Good teaching amazes. People can't get enough of it. It's why Stephen Jay Gould's classes were loaded to standing room only at Harvard, and Robert Reich, too, at Brandeis.
And Jesus of Nazareth, come to think of it. He didn't pull off that loaves and fishes deal just for laughs; all those people really needed all that food. He provided vittles along with great wisdom and learning.
When you see it, you latch onto it in whatever its form or format. That's why people in show business, be it in theater or film, wanted Mike Nichols: He taught them something they didn't know they didn't know. He was a teacher, yes, but also coach and philosopher and surrogate uncle to so many. He was hands-on, all-in.
It kept coming back through Mark Nichols' biography, Mike Nichols: A Life. If you look at him superficially, Nichols was just plain obsessed--with his craft, with the next thing to do, with himself. He rarely rested. He barely knew what that meant. As Harris points out, the week after he died, Nichols had a full schedule of meetings, and he was 83.
The creative spirit can do that: It can foster insatiability inside the soul. There's always something else to begin or do again, to do better. Perhaps the book should have been entitled, Mike Nichols: Never Rest.
The book has a certain rhythm, like Nichols' life. It can get monotonous, but only because from the outside, that's the way Nichols' life looked. After one show, good or bad, there would be another--casting, producing, and parties after the performances. But it's thorough and gives a sense of the roller-coaster that being in the Broadway-Hollywood mix can be.
In fact, it was turbulent, sometimes self-abusive, never easy, never in cruise control--not even with his fourth and final wife, journalist Diane Sawyer, with whom he had the best relationship. It was almost as if he couldn't stand to rest, didn't want to know what rest was like.
He was surrounded by beautiful women his entire life, some of whom he worked with, some with whom he became lovers, some of whom he married with obsessive attachment that later proved dulling. He loved the dramatic life, loved its dynamics, loved diving into the middle of problems and solving them, sometimes with a shoestring and a prayer.
Some of what he did was brilliant. In fact, most of it was, whether it attracted large crowds or not. Awareness of that drove him sometimes crazy. He won Tonys and Oscars galore. It never seemed enough.
Oddly, what he really needed to do was live down his previous reputation as part of a comedic act with Elaine May, who combined for perhaps the most sought after humor sketches in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were sharp and wise and acerbic, always a step ahead of audiences who would cry out, "Oh, yeah, that's right."
It also made him an accomplished writer and actor, from which to draw his instruction and encouragement and pass them along to others. The rest was his acumen for the true meaning of teaching--not just instruction, but purposeful observation and getting the words just right to get inside people's heads to get them to do exactly what he was looking for. That, like it does for any teacher, takes trial-and-error and repetition, as well as doggedness and a willingness to tear things down and start all over again, listening to one's intuition and seeing what's evident: That things aren't working. That there's a way through the noise.
That's great teaching. It's reaching inside of people to get the most out of them--be in in a laboratory, on a soccer field, or on stage. It's making them uncomfortable on purpose. It's trouble-shooting and knowing when to take off the training wheels. It's driving the subjects through yet another take, another run-through. It's showing them that if they can do it while tired and on edge, they can do it when the lights go on. Practice is hard, but it's supposed to be hard. Within it, the reminder: This is bigger than you. This will work if you remember that.
Maybe it was his utter luck in even making it to America that drove him to prove himself beyond what was needed. He and his little brother were shoved onto a steamship in 1939 in Germany, just before the Nazis closed in. He was Jewish, and would probably have been just another of the amorphous, murdered six million, had his father not managed to bring him over just in time.
He had to find his sea legs in more than one way: His parents' marriage did not last. Due to a childhood malady, he lost his hair, never to return. His insistence on having a wig, his stubbornness in proving himself to be truly American, mirrors that of many immigrants.
Even before The Graduate, he had hit it big with Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, embarking on a long and always fairly successful collaboration with Neil Simon. His resources were stretched by Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, largely by Richard Burton's odd schedule and his incessant drinking. But in the end, his brilliance eclipsed all.
He built enough of a reputation that when he excluded well-known stars for some of his productions, he got away with it and they came back to him. It had to be because of his underlying care for whatever he was involved in; his thoroughness and his ability to be both immersed and detached, one of them and independently chief creator.
This work can't help but be a bulwark of namedropping and some gossip if only because Nichols attracted the best performers of two generations. But Harris does so while connecting the way Nichols would probably have preferred it--to establish an attractive narrative. This he accomplishes while giving us a revue of some of the great Broadway and Hollywood productions and reminders of their, and Nichols', greatness: the greatness of superb teaching.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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