They kept the breakup a secret for almost a year. In November, a few weeks after May’s play had been scheduled to open on Broadway, they gritted their teeth and got through a benefit performance for the New York Philharmonic to which they had long been committed; they barely spoke except onstage. A third hit album, Nichols and May Examine Doctors, was compiled out of their Monitor sketches and won them another Grammy nomination; they avoided doing publicity. Their contract to star in eight television specials was quietly undone by lawyers. Nichols had felt injured and angry when he realized that the character May had written for him in A Matter of Position was a synthesis of what she saw as his worst traits. But in the wake of their split, he did exactly what the character he had just played would have done. “He went to bed. Period,” said his agent, Robert Lantz. “He really wasn’t functioning.”
Nichols was in what Lantz described as a “state of deep depression,” a condition with which he would struggle, intermittently, for the rest of his life. He could find nothing to hold on to. “In a way, it was the worst time in my life,” he said, “because not only had I lost my best friend, but I had lost my work—it was who I was.” He frequently referred to himself as “the leftover half of a comedy team.” He knew what the press would say when the news finally broke—that he was an affable and skilled comic actor, but May was the truly incandescent talent of the two. He did not disagree. “I felt for a long time that what I was able to do came from my special connection with Elaine,” he said. “Without her, there was not much.” Even the friends who tried to give him pep talks couldn’t hide their uncertainty. “Oh, Mikey,” said Leonard Bernstein after a long, consoling walk along Park Avenue. “You’re so good! . . . I don’t know at what.”
Should he start auditioning? Should he try to write? Nothing felt like a good fit; everything reminded him of her. He went to see the new play everyone was talking about, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which had opened on Broadway the week that May’s play was supposed to start previews. He felt “enormously jealous, having just been in a play that didn’t work at all,” but also overwhelmed by the war of wills he saw onstage. He was uncomfortably familiar with the way “the two main characters compete in recruiting the audience to their side” and with how “they enjoy each other’s prowess . . . They’re often quite amused by the terrible things they say to each other,” he said. “It’s a fairly accurate portrayal of two people . . . who really do love each other and have allowed things to get in the way of the relationship surviving.” Watching Uta Hagen’s Martha and Arthur Hill’s George slash at each other, first playfully and then lethally, he couldn’t help but think of the “Pirandello” sketch. What was Virginia Woolf if not the story of a long and dangerous improv?
A couple of years earlier, he had met Albee, who had, in his “austere and restrained” way, been complimentary about their show. After he saw Virginia Woolf, Nichols called to offer his congratulations. He couldn’t get the play out of his head—he later said it was the most powerful experience he had had in a theater since seeing A Streetcar Named Desire as a teenager—but he had no particular thought of trying to attach himself to it, or to anything else, as a director. Richard Burton wanted to work with him on, of all things, Othello, in a proposed off-Broadway production in which he would play the Moor and Nichols would play Iago. They got as far as one reading. “As Richard and I read together,” said Nichols, “my voice got higher and higher, and more midwestern. Iago became a squeaking Chicagoan. At the end, I closed the book and said, so long, everybody.” (Burton wisely thought better of the plan and instead went to Broadway in an acclaimed production of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud.)
Lantz urged Nichols to try something, anything, that might help him shake off the doldrums, and convinced him to spend part of the spring of 1963 at the Vancouver International Festival, staging a short run of The Importance of Being Earnest while playing the Dauphin in Saint Joan. Nichols acquiesced—he had nothing better to do—but he wasn’t happy, and phoned Lantz every night, saying, “Get me out of this!”
The call that would change his career came without fanfare. Lantz told him that a producer named Arnold Saint-Subber—he used only his last name professionally and was “Saint” to his friends—was looking for someone to direct a still-unfinished play by Neil Simon called Nobody Loves Me at the Bucks County Playhouse, in Pennsylvania. Simon had been a staff writer for Your Show of Shows in the 1950s and had turned from television to theater at the age of thirty. His first Broadway show, the moderate success Come Blow Your Horn, had recently closed; his second, the book for the Cy Coleman–Carolyn Leigh musical Little Me, was struggling. He had written only the first act of the new play, a comedy about a young New York couple in their first week of marriage trying to get used to living with each other, and he had sketched a quick outline of Acts II and III.
