They just seemed like a continuation of the conversation we were having. One morning you wake up and find you’ve turned into stone, or Streisand.” I appeared in two films for him- Postcards from the Edge and Angels in America-but that didn’t materially alter things. “You must never live in Hollywood,” he once said to me. He was from the beginning wonderfully candid about people he knew or had worked with. The seeming intimacy, which never wavered in the quarter-century we knew each other, was a kind of conjuring trick-by behaving as if we knew each other deeply, we did, in a sense. By the end of the call I felt as if we knew each other very well, but of course we didn’t. Immediately we were both laughing at the absurdity of this, and the laughter produced a kind of complicity, which was his essential modus operandi. ![]() And it would help me very much if you were to say yes, because, you see, I’ve just made a personal oath never to make another film without you in it, and I don’t know what I’d do if you were to turn me down. This is Mike Nichols, and I have a movie I’d like you to be in. But no: “Hello,” the unmistakable voice said: They, or more likely, their people, call the agent, the PA, the manager. Mike Nichols.” It couldn’t be the Mike Nichols, I thought: these great ones don’t do that. My first encounter with him was characteristic: the stage door keeper of the theater I was playing in put through a call to my dressing room. The charm was exceptional and very conscious, and was all the more charming for it. The actor David Hyde Pierce recalls him saying, “The art of being charming is giving away a vital part of yourself which you can absolutely part with.” Almost everyone agrees that there was a great deal hidden behind that impeccable exterior. Life Isn’t Everything, which draws on witnesses from his earliest to his final years, ending with one of the last people he worked with, the young English actor Rafe Spall, exemplifies the mystery by offering radically contrasting glimpses of him across over seven decades. “In other words, the wit completely disarms the other, and a lot of what Mike is about is disarming the other.” Or maintaining the mystery, he might have added-deflecting discovery. ![]() ![]() “There’s no comeback to an epigram,” notes John Lahr, one of the contributors to the book and author of a New Yorker profile of Nichols in 2000. Part of Mike’s allure was his wit, a rare commodity in Anglophone public life: we like our public men and women to be funny, but wit is considered to be just too clever by half. I just want to remind you of my motto: ‘Cheer up, life isn’t everything.’ It always stands me in good stead.” The book’s title comes from a speech Nichols made when collecting one of those nine Tonys: “My love to those who have not won tonight. To those of us who knew him and worked with him, he was a uniquely alluring figure, radiant and lucid and infectiously amusing, but for almost all of us, he was also essentially unknowable, as Life Isn’t Everything abundantly demonstrates. But he somehow stood apart from the tawdry passing scene, a twinkling grandmaster, above and beyond all the awards-or ratfucks, as he preferred to call them. Rubempré, of course, fails and kills himself, which Nichols sometimes contemplated Rastignac rises to the very top, as Nichols so conspicuously did, first as a dazzling comic performer, then as a masterful director of theater, television, and film, earning what Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times, called “the grand slam of major American entertainment awards”: a Grammy, an Oscar, four Emmys, and nine Tonys. ![]() Its subject is one of the rare individuals who transcend their professions and indeed their output to become archetypal figures of their time, acquiring the resonance of characters from a novel-in Nichols’s case, one perhaps by Balzac: Lucien de Rubempré or Eugène de Rastignac, those young men who set out from positions of great weakness to conquer their worlds. Mike Nichols on the set of Catch-22, Guaymas, Mexico, 1969įor practitioners of what used to be called the lively arts, Life Isn’t Everything, an oral biography of Mike Nichols, is manna from heaven, its brilliantly orchestrated polyphony bringing him, his work, and his world to vivid life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |