It Never Goes Away
On Mike Nichols: A Life, audiobooks, car trips, and re-re-reading.
We were in the family car. “We” being at least two of my nuclear family, myself and my dad. All seven of us could have been in the car together at this moment, as we were many times on trips like these, but I can’t recall exactly. “The family car” being one of perhaps just two minivans we ever owned as a seven-person household, minivans that we would pile into to drive from northern Illinois to southern Florida, or to central Colorado. How seven people, with luggage and egos and body odors, fit into these cars for extended trips, I also can’t recall exactly. What I am recalling now is a voice on the car speakers, one specific voice, and it’s reading my favorite stories of the moment: those of a lonesome boy rescued into a world of his own people; a school of wizards. What do you call a group of wizards, by the way? Could it be a school? As in: a school of wizards walked across the street. Somebody ask J.K. Rowling. Actually, no, nevermind, let’s leave her alone, we don’t need to talk to her any more.
That voice belonged to Jim Dale. Along with some simple, very dated, computer-generated sounding musical inserts, Dale gave real voice and real life to characters that only belonged to me until that point. I’m almost cynical enough to admit that it likely could have been anyone narrating that audiobook and I would have still fallen in love. But no, I’m not that cynical, and also: I know I have good taste, and I always have. I liked Jim Dale’s work because Jim Dale did good work. Ok, back to the car. I don’t recall exactly the details of this trip, probably because the thing my brain decided was most important was that this audiobook was a remarkable experience. My father has been consuming the written word through the spoken word for my entire life, I think. Probably even longer, though then we’re getting into 8 tracks and vinyl pressings of spoken word, and I don’t know if he was that kind of guy (more on spoken word vinyls in a bit). The discovery of Dale, and the influence of my father’s listening habits, means that I’ve been partial to audiobooks for almost my entire life as well.
Let’s fast-forward a bit, something like twenty years.
I’m not in a car, filled to complete capacity, but rather an apartment, my apartment, that I have lived in for a year, and it is, and always has been, empty, except for me. Something else has been going on for a year: a deadly global pandemic. I’ve been mostly locked away, finding ways to pass the time, mostly consuming art. Somehow, and gods I wish I could remember how, a new book catches my eye. But I’m thirty-one years old and still haven’t re-caught the reading habit, so I decide to take a chance on the audiobook. I probably listened to a preview of the thing on Google Play, my then platform of choice, and I hear George Newbern speak a few sentences, and I decide it’s good enough, I’m going to pay the twenty-five dollars to own the thing.
The book was Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris. At the time, I couldn’t have told you a single thing about Mike Nichols, a film and theater director, but I could tell you a thing or two about Mark Harris, who I followed on Twitter. I knew he was a writer and editor at Entertainment Weekly in their heyday. I easily convinced myself that both were people worth getting to know better, especially Nichols, who made titles that I was definitely aware of: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (film), The Graduate, Annie (Broadway musical), Catch-22 (there was a movie, apparently), The Odd Couple (theater), Spamalot (theater). I was, and still am, young in my pursuit of more institutional and historical knowledge of the medium of film; its business, its purveyors, and its creators, and I wanted to do more than just watch the works of the artists themselves.
Let’s fast-forward one more time, about three more years, to today (February 5th, as of my typing).
I’m not in that apartment any more, and I’m not in that minivan. I was at work today when I finished Mike Nichols: A Life, via audiobook, for the third time.
What has kept me coming back to A Life is equal parts Nichols’ story, Harris’s writing style, George Newbern’s reading performance, and most importantly Elaine May. May, for the unaware, is a writer/director/actor/comedian who, along with Nichols, had the hottest show in New York, and therefore the country, in the late 1950’s, a sketch comedy duo that were on the forefront of improv, heralded as co-creators of a new form of comedy. May would go on to write screenplays for several Nichols films, advise on most of his projects, and even co-star with him in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1980. Her individual career, which includes directing four feature films, is so rich and wonderful and curious that she is who I spend more time studying and thinking about, but no biography yet exists for her like A Life does for Nichols. I’ve since watched three of May’s features: A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), and Mikey and Nicky (1976). Each is masterfully made, so precise in their comedy and their absolute dread. Her last feature, Ishtar (1987), is famously labeled as one of Hollywood’s biggest financial flops, but of course there will be more to the story there. I’ll tell you when I get there.
The writing style from Harris and the reading performance from Newbern go, in this case, hand-in-hand. I own the paperback, but I have never just consumed Harris’s writing on its own. It exists solely in recorded fashion, delivered by one reader, one voice. Harris does a masterful job of blending different sources of information to create a readable (or listenable, I should say) experience that exists far beyond a “‘this is what I think’ said this guy” format that biographies of those who are no longer with us can take. I imagine Harris’s experience as an editor plays a big role in his writing style. Beneficial to Harris, and to the reader, are the relationships that he had with Nichols and has with a Nichols collaborator, Tony Kushner, to whom Harris has been married/committed to for over twenty years. The reporting and personal experience allow Harris to create a seamless weaving of information that makes the consumption of the book so easy and exciting, and allows for a momentum that has carried me through the twenty hour audiobook three times.
