Nichols had one phone number in his pocket, and it was all he needed. He and May were in New York City with $40 in borrowed money, the names of a couple of friends willing to let them sleep on their sofas, and a single contact. An actress he had known from his Strasberg days was married to an associate of Jack Rollins, a talent manager who could book singers, comedians, and novelty acts into any club in town. They got an appointment, visited Rollins in his small office, and did fifteen or twenty minutes of material. First they showed him “Teenagers,” then they tried out an idea they had started to develop in Chicago. They asked Rollins to suggest a first line and a last line and told him they would invent a scene for him on the spot. May riffed; Nichols moved her along when he sensed the time was right. “Elaine would go on forever if you let her,” said Rollins. “She was insanely creative but had no sense of when to quit. Mike [was] Mr. Practical.” They won him over. “[I thought] my God! I am finding two people who are writing hilarious comedy on their feet,” he said. “They did things that were taboo in those days . . . they would uncover dark little niches that you felt but never had expressed. They expressed it for you.”
It was done. They were in. “They were remarkable,” Rollins said. “They were complete. I knew they had something odd and wonderful, but I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” That day he took them out to lunch at the Russian Tea Room and signed them. They were relieved when he picked up the check.
In the late 1950s, supper-club culture was still a thriving New York scene, with full houses, big names, and a cadre of columnists covering every up and down, and Rollins got them an audition at one of the most popular of the East Side cabarets, the Blue Angel. The owner, Max Gordon, was as impressed as Rollins had been, and offered them a booking in two weeks. Politely, Nichols explained that they needed money sooner than that. So Gordon gave them a second, temporary gig—starting right away, they could play his downtown club, the Village Vanguard, until the spot at the Blue Angel opened up.
The venues couldn’t have been more different. The Vanguard had been a mainstay of the West Village for almost twenty-five years, a casual watering hole for a young crowd of locals, beatniks, poets, potheads, and anyone else who liked jazz combos, blues singers, and cheap drinks. The acoustics were rough, and the chairs scraped noisily on the floor when anyone moved. The Blue Angel was dark, plush, and self-consciously swank, a long, narrow space with gray velour and pink rosettes covering the walls, thick carpeting, a well-dressed clientele crowded at small black tables, and, in the back room, a stage so tiny that the singer and actress Dorothy Loudon once said it was “like trying to perform on top of a cocktail napkin.”
The Vanguard, which bore a close resemblance to the bars Nichols and May had played in Chicago, was a comfortable place for them to warm up. They started there in early October as the opening act for Mort Sahl, whose style of casually delivered topical humor—the equivalent of a live late-night monologue—had brought him a measure of success in the previous few years. Every night, Sahl would stroll out onstage, usually in a red V-neck sweater and with a folded newspaper under one arm, and riff on the day’s events. It wasn’t Nichols’s style, but he saw how effectively Sahl worked the turf; he packed the Vanguard every night, and thus guaranteed his two novice openers a big audience. They came up with a short set tailored to the small space—nothing that required props or a lot of physical action would work, but “Teenagers,” set in a parked car at night, could be done with just two high stools on which they sat side by side. The radio-host-and-starlet sketch might also play well, or perhaps “Telephone,” a reliable routine they’d worked up with Nichols as a young man desperate to make a call from a pay phone and down to his last dime and May voicing a series of operators ranging from bored to extravagantly solicitous.
After “Teenagers” and maybe one more sketch (or not, depending on Sahl’s level of impatience), they would do what they’d done to impress Rollins: They would ask the audience for line suggestions—and for a particular literary style, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Clifford Odets—and, for their big finish, they would improvise a scene in that writer’s style. The laugh when they got to the last line, with the audience delighted to discover how they’d made their way there, was a perfect high on which to end. “The trick was, we had both read everything,” May says. “The toughest thing was if they gave us an easy one, because we hadn’t read the easy ones. But they would try to stump us, and the more they did that, the easier it got. Greek plays were easy. Ibsen was easy. Harold Robbins would have been hard, because we hadn’t read him.” The improv invariably showcased the two of them at their most relaxed and connected. Nichols would have to fight to keep from breaking character and cracking up, a habit he’d gotten into in Chicago, sometimes to get an audience on their side but more often because he just couldn’t help it. “This will sound simple-minded, but we both thought the same things were funny,” May says. “We found each other hilarious.”
