FOUR

When Mike Nichols sat down and started to read the copy of The Graduate he had received from Larry Turman, his first thought was that the story was “totally unoriginal.”¹ His second thought was that he was going to make it into a movie.

Nichols didn’t know who Turman was, only that a producer had sent the book to his agent, Robert Lantz, and asked him to forward it. He had never heard of the novel. He had never directed a movie; in fact, only recently had he started thinking of himself as a director at all. Twelve months earlier, he had been an improvisatory comedian facing the demise of the creative partnership that had made him famous and utter bewilderment about his next professional move. Now, he had become, for the second time in four years, one of the hottest commodities in New York.

Nichols’s first round of celebrity came in October 1960, when he was twenty-eight and his show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, directed by Arthur Penn, opened on Broadway. Nichols and May had met when he was a student at the University of Chicago. They started performing together with the Compass Players (which later evolved into Second City) in the mid-1950s. Though their backgrounds were dissimilar, the armature they had acquired along the way was oddly complementary. Nichols, born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, was an immigrant, the sickly child of a German mother and a Russian Jewish father who had escaped Europe just before World War II; he had arrived in the United States at the age of seven and been educated in New York private schools and raised in a European intellectual tradition.² May was born in Philadelphia to a family of Yiddish theater performer-directors; they moved to Los Angeles when she was young, and by the time she was nineteen, she was the divorced mother of a two-year-old girl. Both Nichols and May were outsiders who had endured stormy childhoods by sealing themselves behind walls of wit. Both had the ability to stand just far enough apart from the culture around them to observe it with the ruthless detachment of great comedians, and both had an astonishing gift for improvisation; May could lampoon, on the spur of the moment, the stylistic tics and affectations of writers she had never actually read,³ and Nichols, who had read all of them, knew just how deeply he could tap his own intelligence without scaring the audience away.

Nichols and May’s partnership took them to New York City, where they began to gain a reputation with performances at the Village Vanguard and other clubs, television appearances, and Improvisations to Music, a 1959 comedy album of two-character vignettes spoofing everything from cold war spy thrillers to Brief Encounter (relocated to a dentist’s chair). Nichols’s talent for rooting out what he called “the secrets under the lines—the secrets that aren’t in the lines,”⁴ and the almost flirtatious energy with which he and May could lob the ball back and forth, each raising the other’s game repeatedly in the space of a four-minute routine, made them media favorites, and the cult began to grow. Their move to Broadway, at a time when Broadway success meant feature stories in Time and Newsweek and exposure on The Ed Sullivan Show, was a smash, and the ease with which many of the show’s language-rich routines translated to a hit LP helped make Nichols and May into nationally known stars. For its entire 306-performance run, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May wasn’t just a hot ticket; it was a showbiz magnet, attracting luminaries not just in New York City, but from Los Angeles, as studio chiefs and producers regularly made excursions eastward to scout new talent, and from London, where new directors, young actors, and pop singers were just beginning to assert their claim on America’s attention. By the time the show closed in July 1961, the list of celebrities who had knocked at the stage door and paid their respects was staggering. Everyone wanted to know Mike Nichols.

Even when they were on Broadway, hunting for the laugh and then for the twist that would lead to the bigger laugh, Nichols and May had their share of rough nights and clashes; during one performance, they hit and scratched each other onstage as the audience, caught off guard, wondered nervously whether they were in character.⁵ They were and they weren’t. “We were both seductive and hostile people,” Nichols said later, “and we were both very much on the defensive.”⁶ Perhaps inevitably, given the pressure to follow success with more success and the tension of working in so airlessly interdependent a dyad, their partnership took only a little more than a year to rupture after the show closed. Their rift, which Nichols called “cataclysmic,”⁷ came soon after his agreement to take the lead role in May’s play A Matter of Position in Philadelphia. The two fought furiously, and the transformation of their working relationship from that of collaborative performer-writers to one in which May did all the writing and directing and Nichols did all the performing was more than either could take. Nichols enjoyed being directed by Arthur Penn, but not by May. He quit, the show closed out of town, and although the two would eventually mend their relationship and work together again several times, Nichols was now on his own.

