He had one last mountain to climb.
In the summer of 2010, Nichols started talking to Scott Rudin about directing a revival of Death of a Salesman on Broadway. Nobody, including Nichols himself, was sure he would be able to do it.
He had never escaped the shadow of Arthur Miller’s play, and he had never wanted to. The look, the sound, and the impact of Elia Kazan’s original staging remained as vivid to him as if the sixty-two years since he saw it as a teenager had been no more than a week. Salesman was etched in his consciousness, a touchstone to which he returned so frequently that no cobwebs had ever grown over his memories of a production that he called “sainted.” “I’m aware that that production was part of the greatest year Kazan ever had, with Streetcar and Salesman one after the other. Unbelievable. Those two plays and the way they were presented are certainly the reason I’m in the theater,” he wrote to Linda Emond, the actress he asked to play Linda Loman. “On my last reading of Salesman, I was keenly aware that the collapsing of time, the idea that causes the play to lift off . . . is the result of what to me is the whole point of the theater, even though the phrase belongs to a great novelist: Only connect. Miller and Kazan found that time-reality together. Just as, in a mini way, Buck Henry and I found the [Graduate] montage of being on top of Mrs. Robinson and at home at the same time together. You need a buddy to find the nonrealistic true things.”
Nichols told Emond he intended to schedule a workshop that would allow his cast to become partners with him—“a process in which we dream together, and bring to the rehearsal the things that are ours, is the sacred part of what we do,” he said. “Little thing by little thing, pebble by pebble, till we are basically saying to the audience, ‘This is our life. You recognize it, don’t you? It’s yours, too.’” He had strived for that finger-snap moment of discovering common ground ever since his first improv sketch in a Chicago bar. But as much as he yearned for collaboration, his deepest reason for directing Death of a Salesman was personal. For him, approaching the play was akin to making a private offering—to Kazan, to the theater, to memory, and to his own sixteen-year-old self, the bright, alienated, lonely boy whom he could finally and fully remember with compassion.
Rudin was willing to tailor the production to Nichols’s needs and to his advanced age. Since he was no longer up to the rigors of the road, there would be no out-of-town tryout, but he would have as much time as he needed—upward of a year—to cast, plan, and rehearse a production that would not begin previews until the fall of 2011, just in time for his eightieth birthday. He already had his Willy Loman. At forty-three, Philip Seymour Hoffman was too young for the part (just as the original Willy, Lee J. Cobb, had been at thirty-seven), but ever since The Seagull, Nichols had known that Hoffman had the anger, the fear, the desperation, and the lumbering sadness to play Willy, and the commitment and technique to dig as deep as the role demanded.
From the start, Nichols was adamant about a design concept: He wanted to stage Salesman on an exact replica of Jo Mielziner’s original set, and to use Alex North’s 1949 underscore as well. In photographs, the skeletal frames that Mielziner, who had started designing in the 1920s, had used to create the humble kitchen and bedrooms of the Loman house looked quaint and small, a relic of a pre-technological theater era when brilliant designers used efficient but modest visual gestures to connote seriousness and modernism. “When he said, ‘The Mielziner set can’t be bettered,’” says Rudin, “I said, ‘Okay, if that’s what you want, we’ll do it.’ But what I was thinking was: We’ve just made the most catastrophic mistake.”
Nichols secured Andrew Garfield, his choice for Biff Loman, during a phone call. “I was in L.A., staying with a director of Mike’s generation and trying to decide between a movie he was going to do and Salesman,” Garfield says. “I remember asking Mike why he decided to be a New Yorker rather than get seduced, and he said, ‘Why would I want to live in a city where I can tell what my stock is on a daily basis by how the valet parking attendant looks at me?’ He somehow managed to key in to everything I was wrestling with, and I knew in that moment I was going to go to New York.”
