After almost every performance of their show, May would go home and Nichols would go out. Although she had learned to fake her way through small talk, she was not a natural socializer. “If somebody came toward us in a restaurant waving,” she says, “I would look at him blankly and Mike would say softly, ‘You slept with him for two weeks. He’s part of the Socialist Party. You had a big fight. When he left, he broke all the dishes. His name is Bert.’” Whenever possible, she opted out of the late-night festivities that were a cherished post-show release valve for many Broadway performers. But each evening brought a fresh luminary or two to the stage door, and Nichols took to his new status as the celebrity everyone wanted to know with unashamed glee.
There was always someone new to meet. The essayist and critic Edmund Wilson went to see An Evening With four times and made it his business to get close to them. “Even after I had ceased to laugh very much,” he wrote, “I was fascinated by their ability to take the stage and hold it and to create a dramatic tension in every one of their sketches.” Another ardent admirer, Lillian Hellman, went backstage specifically to gush over Nichols; a month later, he met her again when they both attended a birthday party for Leonard Bernstein at which a portrait of the maestro was unveiled. As the guests murmured their admiration, Hellman spluttered, “What the hell is everybody talking about?! It makes Lennie look like a middle-aged fag—I think it’s the worst mess I’ve ever seen in my life.” Bernstein’s homosexuality was known to enough of the attendees—though not, apparently, to Hellman—that a mortified hush fell over the room. As Bernstein’s wife ushered the other guests away, Hellman covered her face and muttered, “Now look what I’ve done.” Nichols came up, put his arms around her, and said, “Will you marry me?” They were friends thereafter; Hellman felt they both “pretend[ed] to be hopeless about the world and ourselves when we really have rather hopeful natures.”
Not everyone was a fan. At a dinner party, Norman Mailer called Nichols a “royal baby” and told him he was too comfortable being surrounded by sycophants. (“Mike said he didn’t mind Mailer’s characterization because it was kind of true,” says his friend Peter Davis.) And when the critic Kenneth Tynan brokered what he hoped would be a meeting of the minds between Nichols and Peter Sellers, the result fizzled. “Nothing that Peter said amused Mike; nothing that Mike said amused Peter,” he wrote. “The sly, pragmatic, New York Jewish sense of humour meant nothing to Peter; and the giggly-facetious, whimsical fantastic . . . jokes of Sellers seemed merely embarrassing to Mike.”
But within the theater community, almost everyone was intrigued by Nichols. When Avedon threw him a surprise twenty-ninth-birthday party at a Chinese restaurant, Tynan, the Bernsteins, Sondheim, Comden and Green, Lauren Bacall, and Jule Styne all came, as well as May and her new boyfriend, Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick. Avedon made sure New York’s society and entertainment columnists knew that Nichols was now at least an honorary member of a clique of creative artists that Sondheim memorialized as “The Blob”:
The bodies you read about
The ones who know everyone
That everyone knows . . .
They’re the most important people
In the most important city
In the most important country
In the you-know-what!
Nichols forged his closest bond during the show’s run with the people right next door. Two months after An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May opened, the musical Camelot, with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews, arrived at the Majestic Theatre, the stage door of which was right next to the Golden. Andrews had recently married Tony Walton, an aspiring production designer; each night, as he waited for the curtain to fall on the very long musical so he could pick up his wife, he made a point of arriving early enough to sneak into the back of the Golden and watch the improv scene, new each time, that ended the show. Walton and Nichols, who were about the same age, became pals, and Walton drew him into the orbit of Andrews and, by extension, Burton, whose dressing room was the site of an ongoing all-star party at which alcohol and gossip flowed abundantly. “Sometimes Elaine would come, too,” says Walton, “but mostly just Mike and Julie and I would sit and schmooze for a while.” Nichols and Burton, who had seen his show before Camelot opened and had great admiration for his talent, struck up a friendship as well. Burton was more intimidated by May, whom he found “too formidable, one of the most intelligent, beautiful, and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again.”