It was a producer named Arnold Saint-Subber who nudged him toward directing,⁸ handing him Nobody Loves Me, a comic play about young newlyweds by Neil Simon that nobody, including Simon, thought was working particularly well. Nichols agreed to direct the play in summer stock. “In the first fifteen minutes of the first day’s rehearsal I understood that this was my job, this was what I was preparing to do without knowing it,” he said.⁹ Nichols discovered within himself a natural talent for drawing good work out of actors and for guiding playwrights through rewrites without making them feel threatened or trampled. He also found, to his own surprise, a kind of emotional comfort in being at the center of the action. “I think people try to become famous because they think: If you can get the world to revolve around you, you won’t die,” he remarked to a reporter.¹⁰ The comment typified the way Nichols handled himself with a press corps that was insatiably curious about his life with and without Elaine May—it was fast, funny, and so offhand that nobody could be certain whether it was self-revelation or just a good line.

Neil Simon, who didn’t believe Nobody Loves Me was funny until he heard the audience laughing, came away flabbergasted by what Nichols brought to the table. His play, retitled Barefoot in the Park, opened in New York on October 23, 1963, to rave reviews that launched the careers of its two young stars, Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, turned Simon into a brand-name playwright, and almost instantly made Nichols the comedy director at the top of every playwright’s and actor’s lists.

Larry Turman had been impressed by Nichols’s work on Barefoot in the Park, which would shortly win him his first Tony Award. But when Turman sent him The Graduate and asked him to consider directing it, “I was really responding to the funny nervousness of his performances with Elaine May—I felt some connection there. When you read The Graduate, you feel the way I felt watching him: You laugh, but you’re nervous.”¹¹

Nichols laughed when he read The Graduate and wasn’t nervous at all. He had loved The Catcher in the Rye,¹² and he saw Holden Caulfield’s literary descendant, slightly more grown-up but still utterly baffled, in the pages of Webb’s story. “I thought it was a good, old gag,” he says. “Kid, older lady—that’s how everybody got started back then. It was a good subject. And I thought, I know how to do this.”¹³

A few nights after he got the book, Nichols told Turman he was interested. The project and Nichols’s involvement were announced in The New York Times on March 15. Soon after, the two men had lunch at the Plaza Hotel with William Hanley, who had completed a draft of the screenplay for The Graduate, been paid his $500, and was now moving on to considerably more lucrative work on action films. “I thought the book was terrific,” says Hanley. “Charles Webb’s dialogue couldn’t be improved on—it was pointless to try. All the script needed was structure.” At the lunch, Nichols expressed his desire for changes in a new draft. “I didn’t want to make them,” says Hanley. “I just knew it wasn’t going to work with us, and I said to Larry Turman, ‘I’m gonna back out—you need Mike Nichols more than you need me.’”¹⁴

With Hanley gone, Turman needed a new screenwriter who would be willing to take Nichols’s notes, but Nichols was in no rush to find one. He was flooded with offers to direct plays; moreover, he told Turman, The Graduate would have to be his second movie, not his first. Nichols had no desire to make a film version of Barefoot in the Park or of anything else he went on to direct in New York. “I couldn’t! What would I do? They were dead for me,” he says of the first four plays he staged. “There was nothing to discover. Unless I can be terrified and mystified and feel, ‘I’m lost, this is the one that’s going to destroy me, how could I have made this mistake’…that terror is the life of it.”¹⁵ But he did think that adapting a play to the screen might make for a logical first footstep into Hollywood, and he’d found a property he liked: The Public Eye, one-half of a pair of one-acts called The Private Ear and the Public Eye by British playwright Peter Shaffer that had opened on Broadway two weeks before Barefoot in the Park. Universal had announced that Nichols would direct the film, and Shaffer had recently begun to work with him on a screenplay for the three-character piece.¹⁶ That bought Turman a little time, not only to get a viable screenplay drafted, but to use Nichols’s name to lure a studio. Given all the buzz around his director, The Graduate’s future looked bright.