But Garfield had just signed on to play Spider-Man and would have to shoot throughout much of 2011. The negotiation with Sony to secure his participation was complicated, and Rudin pushed Salesman to the spring of 2012. It was a dangerously long time to try to hold on to everyone, especially, given his fragility and tendency to waver, Nichols himself. Every year now was a year of loss. In the spring, he wept when he heard that Elizabeth Taylor had died, and fall brought the death of his closest and oldest friend in Hollywood, John Calley, a man who had championed his work since Catch-22 and whom he viewed as “a life saver.” More homebound than he had been before his health started to falter, he had gotten interested in television, and, in the wake of the success of Downton Abbey (which he loathed), he had started talking to the writer-producer Tom Fontana about collaborating on an Upstairs, Downstairs–style drama based on the Bouvier family in the early twentieth century. He was doubtful about his ability to be insured for a film, but in TV he could produce or consult without subjecting himself to the strain of a daily shooting schedule. He had also started to worry about losing his memory. “Forgetting names was frustrating for him,” says Fontana. “He’d be on a roll with a story, and then he’d stumble over a name and be so upset he wouldn’t finish.”
It would have been easy for him to retire. His son Max’s wife, Rachel, had just had twin daughters, and, like many men of his generation who felt guilty about their absence from their children’s early lives, he became a delighted and doting grandfather, drinking in every minute he could. “We don’t go anywhere,” he told a reporter who asked about his marriage. “We have weekends, we have most nights, we have our own secret life in our own little place. And we just go play with our grandkids.”
“When his son and daughter had children, he went crazy, he was so happy,” says Celia Costas. “I think he never knew that there was anything new that could delight him in that really basic way.” His take on little girls was indulgent and cheerfully retro. “Let them do anything they want,” he told a friend who asked for advice about how to entertain his nieces. “Give them ice cream and toys and keep telling them it’s because today is a special occasion. And make sure that every so often a woman comes in and gives them orders.” And later, when his daughter Jenny’s baby son was born, he proudly announced that he “may be the Messiah, although it’s early to be certain.” Walking away from work was, for the first time, truly tempting; he started talking to Sawyer about a day when they might both slow down and devote themselves to a few years of family, rest, and pleasure.
But he showed up for the fall 2011 workshop ready to engage with Salesman as best he could. “I remember the process as being in very hushed tones,” says Finn Wittrock, who played Happy Loman. “We sat around the table for a lot of the time, and Mike went about it by telling stories of his own life, not talking too directly about the practicalities of the play.” (“I do [tell stories], to an almost embarrassing extent,” Nichols had said several years earlier. “I hope they’re not getting longer as the years go by. What I’m trying to encourage is that we all do that.”)
“I could sense that as time went on, people were getting a little unsure,” says Wittrock. “Like, ‘The deadline is looming—do we have to have another story about you and Richard Burton getting drunk together?’” At times, Nichols almost seemed to mirror Willy’s flights into memory and his inability to contend with the present. “There was seemingly no thread,” says Garfield, “but it was like he was seeping stuff into our unconscious about what the play was about for him and what it should be about for us.”
“Because Mike opened up, everyone started sharing their stories as they related to the play,” says Wittrock. “His goal was getting the four of us, as a family, as close and in love with each other as possible, so that by the time we were in previews, we would feel like he had guided us onto the ship and he could wave goodbye as we sailed off. And that’s what happened.”
“He created an environment that was really helpful, and he did it in a different way from other directors,” Emond says. “When something would happen onstage that moved him, he would share things from his past on a very personal level—about his mental health, for instance—because he felt it would be useful. It was a generous thing to do. And he would also tell stories that were funny when he felt he needed it or we needed it, because the play was so brutal. He did it for the room—it was necessary relief.”
“We really listened to those stories,” says Bill Camp, who played Charley. “When he talked about his childhood or his professional life, my imagination would be fired in a way that aided me in feeling liberated, even before we got up in the rehearsal room and started moving around.”
