The Elaine May whom Nichols encountered when he returned to Chicago was no longer the campus terror he had first met three years earlier but an intensely focused theater artist. By the fall of 1955, May had become indispensable to the newly formed Compass Players. For one thing, the group tilted male, which meant, she said, that she “got all the parts that called for a girl who could wear a trenchcoat and a beret.” It also meant that many of the men she worked with wanted her, something she had learned to navigate in a way that would preserve her growing status without demolishing guys who could then punish her for rejecting them. (“If I kiss, I fuck, and I don’t want to fuck,” she told one potential suitor pleasantly.)
The group’s younger members were dazzled and baffled by her. “Elaine was very much into thought, and very sophisticated, and very smart,” said Barbara Harris. “[But she] was so . . . well . . . incompetent in terms of being able to get her clothes on. I was somehow more able to iron my clothes.” The idea of putting things away or tidying up was utterly alien to her. “Physical reality,” Nichols said later, “does not interest her.”
To Sills, May had become an adviser, counseling him on casting and pushing him to notice talent he might otherwise overlook. And Shepherd knew the group needed her in order to succeed—something the men of the Compass conceded only with great condescension. At first they patronized her as a kind of savant. “She knew everything about the theatre and psychoanalysis,” said James Sacks, who dated her at the time. “She didn’t know about anything else. She didn’t know if Eisenhower was a Republican or a Democrat.” But they understood that without May, the whole fragile enterprise might collapse. Playwrights Theater Club had relied largely on staging the classics, but Compass shows were supposed to consist of new material, and May was one of the few performers who could not only act and direct but write. Time and again, she would save them; they could barely bring themselves to thank her. “Every time she came in with material,” said Compass member Mark Gordon, “it was ‘Oh, my God, it’s awful, it’ll never work’ . . . Then we’d do it for people . . . and the audience would be hysterical loving it. And then somebody maybe would say, ‘Oh, I guess it’s all right.’ But there was never a recognition that Elaine’s stuff was fantastic.”
That summer, Shepherd had found a space for the Compass’s performances in Hyde Park, a nightspot called the Hi-Hat Lounge. Drinks were served at a long bar on one side; performances took place on the other. Their first efforts had a casual, seat-of-the-pants quality that its members valued, “a kind of generosity of energy and spirit,” Harris said. “We were pursuing something that we didn’t know would work. It wasn’t very down-to-earth.” At first, “we were guided by David’s political ideals. He would bring newspapers to work and choose what to deal with—what was happening with atomic bombs . . . whatever the political issues of the time were.”
“David was the sociopolitical point man,” said Ed Asner. “He wanted his People’s Theater . . . whereas Paul was the communicator to actors, the director, the inspirer.” The two men soon realized that they were facing the same dilemma: What good was a theater group if it had nothing to perform? Shepherd took out ads in New York trade papers offering $100 for any producible script. None arrived that met his standards—and the “newspaper plays” had too short a shelf life to sustain the group. So he came up with a different solution. By the time Nichols arrived to start work, Compass was relying on what Shepherd called “scenario plays”—a set of ideological one-acts that he and like-minded members of the company had contrived. “They all seemed to have a theme in common—how society molds people into the shape it wants them to take,” said Compass member Roger Bowen. “Compass was David Shepherd’s personality.”
Nichols was less interested in what he was going to play than in who he was going to play it with. From his first day back, Shepherd said, “he latched on to Elaine and that was the end of it. He was resolute.” Fred Wranovics, who ran the Hi-Hat, recalled seeing Nichols and May sitting in a back room. “It was like a summit meeting,” he said. “The two of them sat on these stools, testing each other’s ad-lib ability and spontaneity. Everyone was watching. It was like the Actors Studio versus the local fast gun. I guess they hit it off.”
