She Made Me Laugh

by Richard Cohen

  If Nichols had a precursor it was Billy Wilder (1906–2002), who had won numerous Academy Awards as director, writer, and producer. The similarities are obvious. Both Wilder and Nichols were émigré Jews. Both were astoundingly fecund. Wilder directed comedies, dramas, farces—and he directed or wrote in both his native German and, astoundingly, his adopted English. But the key to Wilder is the epitaph on his gravestone: “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.”

  The last part of that is the final line from Some Like It Hot, and it’s sort of impish. But the proclaimed reverence for the word, for an appreciation of film as an extension of what is written—not just structure but dialogue as well—this and not merely a Mitteleuropa heritage, is what links Wilder to Nichols and Nichols in a way to Nora. They all had baseline occupations, and just as Nichols always returned to the theater so, too, Nora always returned to writing.

  Nichols’s instant infatuation with Nora had a precedent: Elaine May. Here, also, was a very smart, dark-haired Jewish girl who not only could make a joke but get one, too. Nichols and May had created a pioneering and astoundingly successful comedy act and had had a brief romantic involvement. But the essence of their relationship—and of their act, which had originated in improvisation—was a kind of cerebral chemistry that had become apparent shortly after they bumped into each other in a Chicago train station. May, whom Nichols had met just once before, was sitting on a bench.

  “May I sit down?” Nichols asked, affecting a Russian accent.

  “If you veesh,” May replied, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is show business history.

  Mike Nichols had been an immigrant kid (Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky), son of a Russian-Jewish father and German-Jewish mother, affluent in the Germany to which his father first emigrated, then comfortable in the New York to which they fled in 1939, and then outright poor after his father died. The Nichols family, his mother and a brother, then lived in a drab apartment on the Upper West Side. Nichols had lost all his body hair at the age of four—the result of a reaction to a whooping cough vaccine—and arrived in New York a bald child who could not speak the language.

  “I was a zero,” Nichols told the New Yorker writer John Lahr.

  Nora was never so marked. But she was plain, with a drooping eyelid that seemed to half draw a curtain over her face. (It was later surgically corrected.) Like Nichols she wound up observing herself, choosing journalism, as she once wrote, because you were officially deputized not to join in. You could observe. Take notes. Be at the orgy, but not participate.

  * * *

  Among the many mysteries of life, there is this one: No one ever romantically linked Nora and Mike. I was sometimes mentioned, and I took it as the sheerest flattery. Nichols, though, was her true twin—maybe that was the problem—the man who was as smart as she was, who knew theater and film, the difference between Little Santa Monica Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, the Beverly Hills hills from the Beverly Hills flats, the Upper West Side from the Upper East Side, the cafés of Paris, the works of Bernhard Schlink as well as the writings of Liz Smith. He shared so much with Nora, even for a time their shrink.

  Both Nora and Mike had a surfeit of talent, almost too much to handle, big and small ideas sloshing around in their brains, searching always for the meaning—the hidden meaning—of anything, its essence. Nora and I would sit and discuss something for what seemed liked hours, searching for the point—the point of a column, the thing that was hidden, the thing she could reveal, the point, the point, the point—while Nichols, with a wry observation, could get to the essence of a play or a movie with a snap-of-the-fingers metaphor that materialized even as he spoke it, and his actors immediately knew what the point was.

  I met with Nichols from time to time, nearly always at Nora’s suggestion. I had a script I was pushing, an idea that was perking. He always read my stuff, sweetly passing—“It’s very, very good, Richard, but not for me”—and once saying, astoundingly, that he wanted to make a movie with me and Nora. I was flattered, but not quite convinced. Whatever my talent, I was above all Nora’s friend. And he loved her.

  * * *

  Somewhere along the line, Nora’s relationship with Mike reached an inflexion point. The mentor (Mike) and the mentee (Nora) became near equals, although Mike always remained the dominant one. Mike sought Nora’s counsel, but he always remained the one who had made more successful movies, more successful plays, and, of course, had been an entertainer. What Nora lacked in résumé, she more than compensated for in decisiveness. It could be as good as wisdom.