Downtown, they were an instant sensation—so instant that the audience on the second night already included repeat visitors. Sahl was in danger of being upstaged, and he knew it; in the second week of their Vanguard run, he stepped in a couple of times just as they were about to go on and canceled their set, telling them the crowd was already primed enough for the main attraction.
They hurtled toward their opening at the Blue Angel with barely a moment to rearrange their lives. At the Vanguard, Nichols and May could wear trousers and turtlenecks, but when they left St. Louis, neither of them had taken along anything dressy enough for a Midtown nightclub. “Jack bought Mike a new shirt, and Jack’s wife took Elaine out and bought her a dress,” recalled Rollins’s partner, Charles Joffe.Both of them were trying to find apartments—May would soon be able to move both her mother and her daughter to New York to live with her, and Nichols was on the phone to his wife, trying to get her to tie up loose ends in Chicago and join him. Otherwise, they hadn’t touched base with anyone, a fact of which Nichols was reminded when the phone rang and the voice at the other end, with icy precision, said, “Hello, Michael. This is your mother speaking. Do you remember me?”
“I said, ‘Mom, can I call you right back?’” Nichols remembered. “And I called Elaine and said, ‘I have a new piece for tonight,’ and I told her the first line. She said, ‘Oh! Say no more!’ We did it that night. We had talked about it no more than that and the way we did it stayed forever. I told my mother it was Elaine’s mother, she told her mother it was my mother . . . it was very liberating!” The sketch, known as “Mother and Son,” was a six-minute phone conversation between Nichols, as a brilliant rocket scientist in the middle of a launch, and his emotional assassin of a mother. (“Arthur, I sat by that phone all day Friday and all day Friday night and all day Saturday and all day Sunday. Your father finally said to me, ‘Phyllis, eat something, you’ll faint.’ I said, ‘Harry, no. I don’t want my mouth to be full when my son calls.’”) It was a superb showcase for May, who made a feast out of lines like “I’m sorry I bothered you when you were so busy—believe me, I won’t be around to bother you much longer” and “[My doctor] said, ‘Mrs. White, I have been a doctor for thirty-five years and I have never heard of a son who’s too busy to call his mother.’ That’s what he said to me, Arthur, and that man is a doctor.”)
The mother as underminer was not a new comedy invention, and there was a measure of Eisenhower-era misogyny in the notion that all women eventually emasculate their sons—Nichols’s character literally becomes a babbling toddler by the end. But the barbs were so well aimed and the passive-aggression so specifically and personally observed that it all felt as fresh to audience members as if Nichols and May had somehow unearthed their family secrets. With Nichols graciously teeing up one punch line after another for her, the scene became an instant staple of their act and one of their most frequently requested sketches.
For the Blue Angel they created a set list that included “Teenagers,” “Mother and Son,” “Disc Jockey” (the Jack Ego sketch), and “Pirandello” and ended with the audience-prompted improv. They gave their first performance in mid-October; they were initially a late-night act, for those who didn’t mind staying up and staying out. Two weeks later, Rollins said, “they were the hottest thing in the city.”
As hyperbolic as that sounds, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Within days of Nichols and May’s Blue Angel opening, it became a badge of cultural cachet to say you saw them first, you saw them twice, you saw them in Chicago, you saw them downtown. On October 24, they got their first review, from the New York Journal-American’s Gene Knight. “A large crowd gathered on the sidewalk in front of 152 E 55th St. Something happen? Yes. This was the Blue Angel at midnight and Mike Nichols and Elaine May, sensational young comedy team, were about to go on. These people outside were trying, more or less unsuccessfully, to get in. I was among the fortunate . . . Mike and Elaine certainly pack ’em in. Without any waste of time, this boy and girl went to work on their disk jockey bit. I’ve heard them do it before, but they stage sketches you enjoy seeing again and again . . . The lines (they write their own sophisticated stuff) are the cleverest heard at any club in town. The pace leads to laugh after laugh . . . There is nothing funnier in the niteries.” (Variety’s critic wasn’t as sure; he called them “hipsters’ hipsters” and warned, “in average . . . spots the act will have trouble finding its mark.”)