Over the next six months, every studio in Hollywood turned the film down.

 

On April 13, 1964, Hollywood took its annual Monday off for the Academy Awards. There had been no frantic winter campaigning season; the Oscars, though they drew a reliably huge television audience, were in some years a take-it-or-leave-it affair, even for the nominees. This spring, studio traditionalists were in a particularly glum mood: Twelve of the twenty acting nominees were from the United Kingdom or Europe; one company, United Artists, had dominated the major nominations, just as it had done for the last several years; and it was becoming apparent that, for the first time since the 1940s, the Best Picture Oscar was not going to go to an American picture—the winner would be Tony Richardson’s raunchy smash Tom Jones.

“Wonder why we hate ourselves,” Hedda Hopper snapped in her column.¹⁷ The answer was evident: Even by its own declining standards, the Hollywood studios had mustered an embarrassing lineup of films in 1963 and then failed to nominate the best of them, Martin Ritt’s Hud. Two of the year’s Best Picture nominees, Fox’s Cleopatra and MGM’s slow-moving Cinerama omnibus How the West Was Won, had been scorned by critics and were clearly the beneficiaries of bloc voting by the large roster of studio employees that, at the time, made up much of the Academy’s membership. It was not a year for Hollywood to celebrate its own accomplishments. Some young stars—Steve McQueen, Tuesday Weld, Julie Andrews, Jack Lemmon—showed up as presenters, along with veterans like Edward G. Robinson and Ed Begley. Warren Beatty was in the audience with Leslie Caron; his sister, Shirley MacLaine, was also there, and up for Best Actress. But overall attendance among the nominees was sparse; three of the four acting winners—Hud’s Patricia Neal and Melvyn Douglas and veteran British character actress Margaret Rutherford for The V.I.P.s—didn’t even show up.¹⁸

The fourth winner did, and provided the evening with its headline. Sitting in the audience, a nominee for Best Actor, Sidney Poitier, his palms sweating and his tension increasing with every category, thought, “I’m never going to put myself through this shit no more.”¹⁹ Poitier knew that all eyes were on him, that his win would provide a moment of genuine meaning for black Americans and an occasion for an avalanche of self-congratulation within his industry. He had been here before, five years earlier, when, as the costar of The Defiant Ones, he had become the first black man to be nominated for Best Actor. Now, he could be the first to win—a moment that he knew would make history and yet change almost nothing.

The movie for which Poitier was nominated, Lilies of the Field, was a sweet, thimble-size parable in which he had played a wanderer in the Southwest who stumbles across an isolated convent and helps a group of nuns from Germany build a new chapel. They don’t share a culture, a homeland, or even a language, but they learn mutual respect through working together. Almost nothing of Poitier’s character is revealed in the film’s script; he is a holy stranger who arrives, helps, teaches, learns, and leaves. Poitier accepted a salary cut, taking just $50,000 plus a percentage of the gross to play a role that his friend Harry Belafonte had rejected.²⁰ Shrewdly handled by United Artists, which missed no opportunity to hard-sell the mild little movie as a beacon of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding, Lilies had become a minor success.