Improvisation began at the Compass not because Shepherd had a taste for comedy: He was “not a man with a natural sense of humor—he [could] see the irony in things but not the joke,” said the playwright and improv historian Jeffrey Sweet. It was, rather, a way to make the shows long enough to justify charging admission. The first half of every Compass performance would be rehearsed playlets and sketches—some combination of the scenario plays, the news of the day, and anything else that someone, usually May, had gotten into performable shape. Then, after a break, the players would come back with a couple of scenes based on audience suggestions that had been solicited at the start of the evening—not pure in-the-moment improv, but as close as they had yet come. May, fast and confident, had a knack for it; Nichols didn’t, and found himself flailing. “He didn’t seem well,” said Shepherd, “didn’t seem healthy.” And he certainly didn’t seem like an actor worth importing from New York.
In his first days onstage, Nichols would try to shake things up, only to be thwarted by May’s desire to keep it all real, to respect the premise they had set up and see where it went. At one point during a sketch, he shoved a hand in his pocket, then whipped it out and aimed an imaginary gun at her. “Why are you pointing your finger at me?” she said, without missing a beat. It was embarrassing, and, he knew, his own fault. “I was horrible, the worst improviser anybody ever saw, for weeks if not months,” he said. Nor was he any better in the written sketches, where his persistent discomfort with physical action—sometimes because he was worried about his hairpiece—became a severe limitation. “One night we were doing Hansel and Gretel and Mike was playing the witch,” said Compass member Andrew Duncan. When the other actors “popped him into the oven”—a door with a slatted opening—“you heard this ‘Argh!’ . . . he had broken his collarbone.” Nichols became so nervous that he started smoking onstage—ostensibly as a character choice, but really to hide his shaking hands. He gravitated toward roles in his comfort zone—the know-it-all, the dandy, the snob—and, as had been the case since he first worked for Sills, he would barely move. “He would root himself in a chair and smoke,” said Duncan. “You could always tell when a Mike Nichols scene had been done, because afterward the stage would be littered with Kent Micronite filters.”
Every Compass performer saw May as their ticket to more stage time. Severn Darden, another actor Sills had lured back from New York, was a lightning-fast improviser with prodigious language skills; he could easily have paired with her. Shelley Berman, a more seasoned thirty-year-old comic, had primarily worked as a solo act, but he wanted in on sketches, too. Now that Barbara Harris was abroad with Sills, May was one of only two women regularly appearing in the shows. If you wanted to do anything about romance or dating or marriage or sex, a partnership with her was the way in.
But she stuck with Nichols, trusting their connection the same way he did. They would sit on the floor of her apartment and swoon over the same music, engaging in a kind of quasi-carnal intellectual frottage that they would eventually spoof on a famous track from their first album, or they would talk about the Russian novels they were both obsessively reading. “We were in a kind of ecstasy over literature,” he said. A line from The Brothers Karamazov—“All my life you will remain a wound in my soul and I in yours—that’s how it should be”—seemed to sum up their self-romanticizing feelings perfectly. Then they would eat—“cholesterol food,” May says, “flat food. Cheeses and flat steaks were the only food I could hide under my coat and steal. I couldn’t steal bread, because it was too bulky, so I would make sandwiches out of two steaks and some cheese. That would be our dinner. And then we would work on a scene and hang out.”
They both knew they were good for each other, even essential. May drew him out; she understood that if the lacerating wit he showed her in private could be brought out onstage, he would be unstoppable. And Nichols, in turn, knew how to help May tame her volatility and wariness without being too controlling. “One night,” she recalls, “Mike said, ‘We’re going to see my dear friends the Minnerles. Please don’t be mean. They’re nice people.’ So we go downstairs to the Minnerles, who lived in a basement. They had a parrot. She was beautiful; she was from Brazil; I remember he was tall. I was so bad at chat, and she said something about the weather, and I was alarmed immediately. I had no idea how to respond. I forget what I said, but it wasn’t good. When we left, Mike said to me, ‘Why are you so rude? Why? People talk about the weather—that’s how they begin things! Why do you go out on a date and say before you buy dessert, “I want you to know I’m not sleeping with you”? Why are you like that?’ And I thought, Why am I? I became aware that people were saying what they had to say just to begin a conversation. They’d say, ‘How are you?’ and I immediately thought, They don’t care! So I thought, I’m going to learn to say things like ‘Why, yes, it is hot’ or whatever it is you’re supposed to say. Years later I said to Mike, ‘You know, that night with the Minnerles changed my life.’ And he said, ‘Who are the Minnerles?’”
At first, May tried Nichols out in one of the scenario plays. “The Fifth Amendment” was a heartfelt tract about a man who gets a letter saying that he’s blacklisted and goes from friend to friend—the better to give every actor a role—asking them what to do. Repetitively structured, devoid of characterization, and brandishing its politics on its sleeve, it was the diametrical opposite of something May would have written, but in those days, she says, “anybody who didn’t go out to coffee at the right time had to direct,” and this time the task had fallen to her. The play had been plotted, but no dialogue was on paper; that was for the actors to come up with. Nichols braced himself. “I’m not funny,” he told her. “I can’t be funny.” So instead he decided to be extremely serious.
The result was a disaster. “At first,” May says, “he pantomimed opening this letter with Bobbi Gordon, who played the wife, and he looked at it and burst into tears. This was at the first rehearsal! She waited and waited while he cried, and then she got furious and said, ‘So what’s in the letter?’”
May reeled him in a bit, but by the night of the first public performance, she says, “he was nervous again, his energy was up, and he opened the letter, looked at the audience, and burst into tears. Again. Bobbi said, ‘What does it say?’ and he kept sobbing. Finally she had to say, ‘Let me see it’ and read him the letter.” In the following scene, Nichols was supposed to arrive at a friend’s house and ask four pals for advice. “One of them was Alex Hassilev, who was a wonderful guitar player,” says May. “What the scene was going to be was that he would talk to them and sing some songs. But Alex opened the door and Mike was still sobbing and couldn’t talk. He literally sobbed his way through the whole thing because he was so prepared, so Method. Afterward he apologized to everyone.”
The first time he and May tried to conceive their own scene was, if possible, even worse. “Mike said, ‘You know how when you’re going to break up with someone and they’re crazy about you, you think, Oh, I can’t, I don’t want to hurt them? And you do it, and then you see them with someone else and gradually you want them again?’” May recalls. She sparked to the feeling instantly. “Why don’t you call me,” she suggested, “and the phone is busy, and you call again and it’s still busy, and you think, Who is she talking to? and then you call a third time and the phone just rings and I’m not there?”
Not until they got onstage to perform the sketch in front of a paying audience did they discover—at the same grisly moment—the trap they had built for themselves. They entered, sat on two cubes positioned on opposite sides of the stage, and said . . . nothing. “We suddenly realize,” May says, “that we have thought of no way to dramatize this. There’s no one for him to talk to, and then I’m not there. Both of us thought only in concepts—it had never occurred to us that we needed a way to tell the story.
“There were dial phones then—it’s still so humiliating to think about it. He had to pantomime dialing and make a dialing sound and then make a little busy-signal sound. I could see him deciding to do it. And there was nothing I could do, because I was on the phone on the other side of the stage! How could we be this dumb? Then he had to hang up—I don’t think he even said anything, because he would have just been talking to himself. Then he had to do it again. Again he made the busy-signal sound. To hear him make that sound . . . it was so demeaning to him. And the third time, he made the ringing sound.”
May couldn’t help him, because the concept of the scene was that this time she was gone and the phone would just keep ringing. She was supposed to walk offstage as soon as he started to dial. But, feeling both embarrassed and protective of him, she couldn’t bring herself to leave him alone—they had plunged in heedlessly together, and together they would suffer the consequences. So she stayed onstage, retreated into a corner, and waited as he made sad little ringing sounds. “Finally he hung up,” she said. “And the guy on lights just had to gradually fade us out. We just stood there. I never forgot it. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever done onstage. And it was the first thing we ever did together.”
