When you’re in your mid-seventies, even if your two most recent accomplishments are a successful movie and a Broadway hit, nobody puts you at the top of their must-hire list; nobody makes you their first call of the day. In the year after Closer and Spamalot opened, Nichols’s phone did not ring off the hook with offers. Producers and executives and writers and actors assumed he was doing his own thing, or easing into a less active life, or enjoying a period of post-victory leisure. The last, at least, was true; he didn’t find it difficult to fill his time. There were long lunches with younger filmmakers whom he would call just because he loved their work; they would accept his invitation shyly and then find themselves in the company of a new friend who was also the repository of half a century of show business wisdom. There were weeks on Martha’s Vineyard, DVD commentary tracks to record with the help of his close pal Steven Soderbergh, tributes to receive, vacations to take, theater people to bless by producing short runs of their plays or godfathering their careers. And there was time with old colleagues who, for the rest of his life, would turn to him for advice or consolation or just an evening of good stories.
But work itself—the thing that had always impelled him—was subsiding. Spamalot had, for the first time, brought Nichols face-to-face with the reality that his stamina and energy were waning; he could no longer jump out of his chair to direct a scene or work from dawn until long after the theater curtain fell. The prospect of putting himself back in that position held no appeal. And the adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s novel Skinny Dip, which he had hoped would be his next movie, was slowly foundering. CAA had tried to broker a marriage between Nichols and the star he hoped to cast, George Clooney. “They had the same agent,” says producer Celia Costas, “but Mike wanted George to do it and George didn’t want to, and agents always seem to take a very long time to figure out an acceptable way for one important client to say no to another. It dragged on and on.”
During those discussions, Elaine May became seriously ill, and it was unclear when she would be able to continue to work on the script. By the time she recovered, Nichols had given up on the film. In an appearance with her at Lincoln Center, he was uncharacteristically sour. He bemoaned the state of theater, saying, “People are forever sending me to plays, and I say, ‘Son of a bitch, they’ve done it again. Somebody I thought I could trust has sent me to this piece of shit.’ I get really angry. It’s harder and harder to find someone who sees theater the way you do.” And he was no happier about movies. “Hollywood doesn’t want to be a better place,” he complained, railing against the type of studio executive who thinks “that expressing an opinion in a meeting is a creative act, because that’s all he ever gets to do.” He griped about films being overtaken by technology, about studios being swallowed by conglomerates, even about the influence of the Golden Globe Awards, before concluding, “I’m a pain in the ass.” “Yes, you’re a pain in the ass,” said May, “but amusing.”
His spirits started to sink. He missed making movies. “It’s something I never want to stop doing,” he said. “When you’re doing it with a group of people who you love and who love you . . . something begins to happen.”
When Tom Hanks asked Nichols to direct Charlie Wilson’s War, it was the summer of 2006, he was months from turning seventy-five, and he hadn’t been behind a camera in more than two years. Hanks, who would both star in and produce the movie, had commissioned a script from Aaron Sorkin, who sent it to Nichols before Hanks even thought of pursuing him.
“The bottom line is I don’t believe that Mike had his heart in it,” says his editor, John Bloom. “It’s a film that he agreed to do out of a sense of obligation to a cast and crew who had been hanging around for over a year waiting for him to go ahead with [Skinny Dip].” Hanks wanted Nichols enough to allow him to bring on most of the team he had kept on hold—Bloom, Costas, Mike Haley, Mary Bailey, and cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt. Nevertheless, the reality was that Charlie Wilson’s War was a director-for-hire job; Nichols would, for the first time in his career, be working for his leading actor. “In retrospect, I wish I had been more objective about whether he should do it,” says Costas. “There was so much that needed to be worked on with the material, forget about his health. But he was itching to make a movie.”
