Jack in the Box, page 17
But on that same fateful Friday evening in March 2015, I had been invited to a birthday celebration for Steve Sondheim, with about twenty or so of his nearest and dearest. I happened to be fresh from that very luncheon with Mike when I arrived at the Regency hotel, where the dinner was being held, and found myself being put down at the end of a long dinner table with the writer Alex Witchel, whom I had met only briefly before. The afternoon had been especially fervent, with Mike regaling me with insights; memories, mostly centered around his childhood; and the extraordinary icy bath of arriving in New York with practically no English with which to ward off admirers (the famous recitation of “Please do not keeees me!,” printed as a sign on his back, being his oft-quoted mantra), and with which to negotiate an entirely new life. Coming back to my apartment to dress for the dinner party, and haunted by his insistence that there was no earthly way for him ever to leave a record of all these invaluable experiences, on an impulse I called him back with an idea: What, I asked him when he answered his phone, if he and I decided to do a series of afternoon luncheons with just the two of us at various restaurant locations around Manhattan, where over discarded dishes I might interview him about his life and work, and with us, perhaps, being captured on just two cameras, while recording everything to be evaluated and edited later, a result of which he might not only approve but feel proud. “Well, you know,” he interrupted unexpectedly, “my daughter was saying something exactly like that to me only last night!”
Searching randomly for something that might possibly interest my new dinner partner, I casually shared this conversation with Alex. She straightened with immediate enthusiasm. “Have you mentioned this to Frank?” she asked, but I assured her I had not yet even been introduced to her husband, the legendary Frank Rich, once “the Butcher of Broadway,” who had now so successfully transitioned himself into an HBO producer, while helping guide series like Veep and his latest effort, Succession, to their towering popularity. In a matter of minutes, Frank was standing next to Alex and saying, “Do you think you could actually get him to do this?” “I have no idea,” I replied, somewhat astonished, “but I can certainly ask tomorrow and find out.” “Do!” was Frank’s immediate blunt command. “I know we can make a deal with HBO if you can get him to comply.”
Oh!
I realized I was suddenly surrounded with enthusiastic people who were in the habit of making things happen. Was this real? Or merely a “social incident” about a subject that I had had no business relating in the first place? I had no idea how many times something similar might have been suggested to Mike—hundreds, probably—and how many times he had found an excuse to dodge or delay or wait until the offer eventually just went away. But I called the next morning, and without any justification, I slipped in what probably was the fatal and final dealmaker: “What have we to lose?” I said to him. “You can have complete control over whatever we do, and if you don’t like it, flush it!”
That innocent remark came back to haunt HBO, as executive producer Sheila Nevins reminded me icily upon our first meeting, the day we began taping the HBO special Becoming Mike Nichols, in the lovely Golden Theatre. Once the idea had been proposed—that Mike was to be the sole arbiter of what might be used and what might not be—the proverbial fat was in the fire. Did HBO want to pursue this project? They most certainly did. Was there any way to “un-say” that offer? There clearly was not.
I was accorded the best possible help by the securing of Douglas McGrath and Frank to serve as my overseers, coproducers, and “handlers,” and the entire project came together with breathtaking speed. It was agreed upon that we’d do three days of shooting … the first on a Thursday, with just Mike and me on the very stage where he and Elaine had made their Broadway debut, and the second the following night, but now before an invited audience of a few friends, clearly not industry types, as Mike insisted, thus giving us the weekend off, with Monday morning being held to move over to Bar Centrale, upstairs above Orso on Forty-Sixth Street. That, too, would just be the two of us, and would offer a chance for us to clean up any additional material we might have missed.
And just that quickly I was standing on the stage of the Golden Theatre with Sheila Nevins, a clipboard in my hand, while around the house, various men were setting up cameras, lights, the whole production. “This may well turn out to be the most expensive show we’ve ever attempted,” she reminded me with steely precision, “and we have virtually no control over any of it!” She turned on her heel and moved smartly elsewhere. I hadn’t known whether to apologize or accept this as a kind of compliment, but Mike and I were suddenly knee to knee in a cocoon of white-shrouded lighting instruments, with everyone around hushing up for us to begin. He was completely relaxed, looking at me with genuine affection, as if I knew exactly what I was doing. I didn’t wish to disabuse him of the fact at that moment, but I had to wonder about the validity myself.
Yes, I had a clipboard in my hand, but if I say there were more than three notes written upon it, I’m being generous. “Don’t forget to ask him…,” hissed both Frank and Doug repeatedly, into my ear over the next series of hours and days, with last-minute attempts to get as much good material as possible. I remember nodding vaguely, but I don’t remember writing anything helpful down.
