At the beginning of 1985, Nichols had four hit shows running on Broadway. Although his name wasn’t in the credits of My One and Only, it was on the checks that arrived each week, and as The Real Thing and Hurlyburly neared the ends of their runs, he would still show up to fine-tune the performances and take the actors out for a late meal at Orso or Joe Allen. Often, they were joined by the star of his fourth hit. Whoopi Goldberg had first met Nichols a year earlier, when he and Annabel, at the urging of Judith Ivey, had ventured downtown to see The Spook Show, a performance piece Goldberg had brought to a small space on West Nineteenth Street. Nichols knew nothing about her except that word of mouth had been attracting a stream of theater people to the show. He beamed throughout her act, a series of monologues in which she played an old man’s Jamaican caregiver, a white teenage Valley Girl who learns she’s pregnant, and a disabled person looking for love (“It was a good night—I was on,” Goldberg said). And when her fourth signature character, a cosmopolitan junkie named Fontaine, talked about his visit to the Anne Frank museum, Nichols wept. After the show, he went backstage, hugged her, and offered his help on the spot.
Nichols was always generous in praising new talent, but something about Goldberg touched him more deeply than he expected. He often compared her to Ruth Draper, whose recordings of her monologues influenced a generation of character-driven solo performers, but Goldberg’s portraits-in-miniature and the deftness with which she could leap from social satire to poignancy owed just as much to Elaine May. She was starting to get acting offers but was determined to keep doing her own material: “If I have to shake my tits or play somebody’s fuckin’ maid for the rest of my life,” she said, “it isn’t worth it.”
Nichols’s first idea was to move Goldberg’s show to the Promenade, the off-Broadway theater where Hurlyburly had played. When that proved unavailable, he told her they should take the show directly to Broadway. Goldberg was overwhelmed by his attention but slightly wary of going mainstream so quickly; she was used to working as a performer on the fringes, but also to being the master of her own fate. When she did a show, she said, “I like people to come without expectations, ready to have a good time . . . If they’re rolling, the show can go on and on. If they’re not, it’s one, two, three.” Nichols got it, and he got her. He had spent hundreds of hours onstage watching Elaine May stretch a sketch almost past the point of patience on one night, then move it along briskly the next. He knew that performers like Goldberg needed room to roam within their own storytelling structures, and accordingly, on a given evening, her show could run a crisp ninety minutes or a loose two hours.
Although Nichols didn’t take a director’s credit—“Production Supervised by Mike Nichols” was the billing—he acted as its director in every way, watching, listening, letting her know when she went too far or chased a laugh or needed to round out a vignette or deepen a moment. He had decades of experience being encouraging and intuitive with actresses, supportive and patient with writers, and tough and precise with comedians. Now he was working with all three at once, and he loved it. So did Goldberg; as they worked on shaping the show for Broadway, she felt he was speaking to her not just as a director but as a fellow performer with an uncanny sense of what an audience felt at any moment, and she trusted him completely. “Mike Nichols spoiled me,” she said. “When it wasn’t right, he told me. Not all actors like that, but for an actor like me who loves the process of creating a life—sort of like this God thing—it’s wonderful to have a co-God.” Beyond that, Nichols worked to bring Goldberg into his world, helping her make connections. His imprimatur helped to turn the show into an event that, just as An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May had twenty years earlier, attracted the instant attention of Hollywood—including Steven Spielberg, who was looking for an actress to star in his adaptation of The Color Purple. But beyond that, Nichols wanted Goldberg to experience what he had loved—the dynamism and energy and late-night sociability of life as the star of a hit show. When he realized that, as a solo performer, she had nobody to go out with once the curtain fell—a Broadway rite that he had loved for twenty-five years—he essentially had the Real Thing company adopt her for post-performance dinners that would last late into the night.