“Safety is such a huge thing when you’re making a play, and he was basically saying, ‘It’s safe here,’” says Rudin. “‘If you have a bad idea, you can make a fool of yourself if that’s what you need.’”
Early on, it was apparent that Philip Seymour Hoffman was going to take charge as much as Nichols was. He kept pulling the room back toward the play, asking dozens of pointed questions about the characters and their interactions, and he was the first to walk onto the set that Rudin had had constructed for the workshop to see how it felt. “There were times when Mike kind of let Phil lead the room,” Wittrock says. “It was purposeful, because he was Willy and we were all in his brain. He would take his cues from whatever Phil’s instincts were and go down any road he was curious about.”
“You can’t really say Phil was directed by Mike,” says Rudin. “Mike and Phil made the production together.”
Whatever misgivings the actors may have had about the way in which Salesman was coalescing, when they disbanded, they were electrified at the prospect of reuniting in January to begin full rehearsals. The break was not, however, useful for Nichols, who tried to back out of the production, as Rudin, who had watched him toy with and then turn away from projects for years, had feared he might. “Why am I doing this?” Nichols said. “I don’t want to do this. This is a terrible idea. I’m only gonna be compared to Kazan. There’s nothing in this for me.”
“I have a contract, and I’m going to enforce it,” Rudin told him. “I’m not indulging this nonsense anymore. It’s the great American play, and you have invented yourself as the great quasi-American director. You’re just scared. And you’re not scared of the Kazan part, you’re scared of the Arthur Miller part, because it confronts a lot of things in your life, like your father and your brother, that you’ve never looked at closely. It starts in a week, and you’re going to show up.”
“And he did,” Rudin says. “And in the most gentle, kind, low-key way of guiding the company toward the play, he was unbelievable every day.”
The relationship between Hoffman and Nichols was not easy. Nichols was physically debilitated—“I remember walking with him and asking, ‘What’s the hardest part of your health issues?’” says Emond. “He said, ‘The breathing. It’s so frustrating.’” The medications he had to take made him drowsy, and he frequently nodded off during rehearsals. When that happened, Hoffman would glance over at the assistant director and sometimes pick up and just continue the work. “I noticed a couple of times that Mike didn’t have the energy to sustain a long rehearsal morning or afternoon,” says Garfield, “but also, I think he wanted us to be a little on edge and not to have all our questions answered. He wanted the play to live in crisis and in a state of discovery every night. Yes, he was definitely an old man, but he was still so full of longing—to realize his vision and to provide something of worth.”
Partly because Hoffman was himself on shaky ground—terrified of the darkness of the role, he was taking an unusually long time to get off book—his realization that Nichols would not be able to take him in hand and re-create the detailed, beat-by-beat engagement they had had ten years earlier on The Seagull was painful. “There were times when he’d come home panicked and freaked out,” says his widow, Mimi O’Donnell. “Some of it was the difficulty of the role, some of it was that he had seen Dustin Hoffman do it. He knew that even if Mike couldn’t give him everything he wanted, he wasn’t going to let him fuck up. But I do remember his feeling of I’m a little alone in this. He felt afraid. One night, he was venting, and I said something like ‘Someday you’re going to be that old.’ He suddenly realized he’d been talking about Mike Nichols. Mike! Someone he loved! His anger dissipated, and we just started laughing about age and aging.”
When Nichols was alert, “his style was conversational and analytical,” says Rebecca Miller, who had entrusted her father’s play to him. “That can be the opposite of the most efficient way to direct. But to Mike, they were a group of people trying to answer the questions of the play. He was saying, ‘You guys are smart. Let’s figure this out together.’”