Alexander Cohen was working hard to keep May and Nichols on a tight leash; the stage manager’s log for their Broadway run includes terse notations like “late” or “tipsy” whenever either of them showed up less than fully ready to perform. Nichols himself was, by his own description, becoming increasingly petulant and ill-tempered. “For him the slightest detail, until it’s solved, has the importance of the Geneva Convention,” said Cohen. One evening, during a scene with May, Nichols looked up from the stage and saw that one of about thirty lights on the balcony rail was out. He fumed throughout their performance, then called Cohen at home in what the producer described as “a cold, white fury,” said, “The theater is in total darkness,” and hung up. “I was narcissistic,” Nichols said. “I would get mad. I bitched about our billing. I did all the things I dislike. Comedy is the only work in the world in which the work and the reward are simultaneous. Comedians get it on the spot. It’s very corrupting to your character.”
The release of a hit album with about thirty minutes of material from the show—a recording that reached Billboard’s top ten and would win them a Grammy the following year—only increased demand for tickets. Cohen realized that if the show was to stay on track, there could be no distractions. He told their manager, Jack Rollins, to turn down all benefits, TV appearances, and outside engagements for the duration of the run. “Their health is at stake,” Cohen wrote. “They are the only two performers in a long and arduous show . . . With the compliments of the management . . . offer to each charity that you must decline to help a pair of tickets which they may use as a door prize.” May, the more politically active of the two, insisted on two exceptions—one for the New York party celebrating Kennedy’s inauguration, and one for a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality.
As the number of performances climbed past 150, staying focused became a struggle and, on some nights, a test of discipline that they couldn’t pass. They had never imagined doing exactly the same show over and over on a rigorous schedule with no end in sight. Early in the run, the intensity of Nichols’s emotional connection had sometimes rattled May, especially when she played the innocent, vulnerable girl in “Teenagers.” “During that sketch, I would say to him before I undressed, ‘I really like you,’” she recalls. “And as I was saying it, tears would fill his eyes because he felt so bad for me. I finally said, ‘It’s hard for me to do that—to see you in tears when I’m submitting myself to you.’ And he said, ‘I can’t help it.’”
That was no longer a problem. Instead, Nichols found himself tripping up over his propensity to break into laughter mid-sketch, especially if anything went wrong; May would sometimes succumb as well. “One night in ‘Teenagers,’ he grabbed me to kiss me and our teeth hit each other, and we broke,” she says. “We kissed for a long time, trying to get control of ourselves, because we were afraid we’d break again. We separated, but somehow or other, seeing each other caused us to break again. This went on for a while, and the audience laughed, too, and then we broke up again. Something happened to us that night. We broke up throughout the show, every third line—and after a while the audience did not find it that amusing. We barely got a laugh.
“The intermission came, and Mike said, ‘This is so irresponsible.’ I said, ‘It is.’ He said, ‘We’re acting like children. These people have spent money to come here. They’ve probably gotten babysitters.’ I said, ‘And they expected a good evening.’ We gave each other this really adult pep talk. And the lights went on, we went onstage, and before we even spoke, we broke. We just went to pieces. What I remember was that it was the most responsibly we’d ever spoken to each other. And we meant it! But it was just too adult a conversation for us.”