Gordon realized that he’d stumbled upon gold; he quickly signed Nichols and May to a six-month contract. By December they had landed in the pages of The New Yorker. “Taking shelter from the damp one recent night, I wandered into the Blue Angel and caught their act. I enjoyed it so much that I’ve been back a couple of times since,” Douglas Watt wrote in his Tables for Two column. “Mr. Nichols, a fair youth with an alert and friendly mien, and Miss May carry on little dialogues . . . with something of the same delightful interplay characteristic of that splendid vaudeville team the Lunts; the bantering tone, the repeated phrases, the artful covering of each other’s lines—all these devices are present, and well-mastered.” Watt raised a skeptical eyebrow at the improv sketch, remarking, “I suspect . . . that they have situations prepared for these invited little emergencies, but I still couldn’t help being impressed by the ease with which they slipped into and out of them. On one of my visits they took off on Euripides (with no props at all), and I’m sure that the Greek theatre was never more fun.”
“New York is not only fashion-driven but fashion-obsessed—and we were stunned to become a fashion,” Nichols said. “We’d just been in Chicago, where people laughed if it was funny; if it wasn’t, they didn’t. [But] once [Watt] said we were like the Lunts, they laughed when we came out on stage.” Audiences were fascinated by the pair: Male-female comic duos were unusual enough, and this one seemed not to fit any template. Unlike almost all comic actresses of the time, May was glamorous and self-possessed rather than goofy or clownish, and Nichols, with his affable, cagey grin and pleasant, high drone of a voice, appeared so ordinary that his sharpness came as a series of jolts. He “looked pale and soft, like the boy who never played ball,” Betty Rollin wrote in Look. “Except the eyes. They have played ball.”
At the end of the year, Rollins got them an audition for Jack Paar, the new host of NBC’s Tonight Show. Paar agreed to try them out in front of a full studio audience during a rehearsal—essentially a camera test. It went poorly. The audience was used to stand-up comics, but not to the sly observational role-playing that had won over clubgoers. Nichols and May went into a routine, and when Paar sensed that they were starting to lose the crowd, he pulled the camera off them midsentence and said, “Do an improvisation, kids, and make it snappy.” They stumbled through an attempt, but they were rattled and thrown—and not invited to appear on the show.
Undeterred, Rollins booked them on the competition—ABC’s The Steve Allen Show—and on December 29, 1957, Nichols and May made their national television debut. Allen introduced them as “a youthful duo . . . two young folks who [are] a pair of bright lights on the comedy horizon. Very clever,” and then the camera cut to them in their newly bought clothes—a jacket and bowtie for him, a long-sleeved black dress for her—sitting on stools in front of a microphone. They had chosen to do “Disc Jockey,” their most flexible piece: The sophistication of the references in the DJ’s name-dropping could be dialed up or down depending on the audience, as could the double entendres and allusions in the starlet’s responses. Both were visibly nervous, and Nichols had been given the deadly task of explaining the joke in advance, telling the audience, “Elaine and I have been listening to some of the big disc jockeys, and we’ve found that they’re playing less and less records and they’re talking more and more. A lot of them seem to know everyone in the whole world, which we think is kind of terrific, considering that they never get out of the studio.” He waited for a laugh that never came, took a breath, looked down at his cards, and soldiered on.
Once the sketch started, and he introduced May as “Barbara Musk, in town publicizing her latest picture, I Was a Teenage Brain Surgeon,” they were on safer ground. He got some chuckles with a riff about his close friendship with Bernard Baruch, and she got louder laughs with her inane, vamping answers (“Bernie, for me, is a real great guy . . . For me, a pushy philosopher is always a drag”). The bit wasn’t a home run, and a final joke about “Tristan and Isolde—a great team” fell flat. But over the course of its seven minutes, one can feel the audience gradually warming up as it catches on to a rhythm and style it hadn’t seen before. The two of them, relieved to be done, took their bows as Allen, in his businesslike way, said, “Elaine May and Mike Nichols, real great. We’ll have ’em back soon.”
Three weeks later, their lives changed forever. On Tuesday, January 14, 1958, NBC’s popular program Omnibus aired a two-hour prime-time special called “Suburban Revue,” a series of routines, sketches, and songs built around a unifying theme. The show’s producer liked what he had seen on Allen’s show, and he gave Nichols and May two slots. This time, the framework allowed them to be presented as sketch artists rather than stand-up comedians. “I made a deal that they do two pieces, and that nobody had the right to do any editing,” said Rollins. The first was a slightly self-censored version of “Teenagers” (May didn’t take off her blouse to reveal the top of a slip, as she sometimes did onstage) that the show introduced as “The Dawn of Love, or The Moon Also Rises in an Automobile.” The second was “Telephone,” the desperate-caller-and-operator scene.