Charlie Wilson’s War was a politically complicated project; George Crile’s book recounted the history of a hard-partying, staunchly anti-Communist Democratic congressman from Texas who spearheaded a CIA push to funnel weapons to the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. (According to Nichols, Wilson had, much earlier, gone on a couple of dates with Diane Sawyer. Her verdict: “He was crazy.”) Sorkin’s script had streamlined the story into a parable about the unintended consequences of blundering idealism; the movie he envisioned would end with 9/11, and with the same lines the book did: “These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world . . . And then we fucked up the endgame.”
“There isn’t a person who read Sorkin’s script who didn’t want to do it,” says Hanks. “It had that crackling-ass patter that everybody loves to wrap their heads around—it was a hypnotically great screenplay. But it wasn’t dead-solid accurate as far as what really went on, because Charlie Wilson was very vociferous.” Many of Wilson’s rougher edges were sanded down; his appetite for cocaine was left out after Hanks and Sorkin both said audiences would not be able to forgive the character for drug use. “As we got into it,” Hanks says, “Mike at one point said, ‘I’m never going to do a movie about someone who is alive again.’”
To Universal’s delight, Nichols was able to attract Julia Roberts to play a right-wing Texas socialite with a special interest in Afghanistan, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a gruff CIA operative. Charlie Wilson’s War was starting to look like a Mike Nichols movie. But from the beginning, he lacked the time he knew he needed to make the film his own. In part, that was because his working method had become digressive to the point of avoidance; “rehearsals” would end up being a long, loose series of tales about Hollywood and theater, with little attention to the scenes at hand until the end; work sessions with Sorkin, who was preoccupied with launching his new drama series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip for NBC, would similarly take too long to get to the point, and then Sorkin would have to leave after fifteen or twenty minutes of actual discussion about the screenplay. Nichols went into the film underprepared, and he couldn’t afford to be. Unlike Closer, Charlie Wilson’s War had a large cast, a $75 million budget, and a complicated schedule of location shooting; it would begin production less than three months after he signed on, with months of filming under punishing conditions in Morocco.
By October he was in Marrakesh, and in trouble. Much of the shoot took place at high altitudes and amid intense pollution, both of which exacerbated his respiratory problems. “He had been a smoker, and a recreational pot smoker, for a long time,” says Hanks. “And he had a deep, guttural cough that got really bad—to a degree that worried everyone and affected his ability to plan the shoot.”
“I never should have let him shoot in Morocco,” says Costas. “We should have done it in Southern California, the way a lot of people do. We all thought Mike was invulnerable, but when we were scouting locations, we took him up in the mountains, and suddenly I thought, This is insane. He’s a seventy-five-year-old guy who isn’t in good health. What are we doing?” Every day, Nichols and the cast and crew were trucked up to the location. At one point, a windstorm destroyed the entire set. “We lost the whole thing in less than twenty-five minutes, and much of the crew was stranded on the mountain,” says Goldblatt. “We were actually very lucky that nobody got killed.”
Many of the Morocco scenes involved large numbers of non-English-speaking extras doing things like firing rocket launchers; Universal thought all the action was necessary to justify the budget, but Nichols felt utterly lost. “Our hotel rooms in Marrakesh were on top of each other,” says Costas, “so I knew when he was up, because I’d hear him walking around. I’d text with him, and it was ‘Are you up? Are you up? Are you up? I’m scared. I’m scared.’ He was having anxiety attacks. He understood the script’s politics and its comedy, but Mike was not an action director, and he felt he was half stuck making an action movie.”
“We ended up reshooting a number of big things,” says Hanks, “because they were just not mounted in the way that was needed, and, to Mike’s credit, when we came back to the United States, he knew it.”