As he started making plans to shoot Heartburn during the summer, other offers flooded in. John Lindsay, the former mayor of New York, was heading a search committee charged with finding someone to take over as the artistic manager of the two theater stages at Lincoln Center; Nichols declined, saying he was uninterested in a full-time administrative role. He had also said no several months earlier when Larry Kramer sent him his play The Normal Heart. Nichols’s life was already touched by the AIDS epidemic; a few colleagues in the theater had gotten sick, and many more were terrified of what might lie ahead. In the spring, he and May would reunite again for a Comic Relief benefit for AIDS research, the start of a twenty-year commitment to AIDS fundraising on his part. He didn’t think he was right for the impassioned cry of rage and condemnation that Kramer had written, but the play moved him. “I think along the way I sent him every play I wrote,” said Kramer, “and he always wrote back in a way [that demonstrated] he had really read what I sent. Even though he said it wasn’t for him, I thought, what a gentleman!”
After the miseries of Hurlyburly, Nichols wanted to return to lighter material; he was considering a new play called Social Security, by Andrew Bergman, the co-screenwriter of Blazing Saddles, that read as the kind of laugh-packed urban farce he had not directed since his run of Neil Simon hits. Bergman’s main character, Barbara Kahn, is a nouveau riche Jewish socialite living with her husband, an art dealer, on the East Side. When her mother, an old-world kvetch from Long Island, unexpectedly moves in with them, Barbara has to confront everything about her origins that she has willed herself to forget. For Nichols, the play, a swift, funny literalization of Freud’s theory of the return of the repressed, hit close to home. He was pulling together a reading at the Carlyle when real life intervened. He got a call from Philadelphia. His mother was dying.
In the decades since Brigitte Nichols had remarried, she and her son had found their way to a peaceable but not especially warm relationship. Nichols was fond of her husband, Franz, and financially generous to both of them. But the injuries of an anguished adolescence had never fully healed. For most of his adulthood, he had kept his distance, maintaining their connection, which his brother describes as “polite and indulgent,” by telephone. “He bought them new houses, summer homes, extravagant gifts,” says Robert Nichols. “His public relationship with her was as a very good son, but his true feelings were complicated. Mike suffered the most from our mother’s phobias and neuroses, which were numerous.” In recent years, their visits had been brief and had occurred mostly at the urging of Annabel, who had, during their marriage, won her mother-in-law’s affection; she was the first of Nichols’s wives to pass muster.
He could not afford to hesitate about a trip home. As he had gotten older and had his own children, the facts of his mother’s terrible early life had stirred a kind of pity and empathy in him that he had not been able to find when he was a younger man. He could never entirely like her, but he could, at last, understand and forgive her. The unhappy manipulator whose flair for inducing guilt had inspired more than one Nichols and May routine was also the woman who took him to his first movies, calmly explained to him what anti-Semitism was, bought him his first wig, and kept the family from insolvency as a young widow. He reached Philadelphia in time to be at her bedside with Robert when she died, on January 10, 1985, at the age of seventy-eight. Nichols was deeply affected by her loss. “Mike broke down and wept—sobbed, actually—which surprised me,” says Robert.
“My mother had always been sick with one thing or another, and we thought of her as a permanent invalid,” said Nichols. “And then she had cancer, and was dying, and ended up being as courageous as anyone I’ve ever seen. It moved us very much, and it helped everything. We were able to really love her completely. Finally you say, All right, well, let’s declare a truce.”
That spring, Nora Ephron was ideal company for Nichols. “They had their own language,” wrote her friend Richard Cohen, “a matter of nods and frowns and common cultural references. They knew whose marriage was a sham and who could not act and who had a bad drug problem. They knew the business of movies and the business of theater and, because they were hyperventilating readers, the business of books and magazines. [And] they had words, a torrent of them.” Over the years, their bond had deepened from what Cohen called “mentor/mentee” into close friendship. Ephron possessed every quality Nichols loved in the people closest to him—wit, intellectual fluency, and such strong-mindedness that when she died, in 2012, he asked, unironically, “Who will tell all of us what we should do?” She was a Jewish mother whose own Jewish mother had been as formidable and complex as Nichols’s. After Brigitte’s death, the trust between them grew even deeper. For Ephron, giving Nichols Heartburn—her own story, less raw than it had been a few years earlier but still the expression and repository of a great deal of hurt—was an act of faith. She had once said on a talk show that the only way she could fantasize about infidelity was “to kill my husband for a couple of minutes—and then I get to marry Mike Nichols.”
