio. Strasberg had become something between an instructor and a mystic for performers who wanted to learn the Method—a process that combined psychology, technique, and disciplined use of emotional memory to elicit deep feeling and naturalistic, fully inhabited performances. Brando was Method personified; by 1954, when On the Waterfront opened, every actor wanted to be him. Nichols couldn’t afford to enter the official Actors Studio program, but Strasberg also taught actors on the side, in groups of twenty, and admitted Nichols to his twice-weekly class.
With his mother and brother long settled in Philadelphia, Nichols, at twenty-two, was truly on his own in New York for the first time, ready to begin what he thought would be his adult life. He got a job behind the counter at a Howard Johnson’s in Greenwich Village and moved into the last bad Manhattan apartment he would ever occupy, an eight-dollar-a-week, one-room third-floor walk-up with a communal toilet at the end of the hall, in a West Eighty-seventh Street brownstone near Riverside Park. Joy Carlin moved into a much nicer apartment across the street, sharing it with two young women.
To join the ranks of New York City’s aspiring actors in the mid-1950s was to be suspended equidistant between opportunity and starvation. Sixty or seventy new shows opened on Broadway every season and, farther downtown, smaller, more adventurous and experimental theaters were sprouting in any vacant spot big enough to hold a stage and fifty seats. There were radio serials and fifteen-minute daytime soaps, and a booming local TV production industry that kept the three major networks regularly supplied with sixty- and ninety-minute dramas, often telecast live. Scouts from the studios would sweep through regularly to eye the new talent. To Nichols and his friends, success looked as simple as an agent or a manager or a producer pointing a finger and saying “You.” An actress struggling with a scene in Strasberg’s class one week could land a role on TV or Broadway the next and be gone, only to return, unemployed again, six months—or sometimes six days—later. They all knew about his student Paul Newman, who would still sit in once in a while and had gotten regular TV roles and even a movie contract. Making it big felt alternately imminent and impossible, and the sudden luck of a classmate was both celebrated and obsessively picked to pieces: Had they sold out? Had they really earned their shot? Was it because they were Lee’s favorite? Weren’t there people right in their midst who were so much more deserving? Yes, Newman was handsome, but was he really that good?
Nichols had little to his name but a bed and a TV, which he would watch night after night in search of a single role that he could imagine himself playing. He had come to New York believing that he was a castable type—“nervous young man” was the category he imagined for himself—but as he watched Philco Television Playhouse or Producers’ Showcase or General Electric Theater, he said, “I couldn’t find any part that was right for me.”
Initially, his work in Strasberg’s classes gave him some hope. The room was full of young talent—Gene Hackman would show up, and Carroll Baker, just a year away from being cast by Kazan in Baby Doll, and Inger Stevens, a beautiful, fragile nineteen-year-old from Sweden whom Nichols started dating casually—and they were all impressed by him. It was obvious that “he was exceptionally gifted,” Baker wrote. “While the rest of us were making an effort just to place one foot in front of the other without tripping, Mike was showing signs of being a brilliant comedian.” His work with Sills in Chicago was paying dividends. “He could make even a simple exercise hysterically funny in an absolutely genuine way.”
But Baker declined to work with Nichols in class—“he’d end up directing you,” she said. When paired with another actor, he would find himself steering and modifying the scene almost unconsciously. “What I didn’t really understand,” he said later, “was that [Strasberg] was not only teaching acting, he was teaching directing. I didn’t understand that I was listening to the director part. I never knew it.” In fact, he had no thought of directing at all. “I keep thinking, we can do what we want to do,” he wrote to a friend that year. “I better reconcile myself to keep trying to be an actor. Nothing else will do.”
“Strasberg . . . said the best thing about acting I’ve heard to this day,” Nichols said. “A girl was doing a scene and he said, ‘What were you working for?’ And she said, ‘Oh, spring, and just the feeling of longing.’ He said, ‘Do you know how to make fruit salad?’ She said yeah. He said, ‘How?’ She said, ‘I take some apples and peel them and cut them up, and take a banana and peel it and cut it, and an orange . . .” He said, ‘That’s right. That’s how you make fruit salad. You can sit in front of it for weeks, saying, ‘Fruit salad.’ But you will never have fruit salad until you pick up each piece, one at a time . . . It’s the most useful metaphor I’ve heard for working on a play. You do the first job as neatly as you can: He comes in. Then: He sees her. And so on.”