  But their relationship did not start on an even keel. After all, it was Nora who came to interview Mike, not the other way around. It was Nora who went to Mexico to write about the famous director, the man who was doing what she’d always wanted to do. So it was Nora who sought approval from Mike and who, in the way she judged these things, did not get it back. Catch-22 was over. It was in the can. Nora and Mike had become close. Yet he was not inviting her to dinner.

  So Nora asked Mike to lunch. They met at a place on Madison Avenue, across the street from the Carlyle Hotel, where Nichols was living. Nora said there was something she wanted to talk to him about. “And I said, of course. And I said, what do you want to talk about?”

  She burst into tears.

  “ ‘I’m not on your A-list.’ ”

  “What are you saying? I don’t have dinner parties. I live in a hotel.”

  Nora’s belief that she had not made Mike Nichols’s final cut was a rare false reading on her part. It was also additional evidence, if any be needed, of the centrality of the dinner party in Nora’s thinking. It seemed inconceivable to her that Nichols was not giving dinner parties; it was only conceivable that she was not being invited. It’s actually inconceivable that Nichols would have ever had a dinner party without her.

  In time the mentor and the mentee fused. On a given day, one became the other, and just as Nora would look to Mike for his experience—he was, after all, older and already established when she was starting out—he learned to rely on her, her judgment, and the ferocious certainty of those judgments. They usually talked several times a week, not always about work, but often about food—the hot dogs from Nate and Al’s, for instance, and were they, as Nora insisted, the best. They reviewed various ice creams and restaurants as well, and, knowing Nora, the floundering marriages of people they either knew or heard about. They were both great gossips, not because they were vindictive or spiteful but because gossip was theater by another name. Such characters! Such behavior! Who could have guessed? Not in your wildest dreams. Actually, only in your wildest dreams.

  In fact, one of Nora’s dreams was about Mike. She mentioned it on the Dick Cavett show in 1971. In a very jolly manner, she told Cavett that she dreamed her husband had died and she was free to marry Mike Nichols. It was tossed off as a joke, a joke that’s not a joke, a joke that seemed more of a wish than some wild dream, Nichols himself was watching. It brought him up out of his chair.

  Why didn’t it happen—if not marriage, then an affair? Maybe because when Nora met Mike he was already successful in an industry where a perk, along with a chair with your name on it, was an abundance of women. Maybe because Nora was married much of the time—and so, for that matter, was Mike. Maybe because their chemistry was entirely cerebral or maybe because one or the other feared sex would ruin a perfectly wonderful relationship (the theme of When Harry Met Sally . . .). Whatever the case, while many people wondered about it, I never got the slightest hint that Nora and Mike had ever had an affair. I have to add, however, that my record in these matters is dismal. Caesar and Cleopatra could have gotten by me.

  As close as they were, though, Nichols, too, was kept in the dark about Nora’s condition. He later accepted her decision with equanimity; she had not only done the right thing, but—should there be any doubt—in matters such as this, Nora always did the right thing. Somewhere toward the end, though, Nichols learned that something was wrong. They were plan
ets in the same showbiz solar system—and Nora, inexplicably, went dark. She was working with the movie and stage producer Scott Rudin and he couldn’t find her. He checked with Mike. Alarmed, Mike called Nora. She lied, and then quizzed J.J. about the source of the leak.

  * * *

  Near the very end, Nora’s son Jacob got in touch with Mike. Nora was dying.

  From the hospital, I conferred with Mike. There was this matter of a memorial service. Mike was to speak. I was to speak. He wanted to talk about that. He was distraught—adrift. I felt the same, but Nora’s condition was not a surprise to me. It was, though, to Mike. His despair was palpable. He was disconsolate, and nothing he was in life seemed to matter—not director, not producer, not writer, not intellectual, not entertainer. Momentarily, his confidence was gone. His voice wavered. He was eighty-one and in bad health.

