The Times

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FACE TO FACE A little visit with the impolite darlings

“DON’T YOU LOVE to lie? I don't think there's anything better than making up stories. Ask me anything,” said Miss Elaine May, the morning we met her. “The only thing I worship is the truth,” said Mr. Mike Nichols, with a sober, serious, sincere glance at his partner. The pair were “on,” which in the folk dictionary of The Beat means “to perform, to act, to make believe . . . whether it is on the stage or in a large group or simply making small talk with a friend or acquaintance.” They are “on” in their show, “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May” (one of the year's smash hits on Broadway); in their television appearances; in their night-club stints, and in the many stories about them that appear everywhere these days. It is rumored that they perform 24 hours a day, never use a writer but make up their material as they go along. They are reportedly the most talented, funny, and quick exponents of devastating ad lib satire in show business today. After spending a few minutes with them, we were ready to tell the world that all these stories were true. By the time it was over, we couldn't even tell you our own name and doubt whether that really mattered, because we'd had a wonderful time. Armed with a raft of serious questions, we had come to get the real story, The Truth (not like the interviewer who once asked Miss May her measurements. She replied 24-35-127 1/2 ). The facts that were reasonably reliable were that Mike had been born in Berlin on November 6, 1931, the son of a Jewish physician and grandson of Gustav Landauer, a Social-Democratic leader who had been killed by the Nazis. His family came to the U.S. in the late '30s, where Mike went to a number of schools, worked at everything—dishwashing, waiting on tables, day labor—and ended up at the University of Chicago, where he met Elaine in 1953. Elaine was born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1932, the daughter of actor Jack Berlin. She spent her childhood in and out of many schools—none of which she liked—and traveling about the country with her family. At fourteen, her formal education ended, and she went to work. She took acting lessons from Maria Ouspenskaya, who taught the Stanislawski method. Elaine remembers that the hardest thing to learn was how to be an apple—and ripen. Everybody else in the class could ripen, but she just stood there and could not feel the sun or the juices flowing or the color changing. She claims that it is her major frustration. Every one else ripened and fell off the tree but she. She also went, informally, to the University of Chicago—not as a matriculated student, but she did sit in on some classes, where, one fine day, she was introduced to Mike. Separately, they were just talented, witty people. Together, they discovered, they had the ability to do anything and make audiences react to it. They began working together, first in Chicago with the Playwrights Theatre, then with the Compass, a group that did improvisations in St. Louis clubs. They came to New York 3 years ago, flat broke, in the traditional showbiz pattern, but had

18 Suburbia Today, February 1961