Once production moved to Los Angeles for the second half of the shoot, Nichols was in better health and more in his element. “We restaged a number of things that had been shot in Morocco with all these Afghan refugees who now lived in Fresno, believe it or not,” says Hanks. “But there were peaks and valleys to his acumen and his abilities during that shoot.” Nichols’s bleak mood lifted more and more as he got to work with Roberts, whose scenes involved the kind of minutely detailed social comedy that he loved. “I had to do so much visually to accomplish her,” she says. “I would have my wig cap put on particularly tight to create the strained look of having had a lot of face-lifts. Mike was super into that. It was so much fun having little things to play with that I could show him.” For an exchange that takes place after her character sleeps with Wilson, Nichols said, “I can’t do one more scene where the guy gets out of bed in his boxer shorts and the sheet is right up to here on the woman . . . Why not have them in the bathroom afterwards, and he’s in the bathtub . . . Julia [had] a long speech about armaments and gun bores and the detailed characteristics of weapons, and I said, ‘Couldn’t you be doing your makeup?’” The result was a classic Nichols moment of revealing character through action, as she made a steely speech—“the words came out like a machine gun,” Nichols said—while looking in the mirror with cool self-assessment and separating her lashes with a pin she held millimeters from her eyeball.
Freed from the misery of waiting for a translator to move masses of extras around or standing on a mountain hoping the light wouldn’t change, Nichols was able to concentrate on executing Sorkin’s screenplay to the letter. “He was so nice,” says Denis O’Hare, who had a small role, “except for one moment when I messed up a line. I was inverting something or leaving something out, and he said, in the most hard-ass way I’d seen from him, ‘The line is seventeen thousand in the script.’ It put the fear of God in me, which I appreciated. I thought, Right, this guy is not just a congenial uncle—he’s a high-level professional who expects high-level execution from everyone. It was the only time I’d ever seen the teeth behind the grin. I never felt any sense that he was just letting us do what we wanted—he was keenly aware of what he wanted. He had practically memorized the script and was listening for the words closely.”
“That’s really when it sailed,” Hanks says. “We had one extended scene, a scene between me and Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about the best way to shoot down helicopters, that is still the best three days I’ve ever had shooting. It was vintage Mike.” At one point, a crew member asked Nichols if he remembered the Los Angeles soundstage where he had shot most of The Graduate. He paused for a moment and looked around. “This one,” he said, and then asked for another take.
Nichols didn’t know that the day Charlie Wilson’s War wrapped would be the last he ever spent shooting a movie. Over the next seven years, until the week he died, he would continue to develop new projects, never doubting that he had one more film in him. But after forty-two years, his career as a movie director was over.
A major creative battle, one that would pit Hanks and Universal against Nichols and Sorkin, remained. Sorkin’s script establishes early on that Wilson can see the Pentagon from his office; it’s the setup for a final scene in which he watches the building burn on September 11, 2001. Sorkin intended that image to be the last thing people saw before they read “We fucked up the endgame” on a black screen.
“Sorkin saw everything that happened to Charlie Wilson as a precursor to 9/11,” says Hanks. “And we did shoot that scene, because I thought there was about a 50 percent chance it’d work. But it wasn’t the point of the book, or the movie, or the performance I was giving. I can understand a guy as good as Sorkin saying, ‘I love that there.’ But when I saw it put together, I don’t think we connected the dots. I said, ‘We took a shot, but this ain’t it.’”
“Charlie Wilson himself didn’t want the scene in the movie, because he was afraid that people were going to blame the people of Afghanistan for 9/11,” says Sorkin. “And Tom didn’t like playing ‘the guy who caused 9/11.’ I thought those were silly reasons, but what happened was, by the time we got into the editing room, Mike did not like the job he had done during production, when he had been so sick. And he felt that he had lost the creative authority to tell the studio or producer or star no. We call the first cut of the movie ‘the suicide cut,’ because it can really take it out of you. And Mike was not able to recover from the suicide cut. So Gary [Goetzman, the head of Hanks’s company Playtone] and Tom won that fight. I want to emphasize that they were not taking advantage of a sick Mike Nichols. They simply had a creative vision as strong as the one that Mike and I had, and theirs won.”