The special was a mess that never quite recovered from the irrelevance of its opening, a flapper-era song-and-dance skit called “The Gladiola Girl” that dragged on for eighteen minutes with barely a smile from the audience. But Nichols and May were standouts; the laughs built steadily in both of their appearances, with the biggest of the night coming in “Teenagers.” Over the years, they had worked out their only extended bit of physical comedy—a long car-seat kiss during which all four of their arms flail and interlock as they negotiate the holding of a cigarette; after a long time, May pulls her lips away from his to exhale a cloud of smoke. When they did it on Omnibus, the audience exploded with laughter—as it did when, a few moments later, Nichols said to May, with imploring urgency, that if she let him go further, “I wanna tell you right here and now that I would respect you like crazy.”
By the end of the telephone sketch, when the audience howled at May’s throaty, heartfelt “You go ahead and cry—Bell Telephone understands,” it was clear they had stolen the show, and they knew it—but amid the program’s general dreariness, had anyone noticed? Nichols got up in the middle of the night and headed for the newsstand to find out. The first review he saw was from The New York Times, whose critic Jack Gould wrote, “The only two interludes of distinction were provided by Elaine May and Mike Nichols in two good sketches . . . each item had style and freshness.” The other papers followed suit, and in a column that ran that Sunday, the Times reiterated its praise—particularly for May, who it said “should go skyrocketing in the musical comedy world.” Time, Life, and Newsweek all weighed in as well, with Time echoing the unanimous verdict that their “satiric thrusts were fresh, inspired stuff.”
Tens of millions of people watched that episode of Omnibus—not just watched, but paid attention. “Everyone had said to Rollins, ‘Nobody will get them, they’re too intellectual,’” says May. “Well, everyone got us. We couldn’t believe it.” Nichols and May had had a “Who are they?” moment in front of mainstream America: They were literally an overnight success. “We did twenty minutes and just like that, we were famous,” said Nichols, who knew it had happened the second he read the first review. (He immediately woke May and said, “What do we do now?”) The trajectory that Rollins had mapped out for them—perhaps a few more appearances on Steve Allen’s show if they were lucky, plus steady work at the Blue Angel—was scrapped. In one step, they had cut straight to the finish line. They were no longer up-and-comers; they were stars. Rollins started planning an LP and a national tour; he would still put Nichols and May on TV, but now he was demanding $5,000 for each appearance—more than either of them had made in total during their last year at the Compass—and getting it.
For the rest of his professional life, no moment would disorient Nichols as profoundly as the sudden, simultaneous arrival of wealth and celebrity did in the first months of 1958. He was twenty-six years old, less than six months past being fired from a minor comedy gig in Missouri, and had only recently been able to afford a new and slightly better toupee. The self that he would painstakingly compose in front of the bathroom mirror—“It takes me three hours every morning to become Mike Nichols,” he later told the actor George Segal—was a struggler, a striver, someone who had to put great daily effort into making himself just passable enough to blend in. Now, he said, “I had sharkskin suits and Jack Rollins calling us the hottest team in showbiz.” At the time, Nichols insisted that he saw “nothing operationally different in my life.” It couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Suddenly, people—young, talented people doing interesting things—wanted to know him. The Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer, already a brilliant social anatomist at twenty-eight, had turned on Omnibus that night and thought, “Oh my God—they’re me, but they’re better. They’d gone further and perfected it. I was afraid to laugh, because I might miss something. When they were doing ‘Teenagers,’ I could not believe what I was looking at. Everything was unprecedented. All I could think was I have to know them, I have to meet them, I have to let them know about me. The only social part of my existence was when I turned in the cartoon and spoke to everybody at the Voice. Other than that, going out at night, getting drunk, and trying to get laid was about it. So I went to see them at the club and worked up the nerve to go backstage and discovered that they were fans of mine. I started hanging out with them, because it was a lonely world out there if you were doing the sort of work we were doing.”
Another early visitor to the Blue Angel was Stephen Sondheim, then twenty-seven, whose new show West Side Story had opened on Broadway the week Nichols and May started at the Village Vanguard. Sondheim was a decade younger than his collaborators Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins, and when he was dragged backstage to meet Nichols and May by a friend, he felt an instant connection to a fellow wunderkind. “Mike and I just hit it off,” he says. “I’m smart, he was smart, and we were both sly—he was slyer than I. With him, nothing was just on the surface—there was always some little undercurrent that made you either apprehensive or giggling. Always something funny and always something surprising.”
