Free Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris Page B

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