By the end of rehearsals, Hoffman and Nichols had found a way to work in harmony. Hoffman would steer the cast toward specific decisions while Nichols kept his focus on the play’s themes, the Loman family dynamic, and the production’s overall tone. “Phil seemed like the stronger hand,” says Matthew Stern, the stage manager, “and Mike was more the guiding force.” He didn’t do much physical direction or positioning of the actors, but he understood what Hoffman needed and found a way to give it to him. “Mike had this phobia of giving a bad note to an actor,” says Wittrock. “Phil said that in a final rehearsal of The Seagull, Mike gave him a note and I guess that night’s show didn’t go too well. Mike hardly talked to him after that, and Phil thought, Oh, well, I just fucked up that relationship. And then he got a note from Mike months later that said, ‘I’m so sorry I gave you that terrible note.’ He had been carrying around that guilt! So, during Salesman previews, at one point Phil said, ‘Am I yelling too much? Is it too angry?’ Mike said, ‘Yes.’ Phil said, ‘When?’ Mike said, ‘I don’t want to tell you, but it’s a little too angry.’ That was it. In the next show, Phil toned it down. Mike knew he’d figure out when and how to do it.”
Once previews started, it was clear that Nichols’s most daring bet—his use of the original set—would pay off. The design was so cramped and the rooms so oddly configured that Hoffman, Emond, Garfield, and Wittrock had no choice but to embrace their unnerving, sometimes awkward proximity. The design, as Nichols knew it would, forced a kind of intimacy among their characters; the Lomans became a family bound together in suffocating and misshapen ways, with the house serving as both a cause and a representation of their dysfunction. The version of the play that the actors began to embody once they got on their feet was the one Nichols had held in his head and heart for more than six decades.
Death of a Salesman opened on March 15, 2012. Nichols was upset by a disappointed review from The New York Times’s Ben Brantley, who called it “an immaculate monument to a great American play” but felt that, while “you admire every detail of construction and leave . . . feeling that you have learned something of worth,” the production “never quite achieves greatness.” But almost all of the other reviews were raves. The Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout wrote that “the genius of Mr. Nichols’s unostentatiously right staging of Death of a Salesman is that each part of it is in harmony with Mr. Hoffman’s plain, blunt acting . . . the result is a production that will be remembered by all who see it as the capstone of a career.”
“Nichols’s unequivocal admiration for Elia Kazan’s legendary directorial contributions to the play’s original production hasn’t inhibited him from advancing his own views,” Marilyn Stasio wrote in Variety. “Willy is his hero—a weak, foolish, deeply flawed man, but still his hero—and Nichols understands and indeed loves him enough to forgive him his many sins.”
The show’s limited run was a major success—“an astonishingly good time,” says Rudin, “with no real bumps except for Phil and Andrew’s complete inability to mark it,” that is, to lock their performances the way many actors do during the run of a play. “They never stopped. They were both so ruthlessly hard on themselves when they did not feel the things they were meant to express, and they would not rely on just technique to power through the show, ever.”
“The part was brutal,” says O’Donnell. “Every night, Phil would come home and go beat by beat over what worked and what didn’t and why it didn’t and what felt off. Theater stops your life to a certain extent, but this was different. I had never seen that before with him.” Often, he couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. Before his last scene, he would put on his street clothes under his costume; the minute the curtain call ended, he would strip off Willy’s suit and walk straight off the stage, through the Barrymore Theater’s side door, and across the street to the Glass House Tavern, where he would wait for the other actors to join him. The work took a terrible toll. “He would drink with the cast,” says O’Donnell. “He’d never done that before. He knew he couldn’t go onstage if he had used drugs. So in some ways I think doing the play kept it at bay. But I knew the minute the show was done, drugs would come into the picture.”
