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.  

My Lunches with Orson
Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Biskind
Metropolitan Books

First the cast of characters: Legendary and iconic actor, theatre director and filmmaker Orson Welles.  In his final years in the 1980s, he lunched at Ma Maison in LA with the then young entrepreneurial director Henry Jaglom, who tape recorded their conversations from 1983 to 1985, the year Welles died.  Peter Biskind is a former magazine editor and author of books and articles on film and filmmakers.  He made a book of the edited transcripts, and this is it.

Which is where we start, with its ambiguities and uncertainties.  Does our first scene begin with Welles requesting that Jaglom tape these conversations, but keep the recorder hidden in his bag so he isn't distracted, as Biskind claims in his introduction?  Or, as Oja Kodar, Welles' life partner for his last 24 years and the person now in charge of his estate claimed to a reputable source, with Welles peering into Jaglom's bag to find a tape recorder, realizing Jaglom is taping these conversations without his knowledge or permission, and feeling betrayed?

We might actually start in the editing room, for as Biskind acknowledges, this is more than a transcription.  Biskind subtracted and also added, sometimes from other sources.  "Welles ruminations on like subjects, in fact separated by months or even years, have been grouped together."  We must hope that he took into consideration that people's opinions and even recollections change over years or even months.  Biskind  changed some of Jaglom's dialogue. His purpose was to present "Welles unguarded and relaxed, with his hair down."

Which brings us to the possibly unreliable narrator.  Is Welles an accurate reporter of events he witnessed, an accurate reporter of what people said?  That some of the stories he tells have made it into previous and otherwise reputable books (his assertion that FDR told him that "you and I are the best actors in America" appears in William Manchester's history, The Glory and The Dream)  is not complete proof, especially when he is the only source.  After all, he was a storyteller.

And then there's the missing context of just how serious he was being in his assertions--was he saying outrageous things just for the sake of lively conversation, or as a devil's advocate?  Guess you had to be there, and even then...  

What might have made a really valuable book is suggested in the introduction, when Biskind quotes advice Welles gives to Jaglom about his relationship with his crew on his first big movie, which Welles appeared in.  It's a fascinating view into practical film making.  Unfortunately, it's one of the few moments that actual film making is the topic.

Welles' provides a lot of opinions and evaluations, and some insider anecdotes that may be of interest in proportion to the reader's interest in the people he's discussing. But much of the book is simply gossip, and not even gossip about people that a lot of readers today care very much about, though they were icons of the past.  What Welles said about Spencer Tracy as a diabolical Irishman certainly runs counter to Tracy's reputation, and may well reveal a side to him, but who much cares?  We have the performances.

The mystery of Orson Welles is: how did such an awesomely multi-talented theatre and film artist, who made arguably the greatest American movie of all time in his mid-20s (Citizen Kane has led such polls for decades, until recently displaced by Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film Welles disparages in these pages), spend the last decades of his life being unable to finance or finish a film?  The middle period--frustrated by the Hollywood studios he'd offended, but still able to act in and direct both studio and independent classics--is at least comprehensible. His low budget Shakespeare films, flaws and all, are monumental.  But what about that Hollywood ending?  Generally lauded as America's greatest filmmaker for at least the last several decades of his life, why was there no redemptive final film?

Here and there, the conversations as presented in this book suggest possible contributing factors, including Welles' undermining insecurities and understandable sensitivity to yet more rejection.  These are the most painful and human moments.

There are informative passages, as when Welles describes European reception to his work (much greater than in America) and when he describes the strain of directing.  But though he talks about people he admires, these pages have him talking much more about people he loathes, thinks are overrated or just awful, or who have betrayed him, or all of the above.  While all of that might well be justified, it doesn't make for inspiring reading.

As a document of Welles' last years, this book may have value, assuming it is an accurate representation.  As a reading experience, it's too long for the form (though I acknowledge that others may have a greater appetite for dish.)  Structuring the most important content of  these conversations with context and some reporting seems to me a more fruitful approach than this.  Jaglom certainly comes off well, which isn't surprising, given that he is the source of the tapes.