Nobody Loves Me already had its leading lady. Elizabeth Ashley, a young actress with a quick wit and a distinctive catch in her husky voice, had won a Tony Award a couple of years earlier as the ingenue opposite Art Carney in a throwaway father-daughter comedy called Take Her, She’s Mine. The play had been directed by George Abbott, a venerable Broadway force whose bright, surehanded style had been a much-imitated hallmark of New York stage comedies and musicals for more than thirty years. Ashley wanted Abbott for this job, but he was well into his seventies. “Stark Hesseltine, my agent, said no, they wanted to make it—I remember this phrase—‘a new comedy,’” she says. “Somehow, in my contract I had director approval—I was, what, twenty-three? That’s nuts.”
When Nichols’s name came up, she loved the idea. “I was a little smarter than just being starstruck,” she says. “I just knew that, although it seemed like an outside-the-box idea to the grown-ups, it was right. There was a school of Broadway directors—Garson Kanin was typical—who all directed big hit comedies the same way”—with actors smirking, mugging, and halfway facing the audience as they delivered their wisecracks. It didn’t have to be believable as long as it got laughs. Like Nichols, Ashley had studied with Lee Strasberg. “For my crowd,” she said, “the kind of work that we trained in and were pursuing was diametrically opposed to the school of acting favored by Broadway comedy directors. If they really wanted to put someone down, they’d say, ‘Oh, he’s a Method actor.’ They hated that. That, primarily, was why the idea of Mike Nichols thrilled me. He wasn’t part of that Broadway comedy establishment.”
Simon—“Doc” to his colleagues—was not as convinced. Congenitally nervous, driven, insecure, and quick to see the downside in practically anything, he was skeptical when Saint-Subber suggested Nichols. “He’s not a director, he’s a comic,” he protested. But when Nichols called him, told him he loved the first act, and said he “wanted to meet with us as soon as he was through Dauphining—Mike would talk like that,” the playwright agreed to get together with him in New York.
Saint-Subber arranged a meeting at his East Side brownstone. It had been a long time since Nichols had had to audition for a job, but he charmed both the unfamiliar producer and the unconvinced writer in minutes, telling them he would direct the play in Bucks County, and after that, if he or they felt unsatisfied, they could part ways with no harm done. Nobody Loves Me still lacked a leading man, and Saint-Subber and Simon both suggested George Peppard, a handsome, WASPy actor more than a decade older than Ashley who had recently signed a Hollywood contract. “At the time, my attitude was, ‘Why do you want to go with somebody who’s gone off to be a movie star?’” said Ashley. “What about my buddy Bob?” “Bob” was Robert Redford, a twenty-six-year-old actor with whom she had worked in a 1959 Broadway play called The Highest Tree. In the past year or two, he had been getting regular gigs on television dramas, and Nichols remembered being impressed by him in an episode of Alcoa Playhouse called “The Voice of Charlie Pont,” in which he played a struggling writer. “I experienced that frisson you get when you’re surprised by someone,” he said. “It wasn’t ‘Gee, he was interesting.’ It was more ‘Where the hell did he come from?’ I just thought, he’s gonna crack it.”
Redford was not part of Ashley’s coterie of vibrant, social young Broadway actors. He was a private, taciturn man who had sworn off theater since his last stage appearance, in a flop called Sunday in New York. “There was always this thing about Redford that he didn’t really want to be an actor. He wanted to be a painter,” says Ashley. “My friends were rag-ass, dope-smoking Greenwich Village types. Bob was a little finer—he was an artist, and we were showbiz trash. There was a sense that he was acting to pay the rent.” When Ashley and Redford first worked together, he had been a young newlywed whom she watched endure a tragic loss. “He and [his wife] Lola had a baby, and when we were in that play, the baby died—crib death,” says Ashley. “I remember Bob didn’t even have enough money for the funeral.”