Night after night, Salesman numbered among its attendees people who had worked with Nichols ten, thirty, and fifty years earlier. “I saw him backstage,” says Tony Roberts, who had been a replacement in Nichols’s first Broadway show, Barefoot in the Park, “and he turned to me and said, ‘Oh, Tony, you were always my favorite,’ with that great smile of his where you never knew if he was kidding or not.” For Nichols, it was a moment to embrace old colleagues and, if possible, heal old wounds, or at least avoid reopening them. When he heard that Mandy Patinkin was backstage congratulating the cast, he quietly left the theater, texting Emond, “I stayed out of the way not to make Mandy unhappy.” And when the producers threw a celebratory luncheon after the show received seven Tony nominations, he requested that David Rabe be seated at his table. The two had barely spoken in the thirty-five years since their falling-out over Hurlyburly. “I was surprised he put me there,” says Rabe, “and I was grateful and glad. I didn’t want to stay mad at him. It doesn’t change anything that happened, but you get older and you want to hold on to the things about him that were gracious and winning.”
Death of a Salesman ended its run the week before the Tonys. Nichols was the heavy favorite to win his seventh award for directing, forty-eight years after his first. The ceremony was held at the Beacon Theatre, the former movie house where he had so often escaped his warring parents as a little boy. Toward the end of the play’s run, he had grown weaker; he looked gaunt, and his breathing was more labored than ever. “That was the only moment during Salesman when he was really infirm, when I worried about his stamina,” says Rudin. Hours before the ceremony, Rudin took him to the theater. “I think you’re going to win,” he said, “and there are some steps you’ll have to walk up. You should make sure you can do it, because you’re going to be on camera when your name is called.”
They practiced the walk to the stage together. Hours later, Nichols won the Tony. The standing ovation he received seemed to throw him off balance; he was winded and coughing by the time he reached the podium. “You see before you a happy man,” he said. As he started to thank the actors—“a cast straight from heaven,” he said—his voice broke. He was near tears. “God damn it,” he said. “I can’t talk about them. I love them too much . . . There’s not a person in this theater that doesn’t know what it is to be a salesman, to be way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” he said, reading from a sheet of paper. “And as we know, a salesman has got to dream. It goes with the territory. Thank you.” He raised his hand to his forehead, gave the audience a farewell salute, and left the stage.
Two weeks after the Tonys, Nora Ephron died. She was seventy-one and had fought leukemia for years but had kept her illness a secret from even her closest friends, including Nichols, until very near the end of her life. He was terribly shaken and told more than one friend it seemed wrong that he had outlived her. “As always, she quietly taught us a lesson,” he wrote in an email. “If the worst happens, control it. Do what you want . . . Make the decisions, choose who will speak at your funeral . . . Die as you live: in control. Sort of helps a little.”
Mortality was, inescapably, on his mind. His schedule grew cluttered with doctors’ appointments—cardiologists, pulmonologists, eye doctors to deal with his weakening vision—and when he was asked to do something in public, it was usually because someone had died. In the fall, he was drafted to coordinate a memorial for the composer Marvin Hamlisch at the Juilliard School, at which Aretha Franklin, Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand would all perform. He spent the day in minuets of diplomacy; Streisand would have to sing last, Franklin would have to be told that Streisand was going to sing last, Minnelli would have to be reminded not to take a bow and wait for applause. (“Why don’t you just turn and bow to the picture of Marvin on the stage?” he gently suggested.) “It was so much fun watching him take each of these people and turn them into putty in his hands,” says Ebs Burnough, who coordinated the event with him. “At the end, he said to me, ‘Let’s not overdo it. We don’t want to get a reputation as funeral planners.’”
In 2013, he decided to direct another Broadway play, one he had wanted to stage for thirty-five years, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, with Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Rudin thought more work was the best way for him to keep depression and anxiety at bay. Sawyer worried that he was too weak for another production and that a full rehearsal schedule would overtax him. But Nichols wanted to do it, and in twenty-five years of marriage, neither had ever stood in the way of the other’s professional passion. Rudin scheduled the production for late that year. Serving as co–lead producer would be Nichols’s close friend Barry Diller, on whose boat he had vacationed more than once. (“It’s the ninth-largest yacht in the world,” Nichols wryly remarked to a friend. “I feel anything larger would be vulgar, don’t you?”) Nichols’s longtime assistant Colleen O’Donnell would be by his side as assistant director. He would be taken care of in every way possible.