“I wasn’t terribly thrilled with some of Tom and Gary’s ideas,” says Bloom. “And I told Mike that. But he said, ‘Well, you know, they got the film off the ground. It is theirs.’ And I thought, My God, the Mike I know would have told them to fuck off.”
Nichols labored through an extra two months in the editing room, addressing, without much enthusiasm, a long series of notes from Universal after a test screening. Charlie Wilson’s War opened in December 2007 to decent reviews and mild business; it received a single Oscar nomination, for Hoffman’s performance. Nichols was more philosophical than disheartened. “People who expect wonderful things have serious problems,” he said. “I don’t know anyone of significant talent who goes into something thinking, This is gonna be great! Artists fear the worst, and for good reason. Every time the worst doesn’t happen, it’s a miracle.” His friendship with Hanks would survive their disagreement—Hanks had stood by Nichols in Morocco when other producers might have replaced him. And he was already thinking about what he wanted to work on next—a play, in New York, so he could be home every night with Sawyer and near his doctors should he need them. In the summer, he announced plans to direct two shows in 2008—a revival of Clifford Odets’s 1950 drama The Country Girl, and Farragut North, a political play by Beau Willimon, a rising thirty-year-old writer who had worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign a few years earlier and turned his experience into a Primary Colors–like inside peek at how idealism gets ground up by realpolitik.
By the time it reached Nichols, Farragut North was the industry’s shiny object of the moment; Warner Bros. was considering it as an opportunity to team George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie, and Jake Gyllenhaal was interested in starring onstage. Willimon already had a handshake deal for a production with an off-Broadway theater company, but Nichols wanted more—the chance to direct the play on Broadway, make the movie, or both. He invited Willimon over to talk.
Few directors were as skilled in the art of professional courtship. Nichols knew exactly how agog a young writer would be walking into the Fifth Avenue penthouse with the wraparound terrace—and just how the warm welcome, the quick glimpse of Sawyer in the background, and the carefully chosen pastries would set the stage for a long, intimate, deeply engaged talk. It was all calibrated to produce an effect—and it was also all sincere. “At that point in my life, he was perhaps the most brilliant person I’d conversed with,” says Willimon. “Everything he said seemed like it should be embroidered on a pillow.”
They talked for three hours, with Willimon discussing his hopes for the play and Nichols offering insights that were both sharp and personal. “Because my play has to do with power dynamics and the ways in which people become cruel,” he says, “Mike started telling me about seeing a production of The Heiress and sitting in the audience watching the scene in which the heiress’s lover of many years comes back and says to her, ‘My God, how cruel you’ve become,’ to which she replies, ‘I learned from masters.’ And then Mike started to weep. He said, ‘I’m just thinking about the beauty of that line and how we’re all taught to be cruel,’ and how that feeling drew him to this play of mine. He’s full-on crying in front of me, and I’m thinking, ‘How the fuck did I get here? How is this even possible?’”
Nichols dried his tears and told Willimon his play needed a new ending. “You think you’ve written a Greek tragedy,” he said, “but this is the twenty-first century. There are no gods. There is no fate. The tragedy for this character is winning, with nothing to curb him. He must turn into the monster. We must see him victorious.”
“I’ll always be grateful to him for that,” says Willimon, who went on to create the American version of House of Cards. “The direction he pointed me in for that play informed a lot of stuff that I wrote later.” Willimon was reeling when he left, but their partnership would go no further. By the time they met, other producers were already involved, and Nichols insisted on complete control as a condition of his participation. “I don’t know how to function any other way,” he said several weeks later, “and at this point, I don’t see a need to change my way of doing things.” Willimon thanked him, and they parted ways.
