Soon after his father’s death, Mike asked his mother for permission to be fitted for a hairpiece and false eyebrows. His first wig was cheap, with visible netting in front and an odd, too-short fit in the back—and it was blond, the better to look like an all-American boy. He had gotten what he wanted, but his prize came with a new set of struggles. The adhesive that attached the wig to his head was uncomfortable, and acetone, the solvent used to remove the glue at night, had a distinctive, unpleasant odor. “He would always refer to the wig as ‘it,’” says his brother. “‘How does it look? Is it all right?’” Like any awkward thirteen-year-old without many friends, he was self-conscious and nervous about his appearance. But even a just barely passable hairpiece was infinitely better than walking into school with no hair at all and becoming the instant target of stares, whispers, and worse.
Moreover, he would now have a chance to start fresh, with a group of classmates who didn’t know what he used to look or sound like. His years at Cherry Lawn were done; his mother, now working nonstop to take care of herself and her two sons, wanted him at home, and needed him to contribute to the household by taking jobs after school and on weekends. He started ninth grade as a scholarship student at Walden, a progressive private school in Manhattan that was a twenty-minute walk up Central Park West from their apartment. Walden had a reputation as modern and almost experimental, with a multitude of art classes, teachers who allowed students to call them by their first names, and a lack of rigidity in the curriculum. In his years at Cherry Lawn, Mike had shed the last vestiges of his German accent. Now, for the first time, he had the chance to blend in.
The wig, inexpensive as it may have been, was nevertheless a luxury purchase, now a rarity for a family that had suddenly and unexpectedly fallen from middle-class comfort into poverty. “I have no figure for how much insurance my father may or may not have had. Ten thousand dollars is in my head,” says Robert Nichols. “But whatever it was, it didn’t last long . . . and [our mother] was left with the task of sustaining three lives without any clear profession or skills. She was reduced to trying any and all ways to scratch out a living.” In addition to continuing to work as a typist, Brigitte started a word-of-mouth business selling leather goods and jewelry out of their increasingly cramped apartment, cluttering the living room where she slept with display tables. She found work in a bakery and a bookstore. Anything they needed was purchased on an installment plan; she even hung a good-customer certificate from the Household Finance Corporation on their wall, honoring her for always paying back what she borrowed.
For a time, it looked as if support would soon come from her older sister. Gudula had survived the war, and after it was over, Brigitte helped arrange a marriage of convenience between her and a homosexual pianist that would ease her move to New York. Mike and Robert both adored their doting aunt, who was fond of saying to them, “I love you heaps and loads.” But in 1946, just weeks after her arrival, she was struck by a bus on Central Park West and killed.
It was one loss too many for Brigitte. Always anxious about her health, she was now afflicted by so many ailments, from migraines to asthma, that she sank into a depression and began to treat herself as a semi-invalid, lying on her unmade bed in the center of the living room, next to a makeshift night table with, Nichols said bitterly, “maybe a hundred and fifty bottles of medication, and the phone, on which she always was.” Friends and neighbors tried to help by bringing over food, but the household suffered. Cockroaches infested the apartment, dishes piled up, cat hair was everywhere, and laundry went undone. “We weren’t clean,” Nichols recalled. And his relationship with his mother, which had become almost peaceful during the years he was at boarding school, now deteriorated into rancor, guilt, and caustic recrimination. “Everything wounded her,” he said. “‘I raised you so you could say that to me? Thank you very much, I deserve that.’ It went on for hours, days.”
“I don’t think Mike ever granted her a pardon based on the unacceptable losses she had suffered,” says Robert. “Mike and I were all she had left, and perhaps she clung to us too tightly and fearfully. It was mostly Mike who bore the brunt of her inability to cope. Nevertheless, she got the job done, despite our living in real poverty for years.”
Not surprisingly, Mike tried to spend as much time outside the apartment as he could. Now a teenager, he was able to get a job as a children’s riding instructor at the Claremont Stables, near Central Park—he liked the horses but had little patience for the kids. And high school was not the waking nightmare that his earlier education had been. There wasn’t much bullying at Walden, and although he later insisted that he “never had a friend from the time I came to this country” until adulthood, that seems not to have been the case. At least one Walden faculty member recalled him as being reasonably popular with both teachers, who thought he was bright, if unmotivated, and classmates, who enjoyed his sense of humor. He didn’t have the time or the means to socialize with other kids after classes—“I was in the position of going to expensive schools without having any spending money,” he said. Inviting kids to his home was out of the question, and, by his own admission, he was too guarded and untrusting to make much of a connection with anyone.
