Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Carrie Courogen, Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2024), 386pp.
15th Edition.
Hard as it is to believe, Carrie Courogen’s superb Miss May Does Not Exist is the first thorough biography of actress, comedienne, filmmaker, and director Elaine May (coincidentally, an 80-page bio was also recently published). Regardless of the title (which quotes the complete bio May wrote for the jacket of her 1958 album with Mike Nichols), she still very much exists, although things appear to have quieted down post-Covid; which, given that she’s 92, is only to be expected. Nevertheless, with her track record for surprises, one can never be sure she still hasn’t got something up her sleeve. After all, she was 86 in 2018 when she returned to Broadway acting after 60 years to star in The Waverly Gallery and won a Tony as Best Actress in a Play.
Courogen’s well-documented book (which includes notes and an index, but no bibliography) is unusual for a work about a living subject; in the prologue, she amusingly confesses to her lack of success in meeting with the interview-averse star, despite living nearby on the Upper West Side and even watching for her from a Central Park West bench. (Interested readers can find several recent interviews by producer and longtime May colleague Julian Schlossberg on YouTube.)
Courogen makes clear that digging out the facts of May’s life involved considerable separating truth from fiction, May herself being a self-mythologizer who often fibbed about her backstory. Sometimes Courogen offers multiple versions of the same stories to reveal the difficulty in getting to reality.
Elaine Iva Berlin was born in Philadelphia in 1932. Her father, Jack, a Russian immigrant, being a second-tier Yiddish theater actor, was always on the move from city to city. Elaine sometimes appeared onstage with him, but he died when she was only 10. Her surname came from her first husband (of three), whom she married at 16 and divorced after three years, following the 1949 birth of her only child, Jeannie Berlin. Jeannie, of course, would become an actress closely associated with her mother’s creations.
After a hardscrabble youth, including a period when May and her mother, Ida, moved with an uncle from Chicago to Los Angeles, which she hated, she moved back to the Midwest—leaving Jeannie with Ida—to study at the University of Chicago, but she never formally enrolled. She did, though, get involved in the burgeoning beatnik culture of the day, becoming a bona fide bohemian.
A voracious reader, physically attractive but famously negligent about her grooming, and an inveterate chain smoker (eventually including cigars), she was appreciated for her intellectual brilliance and her cynically acerbic, rapier wit, drawing men like moths to a flame. Among them was Chicago’s Paul Sills, who taught the game-based acting methods of his mother, Viola Spolin. May was involved as a writer and actor with Sills and the sprouting local improv scene of the mid-50s, especially the Compass Theater, gaining attention for their comic handling of previously taboo subjects.
Her first encounter with another struggling actor, future film and stage director Mike Nichols, went nowhere when they expressed mutual hostility. Two years later, though, they met again and hit it off, finding a powerful emotional and psychological connection, and creating a widely celebrated improvisational stage act in which they did little but talk while sitting on stools. Their brief romantic alliance was followed by a purely professional partnership in which they used improv to polish pathbreaking set pieces (like “Teenagers,” “Telephone,” and “Pirandello”) and sketches improvised raw using the “first line/last line” method. They caught on quickly and literally leaped from rags to riches as they gained national fame in clubs and, especially, TV. In 1960, Broadway warmly welcomed their An Evening with Nichols and May. Despite the show’s being a moneymaking machine, May quit after a year when it became too much of a drag.
Courogen takes us on the path that got Nichols and May to this peak, the downtown and uptown clubs that featured them, and the different ways each handled their newfound fame and fortune as the hottest thing around. May, more a loner than a social animal, proved constitutionally unable to exploit her sudden celebrity; it made her uncomfortable, an impediment to her primary goal of concentrating on doing the work.