Although television had allowed Redford to make a decent living, often playing bad guys, Hollywood had not yet come calling, and he was on nobody’s short list for romantic comedies. “When I got word that Nichols wanted me to be in the play,” he recalls, “I thought, Why is he choosing me?” The part of Paul Bratter, a staid young professional gradually getting used to his free-spirited wife, Corie, and realizing that he would have to change his life just to keep up with her, seemed on paper like a straight-man role without a lot of opportunity. When Redford met Nichols, he asked, baffled, “What do you see in this?” Plenty, said Nichols, who knew how much could be made of the push-and-pull between an uptight man and a smart, alluring woman who alternately attracted him and drove him crazy. “It’s a battle,” Nichols told him. “These two are in a full-scale war.”
“It felt slightly perverse,” Redford says, “in a way that fascinated me. As soon as he said that, I thought, His idiosyncratic sensibility could make this really fun.” He was reluctant nevertheless; he and Lola had recently moved to Utah, where they were building a house and raising their two young children. “I didn’t want to get back in the race,” he said. He told Nichols he would commit to the short run in Bucks County but not to anything more. “It was half-assed,” he said, “but it was the best I could do, given where I was at emotionally.”
Nichols walked into the rehearsal room, looked around, and said genially, “Is it possible there are no doughnuts? There’s no point in rehearsing if there are no doughnuts!” There were three weeks until Nobody Loves Me was to begin its Bucks County run, and it didn’t take long for him to size up what he had to work with: a reticent leading man, a high-strung leading lady, and a writer so convinced his play was awful that when they started reading it aloud for the first time, he excused himself to go sit in the hall. Simon came back in when he finally heard a big laugh, only to discover that the cast had taken a break and Nichols was cracking them up with a story about working with May. When Simon asked, “Can we get out of the Bucks County booking?” he recalled, “Mike looked at me as if I were insane. [He said,] ‘Didn’t it occur to you that the actors were nervous?’”
They were. Nichols was not. In one day of work, he said, he had discovered exactly what he wanted to do for the rest of his career. He was struck by two revelations. The first was that, rather than acting, “this was the job I had been preparing for without knowing it,” he remembered. “All the Strasberg, all the studying, all the yakking at night over one cup of coffee driving the people in the restaurant crazy was for this.” The second discovery was more personal. “If you’re missing your father, as I had all during my adolescence, there’s something about playing the role of a father that is very reassuring,” he said. “I had a sense of enormous relief and joy that I had found a process that . . . allowed me to be my father and the group’s father.”
He now realized that performing—the thing he had thought he wanted most—“made me unhappy. It brings out [my] childishness. Directing encourages the adult portion of your character.” As he looked at Simon and the actors, he knew not only that his job was to help them, but that he could. “Look at this! Look at this!” he thought. “This is my job! I knew instantly what I wanted them to do, what we would do. It was perfectly clear.” Not wanting to overwhelm Simon with suggestions, Nichols told him to calm down about the play. “Once they’re relaxed in rehearsal, you’ll change your mind. I’m not positive it’s good but I think it is. Anyway, it’ll be fun trying.” Then he told his jittery writer to think about a new title. Simon came back with one the next morning: Barefoot in the Park.
His play was brisk, funny, almost overpacked with one-liners, and shrewdly constructed, complete with a secondary plot that mirrored the main story, in which Corie’s widowed mother, played by the veteran Mildred Natwick, learns to loosen up when she is wooed by the Bratters’ eccentric European neighbor. Simon was a fast rewriter, and his characters were equally fast talkers, batting his banter at one another so rapidly that it could easily become tinny and false. The first thing Nichols did was tell his cast to play the material as if the characters had no idea it was supposed to be comical. “Let’s do it as though we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “As if the people were alive. I didn’t want to keep tipping the comedy, having the actors running downstage, yelling, slamming doors, things like that.” Play it as if you think it’s King Lear, he told them.