Mike didn’t look all that good, in truth. Whatever it was—the horrifying, racking cough that could freeze you in your tracks, the aftermath of that quadruple bypass, the exigencies of age itself, the exhausting pace with which he charged through his days, attending events, theatre productions, screenings, the punishing schedule of being “Famous Mike Nichols Married to Glamorous Diane Sawyer,” and all that entailed—now, sitting across from me in the encapsulated little world of movie lighting, or the next night, with both of us half facing each other on the stage, with a full audience of eager, expectant faces looming up at us, he looked, at best, gaunt, the nostrils flaring, the eyes red-rimmed. Situated in an armchair, as he was that night, one was treated to a view of his pant legs, inexplicably creeping up, exposing more and more of his argyle socks and the white legs above them. Mike didn’t appear to fidget or shift as he spoke, but the pant legs managed still to inch ever higher, as if of their own volition. Later, Doug McGrath explained that the cameras had to keep tightening to exclude his shins from the shot, but, as Doug said, the cameraman and he had to admit of the gleaming shins, “They’re gaining on us!”
Still, the energy, the relish, the sheer heart-pounding effect of “the game’s afoot,” were Mike’s once more, and with very little opposite him but a loving, supportive fan-colleague who was in no way interested in exposing or betraying him, Mike was off and running. And at his absolute best.
I don’t recall all that much about me or my role or even my interviewing. I remember the feeling of “sharing” him with that active audience on Friday, watching him swivel to give them his best jokes, his meticulously adroit phrasing, even with anecdotes that I can guarantee, without assurance, he had thrown to probably an endless string of interviewers before me. I had a kind of innate grasp of the shape of what should happen … the theatrical astonishment of the Simon successes, the almost immediate occasion of making the film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with whom he had shared the alleyway directly behind where we were now filming, when he and Elaine were slaying Broadway and Burton, next door, was still in Camelot.
A gentle guiding of him through aspects of The Graduate, a dip back into his personal history, which the hoi polloi probably knew the least about, with stops along the way for elements he could easily spin into graceful grazings on this or that side of his rememberings. The private interview on Thursday had needed no intrinsic shape to it until we were told to stop, obviously. Editing would take care of that. And left alone with him in Bar Centrale the following Monday, I took off with a numbing, name-dropping parade of people we hadn’t, in fact, been able to accommodate in the two Golden Theater interview sections—Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, the film Carnal Knowledge, his marriages, various producers, designers, and artists all falling this way and that, as if we were skimming over the icy surface of celebrity in our own personal Zamboni. When he later viewed that material, he brushed the entire episode aside as mere gossip. And out it went. But before we faced the audience on Friday, I asked Doug and Frank how long we were meant to go in that particular section. “About eighty minutes” came the instant reply, and curiously enough, as Mike was wrapping up his recitation about the filming of The Graduate, I glanced at my watch to see that almost exactly eighty minutes had elapsed.
There was time for one more gorgeous anecdote, and I chose to toss him the final shot of The Graduate, which I had responsibly watched myself only days before. Benjamin, having interrupted the wedding, has absconded up the aisle with Elaine, and, cramming the enormous cross into the doors to block anyone else from leaving (“… and who hasn’t wanted to do that?” I had happily ad-libbed), they flag down a yellow school bus filled with average people (what? no schoolchildren?), and, having run all the way to the back of the bus, they sit together alone. And they sit, and sit, and the exhilaration begins to fade, and still the film goes on and on without Mike calling, “Cut!” I asked about that astonishing, perfect, amazing ending, and it gave him the wrap-up of one’s dreams. When he had finished, I was able to signify that we had clearly heard the perfect “final word” from the master, and we rose to his standing ovation.
It felt like a roar, honestly, and I have had the pleasure of experiencing various standing ovations in my time, but this had a joy to it that would be hard to top. Our arms around each other, after taking the bows, we moved off to the stage door. I glanced up at Mike, who was flushed and genuinely happy. “Shall we take one more?” I asked rather wickedly, and he said immediately, “Oh, hell yes! Let’s!” We spun around and walked back, and here I managed to push him forward in front of me, while the crowd, as they say, went wild.
At first, the rush: Frank, Doug, and friends crowding into that back alley to greet us, all seemingly thrilled with the results. Diane, herself an established and famous interviewer, looking into my eyes and saying sweetly, “You should do this for a living!” And at that moment, I thought she might even have believed it.
The editing began almost immediately, but at the time, I was quickly absorbed in a nascent opera workshop of a new piece by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, written expressly for the Met mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and called Great Scott. I was kept apprised of the progress of documentary editing, and was even called in at one point to loop some text that was affected by cutting, but with the usual intensity of a worker bee, I, like Mike, in the manner of everyone else in our profession, had been completely swept up into another subsequent reality altogether, with different demands. The HBO enterprise drifted for a while—quite a while, in fact—before it was finally aired, and I was never exactly certain why. I can believe that Diane, more than anyone else, was hesitant to allow our very last glimpse of Mike to be the gaunt, slightly shrunken presence in that chair, his pant legs slowly, slowly inching north. Wasn’t he always beautiful? Radiant? Younger, healthier than this?
Afterward, I had the opportunity to check in with Mike, who, having seen the footage, told me that it was the only time he ever liked himself on film. Considering the aesthetics of what we had been through, I loved hearing that. But a few months later, I found myself somewhere in the Midwest, attending one of the essential workshops necessary for creating an opera. I awoke in the hotel, early one morning, as usual, and turned on the television to witness the heart-stopping news that Mike Nichols was dead.
