Wallflower at the Orgy (21 page)

Q
:
Most of the articles written about you say you had a lonely childhood.

NICHOLS
:
Lonely? No.

Q
:
Was it a happy one?

NICHOLS
:
Not particularly.

Q
:
I remember reading that after you came here from Germany, you went to the Cherry Lawn School and someone held your head under water.

NICHOLS
:
I don’t even know if I can remember it exactly, but there was this guy who, you know, as has happened to everybody in school, there are guys you fight with, and there was this one guy who held me under water and stood on my head, so that I stayed under for some ten minutes and almost drowned. Now this was when I was, I don’t know, eight? nine? And unfortunately for myself and others, I have total recall. I remember almost everything. So some years later, when Elaine and I were playing at a night club, he came to see me, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You don’t remember me, but—” And I said, “I remember you very well. Your name is so-and-so and you are shit.” And he blanched, and I said, “What are you doing now?” And he said, “I’m working in a used-car lot.” And I said, “I’m very
pleased.” But I’ll tell you something about that. I think when people do things, they do them out of a variety of motives. Let’s say, arbitrarily for a minute, you can divide why people act into three motives: vengefulness, despair, and celebration. Dig? I think for a long time, mine has been vengefulness. There was an element in everything I did of I’ll-get-you-you-bastards. I think it’s changing now because of things that have happened to me. I don’t know if I can ever achieve celebration, though.

Q
:
That’s fascinating, because I am totally motivated by—I call it revenge, but you called it vengefulness, and it’s the same thing. So is my husband, and he has a fantasy about a person named Roland Mantifle.…

NICHOLS
:
They are all named Roland Mantifle.

Q
:
Roland Mantifle used to grab my husband every day after school and beat him up and take away all of his baseball cards and say unprintable demeaning things. So Dan has this fantasy that he will someday pull up in front of Roland Mantifle’s low-income housing project in a Maserati and knock on the door and Roland Mantifle will answer in a T-shirt carrying a beer can, and Dan will say, “I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Dan Greenburg and I’d like to show you my bank statement.”

NICHOLS
:
You’ve got to keep that story in. Would you do that for me? But listen, there are two things about that. One is that, unfortunately or fortunately, when you get to that moment, revenge is not sweet, because you’re overcome, to your surprise, by sympathy for the other person. You can’t do it when the moment comes. And so you’re left with something—I’ve thought about this a little bit—you’re left
with something very strange. It’s not possible to divide people into two categories, but if it were, I think that it’s possible that there are people to whom all the good things happen in the first part of their lives—the Kennedys are the world’s great example of this—and then, because they can’t escape this, all the terrible things happen. And then there is the other half of us, where the not necessarily terrible but the pretty bad things happen in the first part, and then things get better and they get better and then they’re great. There is only one drawback, and that is that one is poisoned forever by the bad things that happened in the beginning. So that if one had a choice, I think, one would choose to be the first kind: they are the lucky ones, because they get to experience the untainted good half. Otherwise, although you can fight it and overcome it and make something joyful and pleasurable out of your life, there is always some poison left from before. And you never get rid of it.

Q
:
You seem to have gone to about ten schools.

NICHOLS
:
Well, not really.

Q
:
Why so many?

NICHOLS
:
Well, we got to the United States and I went to Dalton. I forget why. And then I didn’t and I forget why. Then I went to P.S. 87, where Mrs. Bullock used to come into the boys’ room to make sure we weren’t spending too much time in there and pull us out with her long red nails. Then I went to Cherry Lawn, which was a postprogressive co-educational boarding school, where you slept on sleeping porches in the winter, with screens instead of windows and no heat. That was to toughen your character. In my case, it didn’t work. Then I went to Walden, which was very progressive.
They took us on trips ostensibly to see things like Williamsburg but really to encourage sexual intercourse as early as possible. And they were very liberated. They were liberated before anyone. The motto was “Black and white, shoulder to shoulder, against the lower class.” We were all good liberals. You weren’t meant to actually
work
or
learn
anything—it was much more important to be a member of your peer group. For instance, I was skipped several times in order to be a member of my peer group, and, as a result, I never had geography or penmanship. I literally do not know anything whatever about geography or penmanship, and I’m always having arguments with my girl about whether Asia is in Africa, whether Egypt is in Asia, or whether they’re all separate continents. And she explains and then I forget again. I also skipped penmanship, with the very awkward result that I can’t write with my hand. I can sign my name and I can write things that
I
can read and I can print when I print a note to someone, but I can’t write anything that anyone else can read.

Q
:
What were you like at the age of sixteen?

NICHOLS
:
Let me think. It was my first year of college. I got out of high school at the age of fifteen and I registered at NYU. I hadn’t taken the College Board exams, somehow, which made me eligible for, I believe, three schools: NYU, Mexico City College, and the University of Chicago. I opted for NYU because I was in New York. And I went there for one day. I was very self-conscious and sort of awkward and they made us stand and sing the NYU school song, which was called “Oh Grim, Gray Palisades,” and I left. I went home and took a job for a year as a shipping clerk at a costume jeweler’s. Then I got bored with that and tried out for
Mexico City College and Chicago. I was accepted at Chicago and went there and that was when I was sixteen and it was a very very happy year for me. It was sort of—and I think I’ve said this before—it was the first time I realized that life wasn’t frozen in that high-school pattern forever. You know, in high school you think, Mike Tenzer can beat me up and I can beat up Dave Halpern. And Laura Lichtenstein will go out with me and Lenore Firestein will
never
. And life will be like this
forever
. Do you remember that?

Q
:
Oh, God, yes.