“Several months later, I was at a party in Los Angeles and saw Jake Gyllenhaal,” Willimon says. “And Jake said, ‘What happened with all that? It just seemed to fall apart with Mike.’ I told him the story of our meeting, and when I got to the part where Mike brought up The Heiress, Jake said, ‘Hold on. Did he tell you about the line I learned from masters and start to cry? Same thing with me.’ What I realized in that moment was that Mike was an actor, a Jedi master of intellectual seduction, someone who could bring you into his orbit in ways that verged on sorcery. At the time, I remember feeling like that had completely devalued our amazing meeting. Could he really call up those tears at will? Had I fallen prey to an act? But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that we all have our stories that work. We burnish them as we retell them, and it’s pretty natural. It’s just part of living in the world. But I never met anyone better at it than he was.”
Nichols moved on to The Country Girl, and once again he found himself on shaky ground from the moment he started work. “It was a struggle,” says Peter Gallagher, who played one of the three principal roles. “It’s a very difficult play. And while we were doing it, I think Mike was genuinely scared for his life.”
Odets’s downbeat look at the working lives of a fragile, alcoholic stage actor, his drab, loyal wife, and the producer and director who are determined to get him working again had debuted on Broadway when Nichols was a teenager, but the 1954 movie with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly had left a stronger impression on him, and his own professional experiences had seemed to confirm for him the idea that the play contained some real wisdom about the relationship between addiction and life as a performing artist. He had watched Richard Burton struggle to get through a monologue without tremors, George C. Scott practically destroy entire productions and himself with his uncontrolled drinking, and Art Carney drive himself to a breakdown. He viewed their alcoholism as the way they had coped with the constantly heightened sensitivity they needed to draw on to do their work. “There’s no question that a great actor hears what people are thinking,” he said. “That’s the only way he can do it. And he survives by doing anything to stem those bad opinions.” Nichols told some friends that he viewed The Country Girl as his chance to come to terms with his memories of Scott. He also wanted to do something he had never done—a backstage story. “There is a kind of neurosis,” he told one of his actors, Remy Auberjonois, “that only finds satisfaction or solace in self-dramatization. Jewish mothers and theater people compete for the prize of being most put-upon.”
“There is great life under the surface [of the play],” says Jon Robin Baitz, whom Nichols brought in to help make trims and adjustments. “Two wounded veterans leaning against each other like old athletes with a lot of scars—a picture of a marriage. I’m not sure we ever saw that version of the play, but it was the one Mike talked about.”
To secure financing, Nichols miscast both leads with stars he hadn’t worked with and didn’t know, Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand. Race-blind casting in a naturalistic American play set in the 1940s raised all kinds of questions about what had caused years of strain in the marriage of the two main characters; Nichols was not interested in asking or answering them. “Morgan’s casting . . . What was in Mike’s head, I have no idea,” says Albert Wolsky, the play’s costume designer. “The play didn’t support it, and we needed a little more context than Mike gave it. And Frances McDormand is a wonderful actress, and can be very sexy, but he kept saying, ‘I want her to look like Grace Kelly,’ and that’s not who she is.”
Rehearsals did not go well. “Mike was not fully himself,” says Baitz. “His coughing was kind of cataclysmic, and his approach to rehearsing was mostly to use anecdotes and inference—tell stories about himself and his life that might direct an actor towards an impulse. But you had to be a Mikeologist, and some actors [could] not find a path through the maze of stories that [would] enable them to make choices.” After four weeks, with previews looming, the central relationship between Freeman’s and McDormand’s characters had gone undiscussed, and several actors still didn’t know their lines. “Usually, by the time you leave the rehearsal room, you have the lines locked down. They were still paraphrasing,” says B. T. McNicholl, the production’s assistant director. “As we were walking down the alley towards the theater for a preview, Mike said, ‘If this were Philadelphia or New Haven, we’d be about halfway there.’ And I realized, Oh my God, he’s completely miscalculated the trajectory. He had worked in an era when you had three stops before New York, and now there were none.”
“Well,” Nichols said, “I guess there’s nothing left to do but go down with the ship.”