“I was stranger than them in ways that I couldn’t have pinpointed,” he said. At times, he said, he felt like a human seismograph, recording “a thousand tiny victories and defeats in an ordinary conversation. I was so impaled on what people thought. I had to train myself away from that.” He began imagining a future that would have no connection to anything he had experienced. “Mike often used the phrase ‘When I’m rich and famous . . .’ when he was young,” says Robert, “perhaps even in his teen years.”
As self-dramatizing as Mike’s mother could be, she was also resourceful and determined to use whatever connections she had to improve her family’s prospects. In her second year as a widow, she found a way to get herself and her sons out of their airless apartment during the sweltering city summers, partnering with another woman as the on-site manager of a couple of small hotels in the Catskills. These were not the resorts that were then so popular with relatively affluent Jewish New Yorkers, but inns that were smaller and catered to people like her—German or Austrian Jews who had fled Europe before the war. Mike and Robert went along, and Mike added to their income by working as a server or busboy. (He later told Edmund Wilson that he was fired at least once for “being too snappish with the customers in order to let them know that he was something better than a waiter.”)
In the mid-1960s, in the course of a lengthy Playboy interview, Nichols claimed to have lost his virginity on the grounds of one of those hotels at fourteen. After a failed trip with some older busboys to a bordello that turned out to be closed, he returned to the hotel, “met this nice girl who was 18 and . . . took her up under a tree. I was a big reader and I expected to be disappointed, as in all the novels; but to my surprise, it wasn’t disappointing at all.” Unlike many stories from his childhood, this was not one Nichols repeated or referred to again. But a ready-made anecdote about the summer you lost your virginity to a kindhearted older girl was practically an obligatory response for a Playboy interview at the time, and, although Nichols gave readers what they wanted, including an offhandedly dismissive opener (“I’m afraid it wasn’t very colorful”) and a punch line (“The girl has since become a psychiatrist; make of that what you will”), this carefully shaped story—an attempt, a failure, and then an out-of-the-blue success that very day with a girl who isn’t interested in the older boys—is not particularly consistent with the shyness, isolation, and trepidation that he more often said marked his early adolescence.
When she had any extra money, Brigitte found ways to expose her son to a wider world of culture. As a teenager, he once traveled with her to the music center Tanglewood, in western Massachusetts, where Leonard Bernstein, already becoming a celebrity in New York music circles, was conducting an opera. The sight of the handsome, beaming young maestro after the performance, aglow with perspiration and surrounded by cheering admirers as he hurried to his new convertible, left a vivid impression on Mike. “He looked golden,” he said. It was his first intimate glimpse of celebrity, and of the life that went with it.
By the time he was sixteen, he had become more confident, and he even had a girlfriend. Her name was Lucy Halpern, and her parents, who liked him, were generous enough to pay for the dates. One night in December 1947, they handed Mike and Lucy a pair of tickets to see one of the first performances of Elia Kazan’s Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy. Mike was interested in plays, and in Tennessee Williams—a year before, on his own and unable to afford a ticket, he had snuck into the second act of The Glass Menagerie to see Laurette Taylor’s storied performance as Amanda Wingfield. But Streetcar was a transformative experience, one that shaped his understanding of theater in ways that would resonate through almost all of his work to come.
“It sounds very dramatic,” he said, “but I never got over it. We never got up in the intermissions. We were poleaxed. Brando . . . first of all, you said, what is this? Who is this person who looks like a real person, not an actor? It was the only thing I’ve ever seen that was a hundred percent real and a hundred percent poetic, simultaneously. Kazan was, for many years, my hero of the theater, because he could really create life onstage.” For Nichols, the drama that unfolded “was the opposite of what I think of as the most difficult thing about the theater, which is, you come in and you sit . . . and the curtain comes up and someone says [yelling], ‘Mother came home last night and she doesn’t yet know that the orphanage burned down,’ and you think, Oh, no, are they going to do this all night? It was just alive. It was living in front of you.”