In a sense, Nichols had outlived his passion for the play without realizing it. When he first saw Betrayal, he was a troubled and somewhat angry man in his late forties, determined to make his brand-new third marriage work. Back then, Pinter’s depiction of the deceit and cruelty of infidelity had struck him as an exposé of the dark heart of the war between men and women. “It’s a play about marriage, but it’s also about a question of middle age,” says Ian MacNeil, who designed the show. “Are you going to do it right, or are you going to fuck it up again?”
Nichols was past all that now; at eighty-one, he had come to see Betrayal as a human comedy about how sexual desire drives everyone mad. The stakes no longer felt as high to him; the play’s insistence on futility was something his own life had disproved. “At one point he was talking to a young woman, about twenty-five, about her marriage, and he said, ‘Is this your first husband?’ MacNeil remembers. “She said yes, and he said, ‘The first and the fourth marriage are always the best.’ That had been the journey of his life: learning to love more and more. But that wasn’t the play.”
“It’s a nasty piece of work about jealousy and power and men who are pigs,” says Brian MacDevitt, who designed the lighting for both Salesman and Betrayal. “And he made it a big lovefest about ‘What are we going to do? We all love each other so much!’”
A workshop in the spring went promisingly. “It was Mike doing the kind of comedy he completely owned,” says Rudin, “that granular behavior, every second explicated, subtext in everything, people deploying language in a way that made it clear they were lying—all the major skeins of his work. But when they returned and started rehearsals in the fall, that just never came back.” By September, there was no hiding how enfeebled Nichols was. Many days had to be cut short for doctors’ visits, and on others, he was too sick to come in at all. “It was bumpy in part because he was so upset,” says MacDevitt. “He was really ill, and he’d get into coughing fits that would shut everything down. He was so pissed off about it. He would curse the health issues and say, ‘If only I hadn’t abused my body so much back in the day.’”
The production that resulted felt jagged and unsteady, including to those who were working on it. Daniel Craig was patient and deferential, but everyone involved was worried. Nichols and MacNeil spent endless hours at odds about the way the set design slowed the transitions between scenes. “Betrayal is like an exhale,” says Rudin, “and the production felt more like a series of short breaths. Everybody knew it was in trouble, so there was an undertow of panic during previews. I think Mike thought from the beginning that he wasn’t going to get away with it.”
Friends and colleagues from across the decades—Aaron Sorkin, Julia Roberts, Candice Bergen, Julie Andrews, and Tony Walton among them—showed up to support Nichols on opening night. But reviews were mixed. In the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that the play “has been infused with an aching ennui by the redoubtable Mike Nichols, a director who has lived long enough to see that even adultery grows old, and the aging adulterers sad and pathetic.” But Ben Brantley called the production “crude and clunky . . . This Betrayal shrivels Pinter’s play to the dimensions of the minor tale of infidelity that London critics called it when the show first opened . . . Time may have proved those critics wrong, but this production seems determined to show that they were right.”
The review devastated Nichols. “He was really wounded,” says Bergen. “It just seemed to blunt him, in a way.” In the past, he had said that he found that bad reviews injured him less if he didn’t tell Sawyer about them, but this time there was no hiding his feelings. “He was home, and I went to see him, and he didn’t say anything about it,” says Bergen, “but he lost his spark. I was so angry. I thought, Aren’t you supposed to be kinder to people when they’re older? What would it have cost?”
What appeared to be an emotional crash turned out to be the onset of a severe physical illness. Nichols lost twenty-five pounds in just a few weeks. “Nobody ever enjoyed food more than he did,” says Rudin. “And suddenly I would go eat with him and there would be the same parade of food, but he wouldn’t take more than two bites of bread.” Some friends thought he was dying; a rumor that he had cancer had to be kept out of the papers. He turned out to have a systemic infection; once it was treated, he rapidly regained weight and a measure of strength, but each successive illness left him weaker than he had been before.
Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February 2014. “I can’t stop talking to him,” Nichols wrote. “[He] could have been OK and far more. Onward is the only direction.” He had to keep going. Rudin encouraged him, telling him that David Lean had still been directing in his early eighties. (He was fudging by a few years, but it cheered Nichols up.) They started talking about a revival of Our Town, and Nichols got excited at the idea of directing Tom Hanks as the Stage Manager. “Think of the marquee,” he told Hanks. “Our names . . . Our Town!” This time, Sawyer put her foot down. “Diane called me,” says Rudin, “and said, ‘Don’t do this. He’s not well enough.’ I said, ‘Well, here’s the thing. I have to hear it from him. I can’t be the guy who says to him, “You’re done.”’” When Hanks said he wasn’t interested, they started to think about Lily Tomlin. Rudin knew they were fighting against time and reality, but it gave Nichols a project to care about.
He saw friends, went out for meals, and watched as artists many generations younger developed their new work. He exulted over a workshop presentation of Hamilton to which Miranda invited him. And on nights when he was up to it, he headed out to the theater, always sure to stay and congratulate the casts of whatever he saw, although there were times when he couldn’t climb the stairs to their dressing rooms. His car and driver were always close by, and when Sawyer couldn’t be with him, she made sure a safety net was in place. In the spring, Eric Fischl, who had painted a striking portrait of Nichols several years earlier, called him and made a date for them to go see an exhibit of “Degenerate Art”—paintings from the years Nichols had been a child in Germany. Soon after they had arranged to meet at the Neue Galerie, which was just a few blocks from Nichols’s apartment, Sawyer called Fischl and said, “Don’t tell Mike I’m asking you to do this, but I’d feel better if you came and picked him up and took him there.”
“Of course I said I would,” Fischl says. “He insisted on walking, so we walked very slowly and took our time. At one point in the gallery, he broke away, and when I went into another room to find him, he said he had had to sit down. He said the exhibit was too emotionally difficult for him—there was more documentation of the Nazi horror than he was able to handle. It was not the way I wanted our last time together to be.”
Nichols started spending time with Jack O’Brien to do interview sessions for a documentary about his life, and after years of vowing he would never write an autobiography, he became intrigued by the idea of collaborating with John Lahr on a professional memoir, though nothing came of it. “The funny thing is that toward the end of his life,” says Matthew Weiner, “which of course I was not aware it was going to be, he told me with great joy that he had retired.” Sawyer had decided to step down as the anchor of ABC’s evening newscast; they both hoped they would be lucky enough to have a couple of years together. “Mike encouraged me, when Mad Men was almost over, to do nothing and start over emotionally and just take time to appreciate my family,” says Weiner. “Two weeks after that conversation, I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I’m in preproduction.’ ‘What are you talking about?!’ I said. ‘What about just living life?’ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but it’s now or never.’”
In July, HBO announced that Nichols would direct Meryl Streep in a film adaptation of Master Class, Terrence McNally’s play about Maria Callas. It sounded impossible; Rudin, who says, “It never occurred to me that Mike was not going to live forever,” was concerned enough to call Celia Costas and ask, “Are you sure he’s strong enough to do this?” But Nichols insisted he was, and started formulating a plan to make the movie by staging seventeen or eighteen performances of the play in a studio in Queens and filming them all. He opened a production office and began sketching out ideas. “I wanted it to be true,” Streep says. “We worked on it with Terrence, and I thought about the role, but I never, deep in my heart, thought it was going to happen.”
That summer, Nichols started seeing a psychiatrist to help him accept the fact that his time was limited and to talk about his fear of dying. His friends had already noticed a change in his demeanor—an emotionalism that rose to the surface on even minor occasions. “His quips and asides could be . . . smart and mean and sharply observed when he was in his prime,” says Streep. “But, chastened, I guess, by all his brushes with the reaper, he willfully, heartfully changed. Every phone call, email, and in-person exchange was charged with an embarrassing, coursing current of love. Goodbye always had tears. It upset me. But it readied me for what came, I guess.”