Reaction to the novel, which had come out in the spring of 1983, had been explosive. The first-person story of Rachel Samstat, a Jewish cookbook author whose second marriage ends when she discovers, while seven months pregnant, the infidelity of her husband, Mark, was manifestly Ephron’s own, told in her intimate and cutting voice and even punctuated by her recipes, and she barely bothered to pretend otherwise. Heartburn mixed real names—including a warm reference to Elaine May—with barely disguised versions of Ephron’s friends, colleagues, and nemeses. When it was published, The New York Times called it “a tough, funny, bitchy and sometimes touching report from the scene of the disaster in the form of a novel.” Some critics, particularly men, excoriated it as the work of “an effective self-publicizer”; in Vanity Fair, Leon Wieseltier, hiding behind the pseudonym “Tristan Vox,” went so far as to call the prospect of a movie “child abuse,” claiming that Bernstein’s misdeeds were nothing compared with “the infidelity of a mother toward her children” in writing about them. But the outrage of those who felt repelled—or perhaps menaced—by Heartburn only helped speed it to the bestseller list.
Carl Bernstein was livid about being transformed from the hero of Watergate into the bad guy—a man “so horny he was capable of having sex with a Venetian blind”—in what he called “a national soap opera.” At first, his public stance was calculated stoicism: “I’ve always known that Nora writes about everything that happens in her life,” he said. “The book is just like her—it’s very clever.” But when he learned that Heartburn was to become a movie, he went to war, calling the novel “nasty . . . smarmy . . . prurient” and complaining that it “obliterates everybody’s dignity . . . I should have had no reason to be surprised,” he said, “but . . . your marriage, particularly your children, ought to be something you keep for yourself. When you give away what you sing to your infant child in the nursery . . . you give away your soul!” He took Ephron to court, and their battle resulted in one of the most unusual celebrity divorce agreements in history. Bernstein won the right to read all drafts of the screenplay and submit notes, extracted a pledge that Ephron would never turn Heartburn into a TV series, mandated that a trust for their two young sons be created with part of the film’s profits, and won her guarantee that “the father in the movie ‘Heartburn’ will be portrayed at all times as a caring, loving and conscientious father in any screenplay prepared or executed with my name attached to it.” Nichols himself was a signatory to the final settlement.
Nichols did not view Heartburn as an act of betrayal but as a response to one. He was moved by the way Ephron had turned a crushing emotional blow into a statement of survival, and he initially saw it as a movie about “a woman doomed to be right, and therefore alone.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to do this,” Bernstein said to him when they met at the Russian Tea Room to discuss the movie. “Particularly since, more than anybody I know, you’re a person who cherishes his privacy and that of your children.”
“Somebody is going to make this movie,” Nichols told him, “and you’re much better off if I make it, because I’m your friend.” Streep insisted that the movie be treated as fiction; she wanted to star in an emotional comedy about a contemporary woman’s life, not a tell-all drama, and on that point, her word was law. “Mike at that time was a romantic, and a total womanizer,” says Heartburn’s producer, Robert Greenhut. “But what he felt about Streep was love and respect. He listened to her.”
In some ways, Nichols’s choice for Rachel’s husband was a natural for a director who often looked to theater when casting his movies. By 1985, Mandy Patinkin had won two Tonys and was beginning to get noticed by Hollywood, with major roles in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl and in Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. Patinkin was a Sam Cohn client, and Cohn was constantly in Nichols’s ear about how right he was for the part. He was earnest, he was emotional, he was Jewish; he was also, in the memories of those who worked on Heartburn, a lot to handle. “Mandy was at the top of his game,” says Juliet Taylor, the film’s casting director. “But when he came in to read with people, we got to a point where he sings”—Mark exuberantly breaks into “Soliloquy,” from Carousel, when Rachel tells him she’s pregnant—“and he sang it. The whole song. Every single verse. We were all just dying and thinking, ‘Oh, he is going to be so high-maintenance.’”