They had long since stopped changing the dialogue in their sketches, a choice that troubled May, who wanted every moment to be fresh, much more than Nichols, who wanted every moment to be perfect. The three exceptions were a sketch called “PTA Fun Night,” in which May frequently extemporized during her introduction of Nichols as Alabama Glass, “Pirandello,” where the exact wording and pacing were never quite locked, and the final improv scene. Many who saw the show, including critics, liked to speculate about just how spontaneous those closing sketches were; they wondered if the line suggestions came from audience plants, or if the literary styles were chosen from a small repertoire of about a dozen. Neither was the case. Although some writers came up often—Shakespeare more than fifty times, Tennessee Williams more than twenty, and Chekhov, Noël Coward, and Brendan Behan (whose play The Hostage was then on Broadway) more than a dozen each—Nichols and May took ninety different style suggestions during the run of the show, including Jane Austen, Ingmar Bergman, Ray Bradbury, Chaucer, Dick Tracy, Gilbert & Sullivan, James Joyce, Kabuki, Molière, Richard Nixon, the Old Testament, Poe, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and the Yiddish Art Theater. Nor did they ever reuse an opening or closing line—even in January, when, for a while, almost every suggestion was about the Kennedys. When the audience got playful or belligerent, Nichols and May would go right along. “Why don’t you start the show on time?” someone yelled one night. On another, a patron demanded, “Finish the last scene!” And on another: “Will you do the next act of the ‘Teenagers’?” They just laughed and used all three as first lines.
By the spring of 1961, the work was taking its toll. Cohen was losing patience with the chronic tardiness of both performers, which, combined with May’s appetite for playing out all the possibilities of an improvisation, was threatening to push the show’s end past 11 p.m., triggering union overtime charges. “we are the only show in town that goes up consistently late,” he told his stage manager in a furious memo. “Under no circumstances . . . is this show to run into overtime and if you think it is going to come within one minute of running into overtime, cut the encores.”
And Nichols and May themselves were no longer bothering to conceal their growing tension. A New Yorker writer who profiled the two noted that “there is little carefulness . . . in the way they talk to each other privately during practically every intermission. In fact, these colloquies are often conducted in such injurious terms that the team sounds like a married couple on the way home from a particularly disorderly cocktail party; how-dare-you-treat-me-this-way is a recurrent theme.” In an interview she and Nichols had done a few months earlier with Mitch Miller, May had drily remarked, “We don’t speak, except onstage,” and Nichols had said, “She resents those two hours.” It was no longer clear if either of them was joking.
May had always let Nichols handle the business side of their partnership; he dealt with the details of their finances, contract issues, and publicity. (Cohen once estimated that while the show was on Broadway, he talked to Nichols four times a day and May once every two weeks.) But now Nichols started to try to run the show itself. What had been a productive dynamic—“Elaine would fill sketches, and I would shape them,” he often said—became a contentious one. During her introduction of Alabama Glass, he would stand in the wings, gesturing at her to move it along; she would spot him out of the corner of her eye and continue, furious. He grew afraid of the final improv sketch; for her, it became the only part of the evening she enjoyed. “She got so bored,” he said. “All comedians want to change at a certain point. Your act becomes your enemy. She was more interested in taking chances than in being a hit. I was more interested in making the audience happy.”
But Nichols was growing frustrated, too; he felt that his performance had become “rote and dehumanized,” and, partly to shake himself out of a depression, “I would start playing games like, ‘Let’s see how fast I can make it go,’” he said. “I had to push the sketch ahead, because I couldn’t invent as she could.” He later expressed deep regret for his behavior during the last months of the run. “She was a real actress, and I was beginning to be a real pain in the ass to her,” he said. “I was very controlling—‘You were a little too slow tonight.’ Once that happens, you’re in very bad trouble. We could not recover.”
Onstage, Nichols and May had always represented their partnership as a kind of challenging quasi marriage. They weren’t George Burns and Gracie Allen, or Lucy and Desi, kidding and squabbling throughout but hugging and kissing at the end, but rather two spiky, sharp, neurotic people in an ever-evolving contest of wills, who, especially in “Pirandello,” would turn the tenuousness of their bond into a public storyline every night. They had never imagined their act would reach its climax with them doing the same thing week after week, month after month. Nor had they anticipated how much it would fray the connection between them.
Finally May had had enough. A clause in their contracts allowed either performer to quit on four weeks’ notice, and after she and Nichols talked it over, she told Cohen she was leaving, writing a formal letter in which she said, “I have enjoyed my association with you, but I do not wish to continue in the Play as it is too great a strain upon my strength and time.” An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May closed on July 1, 1961, after 311 performances. It had more than doubled its investors’ money.