In October, he attended a Broadway revival of The Real Thing. Cynthia Nixon, who had played the main character’s daughter for Nichols at seventeen, was now playing the girl’s mother. Two of her original costars, Christine Baranski and Peter Gallagher, went to the opening night, as did Tom Stoppard. Nichols tried to sit through the play, but his cough got the better of him and he quietly walked up the orchestra aisle to a lounge where he wouldn’t disturb anyone. A few days later, the impromptu reunion turned into a real one when Baranski organized a lunch at his favorite restaurant, Marea, for the women of Nichols’s 1984 productions: She was joined by Glenn Close, Whoopi Goldberg, and Nixon. They knew his birthday was coming up in a few days and wanted to do something special for him. “It was fantastic,” Nixon says. “He told stories and talked a lot about his grandchildren. Sometimes he’d talk about a show and he wouldn’t remember a name, and he would get upset, and Christine would calmly remind him. And we also told stories, especially Whoopi and Glenn. They gave themselves to him as gifts—you know, ‘This is what my experience was, this is what you did for me, this is what you meant to me . . .’”
On November 6, Nichols turned eighty-three. He woke up to an email from his first wife, Patricia Scot. Like Nichols, she was now on her fourth and happiest marriage and was living in Florida; they had been back in touch over the previous decade, initially at the urging of Sawyer, who had done a great deal to unite the different threads of Nichols’s family and past. “I wrote to him and said, ‘Happy birthday, dear old friend. I hope you have a wonderful day and all your wishes come true.’ He emailed back,” Scot says. “It was very nice, because after all those years, that’s what he finally was—a dear, old friend.”
The last week of his life was a busy one. He and Sawyer went to dinner at Lorne Michaels’s house, where they saw Paul Simon and Edie Brickell and Tina Fey. He touched base with John Patrick Shanley about Shanley’s desire to have him direct a new play called Prodigal Son. “Just promise me you won’t die,” said Shanley. “I’ll try,” said Nichols. He went to a conference room at CAA to listen to the actors Josh Charles, Nina Arianda, and Jon Hamm read a play whose director he had mentored, and he participated as an actor in a reading of a new play called Evening at the Talk House, by his old friend Wallace Shawn. “He was very ill,” says Shawn, “and it was even more moving to me that he would do it, that he would expose himself to being watched by people. His cough was terrifying—at one point I thought, Maybe this will be the end of his life, right here. He walked out for a good twenty minutes, and then he came back in and said, ‘I’m fine. This happens.’” The actor Larry Pine, whom Nichols had cast in The Seagull, sat next to him and helped him keep his place in the script. He had rehearsed his part, and when the time came for him to read his lines, he did it effortlessly.
On November 18, he had lunch with Candice Bergen. He had just gotten an eye examination and was having trouble reading street signs and addresses; he got to the lunch late and was slightly disoriented and frightened. He told her that he was having a minor medical procedure the next day—an adjustment to his pacemaker, and possibly the insertion of a stent. After lunch, he went to play with his granddaughters, and then to the hospital to sit by the bedside of his friend Buck Henry, who had just suffered a severe stroke. He firmed up lunch plans with Bob Balaban. And he and Sawyer saw Terrence McNally. “It’s dumb nuts and bolts,” Nichols told him, “but I have to have this thing done, and I can either get it over with or wait until next week.” “Get it over with,” McNally advised him. “Thank you for that,” Sawyer said.
The next evening, after the procedure, Mike and Diane went out to dinner with Daisy, Max, and Jenny. As they got back to the apartment, he complained of feeling dizzy and collapsed. He died a short time later, at home, surrounded by the people he loved the most. He left behind an appointment book for the coming week that was completely full.