EPILOGUE
A few hours after Mike died, his three children divided up the long list of people who needed to be told he was gone and started making calls. The outpouring of love and grief was immense. In the morning, Whoopi Goldberg broke down when she tried to announce his death on The View. That night, Glenn Close and John Lithgow, who were costarring onstage in Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, sang one of Mike’s favorite songs, “Happy Trails,” to the audience after their curtain call. The night after that, Broadway’s theaters dimmed their lights in his honor.
Movie people reacted to his death with heartfelt paragraphs delivered by their publicists to trade publications for use in memorial roundups. Theater people reacted to his death by getting together in the back room of a Midtown restaurant for an impromptu wake after the curtains on that Thursday night’s shows fell, to hug and cry and laugh and swap stories and drink. And several dozen people who were close to Mike gathered that Sunday at the home he and Diane shared, chatting quietly and observing the rites of condolence as grandchildren too young and tiny to be sad scampered obliviously between the legs of the people in his many circles, some of whom were meeting for the first time and discovering that his world was wider than even they had imagined.
One year later, not much more than a mile from where the SS Bremen had deposited a seven-year-old boy ashore in his new country in 1939, about 250 of Mike’s friends gathered in the IAC Building, where Barry Diller had turned the high-ceilinged, Frank Gehry–designed lobby into an event space that could accommodate what he described—invoking Mike’s favorite word, to the delight of the crowd—as “the last ratfuck.” It was November 8, 2015, a long-awaited send-off that Diller, CAA head Bryan Lourd, and Lorne Michaels had planned, and a night so packed with celebrities that even the famous dropped their guard and gazed at one another in fascination. It was a convocation of different realms: Anna Wintour and David Remnick and Frank Rich, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts and Emma Thompson, Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard and John Patrick Shanley and Terrence McNally, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Donen and James L. Brooks and Bennett Miller. Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen, publishers and designers and artists and agents and news anchors and billionaires. Diane had decided on the food—it would be Thanksgiving dinner, Mike’s favorite meal. A dais of transparent cubes filled with autumn leaves collected from the park along the Hudson River had been erected in front of the dining tables at the center of the long, narrow space.
The night had the feeling of a large and unusual family reunion—a gathering of people who had never, until now, realized that they were members of the same tribe, united only by their deep connection to the man who wasn’t there. The angry girl who first met Mike in Chicago stood up to talk and said, “Can everybody hear me?” “Yes,” roared the room. “Can everybody see me?” said Elaine May. Shouts of “No!” came from distant tables. “No?” she said. “I look fabulous.” Tom Stoppard got up to say that he had always felt “overestimated by Mike . . . People ask, ‘Do you write for yourself or for the audience?’ For the last thirty-five years, I’ve wanted to say, ‘No, I write for Mike Nichols.’”
“I never understood why Mike was my friend,” said Whoopi Goldberg. “He told me, ‘You have to understand you’re unique, and if I don’t help you realize this, you will always be ordinary because that’s how you think of yourself.’” She paused, as expertly as he would have wanted her to, then added, “And so it is his fault that I am the egotistical bitch that I am.” Tony Kushner spoke about Mike’s mind and heart and life as an immigrant. Meryl Streep read his emails and talked about a relationship that was based on “the love of working,” adding that they had learned only late in his life that they were distant cousins. “We shared a nose,” she said. Julia Roberts spoke of her love for Mike and fought back tears. Christopher Walken, who had seen the film of The Designated Mourner dozens of times, said, “Mike was a great actor—that doesn’t get talked about much.” Paul Simon sang “Homeward Bound” as many people in the room wept. He said, “When I sang this at Anne Bancroft’s memorial service, I thought, I don’t ever want to sing ‘Mrs. Robinson’ for Mike.” Then he sang “Mrs. Robinson.” People craned their necks at the lean, gray-haired, diffident-looking older man who had been given a place of honor. Many of them did not realize until he got up to speak that Mike had a brother. People leaned forward, as if a secret code were about to be cracked.
Many in the room commented that Mike was the last of a certain kind of cultural celebrity—someone who could travel between film and theater, who understood art and politics and fashion and history and money, a man of the world and of his century. “I don’t think anyone here will have this many people at their memorial service,” said Mia Farrow, her son Ronan on her arm.
There were funny stories and personal stories, there was gossip and the sharing of his favorite aphorisms; people compared notes and exchanged memories and talked about an era ending. “How did he make us all feel like we were the special one?” one actress asked. There were posters of Mike’s work to examine, and the images on them filled the room with ghosts—Taylor and Burton, Tandy and Cronyn, Walter Matthau and Art Carney, George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton, Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. People spoke with special fondness of those who couldn’t be there—John Calley and Richard Avedon and Nora Ephron. They would have known what to make of a moment like this, they said, and then: He would have known what to make of it, better than anyone. Finally, there was Mike himself, filling the room with both his presence and his absence. The night ended with an audio clip of an old Nichols and May routine, an improvisation about a male nurse that he couldn’t get through without disintegrating into hysterics. That sound—the sound of Mike breaking into hilariously helpless laughter—sent the guests out into the pleasantly cool night, the breeze from the Hudson River on their faces, feeling that they had heard him happy one last time.
Fifty years earlier, in a state of agitated anxiety, he had told an interviewer, “I don’t care about being forgotten. I fear getting to the end of my life and feeling I’ve wasted it. I don’t want to get to the end and think I haven’t tasted enough and touched other people enough and had a good enough time.”
In old age, that fear had vanished. All of his desperate urgency had given way to a serenity he had taken a lifetime to find. At one of his favorite restaurants, he had lunch with a friend whose son was about to go out on his own; he was looking for some advice he could share. Did he have any wisdom to offer?
He thought for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “just so long as he knows that things that start out poorly don’t always end poorly.”
He thought some more.
“That,” he said, “and study improv.”