More than anything, Nichols wanted to learn “how to be in the course of your life [and] performing a play” night after night, making it new and real each time. He liked Strasberg’s notion that the director creates the events of the play, but he was even more drawn to Kazan’s conviction that psychology onstage is best illuminated when it is made manifest in physical behavior. He felt he was growing in skill every week; if he couldn’t get cast in great roles right away, he told a friend, maybe he would eventually age into a career as a comic character actor, like Robert Morley. But as the months went by, he couldn’t help but notice how quickly his contemporaries seemed to be moving ahead while he stood still. His Chicago classmate Zohra Lampert, who had also come east, was now in the cast of a daytime soap opera called Hawkins Falls. Carroll Baker got a Robert Anderson play on Broadway. And his casual girlfriend Stevens “hit the jackpot,” he wrote to Carlin, who had left New York to go on her honeymoon in Mexico. “She had a lead on Philco three weeks ago and from then on she was in . . . She had her picture in Time magazine . . . The caption was ‘From Sweden, big eyed silences’ and the article said as how she was hauntingly attractive and her silences were more eloquent than all the speeches of the other actors . . . Well, she’s been on a TV show every week since then . . . and may get a cover story on Life. She is being great about the whole thing,” he said, remarking sourly, “I am continually astonished at the minimum of acting ability that is required, once you’re in a little bit.”
Nichols was getting nothing, and he was increasingly unable to afford even the modest tuition that Strasberg required. Howard Johnson’s fired him for mouthing off to a customer. (Asked what the cafeteria’s ice cream flavor of the month was, he had snappishly replied, “Chicken.”) For a while, he worked as a runner for the spoken-word label Caedmon Records, which, like every other employer he encountered in the city, seemed remarkably unimpressed with his potential. “I would get terrific ideas like, ‘Let’s have Robert Frost reading his own work,’” he said, “and they would say, ‘Take this package to 105th Street.’”
Joy Carlin’s husband, Jerry, who had come with her from Chicago, was also a friend of Nichols’s; the newlyweds would sometimes meet him in Greenwich Village, then walk five miles uptown to Eighty-seventh Street, winding through the Theater District, chatting earnestly about their futures. They knew Nichols was suffering; during his time at Howard Johnson’s, he would pocket ketchup and mustard packets, then walk over to the Horn & Hardart Automat, get a cup of hot water, mix the free soda crackers on the table into it, and squirt in the condiments. Sometimes that would be dinner; sometimes it would be cheese he stole from the grocery store; sometimes, when he was lucky, Joy and her roommates would bring leftovers to his small, disheveled room, where, she said, “the smell of acetone”—the wig-glue remover he used—“would just hit you in the face. He was really struggling. It was horrible.”
At one point, the Carlins, seeing Nichols losing a battle with his circumstances, urged him to get on the phone with Sills and consider returning to Chicago and Playwrights Theatre Club. But Nichols’s time with Strasberg had caused Sills to tumble in his estimation; he had come to believe that Sills “castrated his actors” and had “no method with which to communicate with” them. Besides, he said, “right now I feel I can’t go home again.”
But he was out of options. “I was in class, and I was doing good,” he wrote to Joy. “Like, I cried during the song exercise and all that. But . . . I’m getting farther behind and all, and one day Lee says to me . . . there’ll always be a place for me in class but maybe I better drop out for a while until I can get back on my feet, and I allowed as how this seemed the only thing to do.”
Then he got lucky: A man to whom he had applied for a radio-hosting job months earlier told him there was an opening in Philadelphia. The position came with a good salary and hours flexible enough to allow him to commute to New York twice a week for Strasberg’s classes. In December 1954, Nichols essentially moved home. “The idea,” he told Carlin, “is to save till I have paid my debts and accrued enough backing to return and tilt at New York again. In the meantime I go to bed at nine every night, get up promptly at four thirty in the morning . . . drive out in the family car, which is mine to use, and work till twelve or one. I live in a beautiful room . . . near my family with whom I eat dinner. I have eighteen clean white shirts. I go into New York most weekends to see the gang. It’s a regular metamorphosis.”