While nobody was claiming that the film was a masterpiece, much of Hollywood and the press were willing to laud it as a step in the right direction. More than a decade after the McCarthy era and blacklisting had caused many in the movie business to retreat from any public association with political issues, the civil rights movement was becoming the occasion for many in Hollywood to reassert their right to speak out on political issues. Actors like Paul Newman and Marlon Brando felt free to make their voices heard, and so did those considered industry leaders like Gregory Peck and Robert Wise.²¹ The August 1963 civil rights march in Washington had been a galvanizing moment for the repoliticization of Hollywood, which New York Times columnist Murray Schumach wrote had “decided to rejoin the nation after nearly 16 years of spiritual secession.”²²

The content of Lilies of the Field was anything but political, but the fact that some movie houses in the South declined to book the film only added to its status as a good cause. And Poitier was a hard man to root against. Before Oscar night, one of his competitors for Best Actor, Hud’s Paul Newman, announced that he would be skipping the ceremony and pulling for Poitier to win. And even the part of the Hollywood establishment that still had one foot planted firmly in the era of red-baiting saw a chance, as columnist Sidney Skolsky wrote, “to telegraph to the globe that WE do not discriminate and thus give the lie to our so-called Communist friends.”²³

Poitier knew that was nonsense. He was well aware that, as much as the sight of a black man holding an Oscar statuette for the first time might move many black and white Americans, his win would be used to sell a preposterous falsehood, the spurious notion that the movie industry had solved its own race problem and was now pointing the way for the rest of America. “Did I say to myself, ‘This country is waking up and beginning to recognize that certain changes are inevitable?’” he wrote, recalling the evening. “No, I did not. I knew that we hadn’t ‘overcome,’ because I was still the only one.”²⁴

Nonetheless, when Anne Bancroft, who had won the Best Actress Oscar a year earlier for The Miracle Worker, took the stage, announced the nominees, opened the envelope, and, beaming, spoke Poitier’s name, he strode to the podium with genuine excitement, telling the cheering audience, “It has been a long journey to this moment.”

That much, at least, was true. Lilies of the Field was the thirty-six-year-old actor’s nineteenth movie. Poitier was a native of the Bahamas who grew up in poverty; he moved to Miami as a teenager, then to New York, where he scraped by working in blue-collar service jobs and living in small rented rooms before he turned to acting. Poitier began his career as an immigrant who could barely read, an outsider wherever he found himself; the growing music and theater scene in Harlem in the late 1940s, and the indigenous black American experience from which it grew, felt and sounded, at first, as foreign to him as everything else in America. (He taught himself diction and grammar by listening to a white man on the radio.) He made his movie debut playing a doctor in Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 urban melodrama No Way Out. The film established a template for Poitier’s roles that was to provide him steady, if creatively constricting, employment for the next fifteen years: The character was a young professional surrounded by white bigots, a so-called credit to his race who achieved what white America was comfortable labeling “dignity” by at once demonstrating that he could feel anger and proving he was evolved enough to restrain himself from expressing it. Eventually, white characters in many of his movies would come to understand his finer qualities, meaning they would learn that he was exceptional and should therefore not be the target of prejudice: Often, for the sake of an imagined evenhandedness that made the films more palatable to white moviegoers, Poitier’s character had to learn a lesson, too, usually something about the perils of being too proud or suspicious to accept a helping hand.

Poitier worked steadily after No Way Out: He was handsome, and his Roman-coin features made him castable across a broad age range (five years after playing a doctor, he played a high school student in The Blackboard Jungle, the film that really ignited his career). And he had no competition, since in the 1950s the movie industry had room for exactly one black actor (Belafonte, who acted once in a while, was really more of a recording star). Hollywood needed an “Exceptional Negro” in the 1950s, and Poitier was perfect in the role. Aside from his talent and magnetism, he demonstrated a remarkable instinct for self-presentation; without anyone to emulate, he knew exactly how much he could say publicly without jeopardizing his status in either black or white America. In the press, he walked a fine line almost unerringly: He was humble but never servile, concerned but rarely intemperate, unwilling to pretend bigotry was anything other than an immense national problem, but optimistic that it would eventually give way. But as much as journalists liked to point out his unique status to him, Poitier didn’t spend much time discussing the cost of that exceptionalism. He wouldn’t let himself—couldn’t let himself—play villains. Hollywood would never allow him to play a character with real sexual passion. And the possibility that he might one day be able to compete with white actors for roles in which race could be factored out wasn’t even worth discussing.