During Heartburn’s two weeks of rehearsal, Nichols started to worry. Many of Patinkin’s questions seemed to emanate from his skepticism about the bad behavior of his character. “Mandy would constantly say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t understand, would a guy really do this? Would a man really cheat on his wife while she was pregnant?’” says Richard Masur, who played one of Rachel’s friends. “Mike and I were the only two men in the room, and we found ourselves talking about our own lives and saying, ‘Yes, men do terrible things!’ He never got it. I think on some level he wanted his character to be the hero of the movie, or at least to be softer and more likable.”
Streep wasn’t worried. “Mandy’s a questioner, right?” she says. “That’s the way he was the very first time we worked together in Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’” the play in which she made her off-Broadway debut in 1975. “He’s a rabbinical actor. He wears everyone down with questions, and that’s how he solves the mystery of the thing for himself.” But by July 19, the first day of production, Nichols had begun to convince himself that he had made a mistake that could put the entire movie at risk. In Heartburn, Rachel has to fall in love with Mark, marry him, go into a tailspin when she discovers his betrayal, leave, reconcile with him, realize she was right the first time, and leave again. For the movie to work, Mark would have to be alternately seductive and contrite, gentle and loutish, imploring and impatient, someone she could love, hate, and need.
They shot for five days. “Neither Meryl nor Mandy had any idea there was a problem,” says Greenhut. “They thought everything was hunky-dory.” Soon after filming a restaurant scene, Nichols went to Greenhut and said, “‘This is not happening. I think we should try and replace Mandy.’ He couldn’t even articulate what it was, except that there was no real excitement in the relationship. He asked me to give Mandy the bad news, and I said, ‘I really think you should be the one carrying the water on that,’” Greenhut says. “We sat in my car—I had one of the first car phones. I said, ‘You call him, and I’ll sit here and hold your hand or whatever.’ It was a very emotional experience for both of them. I sat next to Mike and I could hear Mandy gasp on the other end. It was very, very rough.”
Streep was stunned. Nichols had not told her of his decision, and, she says, “I never really understood it. He just took a dislike. Mandy was wonderful, and it was so early in the shoot. I did say to Mike, ‘I think it’s a bad idea.’ And it was so sudden! Just like shaking an Etch a Sketch, and he was gone.” Patinkin later faulted himself for listening “to all the relatives who said, ‘Yes, you win Tony Awards, but how’s the movie career going?’” and said that he was “ambivalent” about the role and believed that Nichols had always wanted another actor for the job. He was devastated, he said, when Nichols fired him.
“I’ve felt awful about it all my life,” Nichols said. “But on film I couldn’t see the chemistry I wanted. I had to move fast.” Unless he could get a new costar for Streep on a moment’s notice, the production would shut down, and it would be Bogart Slept Here all over again. He reached out to Kevin Kline, who was Streep’s friend and had worked well with her in Sophie’s Choice, but Kline wasn’t interested; “I liked the book,” he said, “but when I read the screenplay, the character just seemed like a jerk.” Nichols then called Jack Nicholson, who agreed to step in immediately—for $5 million, which was about $5 million more than Paramount had been paying Patinkin. “When I called him,” said Nichols, “the first thing he said to me was ‘If you need me, Nick, I can be there in two days.’ Then comes the bill, and it’s very high, but that’s also part of ‘If you need me.’ Because you can read it, ‘If you need me.’” The studio did some quick calculus about whether Nicholson’s drawing power was worth what would amount to a substantial increase in Heartburn’s sub–$20 million budget, and approved his hiring.
Both Streep and Ephron worried that Nicholson’s arrival would throw Heartburn out of balance. Patinkin had been striving, needy, serious; Nicholson—who was nobody’s idea of Jewish—was sly, confident, and indefatigably charming. “Now everyone will like him, that son of a bitch,” Ephron fretted.