For the first time since they had come together six years earlier, they had no particular goal for the next stage of their performing career. “We’ll be writing separately and writing together,” Nichols said. “Elaine has been working on a play for us . . . [but] this will be the first break we’ve had in many years.” There had been talk of a second show—an all-new assemblage of sketches that they would contrive out of their recording sessions for Monitor. Nichols quashed that speculation unambiguously. “We’re not going to do the revue type of thing again.” Cohen had gotten them to agree to bring An Evening With to Toronto for a week at the end of the year, but for the six months until then, there would be no urgent need for them to work together, and they kept a respectful distance. “He felt guilty that he had been mean to me, and I felt guilty that I had left the show,” says May.
“Elaine pulled back from the high life,” said Nichols. “She wanted to stay [home], she was writing, her daughter had joined her. And I was going through the things that happen after [divorce], dating and so forth.” Their sudden awkwardness felt inevitable to him. “When you do a show for a year . . . you can’t be best friends anymore,” he said. “It’s like you’ve lived with somebody and fucked each other’s brains out and you’re so sick of them, you just have to get out of the house.”
Nichols was, in every sense, single again, and he soon had someone new in his life—an actress named Joanna Brown, who had recently divorced the writer Harold Brodkey and who, like May, had a little girl. Brown had become disenchanted with performing after a couple of roles on Broadway and had taken a job in Avedon’s office; he thought she and Nichols might be right for each other and introduced them. To those in Nichols’s circle, the relationship had the feel of a rebound—but they weren’t sure from whom. “She is very good-looking, but it is perhaps not a good sign that she gets herself up like Elaine,” wrote Edmund Wilson, who hosted a lunch for Nichols and Brown that became considerably more strained when they were joined by May and Harnick. As soon as Brown was out of the room, Nichols started disparaging her intelligence. “[Mike] is evidently still in love with [Elaine],” Wilson observed. “Their relationship is so peculiar, both alienated and incredibly close, that it must make their relationships with other people precarious. This is perhaps not surprising.”
While May worked on the play, she kept him at arm’s length until he got tired of calling and decided to get out of New York. He packed a box of books he’d been meaning to read, rented a big house with a pool in Stamford, Connecticut, across the street from Sondheim, installed himself there with Brown and her daughter, and started to spend more time with Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, who had a house in nearby Fairfield, becoming a sort of fun young uncle to their three children. Sondheim would drop by once in a while to lounge by the pool, “not for dinner or anything, just swimming and sitting on the lawn. I knew him well enough to do that, but we weren’t really friends yet.”
By the fall, Nichols and Brown had become serious; they rented an apartment in Manhattan, planned to move in together, scheduled a wedding, and sent out invitations. “I love this girl—I just hope she’ll be happy,” May told a reporter when she and Nichols went to Toronto to do five performances at the beginning of December.
But other friends were alarmed at Nichols’s impetuosity—including Avedon, who started to rue the match he had made and worked to convince Nichols he was making a mistake. At the very last minute, they broke off their engagement, returned the gifts, and ended the relationship. “She told a story to me about being in a taxi with him and having a conversation where it became clear to her that she would never be more important to him than his career,” says Brown’s daughter, Temi Rose. “She was old-fashioned, and I think that what he was to her, she knew she wasn’t going to be to him. My mom went to Radcliffe, but she was a girly girl, closer in spirit to the fifties than the sixties. She was from a wealthy family and a class of person that a Jewish man in America at that time would have considered very desirable. I don’t think she was the right person for Mike—she wasn’t intellectually up to him. But I don’t think she was even close to in love with my father the way she was in love with Mike. She loved him forever.”
“It was unwise. We were both smart not to get married,” said Nichols later. “The young lady was much better off.”