NICHOLS
:
And I got to college and I thought, Jesus, the world is full of possibilities. And the world is not frozen and I am not frozen. And I was very happy at sixteen.

Q
:
But you soon dropped out of school.

NICHOLS
:
Yes. I don’t know if you know about the Hutchins system (after Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago), but at the time, when I went to Chicago, you first took a placement exam, and if you knew something, you didn’t have to study it. You took a test where you mark the paper and the machine decides if you’re right. Well, later on they caught this and it was no longer possible, but there was one girl who didn’t understand any of the biology questions, so she drew a duck, using the little spaces, with her electromagnetic pencil, and she got a B. I placed out of math and physics, which I knew nothing about, through luck. Anyway, then they tell you what you have to study and you don’t have to go to class. So, of course I never did go. I sort of hung around and talked to people and drank and sometimes read the texts and sometimes didn’t, and at
the end of the year you take a comprehensive exam. Which I did and sort of got through the first year. But then the next year the whole thing began to disintegrate. I hadn’t gone to class and I enjoyed my friends and drinking and living more and more, so I ended up not taking the comprehensive exams either. And then I wasn’t in school any more. But there were lots of us like that and we just sort of lived in Chicago, and it was a terrific community and a very happy time. We all lived in the same neighborhood, and you came out of your house and ran into your friends and had breakfast in the drugstore, and the theater that we formed began to come out of that. I’d known Elaine, but then something happened between us that led to many things—to the theater and the cabaret and so on.

Q
:
I read that you were very depressed after you broke up the act with Elaine May. What was that period like?

NICHOLS
:
It was like hell. I was the leftover half of something—both professionally and otherwise. I didn’t know what the point of me was, or what I was supposed to do next. So I bummed around and felt sorry for myself and was a pain in the ass to my friends and complained a lot and did dopey things like acting on TV shows and directing at the Vancouver Festival—oh, and acting in it. I was the Dauphin in
Saint Joan
opposite Susan Kohner.

Q
:
No kidding.

NICHOLS
:
Yes. I played the Dauphin to her Joan. One night while she was giving us her Joan, I knocked one of her teeth out. By mistake, needless to say. That wasn’t a success in any way. Also it was in Vancouver, and if you haven’t been in Vancouver, it’s very hard to describe. But I also would have fits
in the middle of rehearsal where I would fall on the floor and start screaming, “I’m in Canada. I’m in Canada.” And they would all just stare at me. And then I would have temper tantrums, and once I said, “Blow it up. We’ll get our ginger ale somewhere else.” I hated it. And then Saint Subber (the Broadway producer) thought maybe I could direct a play. He offered me
Barefoot in the Park
, and I thought, Let’s try.

Q
:
I wondered if you had anything to say about improvisation as training for acting or for life.

NICHOLS
:
As training for acting, I think it makes you very comfortable with the audience and it makes you think, I can take care of you guys. Don’t worry. But what I really thought it was useful for was directing, because it also teaches you what a scene is made of—you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, “Why are you telling me this?” And improvisation teaches you that you
must
answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing.

Q
:
And what about as training for life?

NICHOLS
:
Nothing trains you for life.

It is a moment of intense concentration. Mike Nichols is sitting in a blue director’s chair, his face contorted, his hands clenched, his eyes squeezed shut. He finally opens his mouth to speak. “Bladder,” he says. “Whimsy. Dailies. Rumble. Barren. Crystal. Pastry.”

“No,” says Tony Perkins, who is seated next to him. “Not pastry.”

“Strudel,” says Nichols triumphantly. “Strudel. Pepsi. Cancer. Stopwatch.…”

A film is being shot here. Not at the moment, of course. At the moment, the director of the film is playing a memory game with one of the actors while the crew figures out how to work a broken water machine that is holding up the shooting. The name of the film is
Catch-22
. It is budgeted at
eleven million dollars, is on location in the Mexican desert, and is based on Joseph Heller’s best-selling World War Two novel. “I’ve tried, as they say, to preserve the integrity of the novel,” says screenwriter Buck Henry. “Don’t print that unless you put after it: ‘He said this with a glint in his eye and a twitch in his cheek and a kick in the groin.’ Because if that line so much as looks as if I said it seriously, I’ll kill you.” Among the graffiti scrawled on the wall of the portable men’s room on the set is one that reads,
HELP SAVE JOE HELLER
.

A film is being shot here—between memory games, word games, repartee, kibitzing, and general good cheer.
Catch-22
, the story of Captain John Yossarian and his ultimate refusal to fly any more bombing missions. The movie of the year. A film actors signed up for before they knew what parts they were playing or how much money they would get for their work. With Alan Arkin starring as Yossarian, and Orson Welles (General Dreedle), Martin Balsam (Colonel Cathcart), Dick Benjamin (Major Danby), Norman Fell (Sergeant Towser), Jack Gilford (Doc Daneeka), Tony Perkins (Chaplain Tappman), and Paula Prentiss (Nurse Duckett). Art Garfunkel, of Simon and Garfunkel, will make his acting debut as Captain Nately. “What I feel like here,” said Seth Allen, a young actor in the film, “is a near great.”

Whether
Catch-22
will be a masterpiece, merely a very funny film, or the first failure for Mike Nichols after those two smash-hit movies and seven hit plays is at this point almost an irrelevant question for the actors in it. What matters is that the film is a chance to work with Nichols, who, at thirty-seven, is the most successful director in America and probably the most popular actor’s director in the world.
Says Orson Welles, “Nobody’s in his league with actors.” What’s more, he is the one of a handful of American directors since Welles made
Citizen Kane
in 1941 who have had complete creative control over the final product—including the contractual right of final cut and the option of not showing his rushes to studio executives.