“Suddenly, there were a lot of ideas about how we were going to enhance the part,” says Streep. “The man’s part. This was a movie about a woman, which was even more unusual in those days than it is now, and I thought it was a unique opportunity to explore things from her perspective, from Nora’s perspective. That was the first time in my life that I got mad at Mike. Jack Nicholson was a movie star, and it was intimidating to have him come in, and maybe a little piece of that made me go, ‘Hey, don’t lose me in this just because you bring your friend in.’ I went to Mike and said, ‘This movie is about the person who got hit by the bus. It’s not about the bus.’ He heard me—he really did hear me on that. And all the nonsense about new scenes stopped.”
Nicholson himself turned out to be nervous—he and Streep had never met, and there was no prep time before their first scene. Nichols decided to use their awkwardness to the film’s advantage by starting with a scene in which Mark and Rachel uneasily attempt a step toward reconciliation while remaining unsure of how to deal with each other. “If you look at the movie, Meryl’s doing that thing that girls do,” he said. “She’s blotchy—parts of her face are blushing. The thrill of them with each other, and us with them together, is sort of what made the joy of that movie.” For the first time, he started to take pleasure in the shoot. “It became clear to me that it was at least alive,” he said. He no longer felt that Heartburn was about a woman doomed to be alone, but about the struggle, even if unsuccessful, to connect. “I think maybe my subject is the relationships between men and women, without much of anything else, centered [on] a bed,” he said at the time. “I don’t know how to narrow it down any more.”
Streep and Nicholson’s breakthrough came not in that uncomfortable first encounter but in a sequence in which Mark and Rachel eat a takeout meal and chat aimlessly while sitting on their bed in the house they’ve just moved into. Nichols suggested they should eat pizza; Streep proposed that they serve it with a trowel, because their kitchen utensils would probably still be packed. She and Nicholson started trying to remember lyrics to old songs, singing with their mouths full, recalling snatches of melodies, getting them wrong, moving on to something else. In just one take, Nichols captured the kind of private throwaway moment in a married couple’s life that almost never makes it into movies.
He was glad to work with Nicholson again—they soon rediscovered the “Nick and Nick” dynamic they had had fifteen years earlier, although, Nichols said, “Carnal Knowledge is far blacker and bleaker than I feel now.” But, like Silkwood, Heartburn was a set on which his most significant collaborators were women: Ann Roth, Carly Simon, whom he hired to write the score, Streep, and Ephron. “Nora was always there,” says Streep. “He and she always had that confab. They were the Gang of Two. And often they didn’t even have to say much—there was so much between them that was understood.” Nicholson couldn’t have been happier. “He didn’t know how to talk to men unless you were talking about sports or something he was interested in,” says Masur. “But with women, he was engaged, connected, funny. He would light up. In the wedding scene, he was wonderful with the little girls—he would listen to every word they said—charming to the old ladies, great to the women who were extras. I said to Mike, ‘What do you think that comes from?’ and Mike said, ‘That’s what happens when you grow up with two mothers. He didn’t have a father to kill.’”
Streep trusted Nichols so completely that she allowed her daughter Mamie, then just two, to appear in several scenes as Rachel’s toddler; their connection is unmistakable, and Nichols delightedly left much of their interaction in the movie, whether Mamie is pulling her mother’s glasses off her face or climbing a flight of stairs to an airplane one deliberate step at a time as his camera watches patiently and insists that the audience do the same. Their scenes in Heartburn were the first he ever shot with a father’s eye.
To fill in her own performance, Streep watched Ephron every day. “It wasn’t like trying to play Margaret Thatcher or something,” she says, “but there were parts of her essence that were important to me. Nora was a tough girl, but she was also girly, and she had certain fey mannerisms that I wanted to capture.”
For Nichols, the making of Heartburn became a more personal experience than he had expected, sometimes uncomfortably so. The cast was full of people he knew—Maureen Stapleton, Stockard Channing, his old friends Cynthia O’Neal and Milos Forman. And for the first time, he was depicting his own milieu—a world of casual socializing among successful urbanites, of dinner parties and receptions and tense drives home, of prewar co-ops and expensive renovations, and of friends who gossip about one another’s secrets. More painfully, he was trying to do justice to the plight of a woman with two young children who realizes that her husband will never become the man she needs him to be. At the time, Nichols’s own marriage was once again in decline, and he brought a bitter force to the scenes in which Rachel attempts to continue with Mark but realizes she will never trust him.
