Free Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris Page A

of his team was suddenly becoming a lot more famous. In May 1964, Alan Jay Lerner was making front-page tabloid news in New York City. The prospective writer of 1966’s biggest fun-for-the-whole-family musical and his fourth wife, Micheline Muselli Pozzo diBorgo, were beginning a very public divorce battle that was about to provide local journalists with a year’s supply of raw meat. He hired Louis Nizer. She hired Roy Cohn. 45
    On the 20th Century-Fox lot, Jacobs settled in for preproduction. He had an office painted for Lerner and a parking space reserved for him. 46 He wondered when he would get a call or a cable from Lerner and hear his co-producer say he was ready to begin work on the script for Doctor Dolittle. The call never came.

FOUR
    W hen 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