If anything, that terrible performance cemented their bond. They were now a team, for better or worse. “For a month I was a disaster,” Nichols said. “I cried in scenes because that’s what I thought I’d learned from Strasberg.” And when called upon to improvise, “I was desperate, I was boring, I couldn’t think of anything.” The moods that Nichols was able to access spontaneously—anger, whininess, arrogance, resentment—had served him well in his acting class. In sketches, however, they were often dead ends.
“But if you keep at it,” he said, “suddenly the light switches on.” One night he and May were onstage playing with an idea they had started to develop about two Brits together on a bridle path. Once again, they hadn’t quite thought it through; May says that it wasn’t until they were performing that “we realized I would have to be both me and the horse.” But in that moment, something from Nichols’s past as a teenage riding instructor clicked, and so did their shared affection for British movies. They swung into a routine, with May cantering in circles around Nichols. It worked. The audience started to laugh. One of the Compass actors taking a break at the bar was so surprised that he yelled to the rest of the actors, “Come quick—Mike has a character!”
“What is implied in that story—and it was true for the first time in my life—is affection,” Nichols said. “I began to understand that I could be kidded, and people could be fond of me, and that this would all be a pleasurable thing.” After that, with remarkable rapidity, Nichols and May started to find their groove. The instant audience feedback connected with a ruthless instinct they shared about what worked and what didn’t. In this case, they discarded the troublesome gimmick—the riding—and kept the gold: perfect pitch in re-creating the movie dialogue of stoic, gallant, and desperately bland Englishmen and Englishwomen in a doomed romance. “Our work was all about [shared] references and context,” he said. And “the referential joke was [about to become] the highest currency.” The sketch they developed from that night’s seedling was a version of Brief Encounter reset in a dentist’s office, with Nichols as the dentist and May as the patient, both coolly discussing their torrid passion in the most banal context imaginable. “There, I’ve said it,” said Nichols at the climax. “I do love you. Let’s not talk about it for just a moment. Rinse out, please.” It was the first of six or eight scenes that would, over the next several years, carry them to New York nightclubs, national television appearances, and Broadway. Almost every one of the sketches that made Nichols and May famous was incubated at the Compass.
The moment Nichols felt accepted, he started to loosen up. Even failure didn’t upset him as much as it used to. By then, the Compass had moved to another venue—a place called the Dock, where, he said, “if you screwed up, you could run down to Lake Michigan”—which was just across from the theater—“and jump in and run back and do another scene.” The range of characters he could create on the spot became greater, and the audience suggestions—an element of the evening that soon became the most popular part of Compass shows—now energized rather than terrified him. “With Elaine, I got rather good at improvising,” he said. “And in some way, I began to really use what I learned with Strasberg—not acting, but what scenes are made of.”
Together they came to realize, he said, that “you have to create a situation, an event . . . or you’re just sitting there making up lines.” Nichols also came to respect and value the imperative of the audience. “When you’re making up a scene for people who have a lot of beers in their hands, you learn in a painful and memorable way what the audience expects,” he said. “The audience says, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ and you have to have an answer. One is, ‘Because it’s funny.’ But that’s not enough because you’re only going from laugh to laugh and in between, there’s this terrifying vacuum with no purpose. The additional answer is, ‘This is about you. This is about your life. Or the life we all have together’ . . . And if you do it right, somehow they will say, ‘Yes! How did you know? Look at that! I know that man! I am that man!’”
In the mid-1950s, sketch comedy tended to be situation comedy—and the situations were generally so timeworn that audiences knew where the laughs would come before a word was spoken. The first few years of network television had made the setups numbingly familiar: the door-to-door salesman who won’t take a housewife’s no for an answer, the randy boss chasing Miss So-and-So around a desk, the mad scientist and his dumb-blonde lab assistant. Comedy was, in some ways, less about character than about character types, whether the immigrant with the funny accent, the put-upon schnook with a catchphrase, or the exasperated blusterer forever on the verge of exploding.
