My first encounter with Mike Nichols was entirely characteristic. I was sitting in my dressing room at the Queen’s theatre before that night’s performance of Alan Bennett’s Single Spies when the phone rang.
“There’s a Mr Mike Nichols on the line for you,” said the stage door keeper.
“Uh-huh,” I said, suspecting some weary practical joke. “Put him through.”
“I know this is a terrible thing to do, you’ll be getting into character, or gargling, or whatever it is you people do at this time of the evening” – this was Mike Nichols, all right, I’d heard him in interviews – “but I have this rather wonderful screenplay that I’m making next year, at least I think it’s rather wonderful, you never really know till you’ve done it, and there’s a part in it I’d very much like you to play, and it would help me if you did because I’ve taken a vow that I’ll never make another movie without you in it.”
I made the movie. It was called Postcards from the Edge and it starred – well, everyone, really: Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine, Gene Hackman, Dennis Quaid, Oliver Platt, Annette Bening. And there we all sat, one day a few months later, at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, brought together from wherever on the globe we happened to be, for a couple of days of reading the script. This was my first encounter with Mike in the flesh, but he greeted me as if it were a reunion of two old and trusted collaborators, murmuring a few pleasurably disrespectful remarks about other members of the cast as we glided towards the table. Gliding was very much Mike’s mode – physically, verbally, as a director. He sat at the head of the table, surveying the cast he had assembled with satisfaction, but his favourite among us all was Mary Wickes, veteran of The Man Who Came to Dinner and innumerable wisecracking comedies. He said that essentially his work was done, he had the cast of his dreams: should we just read it through a couple of times and go home? Which is what we did. He was a great and unforced laugher, but he offered no comment, just made a few jokes – impeccably; he had not been (with Eileen May) half of one of the great comedy duos of the 20th century for nothing – and as the reading went on, we got better. A month later, a new version of the script arrived, substantially different and superior in every way.
Shooting it was effortless, Mike an amiable, unconcerned presence. Between takes, he would amble by the actors’ trailers and drop in for a chat, a chat that had no ulterior purpose. This is unique in my experience of film directors. But then, he didn’t rate being a director very highly. “When I started,” he said, “I used to scream and roar all day long, and then I realised that being a movie director is like being the president of the United States. You have all the power; you think ‘people will do what I tell them to do’. But they don’t. You have to make it happen, just like anyone else. And that’s when I finally learned that preparation is everything. So now when I walk on to a movie set, I don’t have a care in the world: I’ve made sure of everything. For me it’s just pleasure.” And if it was pleasure for him, it was pleasure for us. Only twice on Postcards did I see him even slightly unsettled: once was when he couldn’t get an actor playing a small part to do what he wanted. “He can’t act. It’s my fault; I shouldn’t have cast him without finding out first. I’ve worked with the best actors in the world for so long that I’ve lost the knack of directing anyone else.” Another time was when he was demonstrating the crane on which I would make my first entrance (in the movie I was playing the director of the film in which Meryl was appearing). As Mike soared up over the Columbia backlot, he spotted a chair on the tarmac. “Why is that chair there?” he enquired through the megaphone. “I said I didn’t want a chair.” The props guy shouted back, “They said – ” “Who is they?” he roared back at the hapless man. “I am they.” The chair disappeared; Mike’s nonchalance returned.
He didn’t think much of Hollywood. “It’s an awful place,” he said, looking up at the sign bestriding the hill above us. “A bad place. It corrupts you utterly. Especially actors. You find yourself talking to them and you realise that, though they’re looking at you, right into your eyes, they’ve stopped listening. They’re thinking about their careers. And it just happens overnight. You go to bed in Hollywood as a normal human being and you wake up the next day and find you’ve turned to stone or Streisand.”
I can see his face today, saying it: those small twitches, of nose and brow and mouth, which heralded the witticism. It was impossible to spend five minutes in his company without becoming – at least as long as you were with him – smarter, wittier, more elegant. He was a generous host and generous with his time: when I sent him a screenplay I’d written, he tracked me down in Venice to say not merely that he’d liked it, but that he’d produce it. It didn’t happen, just as I didn’t appear in every movie he ever directed, but that’s show business.
I did act for him again, in the 2003 HBO TV mini-series Angels in America, playing one of Prior Walter’s ancestors – Mike Gambon played the other – who taunt him in his delirium. Making it was as delicious, relaxed and funny a time as ever, though he seemed a little frail. “Emphysema,” he said, with an amused shrug. He had officially given up smoking, but would from time to time sneak away to have a gasper; the director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt, would hotly pursue him and, if necessary, snatch the cigarette from his mouth. It was shot in an old studio in New York, and mine wasn’t a large part, but Mike liked to be surrounded by friends, so Gambon and I were flown over for a couple of days’ filming. The money was poor, but he contrived to lay on a suite at the Paramount Hotel, with a bottle of Château d’Yquem waiting on the sideboard on arrival. Always elegant.
I last saw him in New York two years ago. Fresh from his triumph on Broadway with Death of a Salesman, he was clearly not well, but within 30 seconds of him opening the door to me, the place was bubbling with merriment, those brows, that mouth, that nose twitching with naughtiness. I had come to ask him about Orson Welles, whose biography I am writing. Mike was pretty angry about Welles, not simply because of the curmudgeonly, obstreperous way in which he had behaved on Mike’s film of Catch-22, behaviour he dismissed as infantile. He also hated the mystique of genius that surrounded Welles. But more, much more than that, he hated the mystique of failure. “Getting movies made is easy,” he said, “if you know how to do it. You just have to be smart. Who cares about the films you never made? What might have been – what could be more boring?”
He cooled down about Welles over lunch, which we took on the balcony of his huge flat on Fifth Avenue; it commanded a comprehensive view of Central Park and beyond. After the meal, he stood up and pointed out how his life had been lived out over the city – the street in which he lived when he first arrived from Berlin, the place he stayed in after his first success with Elaine May, where he moved to after The Graduate, the skyscraper he lived in during the 90s – almost as if the city were a great panoramic backdrop to his spectacular career. But he held no special brief. “I’m not a genius, not remotely. I know how to make movies and direct shows. That’s about it. That’s all you can say or need to say about me.” I chided him: he should write a memoir. “Oh, no, I’d have to do book signings, how awful that would be.” He was unlike any filmmaker I’ve known. In the business of making movies, but not of it, he gave the aristocratic impression of only making the films he personally would want to see. It was something he enjoyed doing, but if he couldn’t, for whatever reason, that would not have been a tragedy. He liked the job. He enjoyed facilitating the work of actors, writers, cinematographers, composers. It was all part of life’s comedy.