In public, Poitier kept his own counsel about those issues, muting his frustration beneath a calm, consistent expression of personal responsibility. “While he disclaims being a crusader or a leader, Poitier acknowledges that he has made it a policy not to play any role that might offend Negro sensibilities or diminish the Negro’s stature as a human being,” noted The New York Times approvingly in 1959, on the eve of his first Oscar nomination and his ecstatically received performance as Walter Lee Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. “As I see myself, I’m just the average Joe Blow Negro,” Poitier told the paper.²⁵ “But, as the cats say in my area, I’m out there wailing for us all.” Poitier was not afraid to speak out about civil rights: The following year, when he went to Los Angeles to star in the film version of A Raisin in the Sun and ended up sequestered with his family in the Chateau Marmont, he went public about the fact that he couldn’t rent a house for himself, his wife, and his daughters in a desirable neighborhood. “I speak about this with pain,” he said, “because I would not like to say these things exist.” Housing discrimination, he went on to say, “will yield only to time and pressure.”²⁶ But his self-defined duty to be the one “wailing for us all” meant that Poitier had to keep his own complicated personal life under wraps. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton could provide endless grist for talk-show jokes and gossip columns, but the news that Poitier, a married father of three, had long been having an affair with actress Diahann Carroll and was now headed for divorce would not have been welcome to moviegoers of any race.²⁷ Everything Poitier said and did had ramifications; the only real power he had was his control over the version of himself he chose to show the world.

How much had really changed, even in Hollywood, as Bancroft hugged Poitier, who took the trophy, made a jubilant acceptance speech, and left the stage to another round of applause? In New York, the actor was to be honored by Mayor Robert F. Wagner with a ticker tape parade. But he still had to endure appalling indignities like the Time magazine story that said he bounded to the stage to receive his Oscar “more like a great Negro high jumper than a great Negro actor” and, as a mark of approval, gushed that “he is so overpoweringly good looking that he quite literally pales the white actors beside him.”²⁸ In his postvictory interviews, Poitier was, as always, grateful but judicious and precise, reminding people that the award was “not a magic wand” and saying, “I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to function as freely as a Marlon Brando, or a Burt Lancaster or a Paul Newman.”²⁹

Of course, he was right. In 1964, black Americans were still virtually invisible in filmed entertainment. “All we ask is that movies show the truthful American image,” Edward W. Warren, head of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had complained in 1961. “Any time [movies] have a crap game they show plenty of Negroes. But when do you see a Negro doctor or lawyer?…They will show you a scene with a baseball crowd and you don’t see a single Negro. You will see city street scenes and not a single Negro. This is ridiculous.”³⁰ At first, Hollywood simply didn’t listen. When 20th Century-Fox was taken to task for making Darryl F. Zanuck’s World War II epic The Longest Day without any close-ups of black soldiers,³¹ Dick Zanuck was caught flatfooted, first announcing that the studio’s research had shown that no black soldiers were involved in D-Day³² and then, when that proved not to be the case, defending his father by pointing out that “one of his three secretaries was a Negro.”³³

In 1963, the movie and television industries finally began to take some real, if minuscule, steps toward integration, less out of the goodness of their corporate hearts than as the result of an extremely effective campaign waged by the NAACP, which threatened to go before the National Labor Relations Board and attempt to have Hollywood’s unions decertified if they didn’t start integrating.³⁴ It took a sitdown between the NAACP and an alliance of producers before Hollywood would even commit to the principle that “more Negroes should be used in movies,”³⁵ both on screen and on crews. Later that year, Wendell Franklin became the first black man ever to hold the job of assistant director on a studio movie, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and publicly expressed his nervousness about how white crew members would react to being told what to do by him.³⁶ But despite the NAACP’s attempt to urge more black workers to apply for jobs, Hollywood’s unions remained largely closed shops,³⁷ and network television programmers were even more fearful than their movie studio counterparts. The pilot for the ABC sitcom Bewitched sat on the shelf for more than a year, a victim of complaints by the network’s southern stations that its innocuous comic story of an advertising man whose wife is a witch was a veiled argument for racial intermarriage. In 1963, CBS became the first network to use a black actor as part of the ensemble of a drama series, casting Cicely Tyson as a secretary in the gritty, innovative New York–based drama East Side/West Side. But the network asked the show’s producers to limit the number of scenes in which she appeared, and the series was canceled after one season, the victim of southern affiliates that refused to carry it at all.³⁸