At the beginning of 1962, Nichols felt pleasantly adrift. He was thirty, unmarried, and, for the first time in his life, rich enough not to work unless he wanted to. He could travel as he pleased, idle when he felt like it, while away the time as a charming weekend guest or extra man at his friends’ dinner parties. With May, he became almost courtly; he felt that throughout their partnership, he had always been the one to push them forward, and now it was time to take his cues from her. In January, she told him that her play, which she had retitled A Matter of Position, was complete. The piece had originally been commissioned by Fred Coe, the producer of Playhouse 90, as a television production; when Nichols read it, he told May it belonged onstage. Nichols agreed to star, Coe would produce it, and a November Broadway opening was scheduled.
That gave Nichols almost a year to dabble, and he did, making tentative forays into writing and directing, mostly at the suggestion or invitation of his new friends. He signed on as the co-writer of what turned out to be an immensely successful TV special that paired Julie Andrews with Carol Burnett at Carnegie Hall, contributing a novelty song called “You’re So London” and polishing their banter. And he agreed, on a lark, to direct a summer-stock evening of one-acts by Jules Feiffer; he assumed his job would require no more than the type of light, advisory touch-ups that Arthur Penn had contributed to their act.
That spring, very suddenly, May and Sheldon Harnick got married, a surprise that, Nichols said, “really threw me for a loop.” He was used to seeing her through brief relationships—and used to being the friend to whom she would always return. Shaken in ways he hadn’t anticipated, he left town. He and Brown had planned to marry in Rome; Richard Burton and his wife, Sybil, who were living there while he filmed Cleopatra, had volunteered to serve as their hosts. But just as Nichols was ending his engagement, Burton was beginning an affair with Elizabeth Taylor; rumors had hit the gossip columns with seismic force, and their lives were now in chaos. Burton called Nichols, told him not to fret over the canceled wedding, and insisted he come anyway. The Cleopatra shoot was already so far behind schedule that he now had to travel to Paris for a week to film scenes for another movie, The Longest Day. He knew that Taylor would be penned inside their Rome villa by paparazzi, and he wanted a trusted friend to show her a good time and distract her. Nichols got on the first flight he could. What could be more fun than serving as the temporary escort of the world’s most beautiful woman?
In Rome, he met Taylor for the first time and was unexpectedly touched by her openness and warmth. “I can’t leave the house,” she said. “We’re surrounded.” He told her to “put a thing on your head, a kerchief . . . come out the back way, and we’ll drive somewhere.” They got in his rented VW and spent a calm afternoon at the Villa d’Este, interrupted only when a tourist pointed at the two of them and said, “That’s Mike Nichols!”
“She never had a life of her own,” said Nichols. “Every movement had always been public. But where most people would have developed a shell, she didn’t. She said a startling thing to me during those days in Rome, when we were at some horse show and everyone was walking past to stare at her. I asked her if it was ever a pain in the ass being so beautiful. And she looked at me and said, ‘I can’t wait for it to go.’” Just as Burton returned to Rome, the scandal reached an even higher pitch, with the Vatican publication L’Osservatore della Domenica publishing a letter accusing Taylor of “erotic vagrancy” and calling her an unfit mother. In just a few days, Nichols had become the kind of friend with whom she could cry, and she did. She also went to Cleopatra’s hairstyle designer, Paul Huntley, and said, “Do you do personal wigs? Because I have a dear friend who’s a comic in New York, and he wears one of the worst wigs I’ve ever seen.” From that point on, Nichols’s toupees would be impeccable.
From Rome, Nichols flew to Paris, where he found himself in the exceedingly strange position of being asked to parody the life he had just lived for the past ten days. Avedon had invited him to participate in an extended photo shoot with the model Suzy Parker that he had conceived as a “gag on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.” He had been assigned to shoot the new fall collections for Harper’s Bazaar and had the then-unprecedented idea to do it tabloid-style, as if he were photographing the public embraces, spats, and scandalous outings of a famous couple. He wanted Nichols to write a scenario for him and then to play Parker’s consort in a ten-page photo essay, saying, “I need you to help me use fashion to send up the whole culture of fame—so go write a burlesque of Liz and Dick.”