To a form that was in serious danger of going stale, Nichols and May brought something slyer, sharper, and wholly new—a comedy rooted in deep observation of the tics, vulnerabilities, insecurities, vanities, and pretensions of others, and of themselves. Once they knew what they were doing, they found that their strengths complemented each other perfectly. May had a genius for turning an idea into a narrative—she told Nichols that everything they did together should be a fight, a negotiation, or a seduction and added, “When in doubt, seduce.” And he turned out to be a natural editor who understood that changing one word could gain them or lose them a laugh; he also had a faultless sense of when to move from one beat in a scene to the next.
Throughout the first half of 1956, Nichols and May developed a core repertoire that became the Compass’s main attraction. The troupe had started as an ensemble; now it had stars. “Shelley Berman was great right away,” said Nichols. “But I was better with Elaine. And soon we had a body of work together.”
Their first triumph grew out of an emotionally brutal, far-ahead-of-its-time scenario May had written called “Georgina’s First Date,” about an overweight teenage wallflower who is escorted to her prom by a college boy as part of a fraternity prank and then raped by him at the end of the night. The scene ended with her returning home in shock and murmuring to her ecstatic mother, “I had a wonderful time.” That searing one-act was way too hard-edged to become a recurring piece at the Compass, but she and Nichols took an element of it—the fragility of a teenage girl trying to decide whether to lose her virginity—and changed the boy from a smug rapist into an awkward, alternately boastful and bumbling but fundamentally decent high school jock, a type Nichols had observed throughout his teens and could replicate down to the nasal honk and mannered drawl. The scene, now a short two-hander known as “Teenagers” and set entirely in the front seat of a car, became one of their best-loved routines, incorporating everything from physical comedy to a heartbreaking dip into tenderness and vulnerability for May to a final emotional swerve that makes it clear that Nichols is as scared as she is. Audiences howled with laughter, but it was the laughter of personal recognition. “Elaine and I had a rule,” Nichols said. “Never try for a laugh. Get the laugh on the way to something else. Trying for it directly is prideless and dangerous, and the audience loses respect.”
Together they scavenged culture, high and low, for ripe targets, and they could be merciless. Tennessee Williams became “Alabama Glass,” a flamboyant, florid southern playwright. (One of his characters turns to “drink, prostitution, and puttin’ on airs” after her husband commits suicide in response to an accusation of “not bein’ homosexual.”) They took a Chicago radio personality named Jack Eigen, whose show was broadcast live from a local nightspot called Chez Paree and who liked to boast about the famous people he was friends with, and turned him first into “Jack Fagan” and then into the preening and unctuous “Jack Ego,” interrupting his own interview with a starlet, played by May, to observe, “Bertrand Russell was on. Bert is a heck of a good kid. He’s not like a lot of your philosophers. By that I mean he’s not pushy, and that is a terrific thing to see, we’re all crazy about him—whaddaya say, sweetheart?”
Not only could May keep up with him, but, to his manifest delight, she could leave him gasping in the dust. Nichols recalled one moment during the Jack Ego sketch:
I thought I’d throw Elaine something new: “I understand your new picture, ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ will be out soon,” I said.
“Yes, Jack,” she said coquettishly. “It was a great opportunity for me. I don’t swim in this one at all. I was just fortunate enough to get to record the title song.”
“Really,” I said. “How wonderful. Could you sing some of it for us?” I asked, mean and curious.
“Surely,” said Elaine. And the lyric that she ad-libbed is engraved forever in my memory:
There was dashing Dimitri, elusive Ee-vahn,
And Alyosha with the laughing eyes,
Then came the dawn,
The brothers were gone,
I just can’t forget those wonderful guys.
Nichols burst into uncontrollable laughter. “People would drive miles to see Mike and Elaine tear apart Jack Eigen,” said Shepherd.