“I will never forget Mike in the alley, smoking a bummed cigarette, coughing and smiling, rheumy-eyed, saying, ‘Don’t tell Diane, she’ll kill me,’” says Baitz. “Anybody who has a spouse who is in their corner could identify with that play. That moment in the alley . . . Why couldn’t that show up onstage?”
When Clifford Odets’s son, Walt, came to see a preview, Freeman was still “dropping lines right and left. I remember sitting with Mike in the back and saying, ‘Listen, this is your production and I don’t want to interfere, but if it were me, I would tell Morgan to go back to his hotel room and think about the scene and learn his lines,’” says Odets. “Mike looked at me and his eyebrows went up, and he said, ‘He’s Morgan Freeman.’ And I thought, And you’re Mike Nichols.” As a younger man, Nichols would have known how to deploy an arsenal of strategies to deal with a veteran movie star who was having line trouble. But now he was struggling himself, and he didn’t have the kind of relationship with Freeman that would have made a frank discussion between two men in their seventies possible. McDormand, meanwhile, was growing impatient with the fact that Nichols had given her almost no direction. Audiences were reacting with indifference. And Michael Riedel, the New York Post’s theater gossip columnist, began to savage the production as a catastrophe in the making. Nichols found himself living in a new, less forgiving world, one in which each night’s performance was instantly reviewed by anonymous internet commentators. As his cough deepened into a serious chest infection, he checked the sites compulsively. Early on, he called Jack O’Brien and said, “You’ve got to come down—it’s a disaster, it’s terrible, it’s unfixable.” O’Brien watched the play and pointed out that the set design Nichols had approved gave his actors so little room to move that they were practically shouting their lines into the wings. “It hadn’t occurred to him to put a table and chairs on the stage,” says O’Brien. “Mike, who had always been so careful about blocking. I thought, Uh-oh. I said to him, ‘You’ve been away, and you’re forgetting you can’t get the results you want unless you stage them.’”
Nichols was braced for the reviews, which were largely negative. (“How could this be?” The New York Times asked of the “inert” revival. “Mike Nichols picks up Tonys the way cashmere picks up lint.”) “He sent a note backstage to the cast,” says McNicholl, “that said something to the effect of ‘You’re all wonderful, and anything that went wrong was my fault.’”
He had always made a point of carefully maintaining his shows during their runs; years into Spamalot, he would still routinely drop by the Shubert to watch a performance, give notes, and sometimes even guide a new actor through a rehearsal or two. But as The Country Girl played out its limited run, he barely had the strength to go in and check on the performances. When Paul Sills died, in June, he was almost too unwell to attend the funeral, but it was important to him to pay his respects to his first mentor, to see May, and to have a moment to mend fences with his onetime nemesis, the Compass Theater’s cofounder David Shepherd. After the service, says Shepherd’s wife, Nancy Fletcher, “Elaine came rushing up and said, ‘Isn’t this wonderful? To be all together again?’ Whatever bad feelings there were had passed.”
A month later, Nichols was diagnosed with a heart blockage and underwent a coronary bypass. The surgery took place a few days before The Country Girl closed. The operation was a success, but his recovery at home would be slow—months, not weeks. His breathing problems made everything harder, as did a lifetime of bad habits. “Mike was, you know, not a guy to get on the treadmill or anything like that,” says Hanks.
Nichols’s daytime social life revolved around regular restaurant lunches with friends and colleagues at one of his three or four favorite spots. But during his convalescence, his world had to come to him. Lunches and meetings were at his apartment and lasted only as long as his energy held out. “There was never a moment when he wasn’t interested in something,” says Tony Kushner. “I remember going to have lunch with him soon after the surgery. His appetite wasn’t good. He was trying to eat the things that he liked, but he couldn’t do it, and he wasn’t able to focus very well. But he was already talking about an idea he had to remake A Little Night Music with Meryl Streep on some island off the coast of Sweden.”