“Well, they were certainly nothing if not spoofable,” said Nichols. For a week, he and Parker dressed up and Avedon shot them all over Paris: “One scene I wrote had him throwing a glass of champagne in her face during a squabble we were supposedly having at dinner at Maxim’s,” he recalled. “And Dick photographed all that shit as if he were covering it for Paris Match rather than Harper’s Bazaar.”* It would not be the last time Nichols enjoyed the position of insider/outsider, someone who could serve as a detached, wry commentator on excess even while being a knowing participant in it.
By the time he returned to New York, May’s impulsive marriage was all but over—barely a blip in the memory of either party to it. (Asked more than fifty years later about the long-forgotten nuptials, Harnick said, “Elaine and I were never married—well, yes, we were, my goodness! It was very unfortunate. She initiated divorce proceedings a couple of months later.”) On May 19, 1962, Nichols and May performed new material together for the first time in almost a year, at a birthday salute to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden—the show at which Marilyn Monroe famously sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” They read fake congratulatory telegrams they had written (“If things had been different, tonight would have been my birthday—Richard Nixon”) and met the president later that night at a party at the home of film executive Arthur Krim and his wife, Dr. Mathilde Krim. “We were on the dance floor,” Nichols said, “and [Bobby Kennedy] and Marilyn danced past us, having met that night. And I actually heard her say—it’s so bizarre—I heard her say, ‘I like you, Bobby.’ And he said, ‘I like you too, Marilyn.’ Who would write this dialogue for the night they met?”
The World of Jules Feiffer, on which Nichols worked that June and July, had the feeling of a casual summer project with friends—an extension of his social life—rather than the prelude to a major career shift. “It was Mickey and Judy—‘Okay, we’ve got the barn next Saturday: You do the costumes, you do the songs, we open on Monday,’” says Sondheim. “Mike said, ‘Do you want to write a little one-act musical? We have two weeks.’ I said, ‘Mike . . .’ He said, ‘Oh, now, Steve, it’s easy, it doesn’t need a lot . . .’ It was fun, and it was the thing that pushed us from acquaintanceship to friendship.” The show, a trio of vignettes that was to play for just six days at the Hunterdon Hills Playhouse, in Union, New Jersey, was an ideal match for Nichols’s sensibility. One of Feiffer’s short pieces, “Crawling Arnold,” was an almost exact companion to Nichols and May’s routine about the rocket scientist infantilized by one phone call from his mother; it depicted a middle-class man in his thirties who, “as soon as he returns home, reverts to crawling, for all sorts of reasons that are explained in the play, which was about atomic bomb testing and Black nationalism,” says Feiffer. “It was anarchic and political and sexy, and it was written in twenty-four hours, and it was my only foolproof piece of theatrical work.”
A version of the show, which also included a Cinderella-inspired gloss on celebrity called “Passionella,” had been staged in Chicago by Paul Sills, who had originally commissioned the work from Feiffer. But Nichols reworked and reshaped it, added two songs and some background music by Sondheim, and cast his friend Dorothy Loudon, a talented singer-comedienne with whom he’d worked in New York clubs, as the lead. Feiffer was impressed. “At one point while we were rehearsing, Mike said, ‘Look, I’d like you to leave the room for a while. There’s something I don’t want you to see while we’re doing it.’ I went out and after about twenty minutes, he called me in, and they played the scene. He had somehow changed everything I thought I had intended and made it more interesting, deeper, better, funnier. I looked at him, stunned, and said, ‘Where did this come from?’ And he pointed to the script and said, ‘It’s all in there.’ That was the moment I understood what he was going to become.” It was also the only time that Nichols, who became known for being exceptionally collaborative with writers, was shy enough about his process to ask the author not to watch.