One of them was Patricia Scot, a Chicago jazz and pop singer who also appeared on a local variety TV program called In Town Tonight (meaning “Who’s in town tonight from New York or Los Angeles?”—a measure of the degree to which Chicago still saw its own cultural life as essentially provincial). Scot’s associate producer, Joe Goldberg, had heard about the couple at the Compass that everyone had to see, and took her along one evening. “I was flabbergasted,” she says. “I was amazed. I said to Joe, ‘My God, they’re doing with acting what we’re doing with music.’ I was just enthralled by the whole group. The TV show was over at ten thirty every night, and I’d hightail it out to the place, this little hole in the wall on the South Side. At the time, it embarrasses me to say it, but I was kind of a star in Chicago, a personality. I had a show and pictures on billboards, that kind of thing. So eventually I was able to go backstage and meet all of them. And of course, it didn’t take very long to discover Mike’s special brilliance. I’ve always been attracted to brains.”
Scot, then twenty-four, was a sultry, auburn-haired former model who, as more than one person at the Compass noted, bore a distinct resemblance to May. She and Nichols hit it off instantly, and, to the goggle-eyed shock of the men in the Compass, Mike the misfit, of all people, had not only become one of the stars of the show but now had a glamorous girlfriend who lived in a fancy apartment, “with wall-to-wall carpeting and an Eames chair,” one said, while “we all lived in walkups with bare floors and roaches.”
By the summer of 1956, when Sills and Harris returned from England, they barely recognized the scruffy, threadbare company they had left behind. It wasn’t just that the Compass had now moved to a larger, fancier nightclub-style space called the Argo Off-Beat Room. “They had made something different out of it, much more professional-looking, more groomed,” Harris said. The actors now wore jackets and ties—the Argo had a dress code—and were earning three times what they used to ($75 a week, a decent income at the time). And the show itself seemed tidier, more formal, more grown-up. “For one thing, the long scenarios were pretty much gone, and two-people scenes had taken their place,” Harris said. “Nichols and May were the dominant talents, and Shelley Berman would do his single scenes . . . It was a surprise.”
Sills was furious—this was far from his vision—but his complaints had little impact, because he had been gone for most of the Compass’s existence. And Shepherd was, once again, disillusioned. Nichols no longer wanted anything to do with his political plays. “Mike hated the whole idea of the scenarios,” said company member Larry Arrick. After “The Fifth Amendment,” “he found the form constricting, pretentious, and boring. He would rather do how hard it is to get a ticket at the airline.”
Within a few months of Sills’s return, the Compass was starting to fly apart. Shepherd quit, then came back, Sills intervened with a heavy hand, then stepped away, and both came to realize that the eventual fate of their brainchild would have less to do with either of their concepts for it than with the two performers who were now filling the house night after night. Nichols and May were continuing to develop new material and building what was essentially a show of their own within the Compass. Not everything they did worked—they both wanted to come up with a nagging-mother-and-unhappy-son sketch that was rooted in their own pasts, but their first try, an update of Hamlet set in a Jewish deli, with Nichols as Hamlet, May as Gertrude, cutting meat behind the counter, and Berman as “Uncle Claude,” never quite landed the way they wanted it to.
But at their strongest, they took themselves and Compass audiences into new and more formally daring territory. Late in 1956, they developed a long, complicated sketch known as “Pirandello” that, true to its namesake, played explicitly with notions of performance, reality, absurdism, and metatheatricality as it wound through several beats that had to be calibrated perfectly to create the level of discomfort and anxiety in the audience that they were after. The scene began with Nichols and May as two small siblings in a burping contest. “Mike would say, ‘I can belch louder than you.’ He was a great belcher,” says May. “It would bring the house down. And then somehow the game went into, we started imitating Mommy and Daddy.” Seamlessly, without tipping audience members as to exactly when the shift happened, Nichols and May glided from playing kids acting like their parents to playing the parents themselves, in an escalatingly personal and ugly fight. “And then,” May says, “we became . . . not really us, but we made it sound like we, the performers, were fighting. At some point, I found something to say within the fight that had something to do with his being impotent. And he would walk offstage. When he did that, there was sort of a laugh, because they still thought it was part of the sketch, and I would laugh, too, and say, ‘Is it something I said?’ in the way that one performer would say something to cover for another.”