With Streep, he was true to his word: The film’s visual showpiece is the scene in which Heartburn announces that it is indeed about the woman who was hit by the bus—a two-minute slow push toward Rachel’s face as she sits in a salon and overhears a conversation that makes her realize her husband has been cheating on her. The only major scenes he cut after shooting them were a couple of fantasies in which Rachel gets to step away from what she’s actually facing. Although the film remained a comedy, Nichols wanted it to carry a sting that audiences wouldn’t fully feel until the end. In most of his movies, he had embedded a thematic statement somewhere in the first five minutes. In Heartburn, he saved it for the end, when Rachel’s friend says to her, “Don’t give me that New York psychological bullshit about how people are capable of change. They are not.” The lyrics Carly Simon wrote for the film’s main theme, “Coming Around Again”—“I know nothing stays the same / But if you’re willing to play the game . . .”—offer more hope than that, but only in the wake of loss and disillusionment. Simon consulted closely with Nichols and Ephron about the lyrics; he chose to thread the song through the film, his first extensive use of music to illuminate a story’s theme since The Graduate.
Nichols finished the movie in October, not quite sure what he had shot, or what life he was going back to. He had been spending more nights and weekends at the Carlyle, often preparing for the coming week’s work late into Sunday night. During one of those sessions, when Robert Greenhut was working with Nichols, 60 Minutes came on the TV in the background. Nichols lifted his head from the shooting schedule, looked at Diane Sawyer, and said, “Wow. How can I get to meet her?”
“You’re a famous guy,” Greenhut told him. “I’m sure you can figure it out.”
The first edit of Heartburn got the most tepid possible endorsement from Carl Bernstein, who insisted that the movie was “a silly little story about two people who fucked up” but conceded that it “come[s] quite close to the truth of what really happened in the marriage.” For the first time in his career, Nichols had no idea how critics or audiences would respond to a movie he had made. His own feelings about his movie, and his marriage, had shifted from optimism to discouragement and back so many times that he didn’t quite know where, or if, he had finally landed.
With the film’s release set for the summer of 1986, he turned back to Social Security, which was aiming for a spring opening on Broadway. Nichols cast the play entirely with friends and colleagues: He had known Marlo Thomas, who would play Barbara, since the 1960s, and in the past couple of years he had worked with Ron Silver (who played her husband), Joanna Gleason (her sad-sack sister), and Kenneth Welsh (her brother-in-law). When he did a reading of the play before shooting Heartburn, Elaine May had stepped in to play Barbara’s mother as a favor; for the Broadway run, he cast Olympia Dukakis. Following that reading, which happened soon after his mother’s death, Nichols encouraged Bergman to take the second act in a new direction. Instead of a guest-who-wouldn’t-leave comedy, Social Security would become “a play about a mother who seemed like a schlepper but who really showed up those wiseass, smarty-pants Upper East Siders,” says Peter Lawrence, the stage manager. “He turned the play on its ear because of what happened to his mother. Everything Mike did was personal to him, and in this case he wanted to do a play about a difficult mother that did not end up being a mockery of the mother.”
In January, he began rehearsals in anticipation of a March tryout in Washington, D.C. “He’d come in and start every day with a joke or something funny,” says Welsh. “His point was ‘If it’s not fun, why are we doing this?’” He played games to loosen up the cast, making them answer questions like “If you could be anyone in this room besides yourself, who would you pick?” And he encouraged them to risk dignity and go as far as they dared; Social Security, with a slapstick scene that featured Dukakis standing helplessly in the living room in her underwear while a ninety-eight-year-old dinner guest is being hidden in a closet, was not a comedy that asked to be underplayed.