  A bit later, the phone rang. I was in the hallway of New York Hospital, a pace or two down from Nora’s room. She had just died. It was Mike. His voice broke.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  Baseball Wives Forever

  * * *

  I don’t want to be misunderstood. Nora knew many famous people. Some of them were close friends, even intimates. But Nora also had friends who were not famous—some of them dating from her college days and one, in particular, going back to when she was the showbiz version of a baseball wife. That’s how she met Judith Corman.

  Judy died of cancer in 2004, a hideous nine-month ordeal from the first little bump on her tongue to the end. Nora suspended the shooting of Bewitched so she could attend the memorial service, where she spoke and declared Judy to have been her “best friend.” She said substantially the same thing in her penultimate book, a collection called I Feel Bad About My Neck.

  “My friend Judy died last year,” Nora wrote. “She was the person I told everything to. She was my best friend, my extra sister, my true mother, sometimes even my daughter, she was all these things, and one day she called up to say, the weirdest thing has happened, there is a lump on my tongue. Less than a year later, she was dead.”

  In order to know Nora—to really know Nora—you had to know Judy. She was the wife of Avery Corman, the writer of the novels Kramer vs. Kramer and Oh, God! and many other works, but when they first met, Nora was not yet famous and Judy Lishinsky of Brooklyn was married to Avery Corman of the Bronx and he had not yet written his first novel. At the time, in fact, he was partnering with Nora’s fiancé-cum-husband, Dan Greenburg. They had a comedy act.

  The act was Greenburg’s idea, and it was good enough for the two to have played both Merv Griffin’s and Dick Cavett’s TV shows, and like many comedians, as well as other entertainers, they honed their act at the Improv, a club in the old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. The place was run by an impresario named Budd Friedman, who seems to have discovered much of the 1960s and 1970s comedy talent. But he did more than merely present the comics. He also managed them, and it was the suspicion of those who were not managed by Friedman that at the Improv they were the last to appear.

  Corman and Greenburg virtually closed the place. It was Corman who used the term “baseball wives.” Like those spouses, Nora and Judy waited for their men to be called to the plate. This, in the haze of cigarette smoke and the rebuke of stale beer, was how Nora and Judy got to know each other. Corman dropped out of stand-up and Greenburg did the same—it’s very hard work, after all—but Nora and Judy remained fast friends, best friends, until the end.

  By then, Judy had gone in and out of several careers. She was an extremely hamish woman, a Yiddish term of very high praise which often gets defined as “cozy and homey.” Judy was all of that—exuberant, bubbly, a central casting Jewish mother (she had two boys)—but her chubby frame obscured an awesome competence and talent. She worked in both the music business and publishing, doing public relations; she ran a quilt and wicker furniture store in Bridgehampton. (For a while, she had a Manhattan store as well.) She had reliable, unerring taste in clothes, furniture, jewelry, fabric, and of course, quilts. She was Nora’s Nora.

  * * *

  Judy was an aggregation of common sense, and in the maelstrom of conflicting advice Nora would receive—agents saying one thing and studios saying another, stars demanding the extravagant and others demanding only what was due them—Judy stood above it all, rendering a judgment that was informed by seeking only the best for her friend. Nothing in her life intersected with Nora’s. In no sphere did they compete. As far as Nora was concerned, Judy’s judgment was entirely based on what was best for Nora. Judy was neither jealous nor competitive. She was, however, astute. And she had been around.

  In the late 1960s, Judy had worked as a publicist for RCA Records. She handled pop music, and her eye fell on a regional performer who was being treated with disdain by the established New York rock critics. This was Elvis Presley, who was then opening in Las Vegas. Judy flew the important New York rock critics out to see the show. They were dazzled by Presley, and suddenly, the Presley song “Suspicious Minds” got airplay on rock radio stations. The King had been anointed.