By then, Nichols and May were no longer the midnight show at the Blue Angel; ten weeks into their run, they were headliners, and other comics were vying for the chance to open for them. But Rollins cut their stint short; he promised Max Gordon they would fulfill the rest of their contract later in the year, but right now there were too many opportunities; there was too much money to be made. He moved them to a higher-paying run at a club in the Duane Hotel, on Thirty-seventh Street, called the Den in the Duane, and started fielding offers. Steve Allen wanted them back; Dinah Shore invited them on her show, and Perry Como on his. And Paar had changed his mind; with breathtaking chutzpah, he complained that, having discovered Nichols and May, he now had to pay through the nose to get them.
It frustrated May that the demands of their schedule now left little time to develop new sketches—they probably had no more than ten reliable performance pieces—but to the networks, eager to put them on the air, it didn’t matter: They wanted “Teenagers” again, or “Mother and Son,” or “Telephone.” For Nichols, each new appearance was an opportunity to calibrate a line or laugh or gesture a little more finely; everything about “Teenagers” on The Perry Como Show was slightly more polished than it had been a few weeks earlier on “Suburban Revue” and, accordingly, they got more laughs. “The bigger the nightclub we were in, the bigger the television show we were on, the more pressure there was to have the sketches we did be the best we had. And we found ourselves doing the same material over and over,” Nichols said. “This took a great toll on Elaine.” But, he said, “early on . . . we discovered that pieces that seemed boring to us because they were completely set were tremendous successes on television.”
In Chicago, Pat Scot was reduced to writing her husband a plaintive song:
Do you recall
A chapel small
The eighth of June
I stood with you
And listened to
A wedding tune
And then we went on our honeymoon
Remember me?
She went to work every evening at WBBM, then came home to see if her husband was on television. “I thought, What the hell? This is stupid,” she recalls. “So I got out of my contract and flew to New York. It was surreal. I slept for three days, just trying to escape from it all. Mike used to say to me, ‘You’re out of touch with reality,’ and of course, he was right. We both were when we got married, and then comes the dawn.”
For a while, they thought they could make a go of it. They found an apartment on East Fifty-eighth Street, a duplex that was nicer than any place Nichols had ever lived. He bought them a Mercedes convertible, and Rollins got her a singing gig at the Den in the Duane, opening for Lenny Bruce—“a sweet, gentle man,” she says, “who used to massage my feet between shows.” Nichols made it a point to watch her perform—and then to stay and watch Bruce, whom he admired. They bought nice furniture and got a Saint Bernard puppy and tried their best to act the way they thought a young, up-and-coming married couple would.
May moved to a large apartment in a quiet neighborhood across town on Riverside Drive, where she, her mother, Ida, and her young daughter, Jeannie, eventually settled in, and although she was dubious about the marriage, she tried to give Nichols and his wife a wide berth. It didn’t help. “I felt very left out because of their twosome-ness,” says Scot. “I was jealous. Because she was incredibly beautiful, in that zaftig Jewish way. She was ripe. Here’s the thing: If they had been having sex, which they hadn’t—maybe they had one time, but who cares?—it would have been one thing. But they were so much closer than just sexual partners. There was no way to compete with that.” And when Nichols would take Pat to parties, more often than not he’d strand her. “It was a whole different world—his world of celebrity—and I was not fitting in at all. ‘Intellectual’ started to be a dirty word to me. I got tired of being put down subtly. I was at a party that [the actor and restaurateur] Patrick O’Neal and his wife, Cynthia, were hosting. Norman Mailer came over and we were chatting, and after a while he said, ‘Sit down. Let’s see if you’ve got anything on the ball.’ And I said, ‘Fuck you!’ I still remember the shock on his face. He came back a little later to apologize. But I just wasn’t interested in passing his IQ test.”
In the spring, Rollins sent Nichols and May to Los Angeles for a couple of TV appearances, some network meetings, and an engagement at one of the city’s biggest nightspots, the Mocambo, which was then in its last months of operation. The gig was a bleak affair. “I remember one performance in which absolutely no one laughed. At the end they clapped heartily, but nobody laughed,” said May. “I also remember there was a huge glass wall with tropical birds flying around inside. Every night during our performance, one of the birds would die. We would learn this because the next night the old wardrobe woman would come to me and say, ‘Well, another bird died last night.’” Nichols found himself disliking club work more and more. People “go there to drink, or to impress a girl or a client—a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the show,” he said. “They’re terribly distracting places to work in. Nobody’s paying attention, the waiters are always bouncing crockery around.”