The show got a positive review in Variety and, given the involvement of Nichols and Sondheim, might well have continued its development and found a path to New York. It was Feiffer who hit the brakes. “As the work advanced, I retreated,” he said. “I didn’t belong there. Sondheim had written some lovely songs, fresh, funny, touching, and original. And Mike’s production was obviously the creation of a soon-to-be-brilliant theater director . . . who hadn’t quite put it all together yet.” But, he said, “this was more their show than mine, and it had my name on it. I was not ready to confront the conflicting emotions and certain humiliation of putting it on . . . [They] could not have been more gracious.”
Nichols was uneasy about his return to work with May from the moment he turned his attention to A Matter of Position in September. The play was to have a trial run in Philadelphia, then another in New Haven, where any kinks could be worked out before Broadway. Nichols was happy about that, but deeply concerned about two other decisions. One was that May no longer planned to costar with him; the other was that Arthur Penn, who had agreed to direct, had dropped out, frustrated by her reluctance to make cuts. May had replaced him with the show’s accommodating producer, Fred Coe, who would now do double duty. The decision, Nichols said, “didn’t work for me, it didn’t work for her . . . If we had had Arthur, or somebody who knew how to work on a play, it might have helped us.”
Then there was the play itself. Nichols started to have a queasy suspicion that a piece that had originally been written for him had somehow turned into a piece about him—and not a flattering one. The main character, a stubborn man who bends others to his will by planting himself in his bed and refusing to budge, seemed like an attempt “to make him ridiculous, to express some kind of contempt . . . She had made him a moral monster whom the audience couldn’t like,” he told Edmund Wilson.
The relationship between Nichols and May had been shaky in the year since their show had closed; once they started work in Philadelphia, it ruptured fatally. “It was pretty much an unmitigated disaster,” said Nichols. “We, who had always been together, were now in an impossible situation in which I was performing and she was in the audience sitting next to the director watching, and it just imploded under that pressure.” As an actor, Nichols said, “I was, God knows, inadequate.” Nonetheless, he felt stung by her judgment; she felt unsupported by the one person she thought she could trust and knew the producers were not on her side. From the first performances of A Matter of Position, “there was something about the play itself that nobody liked,” says May. “It went so badly that at intermission I went out in the lobby and heard someone say, ‘Who can I write to about this?’ It was tough. I didn’t like what he was doing, and that had never happened to us before—that we were at odds.” Even in times of stress, they had always been a unit; now, Nichols said, “as soon as we weren’t in balance, great angers arose. We flew apart.”
What followed was a bitter and ugly power struggle. Coe and the play’s other producers urged May to cut forty minutes; she insisted she could get the time down by working with the actors herself and essentially stepped in as director. Nichols grew so angry that he threatened to quit if she didn’t make the cuts he wanted; she went to the producers and told them to replace him. The producers sided with Nichols, shoved May aside, and made their own cuts. May said publicly that they had taken a play that had “something to do with the realities of human behavior” and “emasculated it.” When it opened, one critic wrote, “those members of the audience who had not already beat a hasty retreat before the final curtain, as many did, were left with a sensation of numbness that was too far down to be attributed to heartburn.” A Matter of Position closed in Philadelphia. The Broadway run was canceled.
Nichols and May would eventually make peace. Over the next five decades, they would perform together, collaborate many times as writer and director, act opposite each other, and heal their relationship. Nichols would never direct a movie without showing her the script; she would rely on his judgment just as much. But their romantically charged, passionate, two-against-the-world intimacy, the dangerous dynamic that had fueled their work and their art through the better part of ten years, would not return. “We stayed in each other’s lives,” said May. “But it wasn’t the same. We had seen each other every day, we knew each other’s lives, we made fun of each other’s dates. But after this, we were careful of each other’s feelings as we had never been before. There was a formality between us that only happens when you hurt someone. He would never turn me down, and I would never turn him down, and I was very careful about asking him to do anything . . . In memory, I thought our estrangement was longer than it was. But we were estranged in that forever we felt guilty.”
“It took years for Elaine and me to come back to each other after that,” said Nichols. “And what happened in those years is that we became two individual people rather than Nichols-and-May.”