Nichols’s approach drew on everything he had learned with Strasberg about rooting performances in psychological truth, and on everything he and May had discovered about getting laughs by refusing to chase them. The result, when Ashley and Redford got on their feet and started to play the scenes, surprised even their author. Standing next to Nichols at the back of the theater, watching the play’s first big fight, Simon recalled, he “began to see what Mike had done. He had turned the play from artifice to believability.” As the fight went on, Simon whispered to Nichols, “I don’t think we should be watching this . . . It’s too private. Too intimate. I feel like I’m eavesdropping.” “Good,” Nichols said. “Then it’s working.”
Nichols wasn’t shy about using his personal experience to motivate his actors—he told funny, embarrassing stories about the rocky start of his marriage to Pat Scot and their terrible honeymoon. But the cast got a more vivid glimpse of his romantic life when the woman who would soon become his second wife arrived in Bucks County. Margot Callas was a tall, stunning twenty-eight-year-old who had, until a few years earlier, lived with the much older British novelist and poet Robert Graves, who referred to her as his muse, “the white goddess.” The company of Barefoot in the Park was dumbstruck when she swept into Bucks County. “Mike would bring people as presents for us to play with—interesting, fabulous people,” says Ashley. (Among them: Stephen Sondheim and Susan Sontag.) “And one of them was Margot. She was just earth-shatteringly beautiful. If I use the word ‘trophy,’ I don’t intend it to be derisive. It was almost like a Scott Fitzgerald thing—the most beautiful woman and the smartest, most creative man. What better merger could there be?”
Ashley herself was in the middle of a romance that would complicate her work on the play considerably—she was now dating Peppard, the actor whom she had dismissed when he was suggested for Redford’s part a few months earlier and a man who, it turned out, was bent on undermining her.* “George would always have some question,” she says. “It was subtle. It was ‘Nichols, yeah, he had that comedy show, big success, but he may not know what he’s doing.’ And ‘Redford—well, he’s good, but can he carry a show?’ So what Mike Nichols got when he got me was this girl who was overly successful with this movie-star boyfriend and heavy-duty agents who would come in and give their notes.”
As the first performance neared, Nichols’s main worry was about his cast. “I knew they were all solid,” he said, “all good at getting the ‘bounce’ in the thing. If I had reservations it was with Bob and Liz’s mindset.” Ashley was game but emotionally volatile and had to be urged to shake off both Peppard’s interference and some bad habits picked up from past plays. “I don’t want you being cute when you’re upset,” Nichols told her. And Redford could be almost too laid back; Nichols soon discovered that he was funniest when the play gave him something to be angry about. “He was pissed a lot in those days,” he said, “so that was great electricity for Paul Bratter. Once Bob got those elements by the neck, he was off and running.”
By opening night in Bucks County, Nichols felt he had the cast and play in good working order. Simon did not agree; after a deadly dress rehearsal, he approached the stage manager and asked, “Have you ever had anything worse than this?” The laconic reply: “Maybe a couple of things.” “That’s it,” Simon told Nichols. “We’re not opening the play.”
“I said the first grown-up thing of my life,” Nichols recalled. “‘Why don’t we wait until tomorrow to see what it’s like with an audience?’ And we did, and they laughed their asses off.”
Barefoot in the Park finished its brief run in May, and Saint-Subber announced that it would open at Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre in October. The Biltmore’s owner groused to him that Ashley’s character was underdeveloped and that the play still didn’t have a workable third act—a hard problem to solve, given that Simon hadn’t come up with any conflict more dramatic than two people getting married, briefly experiencing cold feet, and then deciding to give it a go anyway. Nichols wasn’t worried; he would have all summer to figure it out.
