BABY FACE “Mike Nichols: A Life,” by Mark Harris, Penguin Press, 2021. The pub date is Feb. 2. The rave reviews are already piling up.
MOVIE FANS KNEW MIKE NICHOLS for “The Graduate” (he thought Dustin Hoffman was all wrong for the role until he watched his screen test), “The Birdcage,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Catch-22.” Theater people knew him as the man who made Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” believable, who introduced the world to Whoopi Goldberg, who wound up his stage career with “Betrayal,” a 2013 revival with Daniel Craig, and a shelf-full of Tony Awards at home.
Now Mark Harris, an entertainment reporter and author (who is probably better known as the husband of Tony Kushner, who wrote “Angels in America”), has taken a fresh look at Nichols’s 83 years on earth (1931-2014) and his work in theater, film and television, which managed to impress critics and audiences alike. And with the exception of The New York Times (whose critic, Dwight Garner, stopped short of calling it brilliant but did praise the author’s “patience, clarity and care”), the nation’s most prestigious publications have been giving it five-star reviews.
The Los Angeles Times calls the book “a brilliant portrait,” not to mention “judicious and superbly well-written.” The Chicago Tribune declared it “a superb new biography.” And most important of all, Publishers Weekly, the book-publishing industry’s bible, described it as “joyously readable.”
Things that Nichols fans already know:
(1) He was born in Berlin in 1931 (Michael Igor Peschkowsky), a doctor’s son, and fled Nazi Germany, with his family, when he was 7.
(2) He went to the University of Chicago, where he made fascinating, talented friends, including Elaine May (in photo, with the young Nichols), who became his comedy-sketch partner in the 1950s. Nichols and May became major stars.
(3) When he was 4, he had a drastic reaction to a whooping-cough vaccination and lost his hair. It never grew back.
(4) Diane Sawyer (in photo with older Nichols), the ABC broadcaster, was his fourth wife. They met at an airport lounge in Paris (both waiting for the Concorde), were married in 1988 and were still together, smiling very convincingly for the cameras, when he died more than six years ago.
Things that people who read “Mike Nichols: A Life” will learn: Which world-famous movie star finally put the man in touch with a good wig maker? How did he recover from his Halcion addiction? Did he and Elaine May ever sleep together?
As for how Nichols’s singular mind worked, he gave a hint in a long-ago (1965) interview with The National Observer. Bruce Weber quoted it in his Nichols obituary for The New York Times:
“I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another and wishing they were doing a third. The words are secondary, and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most.”
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