Mark Harris wrote two of the best books about movies that I’ve ever read (Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back) so I always knew I would eventually make my way to his third book, a biography of the prolific director Mike Nichols. Mike Nichols: A Life is a comprehensive account of Nichols’s varied professional life, starting with his legendary improv double act with Elaine May and progressing through his incredible success as a theater director on Broadway and his eventual successes in Hollywood. Harris is almost completely uninterested in Nichols’s life outside work, though that seems fairly appropriate given how much effort Nichols put into his work and how comparatively little he put into his family life. Harris makes time to briefly mention Nichols’s fondness for buying Arabian horses and his close friendships with the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, but the focus is always primarily on the work.
And what amazing work it was, most of the time. In addition to his groundbreaking comedy work with May, Nichols won six Tonys and directed plays like Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, and Spamalot, in addition to revivals of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He worked with legendary actors, most of whom came to trust him implicitly due to his reputation for getting the best of performers. He suffered from criticism that his work was too middlebrow and crowd-pleasing, which he pushed against by reviving some of theater’s most challenging plays. One of my favorite parts of the book recounts Nichols’s staging of Waiting for Godot starring Steve Martin Robin Williams in the lead roles. What I wouldn’t give to have sat in that audience.
Nichols’s Broadway success captured the eyes of Hollywood, and he broke out in a big way with his first two features, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Though his status as a wunderkind took a hit after failures like Catch-22 and The Day of the Dolphin, Nichols was able to continuously work in film for decades, directing such well-liked films as Working Girl, The Birdcage, and Closer. He also had a career-capping success with his adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America into a seven-part miniseries for HBO.
Nichols had a remarkable career and Harris does a wonderful job briskly taking the reader through it. If the novel is a little over-focused on its subject’s career, that is a flaw seemingly shared by its subject.