Mike began seeing plays more avidly—Wendy Hiller in The Heiress also made a strong impression. A year later, when the Halperns handed him and Lucy tickets to Kazan’s production of Death of a Salesman, he recalled being “totally devastated” by the power and artistry of what he saw—the story of a maybe Jewish family with two brothers, a father about to disappear, and a mother frantically trying to preserve some semblance of domestic life. But he had no particular idea of directing as a profession, or of how one pursued a career in the theater. His own life felt aimless, and his goals and ambitions were virtually nonexistent. In the spring of 1948, he graduated from Walden with a decent but hardly stellar academic record. Most of his classmates were headed to colleges or universities. He was not. “Lazy and disorganized” by his own description, he had not even bothered to take the college boards. He looked into enrolling at New York University but walked away in a fit of sullenness when he learned that incoming freshmen were required to memorize the school song. Instead, he began a year of drudgery in dead-end jobs—first as a stockroom worker for a life insurance firm, then as a shipping clerk for a costume jewelry company.
Despite their fraught relationship, Nichols stayed in New York, in part to be near his mother, who relied on him even as they tore at each other. But in 1949, five years after Paul Nichols’s death, Brigitte met a man. Like her late husband, Franz Hausberger was a doctor—a research physician—and like Brigitte, he was a German émigré; he had been educated in Munich and had come to America after the war. He and Brigitte fell in love and arranged a move to Philadelphia, where he had a job as a professor. Once they married, she would work as his laboratory assistant, and her younger son would attend high school there. “The hard times dissolved,” says Robert, who, like Mike, grew immensely fond of their new stepfather. “He became a long-standing professor at Jefferson Medical College. And she fell right into that non-Jewish life. She wasn’t a practicing or believing Christian, but neither was she in any way a practicing Jew. In a social situation, my mother once said, ‘I am of Jewish background,’ and my friend muttered in my ear, ‘And foreground.’”
With no reason left to stay in New York, Mike began to regret his decision to skip the board exams, a choice that, as he understood it, left him with only two options: Mexico City College (later renamed University of the Americas), which had become a four-year institution so recently that it hadn’t yet given out its first bachelor’s degrees, or the University of Chicago, which required only a placement exam. He applied to both, didn’t get a response from Chicago, and was accepted by Mexico City College. He was about to leave for Mexico when he received a telegram of acceptance saying, “Show up at Mandel Hall”—in Chicago—“on Monday at 9 o’clock.” He packed his bags, with warmer clothes this time, and got on the train.
“Yes, I had a tough childhood,” he thought. “I had all those problems—but enough already. All the shit was in the beginning. Let’s start now.”
It’s hard to know what surprised Nichols more when he arrived in Chicago for the fall term in 1949—that people liked him or that he liked people. “In high school you figure things are frozen forever in a certain pattern,” he said. “There are a couple of guys you can beat up and a lot who can beat you up, and there are a few girls who’ll go out with you and some more that won’t, and that’s the way the rest of life will be.” For him, “the great discovery of college was that nothing was fixed and the world was wide open.” On his first morning on campus, waiting in an endless line to register, he struck up a conversation with a fiercely bright and opinionated girl who was just sixteen but already enrolling as a transfer from Berkeley, eager to dig into the great books in Chicago’s core curriculum. Her name was Susan Sontag. They became friends instantly.
The campus and its students were wildly overstimulating for him. In those years, the University of Chicago promoted itself as a bastion of secularism and free thought, with a rigorous slate of required reading and a proudly eccentric student body that forswore distractions like sports and fraternities in the ardent pursuit of knowledge. Here were people who wanted to read what he wanted to read, who loved classical music and could identify composers and their work by listening for a few seconds, who knew the name of his grandmother as soon as he said she’d written the libretto for Salome, who wanted to argue and compare notes and share experiences all night. “We talked about books, about feelings, about how to get free of our pasts,” said Sontag. They did not become a couple; with studied offhandedness, Nichols told classmates, “I don’t usually have alliances with lesbians,” and she was thrown off by his wig. But most students didn’t care what Mike looked like; if he was different, he was no more different than they felt themselves to be. “I wouldn’t say [we were] misfits,” said the musician Alex Hassilev, one of Nichols’s first male friends at Chicago. “I would say we had unique ways of looking at the world. What drew us together was a kind of desire to be with others who were also a little strange.”