One cannot reach the golden age I’m currently occupying without serious and almost continual proximity with death: my parents, my sister, my beloved and dearest friends, my amazing mentors, four lovers, and the unreal experience of the AIDS epidemic in the last century, which saw me eulogizing, over something like fourteen consecutive months, the deaths of more than a dozen of my closest, cherished collaborators. At this point in my life, there is the odd sensation of déjà vu attached to recent losses. The nineties nearly did me in. By this time around, wouldn’t you imagine I’d have it down?
Nor can you predict the degree of scarring a death will leave. In the case of my own parents, gone now for decades, their fragile presences are now recognized, more like the wafting of spring breezes than a knife in the night. With close associates recently departed, there is inevitably the feeling of unreality … No! Terrence McNally cannot possibly be gone! Surely he’ll be back, be able to be recalled, is only just beyond a finger’s reach away! And within that continual force field of memory we occupy, some do emerge from the shadows. An occasional teacher can loom up from the depths, a childhood friend occasionally, or without reason, you are convinced you are staring at the nape of your lover’s neck, hair curling down below one still-pink ear … We survivors are continually ambushed by such visions. It’s part of the curse. Part of the charm.
But Mike! I suppose in the final analysis, and compared to so many of his truly fabulous friends, he and I weren’t all that close, but hardly a day goes by that I don’t experience something of him, refer to him, reach out to seek for him. I’m sure those fabulous others, who treasure their own experiences of him even more vivid, more consequential than mine: his children, say; Diane or any of the still-breathing collaborators … They must, like me, find themselves stiffening to think they hear from the silence, and more often than one might suppose, “It’s Mike!”
It sure as hell was!
11
Two Shakespearean Actors
The final defining differences, as Shakespeare so neatly puts it, of “Man, and Man”
LEFT: John Goodman as Falstaff, Old Globe theatre, 1995
RIGHT: Kevin Kline as Falstaff, Lincoln Center Theater, 2003
1. THE DIONYSIAN
John Goodman ranks as one of our great and authentic homegrown actors. He remains so, of course, but in the early nineties he was fundamentally a big television star, thanks to the rampant success of his costarring role opposite Roseanne Barr in her popular sitcom, Roseanne, the giddily defiant blue-collar propensity of which might have offered a brief glimpse into what a similarly sympathetic nation might make, a couple decades down the road, of someone like Donald Trump, had one had the presence of mind to ask. Roseanne, like the former president, was unquestionably a one-off sensation, and she too basically didn’t seem to give a flying fuck. I’m just saying …
If John was political, of course, you couldn’t prove it by me. We had met in the earliest days of the eighties, when I was about to forgo my status as a directing gun for hire around the regional markets and before accepting Craig Noel’s offer to become artistic director at the Old Globe. This last effort at independence was to take me up to the Studio Arena in Buffalo to mount a production of a small comedy called Lady of the Diamond. It was about the first female major-league pitching star, and in the leading role I had none other than Christine Baranski, whom I had first encountered as my Juno in a Juilliard School production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock when she was a student in the early seventies. In this regional premiere, there was a role for a ballplayer named Boomer, and John had come through the audition process and landed the role without turning so much as a hair. He was big then, in almost every sense but self-confidence, it seemed. But original, one could sense that, as well as a bit of a wild card—that, too, was a large part of the appeal. What he was was hilariously funny, and unforced, and undeniably real. One of those young actors who walk into the room, and you immediately think, How is this even possible? This guy’s going straight to episodic television.
And he very nearly did. He hung out for a while down in the East Village with a group of actors and creatives who were to stay quite consistently connected to each other over the next few years, including the young playwright Stephen Metcalfe, whom I was about to discover and basically claim as my own first Globe writing investment. Over the ensuing years, we became very close friends, and I produced a series of his plays … Vikings, Emily, The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers, Loves and Hours, among others, and even a musical, White Linen, with one of the best ideas for a book I ever came across, saddled with, perhaps, one of the worst scores. He eventually matriculated to Hollywood as a screenwriter with projects like Arachnophobia and Cousins to his credit. The brothers Florek, Dann and Dave, were part of this crowd, making their early marks in showcases like those of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Dann Florek eventually found very comfortable footing playing a recurring leading role on the television series Law & Order for years, but it was John who emerged to become one of the most popular and in-demand character actors of his generation. He bonded with the Coen brothers early on, and in a series of films—Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and the iconic Big Lebowski—began to carve out a kind of niche for himself that was as original as it was individual. Like the best of all American character actors, he had no rival, no competition. If you wanted a John Goodman type, you wanted John Goodman. Period. He emerged as a favored host on Saturday Night Live, and over the following years did exceptional work in films like The Artist and Argo. But it was as Dan Conner opposite Roseanne Barr on Roseanne that he became an incontestable star. Their chemistry was phenomenal, and although he carried his load with individual authority, he managed never to upstage his partner as the star of the series while endearing himself to a national audience that couldn’t seem to get enough of his oddball humor, his bravery, and, most astonishing, his unmistakable reality.