The NAACP’s battles with Hollywood kept making news; the organization proved to be far more skilled than even the publicity-savviest Hollywood studios at taking the lead with the press and keeping its side of the fight in the headlines. Their strategy of repeated public complaints was so potent and widely recognized that, on Oscar night, Sammy Davis Jr., who was handed the wrong envelope as he was about to present an award, got the show’s biggest laugh by ad-libbing, “Wait until the NAACP hears about this!”

Two days after Poitier’s win, television critic Jack Gould commented dryly that Anne Bancroft’s on-camera embrace of the actor, had it occurred in a scripted television series, “would have been written out lest Southern sensibilities be disturbed.”³⁹ Gould called the actor’s victory one of the few redeeming moments of the show. However, nobody was very specific about what, exactly, was being redeemed. Poitier’s Best Actor win was widely taken as a breakthrough moment that was laden with symbolism. But what it symbolized was not a fundamental alteration in Hollywood’s use of black actors, only an affirmation of what Poitier’s career had always represented—his own status as the exception to the rule.

Sidney Skolsky’s exultant headline OSCAR—CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER must have struck Poitier as ironic, given the one fact that everyone was politely declining to mention: This year’s Oscar winner didn’t have a job. Poitier had two films awaiting release—he had completed a cameo in The Greatest Story Ever Told and had a starring role as a Moorish prince in a period adventure film called The Long Ships that he already knew was going to be dreadful. He felt that his career was largely dependent on the grace and conviction of a handful of men—producer-directors Stanley Kramer and Richard Brooks and Columbia chief Mike Frankovich⁴⁰—who kept him working and visible. His success was fragile.

Poitier’s Oscar would turn Lilies of the Field from a modest hit into a major one and transform him into something he had never been before, a movie star with a box office following of his own. After the award, the film’s business increased by as much as 500 percent in some theaters; the same southern movie houses that had refused to book Lilies now sought it,⁴¹ and the movie played into the fall of 1964. But the week after the Oscars, when Poitier went to New York to receive a medal from Mayor Wagner, he was still wondering what would come next for him, and the dissonance between the celebration that surrounded him and his own internal turmoil must have been overwhelming. For one of the first times in his career, Poitier lost his temper in front of a reporter. Pressed to answer the same questions about the civil rights movement he had been fielding for days, he replied, “Why don’t you ask me human questions? Why is it everything you ask refers to the Negroness of my life and not to my acting?”⁴²

Poitier didn’t need to wait for the answer: He had given it himself years earlier. He was still, as he had put it, “the only one.” And with an Academy Award, Poitier was no longer just an actor, but himself a trophy, a successful progress report that the Academy had bestowed on the movie business and a name that Hollywood could invoke again and again as a way of telling itself that it had done enough, that a piece of unfinished business had finally been settled. Poitier had been in Hollywood long enough to know that the Oscar would be less useful to him than to the organization that handed it out. The prize was not a symptom of meaningful change, but a substitute for it; more substantial or widespread advances in the industry didn’t appear to him to be on the horizon. In any case, Poitier certainly did not imagine that he had just been granted an opportunity for leverage. On the contrary, it seemed almost impossible for him to imagine any way that he would now be allowed to ask for more.