The university “was paradise,” Nichols said. “I began to see a world that I could fit in.” It was also too much to handle. Tall, stooped, and baby-faced, Nichols knew his appearance was odd—“something out of a German Expressionist movie,” according to his roommate, Aaron Asher. Overwhelmed by the effort “to be a person that many hours a day,” he began to shut down, in part because the specific person he had decided to be was such a strenuous invention. Thrown off balance by everything around him, he responded by affecting a style of frosty, bored, hyper-cultured contempt for anyone or anything he found wanting in merit, seriousness, or intellect, and he expressed his scorn with such withering humor that his ability to destroy people with a sentence soon became the one thing classmates knew about him before they even met him. Nichols’s hauteur—for the first time since immigrating, he decided to seem more European—was an anxious reaction to a kind of environment he had never before experienced. It was also a taxing performance. By the middle of his freshman year, he was staying in bed sixteen to eighteen hours a day. In the fall, he had signed up for a punishing course load of pre-med studies that he had chosen with the intention, almost by default, of becoming a doctor like his father and grandfather. Now he was skipping most of those classes. “A persona takes energy,” he said. “I just needed a rest. Not to be anything in relation to anyone else.”
At the time, the university’s medical school offered undergraduates free sessions with psychoanalytic trainees. Nichols leapt at the chance to put himself on the couch, and, at a time when many people still viewed the process as faintly embarrassing, he wasn’t shy about discussing it. “He was very outspoken,” one of his classmates, Heyward Ehrlich, said. “Mike’s therapy was at the top of his conversation. He publicized [it].”
Nichols discovered for the first time in his life that there was pleasure in being seen, in being understood, even in being found out. He was particularly taken with a humanities professor named Edward Rosenheim, who introduced him to Jonathan Swift and the principles of satire. It was one of the few classes for which he occasionally showed up. Not often enough, apparently: one day Rosenheim pulled him aside and said, “You know, Nichols, you’re very charming and all that, but I really owe my time to people who do the work. Sorry.”
“It threw me,” said Nichols. “I was one of the millions of people to whom teachers always said, ‘You could do so well if you only applied yourself.’ I would sort of skate through and not work and do perfectly all right. It had never occurred to me that there was any other way. And this guy, whom I admired so much, made me realize, ‘Maybe there’s some pleasure in doing the work.’”
By his sophomore year, Nichols was more ready for the possibilities the university held for him, and he also knew that his future was not in medicine. After beginning psychoanalysis, he had thought of becoming a psychiatrist, but his spiraling grades made medical school unlikely. He was getting by, but just barely, with so little spending money that he would linger in the campus cafeteria after other students had left so that he could eat the leftovers off their plates. The gap between him and those classmates felt unbridgeable, and unjust. He wondered “why my rich friends didn’t give me some of their money, since they had so much of it.”
One day he struck up a conversation with one of the cafeteria’s busboys, a student named Paul Sills. Sills was four years older than Nichols, but he had started at Chicago late and was, at twenty-four, just in his junior year. The son of the acting teacher Viola Spolin, whose galvanizing text on improvisational theater games would eventually become a mainstay of American acting classes, Sills was also an evangelist for her approach. In the last couple of years, he had become active in the university’s undergraduate theater department. At the moment he met Nichols, he was involved in an internecine quarrel over his attempt to rewrite The Duchess of Malfi for a student production he was directing. Nichols was instantly captivated by him and started coming by regularly during his shifts to scrounge food—sometimes by entering through the back door as if he had already paid—and to “bullshit about theater.” Sills, in turn, would come see Nichols at the hospital soda fountain, where he had gotten a job.
Nichols soon started attending Sills’s informal weekly acting workshops. In those sessions, he got his first taste of life as a performer and also of his new mentor’s approach to acting. Sills was not interested in pushing his actors toward the personal or internal exploration favored by adherents of Stanislavski. Rather, he believed that the games created or refined by his mother—which ranged from group touch exercises to word repetitions to physical stretches to something she called “developing organic response through gibberish”—were the way to engender trust and connection between performers, to shape power dynamics, and to teach actors to find the drama and meaning of any text. Sills’s use of those games felt, to Nichols, both playful and radical. In one of his first exercises, he and classmate Zohra Lampert were asked to improvise a scene based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain using only nonsense words.
