INVENTING HIMSELF
New Mike Nichols biography illuminates the path of a Chicago-bred improv master, from Hyde Park to ‘The Graduate’ and beyond
Fall, 1949. Igor Michael Peschkowsky, a German Jewish emigre raised in Nazi-era Berlin and then New York City, arrives by train for the first day of his freshman year at the University of Chicago. He looks like a personality not yet secure, or comfortable. Years earlier the singular-looking character had been rendered hairless, living at the mercy of cheap wigs and his considerable self-consciousness, following an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine.
By 1949, the insular, sarcastic young man — “a prick,” as he described himself later, and often — was going by the name Mike Nichols. But he was not yet the Mike Nichols.
Nichols, best known as a Tony- and Oscar-winning director, wrote and rewrote his own story through success, adulation, depression, addiction, recovery, four marriages, hits, flops and long periods of creative and personal fulfillment. On stage, Nichols brought an unexpected touch of realism to Neil Simon’s early hits, “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple.” On screen, Nichols’s bracing first two films, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate,” turned him into a New Hollywood superstar, riding high for a fall, which came soon enough with “Catch-22.” Then, a smaller-scale, scandalous success with “Carnal Knowledge.” And then so
much more, in movies and on stage and in his own turbulent life — it cried out for the right book to make sense of it all.
That book is “Mike Nichols: A Life,” a superb new biography by Mark Harris, due out Tuesday.
Harris, a New York magazine contributor, is the author of “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” (2008) and “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War” (2014). Each of those books brought significant turning points in film history into illuminating focus. They are panoramic; the Nichols biography is Harris’s first