The reading from Newbern I’m not even sure how to judge or characterize. Moments ago, before writing this sentence, I had an awful experience Google searching George Newbern, and learning literally anything about him. The destruction of the nebulous illusion I had of this narrator, who never existed to me outside of a voice in my headphones, into a real person who also acts on television and in movies, and who has read many other audiobooks. Additionally, I stumbled into seeing reviews of A Life’s audiobook, where people are negatively reviewing/berating the book because Newbern apparently mispronounces people’s names. Once again, I have learned to never go on the internet, especially where people can leave comments. All I will say for Newbern is that his voice is good and his reading of nonfiction text is compelling, and that this pairing of text and narrator feels like it makes sense, even if I can’t explain it further.
Finally, Nichols himself, a Jewish immigrant from Germany who emigrated to the U.S. at age seven, fleeing the Nazis. Nichols would go to college in Chicago, where he would meet Elaine May. He would move to New York to study acting under Lee Strasburg, but would fail to make it as an actor there. He would go back to Chicago and work with the Compass Players, a predecessor to Second City, and he and May would refine their working relationship, leading to the duo’s success in New York in the late 1950’s. Then, after the duo decided to part ways, Nichols would be offered the chance to direct a play, a still-uncompleted work by writer Neil Simon called Nobody Loves Me. It would soon be renamed to Barefoot in the Park, and Nichols would win his first Tony award for Best Director for making it, his first production (he would win seven more Tony’s). A couple of years later, after becoming the hottest Broadway director in the world, he was offered a chance to direct the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, despite never having worked on a film. He didn’t even know how a camera worked, or that you could change the lenses. The film would make the most money at the box office that year, receive 13 Academy Award nominations, 5 Academy Award wins, and be the first film ever to have each of its actors win awards for their performances (four out of four). He would act, he would direct, he would produce, he would advise. He would become an EGOT winner (winning at least one Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar). He would become addicted to drugs, both illicit and prescription, he would misfire on films, he would take break, he would rebound. He would joke, he would be a real ass, he would enter deep depressions, he would smoke for too much of his life, he would get divorced three times, he would learn to love people, he would be a good friend and mentor, he would grow old and tired and sick, and he would die, his appointment book filled with lunches with friends and producers, ready to keep moving forward.
What I love about the experience of learning about Mike Nichols, and of coming back to his story, are the things that I can see for myself, and the things I have to take others’ words for. The films, the television appearances, the awards acceptance speeches, all are recorded and available, a fact that I am continuously thankful for and in awe of. Watching his work chronologically, a project I am still working on, has been completely unique. The experience of seeing Virginia Woolf after the context of the production and the life that led to it was astounding. Seeing The Graduate for only the second time immediately after was illuminating. Working through the overwrought and doomed production of Catch-22 was insightful and meaningful, even if the film didn’t exactly work. The same goes for all the other films of his that I’ve seen. The most fun I have returning to a Nichols production are the vinyl pressings I have found of three Nichols and May records, filled with their sketches, recordings that were best-sellers and Grammy winners in their days. The simplicity of the jokes and of the joy they give me are a time capsule unlike any I’ve ever known.
The relationships, the conversations, the important decisions, and most of all the stage productions, I have to hear about from someone else, mainly Harris and his sources. I have to imagine what they could have been like. Nichols is both knowable to me now and completely unobtainable, a paradox and fact true of all of us. I can know him almost as well as anyone else, and he’ll hold things with him that I won’t ever see. But someone capable and diligent and talented worked long and hard to tell me his story, and someone else even gave it to me in audio form so I can take it with me in my pocket, and play it in my headphones. There is so much joy in the discovery, and in the re-discovery, and the re-re-discovery, of a man who was self-conscious, talented, giving, thoughtful, arrogant, and funny as hell. Whenever I finish the book, I can’t wait to start it again.
In the final pages of the book, describing the final years of Nichols’ life, Harris talks of two events: an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony and a celebration of life event hosted a year after his passing, in which the hundreds of people that dominated the screens and stages of American movies and plays for the last half-century gathered to celebrate and remember their shared friend, and realize how many other wonderful people he had connected them to. That later event, of course without Nichols himself, ended with a Nichols and May skit in which Mike couldn’t hold his laughter back. “That sound – the sound of Mike breaking into hilariously helpless laughter – sent the guests out into the pleasantly cool night, the breeze from the Hudson River on their faces, feeling that they had heard him happy one last time”, Harris writes. Every time I hear this final passage, I can’t help but cry, and to hope for the same for myself and everyone in my life: to bring people together, to collect and connect them, to do fulfilling work, to fill rooms with our friends and family, and to remember each others’ laughs, even after we are gone.
Thank you, as always, for reading. If you enjoyed this, and haven’t already, please subscribe (for free!) to get this post straight in your inbox, the best place for things to read.
What are you re-re-reading right now? Who is your favorite audiobook narrator? What’s the longest car trip you’ve ever taken? Who’s got the best laugh in your life? Let me know, through any communication method you prefer (but don’t ever, ever, expect me to pick up my phone).
TTFN.
Bobby