Biskind's unevenly written introduction summarizes Welles' career while a selection from the cast of minor characters is included as an appendix, though again, if you don't know who he is, or who they are, why do you care what he says about them?  Scholars might, but for their purposes this book probably doesn't provide enough support.  It feels rushed and unfocused, like wine that's sold before its time.

Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema

by David A. Kirby
The MIT Press

From Fritz Lang’s Woman on the Moon in 1929 through Iron Man 2 in 2010, Hollywood filmmakers have hired real scientists to work on their scientific fantasies. David Kirby looks at the phenomenon from a scientific point of view: what do consultants do, and what do they and the filmmakers get out of the relationship?

Why first of all do filmmakers hire science consultants? The most important reason is because scientific accuracy adds to a film’s credibility and makes the movie more believable. This (and some other observations) will be familiar to readers of The Making of Star Trek (Stephen Whitfield with Gene Roddenberry, 1968) and similar books and articles since. But Kirby drills farther down to find some revealing distinctions.

According to Kirby, audiences expect widely known scientific fact (what he calls “public science”) to be accurate. Audiences like cutting-edge science and especially up-to-the-minute portrayals about how scientists work (“expert science”) because it’s new. But audiences also expect their beliefs about science to be included (“folk science”), regardless of accuracy. Like a laboratory always must have vials of bubbling colored liquids, even when real ones don’t. Or the surface of Mars has to be red (because it’s the Red Planet) even if photos show it isn’t.

But even “public science” is relative. Lang’s Woman on the Moon showed people strolling on the moon’s surface without spacesuits mostly because filmmaking technology wasn’t up to showing facial expressions behind helmets, crucial in a silent movie. But in 1929 they could get away with it, because few non-scientists knew the moon had no atmosphere. Otherwise, great care was taken to portray rocketry in a plausible way—and (in some ways unfortunately, since this was Germany) this movie did that.

Sometimes the science consultant’s advice results in a visually arresting scene (the Enterprise coming out of the rings of Saturn to avoid detection in the 2009 Star Trek) or even actual drama (the volcanic vents on the asteroid in Deep Impact that created a fatal accident.) But scientific advice is just as easily rejected. Maybe it’s technically impossible or too expensive, or just not dramatic enough. Filmmakers differ on these judgments: while Deep Impact mostly listened to their scientists, the other asteroid-threatening-Earth movie, Armageddon, mostly didn’t.

Scientists may feel used, particularly when their advice was unheeded but their participation is exploited in publicity. But they can also benefit. Jack Horner’s controversial theories about dinosaur evolution got a major boost, even within science, by being dramatized in Jurassic Park. Starting with Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon and Destination Moon in 1950 and Kubrick's 2001 in 1968, movies made space travel seem possible and exciting.

Scientists working with filmmakers to fashion the physical results of a theory may see new things that helps them refine the theory or the technology itself. (Movie spacesuits have inspired real ones as well as vice versa.) Probably the best example of a mutually beneficial feedback effect is one Kirby doesn’t describe, because it began not with the movie Contact, but the novel. Author Carl Sagan asked physicist Kip Thorne how traveling across the universe and coming back a few minutes later might really be possible. This led Thorne to develop his highly influential theories about wormholes. Thorne then became a science consultant for the movie Contact—and years later Thorne wrote his own Hollywood movie further dramatizing his theories: Interstellar, coming to a theatre near you in 2013.

Both science and the public benefit by seeing the dramatic and visual consequences of science and scientific theories, even if the science is not totally accurate. Kirby discusses the expectations and impact on awareness and public policy of films like The China Syndrome and The Day After Tomorrow.

But does care with science pay off? While Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk tried to furnish at least a scientific theory for all its comic book characteristics, the 2008 Incredible Hulk film made no such attempt, but did slightly better at the box office. So who knows?

Readers may be surprised at what movies overruled scientists (Steven Spielberg convened a panel of futurists for Minority Report, but thought some of their ideas were too futuristic for audiences to understand) and wonder what in the world filmmakers had on their minds to hire a science advisor for Watchman II. But if you’re into these movies the subject is fascinating anyway.

