Book Review: "Mike Nichols: A Life"

In his new book, Mark Harris gives us a sophisticated and generous portrait of a giant of stage and screen

I’ve been a fan of Mark Harris’ for some time now, both for the rigor of his several books on film and for his active and engaging Twitter presence. When I saw that he had a new book out on the director Mike Nichols, I wasn’t sure that I was going to read it. I am not, by inclination, someone who’s particularly interested in directors; I’d even go so far as to say that I’m allergic to anything that even faintly resembles auteurism. However, I decided to check it out of my local library, and I am very glad I did. In Mike Nichols: A Life Harris has crafted a thoughtful, sensitive, and sympathetic portrait of a man who was both brilliant and troubled.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a director with a more varied oeuvre than Mike Nichols. This is the man who directed such wildly divergent films as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, The Birdcage, and Silkwood, a man who won numerous Tonys (six for directing), and even made several notable television productions, including HBO’s Angels in America. Somehow, Harris manages to wrangle the disparate strands of Nichols’ identity--his films, his Broadway shows, and of course his troubled personal life--into a coherent whole. 

Born in Germany, Nichols emigrated to the United States while young. His parents had a stormy marriage, and his father died young. Nichols struggled to really find his place, but eventually the theater provided the haven that he sought (as it has for so many outcasts), and he eventually connected with Elaine May. Finally, of course, he made his way to Hollywood, where he would go on to veer wildly between great successes (Who’s Afraid and The Graduate) and failures (The Day of the Dolphin). In the process, he would forge many fruitful connections with his collaborators, though he was the sort of director who tended to want to control the story (which led to some conflicts with his writers). Once he decided that he liked an actor, they became part of his life forever after, and it’s really rather touching to read of his close bonds with the likes of Meryl Streep and Whoopi Goldberg, with both of whom he worked very closely. 

In some ways, Nichols’ most productive creative partnership was with May. The two of them were enormously successful as the duo Nichols and May, and while they would eventually part ways, they would come together at several key moments, including on The Birdcage (for which May would write the screenplay). Though they had their difficulties over the years, Harris makes it clear that in May Nichols found a collaborator unlike any other. 

Though many laypeople recognize Nichols’ name from his film endeavors, Harris amply demonstrates how, throughout his life, he kept one foot in theater and one in movies. He directed several notable plays on Broadway, including The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, The Little Foxes, Death of a Salesman, and Spamalot (yes, you read that last one right). He was one of those people who, once he sat down in the director’s chair, realized that this was what he was intended to do with his life, and he had a vision that he wasn’t afraid of implementing. Again and again as I read Mike Nichols: A Life, I was struck at just how extraordinarily gifted he was; what other director of the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries had that kind of range?

Harris doesn’t shy away from showing us the darker sides of Nichols’ personality. While he was often remarkably compassionate and helpful to his actors--often working extensively with his stars in order to bring out the absolute best performances they could give--he could also be, to be blunt, a total asshole. He also struggled with drug addiction and numerous health problems, some of which undermined his creative endeavors.

As Harris shows, Nichols’ personal life was also more than a little tempestuous. He was married four times, but it seemed that it was only with his fourth wife--Diane Sawyer--that he finally found the domestic happiness and contentment that had so long eluded him. Rather than depicting Nichols’ marital troubles with prurience or judgment, however, Harris allows us to see them as the very real struggles of a man who was something of a restless spirit throughout his life.

One of the things I appreciated most about this book was that it allowed me to see into the mind and emotions of one of the 20th Century’s most idiosyncratic directors. Nichols seemed to be one of those directors capable of endless reinvention; any time that he endured a setback, he found a way to come back, to restore himself to his former position of prominence. This is no small thing, particularly considering the fact that his later film work faced the reality of a changing entertainment marketplace. It’s to his credit that he was still able to wrangle quite a few successes out of the later part of his career, for while Charlie Wilson’s War was something of a director-for-hire effort, Angels in America on HBO was an unequivocal success. I remember watching it at the time and being blown away by it, and Harris shows us just how pivotal Nichos was to its success as a piece of screen drama. 

Unlike so many other biographies of directors and stars, which can indulge in tangents and side-plots that have little or no bearing on the subject at hand, Mike Nichols: A Life stays laser-focused on its subject. Harris gives us only enough detail about the supporting players to help us understand how they relate to the star himself. I emerged from reading this book with a more nuanced and complex appreciation of both Mike Nichols and his work. Aside from everything else, Harris is a truly gifted writer, with sentences that grab hold of you and sweep you into the story that he wants to tell. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.