Two Giants of Our Times, Also Friends

Mike Nichols: A Life

By Mark Harris

Penguin Press

671 pages

 Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee

Knopf

872 pages

 These two books belong together not only because they are both extensive and well-written biographies published in the last year, and their subjects are major arts and entertainment figures of the past half century, but because these two men knew and very much liked each other, and featured in each other’s lives.

 They also started out in a similar—and similarly peculiar—way.  Both were eastern European emigrants at a young age, and remade their identities in a new country and a new language with new names, prompting a sense of doubleness or inauthenticity that haunted each of them.

 They both became globally famous, yet highly identified with their new countries. As they became financially as well as creatively successful, they each developed a lavish lifestyle, tailoring it to their particular tastes: Stoppard collected first editions, Nichols collected art and horses.  They were both inner-directed and perhaps shy, while both also cultivated a large and varied array of friends, and both became known for entertaining well and on a large scale.

 Both of these biographies extol this friendship. Both note the speech Stoppard made when Nichols received the ultimate accolade of the Kennedy Center Honors.  But only the Nichols biography mentions that, in a long mental fog from a reaction to prescription sleeping medication that led him to believe he was going broke, Nichols called Stoppard and asked if he could come and live with him.

 Yet they worked together only once, when Mike Nichols directed the first Broadway production of Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing in 1984, which began their friendship.  Though Stoppard sometimes wrote for the movies, he never worked on one that Nichols directed. The main aspects of their professional lives were very different.

Mike Nichols with playwright Neil Simon

 Nichols was famous in America, first from television and then as a director.  He was a powerful presence in Hollywood and New York theatre who was essential to the success of many others, beginning with Neil Simon and Whoopi Goldberg, and many young actors who became stars.  But Tom Stoppard is equally famous in England, and in the smaller theatrical world of London he also had furthered careers and maintained a web of relationships.  People were devoted to both of them. The style and subjects of Stoppard’s plays, which may seem arcane to Americans, nevertheless have won him international attention and acclaim.

 There was much about Nichols childhood I didn’t know, but I remember Nichols and May on our black and white TV set.  Still, I was surprised to realize that of Nichol’s 19 feature films, I saw all but three in theatres when they came out.  There is no other director I can say that about, nor is there ever likely to be another. Though I didn’t live in New York, I even saw two of the Broadway plays Nichols directed, including that original production of The Real Thing.

 I was in college when Nichols directed the quintessential 1960s movie, The Graduate. He’d already directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in its way the classic movie about 1950s marriage and sexuality, and Carnal Knowledge, which took that sensibility into the 1970s.  He nailed the 80s with Working Girl, and the 90s with Angels in America (a miniseries for television that I first saw on DVD) as well as Postcards From the Edge, Primary Colors and The Birdcage.  One of his lesser-regarded films, Regarding Henry (with Harrison Ford) is one of my personal favorites.

 At the same time, the style and subjects are so varied, I’ve often forgotten which movies Nichols did direct. This biography notes that his genius was applying fundamentals by the core question he asked: what was this situation really like?  And his attention to the expectations of story: what happens next?

 I was in college as well when Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead exploded in London and then on Broadway.  We could feel the exciting rush of fresh air (not usual with explosives, as Stoppard might point out) breathing into our theatrical efforts on the Midwestern prairie.  I read it, as I did all of his plays thereafter. 

 Stoppard is rightly skeptical of how true to the play as performed the reading of it can be.  But most of his early plays required such large productions that they seldom got out of New York.  I eventually managed to see several regional theatre productions (notably of Arcadia, which he calls his “perfect” play, and which has the advantage of a small cast and single set and no special effects) and several university productions, good and indifferent.  Some of the plays became more coherent on stage, and some productions didn’t match my imagination.  Though I’ve seen some of his television plays and heard radio plays, basically, the playwright Stoppard has been on the page, as language. Even so, I’ve been an enthusiast.

Benedict Cumberbatch in "Parades End"

 I’ve been particularly delighted by some of Stoppard’s film work: from the Indiana Jones movie with Sean Connery to his Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, probably the most similar to his stage writing on film (apart from the film of “Rosencrantz…” he directed—his one play made into a movie so far.)  But I equally admire Parade’s End, his BBC TV miniseries adaptation of several novels by Ford Maddox Ford.  I’ve seen it, and by reading the books and then Stoppard’s screenplay, I’ve deepened my appreciation of his achievement (and his methods.)   

Stoppard brought wit and erudition back to playwriting. In his work and through his personality, he made intellectual respectability respectable as entertainment.  His sense of craft is also important and inspiring, and his idea that the writer's task is to regulate the flow of information to some end, is especially fruitful.

 So I’ve been aware of Nichols and Stoppard’s professional careers more or less all the way through.  (Nichols died in 2014 at age 83.  Stoppard keeps threatening to retire, but then comes up with another idea for a play.) Therefore these biographies contrast and compare with my experiences and memories of these years.  I know the references, I get the jokes.  But of course there was a lot I didn’t know, that I learned in context in these pages.  Marriages and affairs, children and friendships, muses and nemeses, all texture their lives.

 Stoppard gave many interviews over the years which I’ve read and watched.  He was intelligent and charming, as was Nichols in his interviews and discussions.  So I’d formed impressions of both men, which were augmented if not fundamentally changed by these biographies.  Perhaps Nichols was somewhat farther from his public persona, but my sense of him deepened.  These biographies detail how both of them were aware of these differences between their public persona or public perception, and the complexities of their private selves.  Both had persistent self-doubts.

 Given the circumstances of their early lives, a dogged sense of uncertainty would seem inevitable.  Hermione Lee in particular suggests how the theme of doubleness runs through Stoppard’s work.  He consciously applied it to his own life with his play Rock & Roll, which he said began as an exploration of what his life might have been like had he not left Czechoslovakia and ended up in England. 

As seems ironic but is frequently the case, both are immigrants who more thoroughly embrace and express characteristics of their country than many native-born.  Stoppard has lived the life of an English squire and man of letters of earlier ages, adapted to his times.  Mike Nichols lived the American dream of show business fame and glitter, and expressed much of what America was in his time.

But late in life both men looked to the past and to their roots, and found something else they had in common: while Nichols knew of his European Jewish relatives and ancestors, Stoppard learned of his only in recent decades.  Both lost relatives to the Holocaust, adding tragedy to their dislocation. 

 Both biographies—by Mark Harris and Hermione Lee—are judicious and admirably written, and a great pleasure to read.  Lee has the additional critical job of elucidating plays that many readers probably haven’t seen, which she does gracefully and convincingly. 

 Books are internal negotiations; perhaps biographies more than others.  It’s a difficult form, requiring a lot of research and then a lot of construction.  Harris and Lee have selected and shaped, but without reducing their subjects to formulas.  They sprawl appropriately, making for rich reading.