As Nichols and May developed the sketch, they dared themselves to take it even further. Nichols would return to the stage, they would exchange some ugly words, she would turn away from him dismissively, he would grab her arm angrily to spin her around and, in doing so, tear her blouse, and she would start to cry. As the audience gasped, Nichols and May would face front simultaneously, announce, “This is Pirandello!” and bow, as if to say, “Fooled you!”
“The audience didn’t give a shit when we did that,” says May. “Sometimes they still didn’t believe we’d been acting.” They would perform and refine the sketch for the next five years—it was a dance they did together based, as much as anything, on their own awareness that they were capable of hurting each other and their desire to see how close to the edge they could get. It was unforgettable to those who saw it—but you had to be there; “Pirandello” was the only major Nichols and May routine that they chose never to film or record.
By the end of 1956 the Compass was over, a victim of changing career priorities. Once Nichols, May, and Berman decided to go out on their own, there was basically nothing left to disband. Berman pitched a three-way act to Nichols and May, but by then Nichols, who had himself become prickly and territorial, couldn’t bear Berman’s jittery competitiveness. “Shelley is the first person at Compass who had to count who had how many sketches, and I still think of it as the first bite of the apple,” he said later. Aside from that, Berman’s style of comedy—insistent, hustling, unembarrassedly Jewish—represented every fear Nichols had ever had about how he might come off to strangers; being Berman was what he had worked to avoid.
In 1957, Nichols and May started performing in a club on Chicago’s North Side as a solo act. During their nights off, she would write and he would act elsewhere, first in a production of Lysistrata directed by Sills, which critics trashed, and then as Lucky in a well-received staging of Waiting for Godot in a 1,200-seat theater that he called “as happy an experience as I ever had. I had white makeup and the first girl backstage burst through the door very excited and said, ‘Oh my God! Mike! How did you get your tongue so pink?’” His bold, committed performance, in a cast that also included Harvey Korman and Louis Zorich, startled colleagues who still remembered the awkward, almost immobile performer who had arrived in Chicago just eighteen months earlier. “I [had] never seen Mike so physical,” said Andy Duncan. “He played it like a dog. Slavering. He would sit up and pant. He really threw himself into it. I was amazed.”
Nichols and Pat Scot were still seeing each other and getting more serious. It was a match that puzzled people who knew them, and sometimes bewildered Scot herself. “I was not in his league intellectually,” she says. “I was this little girl from Milwaukee, kind of from the sticks. Graduated from high school, never went to college, and here I was, thrown in with . . . Well, once, in Chicago, we were at a party, a gathering of a lot of book-reading people. I was standing alone and Mike came over and said to me, ‘What’s the matter, honey—are you boring?’ It was a joke on me, but I had to laugh at it, because I was. I didn’t have anything to say to anybody and they didn’t have anything to say to me. It was very obvious I was in the wrong world.”
Nevertheless, Nichols appeared to be in love, and by spring he and Scot were engaged. “I remember going to a furrier and helping them pick out a fur coat,” says Joy Carlin. “He must have had some money by then.” The two married on June 8, 1957, in the chapel at the University of Chicago. May attended, and although she had been politely supportive, could not resist remarking to a friend, “Isn’t it a beautiful first wedding?” Nichols and Scot left for New York for two weeks, on what Scot refers to as “our so-called honeymoon. We spent a week in New York and then a week with his mother and her husband somewhere in a resort area. And talk about his mother! Oy, God. Can you imagine being on your honeymoon with your mother-in-law in the next room? Oh, it was terrible. She looked like Greta Garbo—even older; she was absolutely beautiful. She took one look at me and thought, Oh my God, what has he done? I hadn’t brought proper shoes for the sandy walking around, so she loaned me a pair of sneakers for the week. At the end, I gave them back and said, ‘Thank you so much, I was really glad to have these.’ And she said, ‘You are welcome. Of course, I could have used them.’ Jesus Christ.”