Though he is a lecturer in science communication studies in England, Kirby actually can communicate on the topic, with a minimum of jargon, a modicum of theory, and some sharp, informative writing. There’s some of the academically necessary stating the obvious, but plenty of good reporting. Besides, his backlot revelations about specific movies inspire seeing them again with this information in mind. For sci-fi and science-based adventure film buffs, always a good thing.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography

by Rob Lowe
Henry Holt

Yes, it’s a celebrity bio. Though it’s on the cover of Vanity Fair, it’s also in the New York Times Book Review. Pretty boy celebrities are people, too—and an actor who lives in a world populated by the most accomplished film and stage artists as well as the Washington political equivalents is positioned to have some good stories, and possibly even insights into these worlds and their impact on the commonalities of real life. This book has something to say on all these elements.

First there’s the journey to get to those worlds, and Lowe’s was an odd one: from a broken home in Dayton, Ohio to a serendipitous shot in the dark with his mother and her new boyfriend which happened to land them in Malibu down the street from the Martin Sheen family. So his 7th grade pals were Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn. (If you're wondering how Charlie Sheen got so crazy, it's worth being reminded that his dad as a young man was fairly outrageous himself. Lowe has some stories on that score.)  Athletic as well as an artistic outcast, Lowe lost a race to Superman—or a kid who would grow up to play him (Dean Cain of “Lois and Clark.”)

Lowe broke into movies in the Brat Pack teen film era of the 80s. I was probably one of the few in my older demographic who actually liked those movies. But my chief curiosity was Lowe’s reincarnation as Sam Seaborne in “The West Wing.” His departure from the show after four seasons was never really explained. He’s informative but remarkably restrained about it. He only praises the show and the people involved, while letting declarative statements suggest deceptions and remaining mysteries. Watching people suddenly turn on you without ever knowing why—this at least is familiar outside Hollywood.

As well as rags to riches, there’s the fall (sex and scandal, ego and alcoholism) and resurrection: rehab, new mastery and success, a more balanced life of love and family. Easy to cynically recite, but worthwhile in the differences and details.

It’s a pretty well written book, though not to the level of Sting’s autobiography (Broken Music, or for that matter almost any memoir written by a Brit)—and yes, Sting’s in it, too. It too-regularly employs a revelation device (the girl named Sarah that turns out to be...Sarah Jessica Parker!) that Steve Allen was making fun of in the 50s. But the revelations are interesting anyway. Rob Lowe finds a tone that’s flexible and appropriate—that sounds easy but is usually hard to achieve. It also helps if your stories involve dating Cary Grant’s daughter and riding with 9/11 hijackers.  It's a different world, but how to be human in it?  That does have its fascinations for those of us who've glimpsed it, felt it up close, and then quickly gone back outside.

Summer Reading 2009

If there were such a thing as summer reading, and maybe there is--in moments stolen from the reading and writing for projects there isn't time to accomplish the rest of the year--these would be on my 2009 list:

Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited by Molly Haskell (Yale) is one of those guilty pleasures appropriate to summer: a book about a frivolous but fascinating subject by a terrific writer with great insight into film. Especially since Haskell began her career writing about women in movies, this is a great choice of subject. My favorite film critic--Mick LaSalle of the SF Chronicle--loved this book, so I am sure I will, too.

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and His Sons of Genius by Mike Jay (Yale.) A dip into the first few chapters reveals an absorbing story of late eighteenth and early 19th century science and society, centered on a fascinating character, Thomas Beddoes. This is intellectual adventure, of a kind with another new book, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel (Yale) is a book I'm already reading with great attention and pleasure. And of course I'm reading it in my library at night.

Another book I've started reading that doubtless will be a centerpiece of my summer is Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I read his Red Mars on my recent multi-hour airplane trips, and I'm sure the last in the trilogy, Blue Mars, is also in my future. If I wasn't already convinced that Robinson is among our best fiction writers of any kind, I would find the first chapters of Green Mars the clinching and convincing evidence.