He had started dividing his vacation time between Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard, where a year earlier he had become friendlier with the Bernsteins and also with the writer William Styron and his wife, Rose. “Lennie and Mike would turn up and we would play word games all the time,” she remembers. “Then Mike and I would play tennis.” In the summer of 1963, he surprised the Styrons—and everyone who knew him—by arriving with a new wife. He and Margot Callas had quietly married—on their wedding day, Robert Graves, who had met Nichols, had sent him a telegram, half wounding, half warning, that read “keep your hair up.” By the fall, Callas would be pregnant. “My memory is of her standing at the net when Mike and I played tennis,” says Rose Styron, “wearing white gloves, touching the post at the net, and keeping score.” Nichols and Callas had known each other for only a short time; she was emphatically not a part of his New York circle, and if friends raised their eyebrows at Nichols’s marrying a second time at thirty-one, they noted that at least his depression had lifted and kept the rest of their thoughts private.
By September, Nichols had regained enough confidence to go public about the dissolution of his partnership with May, in a carefully handled news story that noted that “Elaine will continue to write, Mike will continue to direct, and they’ll both perform together whenever they feel the urge.” The piece added that they had “just improvised” a fourth comedy album, to be titled Men, Women, and Children. (This was an apparently inaccurate reference to an attempt to get a second LP out of their Monitor sketches; it was never released.) Nichols was much more eager to talk about directing, telling his interviewer, “I learned that things you plan cold-bloodedly are not as funny as what happens when you’re actually doing a scene. I want to create an atmosphere of freedom for my actors. I haven’t blocked the script.”
That wouldn’t be true for long. Nichols was, and always would be, open to suggestions from his cast and to his own on-the-spot impulses—“Do you think you could have a cold?” he asked Redford at one point and watched, delighted, as the actor’s instant adjustment invigorated the scene. But in the two-month run-up to Broadway, Nichols worked out every piece of movement, beat by beat. Barefoot in the Park was set entirely in Paul and Corie’s sixth-floor walk-up, and he was determined that the snappy, rapid-fire dialogue be undergirded by comically naturalistic physical action. Redford and Ashley would never be standing at center stage, nose to nose, trading zingers—that was a style of Broadway boulevard comedy that, to actors and directors of Nichols’s generation, had come to feel false and trite. Instead, while Paul and Corie talked at (but rarely to) each other, she would be unpacking cardboard boxes and checking herself in the mirror, and he would be looking for one shoe and using a dictionary to press a wrinkle out of his tie while he was still wearing it. And Nichols turned each character’s entrance through the front door into one of Barefoot’s best running gags—a can-you-top-this sequence of gasps and heaves after racing up five flights of stairs. Meanwhile, Simon hammered away at a new draft of the ending. “I could wake [Mike] at two in the morning and say, ‘I’ve figured out what’s wrong with the third act,’ and he would curse me and then come meet me to listen to it,” said Simon. “It was the joy of discovering things together.”
During the long break after Bucks County, Ashley had gone to California to make her movie debut in The Carpetbaggers, a lurid, high-profile melodrama about a thinly disguised version of Howard Hughes that was designed to launch Peppard as a movie star. She returned to the rehearsal room with her agents scolding her that she was wasting her time doing a play. “I was conflict walking,” she recalls, “a perfect caricature of the fucked-up overnight success.” Nichols and Redford had developed a close working relationship—“I had some of the best times of my life working with Mike,” Redford says. “As soon as I understood that he saw the play as a contest of wills, things really got terrific and enlivened the whole experience for me.” As Ashley watched them work, she became certain that the show was slipping away from her.
“The play would not have become the huge hit that it was if not for what Mike and Redford did in inventing Paul,” says Ashley. “Mike was like a ferret, burrowing into the marrow of that character in every line, every second. But my character was a general everygirl.” And when Peppard—“a misogynist, a control freak, and a deeply twisted man,” she says—would swing by the rehearsal room, “what he fed to me was ‘Nichols is handing the play to Redford. They’re stealing it from you.’” Her distress became evident to Nichols, who was well-meaning but not initially helpful. “He said, ‘Let’s have a sit-down. I hear that you feel neglected!’” she remembers. “I started to cry, which is every director’s nightmare—to have the chick in the show start to cry. I said, ‘I don’t know who I am in the play!’ And Mike took my face in his hands and said, ‘You’re just a girl! That’s the magic of the play! She’s just a girl!’ And I remember sobbing. ‘But I don’t know how to play that!’ Mike had a sort of funny smile and internal laugh. And he said, ‘You don’t have to play her, don’t you understand? You are the girl everyone wants. You’re the girl every girl wants to be.’ And I said, ‘But I’m not that girl!’”