What followed was a final, brief, and deeply awkward episode with the Compass, or a version of it. David Shepherd was trying to reconstitute the theater in other cities—first in St. Louis and then, if everything worked out, in New York. May needed a job and, to Nichols’s apparent chagrin, said yes to Shepherd’s offer to go down to St. Louis to work for the summer, where she would be in partnership with Del Close, a young former member of the Chicago troupe. Nichols and Shepherd were barely speaking by then—he had spent many of his last months at Compass expecting Shepherd to fire him—but he couldn’t risk losing May to another partner. Just weeks after he and Scot had found an apartment in Chicago’s Old Town, he left for Missouri.
Nichols and Close detested each other. “We just weren’t mature enough to treat each other properly,” Close later said. And during that summer in St. Louis, for the first time since they started working together, Nichols and May found themselves at odds. His marriage had thrown her off balance, as did their new living arrangements; she and Nichols shared an apartment, and Scot would commute from Chicago to see her new husband every weekend. Perhaps in response, May started working more regularly with Close; Nichols became jealous, and Scot got the worst of it. “I’m flying down on Friday and flying back on Sunday, just in tears,” she recalls. “From the beginning, it was difficult. There was such a chasm between us. You could see that he felt, ‘Who is this woman? Why is she here?’ It was really not a good thing. We kind of tried, but you can just feel that horrible coldness, that distance. Poor Mike, poor baby. He really didn’t want to get married. Why did he?”
By late August, Nichols’s professional marriage was foundering just as badly. There were rumblings about Nichols and May going to New York to launch the Compass there, and the two were even dispatched east for a brief visit to meet with a potential backer. But something was rupturing between them, largely, Nichols later said, as a result of his own bad behavior. Del Close had strong ideas about the troupe’s work that would eventually form the basis of much of modern improvisation technique; that summer in St. Louis, he and May started to articulate some basic principles of performance: Always make the active rather than the passive choice, justify every action that you’re playing, and, most important, never deny verbal reality—a tenet that came to be known as the “Yes, and . . .” rule. (Example: If two actors are improvising a divorce scene and one says, “What about our children?” it’s cheating to say, “We don’t have any.” You say, “Yes, the children will suffer, and . . .”) But Nichols couldn’t, or wouldn’t, function in a place where someone else—least of all an upstart twenty-three-year-old like Close—was setting the rules. “I persecuted the shit out of Del,” he said. “Nothing could stop me.”
How it all ended in St. Louis was, over the decades, the subject of varyingly self-serving accounts from everyone involved. At first, Nichols and May said they had made a joint decision to seek their fortune in New York. The reality may be more complex, if not much clearer than Shepherd’s diary entry for August 25, 1957, which read “Mike and Elaine crisis all day and all night.” Nichols told what may be the truest version in the late 1980s: “I was basically fired for being such a pain in the ass. It had to do with Elaine and me, and who she was spending time with,” meaning Close. “But I was finished.” Others said it was May who, at the end of her rope, demanded that Nichols be fired—or it was May who, at the end of her rope after his firing, demanded that he be rehired. In any event, Nichols left amid a storm of bad feeling, with Shepherd warning him that he and Compass owned all of the material Nichols and May had developed in their time there. (They didn’t, as Shepherd soon found out. “You can’t copyright improvised work,” he said. “Shtick is not permanent. That’s what the outcome of that was.”)
Nichols flew to New York. May stayed in St. Louis. He started calling her, entreating her to come. Within a week or two she realized that, as impossibly as he had behaved, she didn’t want to be stuck in St. Louis without him, working on yet another version of someone else’s idea for a theater. When he called one weekend in September and said, “I might have a gig for us,” she got in her car. Three days later she was in Manhattan.
Nichols and May didn’t have plans for the future; they barely had plans for the next two weeks. They had never operated out of anything other than his belief that performing “was a lot of fun for now. It was something you did until you started your life as a grownup. Eventually we would find out what we were going to do, and do it, and have lives like normal people,” Nichols said.
“This did not happen.”