For several months, Nichols enjoyed his new life in Philadelphia as a morning DJ—he played classical music and poetry and even got an acting job as, of all things, an Italian immigrant on the radio station’s apparently terrible local soap opera, Rittenhouse Square. But his heart was in New York, and, according to Jerome Toobin, a co-worker at the station with whom he became friendly, he didn’t last long. “Like all little stations with frugal bosses, ours was a one-man operation at sign-on time,” Toobin wrote. “Mike would arrive at, let us say, 7:14 a.m. and sign on cheerily with a ‘Good morning, it’s seven o’clock!’ Sometimes he arrived earlier—7:08—sometimes later—7:21—but he always said seven o’clock. None of the brass knew—for a while. One morning the owner happened to hear Nichols announce that it was 7 a.m. on his car radio, looked at his watch, drove to the station and fired [him] on the spot.” Nichols didn’t seem particularly upset—or if he was, he put on a brave face, saying that he “couldn’t stand Philadelphia anymore.”
On one of his weekend visits to New York, Nichols agreed to meet with Sills and Barbara Harris, who had just gotten married. The Playwrights Theatre Club—which, despite its name and the intentions behind it, had not succeeded in commissioning any production-worthy new work—had outlasted David Shepherd’s disillusionment with it by only a few months. It had been forced to move twice and had fallen apart for good in February 1955, when its latest venue failed a fire code inspection. Shepherd regrouped and made plans to form a new theater company in Chicago called the Compass Players, which he intended to be driven by new writing, preferably about issues of the day; he would populate it with many Playwrights alumni, including Sills. But the loose, fluctuating group of fifteen or twenty would-be actors, producers, writers, and directors who had constituted the nucleus of Playwrights had reached an awkward turning point, with some committing to careers in the theater and others drifting away from what had been a hobby and moving toward families and steady jobs. Much of the remaining troupe was still so young that the Compass’s ranks had shrunk noticeably with the start of the school year in September.
Sills and Shepherd still didn’t see eye to eye on the group’s mission: Shepherd envisioned a slate of “newspaper plays,” a rotating set of one-acts that would be inspired by the day’s headlines and form the Compass’s core repertoire. Sills was more interested in spontaneity and improvisation. But both agreed that, this time, they needed a group of professional, fully committed actors. Like many of the leaders of the just barely budding Chicago theater scene, Sills viewed New York talent with some skepticism—he didn’t want anyone to think his work needed to be legitimized by out-of-town recruits. But Nichols was different—they had worked together before, and Sills couldn’t dismiss the fact that he had studied with Strasberg. Sills himself had won a Fulbright scholarship and was leaving Chicago for six months in Europe with Harris; after discussing it with Shepherd, he agreed to stop in New York long enough to try to talk Nichols and a couple of other actors into returning to Chicago. As an incentive, Shepherd offered them a modest but workable salary of $28 a week.
Nichols wasn’t sure how to play it. With friends in Philadelphia, he was airy and offhand; he went over to dinner at the house of a friend named Herbert Gans, told him he had saved some money, “and said, ‘I am either going to buy a new car or go back to Chicago.’ A funny choice,” recalls Gans, “but I didn’t ask.” On the other hand, Nichols knew what it would look like to his New York pals: a retreat by an actor who had tried to make it and not only failed, but failed after having been fired even from the jobs he had taken in order to scrape by. Nichols knew how to put on a good front—he’d been doing it every day since he first arrived in Chicago, six years earlier. But he wouldn’t lie to himself. “If I’d stayed in New York with Lee Strasberg, who was very important to me, and just tried to be an actor, nothing would have happened,” he said. “I slunk back to Chicago.”
Privately, Nichols was enthusiastic, even a little excited. He had, after all, finally been offered full-time work as an actor, which was what he wanted, although not where he wanted it. Sills had characterized the new venture as a “cabaret,” which sounded promising. And Elaine May would be there. They hadn’t been in touch, but Nichols felt they were not through with each other yet. He couldn’t stop thinking about “her and that train station and those hamburgers she made me in her apartment, and what came with them.” His feeling that there was more for them to explore—perhaps as a couple, perhaps not—was decisive. He took the job.