Nichols finally heard her, and as they started to block the first scene—a moving-in vignette with a repairman coming and going that devolves into a why-did-we-get-married fight—he realized that he had to make her character as idiosyncratic as Redford’s. Merely patting her on the head wouldn’t serve her performance or the play. “He said, ‘Look, I want you to stand downstage left and play one thing only: Say the lines, but do not move, no matter what happens,’” says Ashley. “‘You are Joan of Arc at the stake, and God is with you, and they may be putting the torches to the kindling, but you will not lose faith, because you are with God. I don’t care what Redford does—that’s what you play, no matter who comes onstage or who leaves, until you hear me say okay!’ He framed it as an exercise. So I thought, I’ll just say my lines to God. And it went on and on and on, and finally he said, ‘O-kay!’ And I found out all kinds of things about my girl. What I learned from Mike was, even if you want something to be universal, you make every detail unique to that person, that circumstance, that character’s history. I suddenly realized I was playing the girl who feared her husband was turning into a middle-aged white-shoe country-club fart. Sometimes you just know a director’s right. Don’t question. Just do it. By the very act of doing it, you will find out everything you’ve been trying to discover. That was Mike. He would just say, ‘Let’s try it.’”
Redford’s own meltdown came soon after, when the production moved to New Haven for its first out-of-town tryout, and it became evident that a newly confident Ashley was now walking away with the play. “I behaved badly. I did not want to be there and I did not cooperate,” Redford said. “I had agreed to do the play, but part of me was resisting everything. My head was still in Utah. When we opened in New Haven, I basically lay down. I thought, I’m going to show everybody why I shouldn’t be in this play—I’m going to be so bad they’ll have to get rid of me. And I was.” Reviews called Ashley sparkling and suggested that Redford tended to recede into the background. Nichols took him to lunch and said, “Look, I know how two people onstage can be. You can’t win the battle until you acknowledge it’s a battle,” Redford recalled. “I know what you’re doing, but it’s not going to work. I’m not going to replace you.” Redford dug in; when the play moved to Washington, D.C., his performance was still lackadaisical and uncommitted.
So Nichols tried another approach. “He said, ‘I think you’re somebody who probably has some secrets that you keep hidden,’” Redford remembers. “‘Why don’t you search yourself? Search for the things you hide. What if you use that for the character—the idea that you carry all these secrets around?’ I had never been aware of that, but he had a deep sense of psychology. So that night when I went on, I didn’t say my lines. I just whistled. The audience didn’t know what the fuck was going on.” Ashley was unnerved as well. “I whistled and whistled, and suddenly I felt so comfortable that I was doing what I wanted to do that I came alive. Mike just kept plugging away until he finally hit the nerve that freed me up.” The battle had been joined. “When we did the show that night,” Nichols said, “Liz became invisible. He pulled out every trick and knocked her off the planet. That’s when we really took off . . . As we headed for Broadway, Bob challenged her, and she gave him a run for his money.”
With every performance, Nichols balanced them more effectively, until, Ashley says, “the audience would not stop fucking laughing.” At the start of one rehearsal, she remembers Nichols telling the cast, “‘There will be no squealing, whining, crying, or screaming, because we’re going to be cutting. But nobody should throw away the pages we are tearing out. You should put them in a safety deposit box, because you will all have hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gag lines.’ Doc Simon was in the back of the theater, pale and shrunken. But we had to get the show down in size.”