He still felt the weight of The Country Girl’s failure. As soon as he was well enough, he sat on his sofa and, on a legal pad, started to write a list of everything he believed he had done wrong in the production. “They’re all great actors,” he told Scott Rudin. “But I just didn’t know them. They weren’t my company in a way that would have allowed me to make a show in four weeks. I didn’t know how to do it.” “The Country Girl really left him feeling like ‘Maybe I don’t want to do this again,’” Rudin says.
Unable to go out very often, he watched more television. After devouring the first season of Mad Men, he emailed a fan letter to Matthew Weiner and asked him over for breakfast. “He had just had the bypass—there was still a bruise on his arm from the intravenous line,” says Weiner. “But Mike was like a heat-seeking missile for anything he found artistically interesting—just on top of it and affected by it and emotional about it.” Nichols became a trusted friend and adviser. “Outside of the immediate world of Mad Men,” says Weiner, “Mike and David Chase are the two people I would run my ideas by.” (It was Nichols who counseled Weiner to get Don Draper into a quick second marriage, telling him, “A divorced guy in the 1960s is going to want someone to put that steak on the table.”)
By the end of 2008, Nichols was feeling healthier than he had in a long time. Rudin, in particular, had taken him in hand, seeing him through his recovery by bringing him project after project until he got interested in working again; they were now starting to plan an update of the 1962 Akira Kurosawa kidnapping thriller High and Low, with a David Mamet script that was being rewritten by Chris Rock. And there were other films on the horizon—Nichols pulled together a reading of an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel How to Be Good with Jon Hamm, Julia Roberts, and Buck Henry, and he briefly became attached to direct an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s suspense thriller Deep Water for 20th Century Fox.
But over the next couple of years, it became clear that he was happy to keep projects at arm’s length—to live the professional life of someone who was perpetually considering another movie or play but would probably not actually direct one. Readings, story meetings, and lunches were a way to keep a foot in working life, but nothing ever went further than that. Nora Ephron had written a play called Lucky Guy in which Hanks had agreed to make his Broadway debut. Nichols did a reading and told her he thought it wasn’t ready; she moved on. He gathered a group of actors to read John Patrick Shanley’s play Storefront Church; he decided not to direct it but stayed in touch with one of the actors, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and offered encouraging words when Miranda later told him he was working on a musical about Alexander Hamilton. Streep brought him Hope Springs, a comedy-drama about a long-married couple dealing with their dwindling passion in late middle age. Nichols arranged a reading, and those who participated watched his enthusiasm dwindle in real time. “Oh, no, no, no, he would never have said yes to making that movie,” says Streep (who eventually starred in the film opposite Tommy Lee Jones for director David Frankel). “It was about a man experiencing failure, insufficiency. There are very few men who want to touch that.” During the reading, according to Patrizia von Brandenstein, “Mike had a kind of hooded look throughout. They had laid on this enormous fancy lunch buffet for all of us, and he was nice to everyone, but he called me the next morning and said, ‘I can’t do it. The story is too sad. If it doesn’t make me laugh, I can’t make other people laugh.’”
When old friends had new work, he was a loyal cheering section. He flew to Minneapolis for two days to see a festival of three plays by Kushner, and made a point of going backstage and congratulating each of the casts. “Every time I saw him,” Kushner says, “he had always just seen a movie or read a book or gone to a play that he was excited about. Once in a while, it would be something he thought was garbage, but he didn’t really like to talk about the things he hated. He loved talking about things that excited him, that he found extraordinary.”
Nichols knew that his film legacy was either complete or close to it, and he felt it was shaky enough to need defending. In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art honored him with a retrospective. Rajendra Roy, who oversaw the festival, wanted it to be almost comprehensive. Nichols did not. “We debated over The Day of the Dolphin, Wolf, and The Fortune,” Roy says. “I won on The Fortune. I didn’t win on the other two. My read was, if he felt that he had let anybody down, he didn’t want to revisit that heartbreak and personal pain. But when he watched The Fortune again, what he saw was that it was a good movie, and that the hurt was that it wasn’t embraced, not that he had failed anyone.”