Well before Sills founded Chicago’s seminal improv troupe Second City, his eye for talent was already acute, and in Nichols he saw a quick and eager learner who neither looked nor sounded like anyone else in the school’s drama subculture, someone who would be an ideal addition to the renegade campus theater company he was starting called Tonight at 8:30. It was, Nichols later said, “a ‘revolutionary’ group, which just meant the guys in ‘Tonight at 8:30’ didn’t like the faculty head at the University Theater very much. All it really came down to was that you had a choice between doing a play at some little place and calling it ‘Tonight at 8:30’ or doing it on the big stage in Mandel Hall.” Aware of Nichols’s acid reputation, Sills cast him to type. He put together a reading of a dramatic adaptation of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and had Nichols play the nasty, cynical newspaper editor Shrike. “I was extremely good,” Nichols said. “I was a prick. And then I started playing snotty pricks.” It was an easy fit. “I liked him,” says Ehrlich, “but . . . he was a pain in the ass. Mike Nichols was not Mike Nichols in those days. He was the person he came to satirize, and he wasn’t laughing at it. He felt the world treated him cruelly, and the theater was his revenge.”
“At the University of Chicago, Mike was a scary person,” says his classmate and friend Joy Carlin, who signed up for Sills’s new group at about the same time Nichols did. “There were plenty of people there who were really smart, and in that sense scary. But he was smart and had a truly wicked, sharp tongue. I was afraid to start a conversation with him, because I’d be skewered.”
In the spring of 1951, Sills cast Nichols as Caesar in Tonight at 8:30’s big production of the semester, Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Nichols was eager to try his hand at directing, and Sills decided to give him a chance by adding a curtain-raiser—a staging of Yeats’s short, two-character one-act Purgatory. “I was still always oversleeping,” said Nichols. “The two actors would have to come get me and wake me up for rehearsals.” One of them was Edward Asner, then a senior.
Initially, Asner was put off by Nichols’s arrant snobbery. “There were times when I resented him,” he says, “and thought he was acting too much the luftmensch. He was unusual—he was part of a coterie of would-be actors with a somewhat effeminate attitude. But it soon became very clear to me that he was the kind of man you had to watch your girl around—he dug women! His effeminacy was just that he had no beard, and he came off as something like a dilettante. But I think his direction was successful. He was having fun when he did it, and as time wore on, I realized there was a decent human being there.”
By the time Nichols returned to the campus that fall, he was maintaining only the most tenuous connection to academic life—and would drop out before his junior year was over. Remaining enrolled as a student had become a means to an end, which was to keep working with Sills and Tonight at 8:30. Classes and grades were an afterthought; he spent more and more of his time traveling off-campus to go to the movies. In late 1951, he saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in the film he would come to call his “bible”—George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, an experience he found as revelatory about movies as Streetcar and Salesman had been about theater. It is not hard to imagine what Nichols, at twenty, saw in Stevens’s adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the story of a lonely, ambitious young man, guilty about his widowed mother back home and eventually consumed and destroyed by the desire to move up in life and to belong. From its first scenes, the film is about the choking frustration of being an outsider who is so close to success and wealth that it is almost palpable.
But Nichols was now old enough to appreciate technique, and he was as gripped by the filmmaking as he was by the story. It was Stevens’s deeply considered visual and structural sense, his way of framing shots, of staging action, of positioning and directing his cast, and of letting scenes unfold slowly that kept Nichols coming back. Throughout his life, A Place in the Sun would be the movie he would mine for inspiration—it was his core text when he prepared to direct Taylor himself in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the length of each shot and the stillness of Stevens’s camera strongly influenced his approach to The Graduate. It was also the font of instruction to which, in later years, he would send novice directors, telling them, “Watch it twenty-five times. When you’re done, let’s talk.” By his own count, he viewed the picture close to 150 times—many of them the year after it opened. “It just really got to me, like nothing else had,” he said.