Courogen examines Nichols and May’s preparatory and performance methods, making a case for May’s uniqueness as a female comic in a male-dominated field. The closest competitor May had at the time, says Courogen, was Phyllis Diller, whose approach was radically different. Joan Rivers was just around the corner. Courogen might have compared May’s comic contributions to those of the title character on TV’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” who comes to prominence at just this time, but she avoids the opportunity. The changes in comedy faced by May in later life, when tastes were rapidly changing, and—in the age of political correctness—satire was increasingly difficult to pull off, also receive consideration.
Nichols and May broke up in 1962 after the out-of-town failure of her play, A Matter of Position, in which he starred, their mutual respect dwindling into petty bickering over her refusal to make script changes; however, they would now and then, over the years, reappear together for special occasions, and eventually became collaborators on various Nichols film projects (like the hit movie Birdcage).
May wrote several other plays, both one-acts and full-length ones, only a few (like “Adaptation”) escaping critical fire. Her first Broadway play, Taller Than a Dwarf (2000), starring Matthew Broderick and staged by Alan Arkin, was a disaster. She gained a reputation, both in her theater and film work, for resistance to change, indecisiveness, budgeting profligacy, impracticality, obsessive editing, and an overweening need for control. Her movie Mikey and Nicky, which resulted in legal action, gained particular notoriety because of her antics.
Still, in what may be the feminist-oriented book’s most strongly iterated theme, the author argues consistently that May suffered scorn for things that men in the same position would have been allowed to get away with. Courogen often stresses that what others viewed as May’s erratic behavior was based on gender bias. “And no matter how brilliant men thought Elaine was, she was still, at the end of the day, a woman” (p. 89). When she failed, insists Courogen, it had a negative effect for other women in the field.
When May began writing and directing movies, she was one of just a tiny number of female directors. Her four principal films, A New Leaf (1969), The Heartbreak Kid (1972, starring her daughter), Mikey and Nicky (1978, costarring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes), and Ishtar (1987, costarring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman), are all closely analyzed with perceptive commentary, their high and low points interestingly discussed. We witness May’s gradual evolution from clunky amateur to nitpickingly painstaking pro, especially when it came to excavating onstage or onscreen truthfulness from her actors. Nor does her third-rate indie film, In the Spirit (1988), hide from Courogen’s scalpel. Especially vivid are the pages devoted to the Morocco-based Ishtar, remembered largely for how heavily it crashed. Courogen is at pains, though, to salvage it from the sands of dismissal, almost making you want to revisit it.
May’s stage and movie acting, the latter beginning in 1967 with Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing, and including her scene-stealing triumph in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000), is covered, of course; as well as her theater work achieving especially high peaks in a six-week,1980 New Haven production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Nichols, and the aforementioned The Waverly Gallery, by Kenneth Lonergan, on Broadway. And Courogen gives ample space to May’s remarkably successful work as a script doctor on important movies (like Reds, Tootsie, Birdcage, and Primary Colors), among many others, not all of them known because she often asked to be neither credited . . . nor paid.
Also scrutinized, to the degree possible, is May’s private life. We learn of her dislike of the kind of self-promotion necessary to build a career; her second and third marriages, to Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick (very brief) and celebrity shrink David Rubinfine; the place of Jewishness in her writing and acting; her relationship with Jeannie; her health food eating habits; and her long-term, late-in-life love affair and artistic collaboration with movie director Stanley Donen, although years were spent, unsuccessfully, trying to make a movie with him called Bye Bye Blues.
The years leading up to Miss May Does Not Exist witnessed an Elaine May renaissance, with numerous revisionist explanations of her oeuvre, retrospectives of her career, lifetime achievement awards, and so forth, much of it met by a milder, gentler, more socially accessible Elaine, when, that is, she deigned to acknowledge the adulation. Then came COVID, and her agreement to appear on Zoom, performing from her New York apartment. Courogen, impressively smart and even funny, provides it all, in incisive, breezy, often scintillating prose, profanities included. I shit you not.
To repeat, Miss May does exist, and long may she continue to do so.
Up next: Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