In the months that followed, Nichols and May started to learn what to avoid—sometimes the hard way. The lure of television was overwhelming, and he was faster to say yes than she was, becoming the business-decision maker for both of them. An appearance in a CBS presentation of a creaky Victor Herbert operetta called “The Red Mill” was their first and only TV acting job as a team—they played a pair of spoiled, vapid Hollywood celebrities, and as soon as the director told them, “You don’t have to hold to the script—say anything you want, kids,” they knew they were in trouble. Nichols later said, “There’s no such thing as a brilliant production of a nonexistent play.” At one point, they were required to ride a horse onto the set. The result, Nichols said, “doesn’t bear thinking about.”
A turning point came when Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, whose jointly owned company Desilu had become, in the wake of I Love Lucy, a major TV production entity that would go on to launch some of the most successful hour-long dramas of the 1960s, made Nichols and May an offer that would have reshaped both of their careers—the chance to develop and costar in a comedy series. The two went over to CBS and, on the precipice of signing a contract, looked at each other. “Maybe we shouldn’t,” May said to him. Nichols giggled. “I don’t think I will,” he said, and put down the pen. They laughed and flew back to New York.
By July 1958, when they resumed their run at the Blue Angel to work off the last three months of their contract, they had a somewhat better sense of what they excelled at and what they disliked. Radio appearances and print interviews were fine; they sat down to talk to Mitch Miller for his radio show and to Mike Wallace for his newspaper column. (“I had this big revelation one day,” Nichols told Wallace. “I always thought the guys in the Jaguars and the little caps were different from me. And then one day I looked at one, and I realized he’s just a guy like me who bought a Jaguar and a little cap.”) They knew that regular TV appearances were essential exposure, but, when possible, they preferred not to get roped into more than a brief role in anyone else’s sketches. During one segment of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show in which he and May had to act like they were at a cocktail party and sing “Well, Did You Evah (What a Swell Party This Is)” alongside the hour’s other guests, Nichols was briefly flooded with an urge to quit show business altogether.
As soon as their run at the Blue Angel ended, he threw himself into further work. Rollins had gotten them a record deal with Mercury, and in the fall they recorded a set of eight two-person vignettes, spoken over background instrumentals, that they called Improvisations to Music. The tracks showcased an aspect of their work that had often gone unremarked during their club and TV appearances: Both Nichols and May had become so skilled vocally that they could nail their characters even when nobody could see them. To do so, they drew on their own history: That first encounter years earlier at Illinois Central Station when they’d both gone into a spy routine became “Mysterioso,” with the two of them as a pair of Boris-and-Natasha agents exchanging cryptic messages aboard a railroad until it slowly becomes clear that they’re just a couple on a commuter train heading home to a Connecticut suburb:
He: Listen very closely . . . Ven you go . . . tell zem I asked for no starch in the collar.
She: It’s impossible! It can’t be done.
He: It must be done.
She: What about the cuffs?
He: Never mind the cuffs, fool!
Their Brief Encounter/dentist sketch worked beautifully as an audio track, as did a couple of scenes that expressed May’s “When in doubt, seduce” maxim. “Cocktail Piano,” in which a boss who encounters his secretary at a bar tries to get her to come home with him, was an ideal showcase for one of Nichols’s improv specialties—libidinous panic expressed as placidly as possible. And the album’s masterpiece was “Bach to Bach,” about two sophisticates lying on a bed who essentially talk each other to the point of intellectual orgasm over their love of music while listening to Bartók.
She: I can never believe that Bartók died on Central Park West.
He: Isn’t that ugly?
She: Ugly, ugly, ugly . . . Oh, I love this part—
He: Yes, here, here, here.
She: Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes.
He: Almost hurts . . . I know exactly what you mean! . . . I don’t know how to say this, but for the whole last two hours I’ve really had my anxiety allayed.
At the end, they smoke a cigarette. The perfect placement of “allayed” was pure Nichols; the uncanny ear for loftiness that veered into lunacy (“Too many people think of Adler as a man who made mice neurotic—he was more, much more”) was pure May. “I had never actually heard someone deliver irony in the tone of their voices, and sarcasm, and satire. [It] was very, very new,” said Steve Martin, who discovered the album as a teenager.