In October 2009, just before his seventy-eighth birthday, Nichols was named the recipient of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. “We sent save-the-date cards to the twenty-five most imperative people,” says AFI head Bob Gazzale. “Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Elaine May, Robin Williams, Meryl Streep . . . In one day, twenty-four of them said, ‘I’ll be there.’ It was one of the first times people called to say, ‘Can I come?’ Steven Spielberg said, ‘I want to be there for Mike.’ Oprah Winfrey said, ‘How do I buy a table?’ It had never happened before, and I don’t know that it will happen again.”
The gala was scheduled for the following June, and Nichols was an active, if sometimes cranky, participant in the creation of the film-clip packages that would be spread throughout the evening. (“You’re not telling my story” was a frequent refrain as the clips were assembled.) As the night approached, he found himself nervous. “I told him, ‘Go watch Wild Strawberries,’” says Weiner. “He started to laugh. I said, ‘You’re going to pass your own hearse on the way, it’s going to break, and you’re going to sit there and remember everything good that happened and be embarrassed you’re so old.’ He liked that.”
Shortly before the tribute, Nichols, Sawyer, and many in their social circle were rocked by the arrest of Kenneth I. Starr, who had been their business manager and was eventually convicted of cheating his clients out of between $30 million and $60 million in a Ponzi scheme and sent to prison. Starr had also handled the financial affairs of, among others, Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Richard Avedon, Neil Simon, Candice Bergen, and Carly Simon. Nichols and Sawyer had fired him after his negligence damaged a trust fund that had been set up for one of his children; they were spared his greater misdeeds, but the news generated a certain amount of gallows humor at the ceremony in Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, it was a happy and emotional night for both of them. After ten years, Sawyer had left Good Morning America to become the anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. For the first time since the 1990s, their nights were their own again, and he loved the extra time they had together. She beamed and laughed throughout the dinner, which was warm, joshing, deeply affectionate. Roberts opened up the speeches by announcing, “Anybody who knows Mike personally knows that most of the really great stories about him contain the words ratfuck or bullshit, so that’s tricky for TV.” Nora Ephron joked that “we could all be in a Buñuel movie—a pack of people who owe Mike everything and are doomed to spend all of eternity giving him awards.” Elaine May brought down the house with a perfectly polished routine about “little Igor” and his cousin Albert Einstein. Dustin Hoffman came out and said, “You said in New York, ‘If it wasn’t for me, you’d be just another aging Jew.’ You are an ageless Jew. Keep doing it.” Tributes poured forth from Candice Bergen, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Cher, Nora Ephron, and Natalie Portman. Eric Idle emerged from backstage, dressed as the Angel from Angels in America, to serenade him with “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
At the end of the evening, Streep presented him with the award, as he had done for her six years earlier. He received a two-minute standing ovation.
“Wow,” he said. “I got to see my own memorial and I’m still alive, sort of. I make a solemn promise here and now, especially to Elaine and Nora and Meryl, who have given new meaning to the phrase ‘I gave at the office’—I promise, no more achievements.”
Nichols almost always effused over his actors. That night, he chose instead to thank his writers, his designers, his composers, and the longest-standing and most loyal members of his crew. Summing up, he said, “I thank my film family and my own family, first and foremost my kids, a constant source of wonder and pride, not to mention gratitude for their patience with me.”
At the top of his speech, Nichols joked, “This is no time for sincerity.” But he ended his remarks with what felt like a fond and sorrowful goodbye to a world he could not quite bring himself to say was now part of his past. “I love the process of making a movie, and doing it with all of you was—despite the fear, the pressure, the budget—happiness,” he said. “As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies—making them, seeing them—is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy . . . I could go on all night, but you have the idea. You get it. Good night, moon. Good night, stars. I’ll see you on the set, and on the beach, and in the kitchen, and at the movies.”