By the time a shorter version of Barefoot in the Park arrived in New York, it lacked only the tweak that would complete its third act—and that was solved by a question from Lillian Hellman, who had seen the play and, at a dinner with Nichols and his new bride, said that she was confused about whether Corie’s mother had actually consummated an affair with the older man she had met. “I said, ‘Can you excuse me for about an hour?’” said Nichols. He left the table and called Simon. Until that point, the act had been dragged down by a scene in which the two older characters tried to describe what had happened between them. “It was so boring,” said Nichols. “We tried this and that . . . and after a whole day, I said, ‘What if it seems funny to you as you recollect it? What if you start to laugh at what happened last night?’ They tried it, and we had solved it . . . I then came to appreciate that this job that I so loved, that I was going to be okay at, needed the unconscious just as much as it needed improv.”
With just one show, Nichols had come to feel at home in his work. The insecurities and vanities of actors didn’t irritate him; he delighted in helping them to the finish line. He greeted the anxieties of writers with serene optimism. And the sound of an audience—or even its silence—only made him feel more in control. He found he could walk into the theater at any point during a performance and “in five seconds I know how it’s doing. It has nothing to do with laughs. You hear it. I hear what people are thinking.”
On October 23, 1963, Barefoot in the Park opened on Broadway. Just before his extremely nervous cast took the stage, Nichols gathered them for a final pep talk. “Everybody relax,” Redford says he told them. “You know your positions, you know your laughs, you know your lines, you know where the comfort zones are. So enjoy yourselves, and remember: Everything depends on tonight.”
On the page, Barefoot in the Park reads as a fairly standard romantic TV-style sitcom of its era; in fact, it became one seven years later. It can be hard to understand why its arrival on Broadway dazzled not only critics but a generation of young comedy aficionados like Lorne Michaels, who believes the work that Nichols did with Neil Simon in the 1960s was “revolutionary.”
“Doc Simon owed more to Nichols than he could ever acknowledge,” says Ashley. “He turned that play into something real.” What critics saw onstage that night was a comedy of the kind they had been trudging to for a decade or more, but this time played with effortless verisimilitude—the acutely funny lines were combined with a rare glimpse at how people go about their lives in the privacy of their own homes, their physical tics, their tiny irritations, the odd habits that you never realized everyone shared until someone revealed them to you onstage. It was the Nichols touch, honed by his years of working with May and getting the audience to say, “Yes! How did you know?”
The reviews were raves. “Mike Nichols—you can call him director Mike Nichols after this one . . . doesn’t busy his actors for the sake of busyness alone,” wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune. “Mr. Nichols’s eye is a restless absolute, as his ear has perfect pitch.” Critics knew the plot was flimsy; it didn’t matter. “Ah, what the actors, paced by genius Nichols, make of this familiar charade!” the reviewer for Cue magazine wrote. “If you haven’t heard by now, [he] leaps into a leading position as a director of comedy.” They particularly loved what Nichols had done with the escalating stakes of the entrances, capped by a scene in which a drunken Redford bursts through the door carrying Mildred Natwick and reels across the room to the couch, a laugh that stopped the show for a full minute. “These entrances could become classics of a kind as exercises for students of advanced acting,” said The New York Times. Summarizing the reaction, the New York Post’s Richard Watts wrote, “Every reviewer in town recognized the deftness, inventiveness and sureness of touch with which Mike Nichols staged the comedy, and thereby he stepped immediately to the top of the class.”
In 1963, there was only one way to get tickets to a Broadway show: Go to the theater and line up outside the box office. The day the reviews for Barefoot in the Park ran, crowds at the Biltmore were so big that the Times sent a photographer to shoot Nichols and Simon, Broadway’s new dream team, grinning in front of the throng as it waited hours to secure seats to the blockbuster hit. By the end of the day, the play had advance sales of $350,000—the equivalent of nine sold-out weeks. Saint-Subber guessed, with wild enthusiasm, that it was on its way to a three-year run. It would run for four.
The show would not make Nichols much richer than he was; he had been paid just $4,000 to direct it, and his royalties for the run would amount to somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a week. But Barefoot in the Park had transformed his life. An out-of-work actor had become the hottest director in New York. And he was already thinking ahead—to his next play, and his first movie.