  Nora’s love for Judy was intense. It complimented both women—Judy because Nora was a good friend and remained so even after she became famous and wealthy, and Nora because Judy was neither of those things. In fact, while Avery’s success was hardly a flash in the pan—he was a gifted writer—the novelist’s life is a hard one and not a long one, either. The Cormans never made it to rich, never made it to famous, and yet as a couple they always remained in Nora’s inner circle—Judy because she was Judy, Avery because he was Judy’s husband.

  Following Judy’s funeral at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue, Nora immediately enlisted my girlfriend, Mona Ackerman, as Judy’s nominal replacement. “You’re now my best friend,” she told her. For a while, it was just a title. Then they both got cancer and it was a title no more.

  A Navaho Ceremony in Foley Square

  * * *

  Bob Woodward had hired a limo. For some reason, he sat in the front and the rest of us piled into the back—my wife Barbara and I; Bob’s wife, Francie Bernard; and Carl. It was April 15, 1976, and we were on our way down to the West Village, to Mildred Newman’s place to pick up Nora at group therapy. In an hour or so, she would be married to Carl.

  Mildred Newman and her husband, Bernard Berkowitz, were famous A-list shrinks. Both Mildred and Bernie were psychologists. Together they had written the best seller How to Be Your Own Best Friend, blurbed not only by Nora but also by Tony Perkins the actor, Rex Reed the critic, and Neil Simon the playwright. The two shrinks were as celebrated as their celebrity patients.

  If you knew them—better yet, if they knew you—you either had it made or were on the way. Nora often dropped their names but rarely attributed to them any particular piece of wisdom. Still, I could tell. For instance, if I said I would try to do something, Nora would seize a nearby ashtray and say, “Try to pick that up.” See, you either do it or you don’t.

  Thereafter, I avoided the word “try” as the weasel word it was asserted to be. I found it a useful insight, if not a life-changing wisdom, and it did not take me long to realize that the whole try-to-lift-that-ashtray bit had come from Mildred and Bernie. That was all right with me, although I distrusted celebrity shrinks, and in Mildred and Bernie’s case my cynicism was deepened by the conspiratorial mist that seemed to envelop them—members of the group were forbidden to identify other members of the group or even talk to them about the group when they were outside the group. It reminded me of the Communist Party with its secrecy and smug incestuousness (as if being in need of a shrink was not enough for admission—you had to be famous, too).

  Indeed, some pretty famous people belonged to the group, including, of course, Dan Greenburg and Mike Nichols. In fact, when Nora went down to Mexico to report on the filming of Nichols’s Catch-22 for the New York Times Magazine, she had effectively joined a Mildred and Bernie group on location. Many of the actors were the couple’s pat
ients, including Tony Perkins and Richard Benjamin and his wife, Paula Prentiss. Perkins brought in Joel Schumacher, later to become a director, and still later Bob Balaban and his wife, Lynn Grossman, enlisted. Schumacher was so broke he told Mildred he could not pay. Don’t worry, she told him. Someday you will. Little wonder her patients were so loyal.

  Mildred and Bernie, so easy to mock, who created something so much like a social clique, were nevertheless revered by their patients. Their methods were unorthodox; they insinuated themselves into the lives of the group’s members. They would, for instance, come backstage to comfort Paula Prentiss before a performance. She could freeze with stage fright, and Mildred would get her to the point where she could perform. Witnessing that was what impressed the actor-director Balaban enough to join the group. Some former members laugh about Bernie and Mildred, but no one disparages them. They were extremely effective.

  * * *

  On this day in April 1976 Nora bounded out of the West Village building. I can’t recall what she was wearing, but I do know she was ebullient, having just told the group that she was getting married. In her autobiographical novel, Heartburn, if not in real life, there was applause and there were many congratulations, and then we were off to the courts in Lower Manhattan, where Surrogate Millard L. Midonick was going to officiate. Suddenly, Nora turned anxious. Maybe it was when Carl mentioned that, after talking to his mother, he suspected that Midonick and his mother, Sylvia Bernstein, had long ago had an affair. “He’s going to want to perform some Indian ceremony,” Nora said out of nowhere.