As an actor, Nichols was still learning on the fly. His only training came from Sills; otherwise he relied on guesswork and on-the-job experience. But there were limits to what he could teach himself—projecting an attitude, especially an unpleasant one, came naturally, but stage movement was so alien to him that he would often root himself to one spot and stay there during a scene, waiting for his castmates to come into his orbit. And he wasn’t getting many opportunities to stretch. In 1952, when Sills took over from another student as the director of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, he again cast Nichols as an unsympathetic posturer, the haughty, upward-striving valet Jean.
By then, Sills’s productions were getting attention on campus and even being showcased on the university’s main stage. This time, to the shock of everyone involved, they attracted the notice of a professional critic, Sydney J. Harris of the Chicago Daily News, who wrote a rave breathlessly comparing Sills’s ensemble to “the highest possible level of repertory in world drama” and noting that Nichols “exhibits an ease and intelligence in the ambivalent role of the valet . . . His technique is sometimes a bit ragged, but his emotional understanding . . . is more than adequate compensation.”
The production, which, like any other student show, had been scheduled to run for just a couple of weekends, became a minor sensation and extended its run for two months. Nichols and his castmates, who were certain the show was awful and didn’t think much better of their own work in it, felt both amused and mortified. “I can’t tell you how bad it was,” he said. “One night, [the actress] who played my wife came up—this was in the very last scene—and said to me, ‘What are you doing up so early, and with your hat on?’ And I thought, this is really interesting—I’m not wearing a hat. She had said that line for the last two months, but she and I and the audience had been so bored that we never noticed that I wasn’t wearing a hat. That’s how bad it was. And we had to do it and do it and do it.”
Nichols’s misery was, in part, the result of a particular humiliation he had experienced on opening night, when Sills brought a guest to the show specifically to take a look at his work. She sat in the front row, “about four feet away,” and as Nichols walked through the role, he became acutely conscious of “this evil girl . . . with a sneer on her face . . . this fascinating, beautiful, contemptuous girl.” Her attention and her expression didn’t waver, and as the show dragged on, Nichols said, “I knew she knew it was shit, and there was no way I could let her know that I knew it also.” Sills had set the table for her by saying, “I want you to see the only person at the University of Chicago who is as hostile as you. You’re both mean, and”—he added with mild derision—“both Method.” He told her to keep her eye on Nichols. She seemed to be following his instruction to the letter.
“That was probably true,” says Elaine May. “I was hostile. I couldn’t believe that Paul said that to me—and I was dating him at the time! I’ve never forgotten it.”
Nichols and May did not meet that night. But a couple of days later, he was walking down the street, a copy of the Daily News review in hand, and ran into Sills and his girlfriend. “Paul, look at this!” he said, and gave him the newspaper. Sills read it, but Nichols was interested only in May, who was reading over Sills’s shoulder. She looked at the review. She looked at Nichols. Her expression was not a degree warmer than it had been in the front row. “Ha!” she barked at him and, without another word, walked away.
Years later, when Nichols and May became famous, they would be asked how they met by every interviewer who spoke to them. In response, Nichols told this story often, along with another, more cheerful one in which, either a few weeks or a few months down the road, he reencountered her at Illinois Central Station, the public transportation hub through which he would often pass on his way to a movie or as he headed back to his apartment. This time, May—poised, beautiful, unnervingly self-possessed—was alone. Nichols approached her with a comedy gambit, dusting off a version of his long-discarded German accent to say, “May I zit down?” “Eef you veesh,” she replied, without batting an eye. “Vould you have a light?” he continued, taking out a cigarette. “Of course,” she answered. “You are Agent X-9?” They took the train together and went on with the bit seamlessly. They had found, without even trying, a common language.
Nichols understood why the public wanted an explanation of this couple that wasn’t a couple but looked and acted like one, this team that, with each appearance, was introducing the country to a completely new style of acutely observant, seemingly off-the-cuff comedy. More than May, he was expert at crafting anecdotes that satisfied a craving while sealing off further inquiry. Did either of those encounters happen precisely as described? They could have, although both were so embellished by decades of retelling that it’s impossible to know. Nichols himself, at eighty, put it more simply, if paradoxically, when he said, “I met Elaine several ways.” But what is clear is that, however they first encountered each other, it felt momentous. Something was beginning. “I knew then that she was the best girl I ever met,” he said. Or, to put it another way: He was in love.