Improvisations to Music wasn’t like other comedy albums: From the first, it was about the possibility of sex, the mores of flirtation, the telltale signs of desperation, the current of carnal hunger that ran through ordinary life. “Most of the time, people thought we were making fun of others when we were making fun of ourselves,” Nichols said. “Pretentiousness. Snobbiness. Horniness.” The tracks weren’t parodies, but Nichols and May assumed that their listeners read the same magazines, saw the same movies, and listened to the same newscasts they did and were just waiting for someone to come along and point out their absurdities. This was the first work by the duo to which people could return whenever they pleased, and they did: The album, which reached Billboard’s top forty and won them a 1959 Grammy nomination, was practically memorized by a generation of comedy aficionados. To its fans, finding someone else who loved Improvisations to Music created an instant kinship.
Public curiosity about the pair reached new heights, aided by their unwillingness to give very much away. The biographies they wrote for the album jacket epitomized their calculatedly teasing approach. “Mike Nichols is not a member of the Actors Studio, which has produced such stars as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, and others too numerous to mention. He has never toured with Mr. Roberts and has never appeared on such television programs as the Goodyear Playhouse and the Kraft Theatre,” it read. “Miss May does not exist.”
Even as the album started to take off, Nichols was increasingly unsure of what their future should look like. Were they recording artists now? Could they be dramatic performers? Regulars on TV panel shows? Were they comics, as Milton Berle, an almost obsessive guest at their shows who watched them perform at the Blue Angel sixty times, said they were? Or were they, as Mitch Miller had suggested to them, “actors who don’t rely on jokes but . . . character and situation”? (“No Fooling, They’re Actors” insisted the headline of one 1958 interview, an idea Nichols fully endorsed.) As he and May continued to draw crowds, he found himself wondering if what they were doing so well was a kind of trap that would turn out to be the only thing he would ever be suited for.
He grew testy, impatient. A nasty story started circulating that when someone asked him if it was true he was an immigrant, he snapped back, “Not anymore!” But Nichols wasn’t ashamed of his roots so much as he was bewildered to be entangled in them once again, back in the city in which he had grown up and suffered, the toast of a town that just three years earlier had spat him out. He wasn’t embarrassed; if anything, he felt so vengeful he couldn’t hide it, telling a gloating story to TV Guide about his wife’s singing coach, a woman who had treated him rudely in Chicago “because I didn’t have a big shiny car. Well, the other day I was at NBC when someone comes up to me and says, ‘I have love and kisses from a very old and dear friend of yours.’ That foolish woman. You wish that the people who couldn’t see you before would have the good taste to be that way now. But they don’t.”
Nothing satisfied him. The apartment he and Pat had moved into, which he had hoped would feel like the start of his new life, now seemed an irritating reminder of everything he had once wanted to escape. “This was a neighborhood where everyone was out on the street,” Scot recalls, “sitting on stoops and talking and yelling across to each other. He came out one morning and said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here—it’s like living in Italy!’ Oh, he was a snob—but a funny, brilliant snob.”
One afternoon, they drove out to the suburbs with their new dog to visit friends whose grown Saint Bernard had just given birth to a litter. “They let her come in, and she just got our puppy by the throat and killed her,” Scot recalls. “Oh, my God, it was horrible. Mike and I just sobbed and sobbed.” As bereft as they felt, it was also a moment of true emotional connection between them. There weren’t many. They bought another puppy, desperate to find something that would bind them to each other. The new dog turned out to have a serious illness. A sense of futility began to overtake them.
Nichols was never intentionally cruel to his wife, but his obliviousness could feel punishing. Their fights kept looping around the same track. She felt depressed, out of place, and ignored; he would try to convince her that she wasn’t seeing things clearly; when that didn’t work, he would pull away, leaving her feeling more isolated. “Once we were in the hallway after The Jack Paar Show, and Mike and Paar were talking,” she says. “I’m standing there like a bump on a log, and Paar looked at me, acknowledging my presence. The conversation ended and we walked away, and I looked at Mike and said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ Then he said, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, Mr. Paar, Mr. Paar—this is my wife.’ It was so embarrassing. Because what he meant was ‘This is my afterthought. This is that woman I wish had stayed in Chicago.’”