One afternoon, Nichols was rehearsing a scene in which Gleason and Welsh arrive at the apartment. The actors were mining the moment for all the self-pity, jealousy, passive-aggression, and resentment they could muster; Nichols, watching from his chair, was laughing hard but wanted more. “Make it worse!” he told them. They did.
“Mike started laughing again—he had this unbelievable laugh,” says Bergman. “Then he turned red and suddenly said, ‘I’m not feeling very well.’” He looked at Lawrence and said, “Pete, I want you to call this number. It’s my cardiologist. I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“Do you want me to call 911?” Lawrence asked. “No,” Nichols said, “I’m just going to get in a cab and go to the doctor.”
Nichols spent two days in the hospital for what the press called “observation and testing,” after chest pains that revealed “no major problem.” Publicly, what had happened was described as nothing more than a scare that would require him to rest for a couple of weeks before resuming rehearsals. “It wasn’t called a heart attack,” says Lorne Michaels. “It was called whatever it was called, because a heart attack could stop you from working. But it was a heart attack.”
Nichols had not been taking care of himself; he was overweight, smoking, eating poorly, working long hours, and increasingly succumbing to his appetite for cocaine. By the mid-1980s, that included crack. Many of Nichols’s peers, even those who regularly indulged in coke, would never have considered buying or using what they thought of as a cheap, dangerous street drug for the lower class. It is not clear when, or with whom, Nichols first tried crack, but his hunger for it was powerful, he quickly figured out where and how to obtain it, and he later admitted that his drug use was, in part, responsible for his health crisis. When he returned to Social Security a couple of weeks later, he was at least temporarily clean, several pounds lighter, and cranky about his new diet. “He was always bitching that he wanted a cheeseburger,” says Bergman, “and Marlo would make these completely tasteless vegan cookies. He was not happy, but he was sassy and mentally on top of his game.”
“When he came back, the atmosphere changed, because he was vulnerable,” Gleason says. “I also remember that he had bought pearls for Annabel—that relationship was on the cusp, near the end. I’d be watching him: Is he coughing? Is he short of breath? But I must say, he seemed fine. I think the heart attack was less debilitating and more cautionary—a shot across the bow.”
Nichols and the cast worked so efficiently that no substantial postponement was necessary. Social Security had a quick run in Washington, and by the time the play began previews in New York on March 26, the heart attack was more than two months behind him and he seemed like his old self. Not long before the play opened, he took a quick trip to Europe and came back with an anecdote for all the friends and colleagues who knew about his most recent crush. “He was talking all about Diane Sawyer,” says Gleason. “They had flown back together, and he was full of stories.”
The meeting was an accident. Nichols had run into her in Paris as he was waiting for his flight back to New York. Sawyer hadn’t slept for three days. She had flown there to deal with a sudden emergency involving her mother, who had developed what appeared to be an erratic heartbeat while on vacation. She was now escorting her and her stepfather back to America and, she said, “had spent the night outside my mother’s door . . . listening to her breathe, and was in a blind panic.” In the morning, she had thrown on old jeans and a stained turtleneck and gotten her family to the airport; she was now waiting to board the same Concorde flight as Nichols. She spotted him before he saw her, and tried to avoid him until he walked up and said, “You’re my hero.”
“And you’re mine,” she replied. She told Nichols what was going on; he talked about the loss of his mother and the stress of dealing with sick parents. They didn’t banter; they opened up to each other quickly, finding unexpected common ground at a vulnerable moment. “Nothing fundamental had changed,” she said. But “in the first 90 seconds, I knew he was at the center of the dance.”
If lightning struck instantly, professionalism kicked in minutes later. Nichols was still married; Sawyer was involved with the diplomat Richard Holbrooke. She knew he had a movie coming out, and she spent some of the three-hour flight to JFK trying to wrangle him for an interview on 60 Minutes timed to the release of Heartburn. “Do you ever have lunch?” she said as they reached New York. He said he did. They exchanged pleasantries and went their separate ways.
At the opening night of Social Security, Nichols was upbeat and cheerful; he and those around him all assumed he was out of the woods. He was not. The worst ordeal of his life was about to begin. “It was,” he said, “the year I went crazy.”